Help for the Haunted (2 page)

 

Chapter 2

Things in the Basement

H
ow would you describe yourself now?

Arnold Boshoff asked a lot of questions each time we met in his windowless office decorated with Just Say No posters, but he returned to that one again and again. Boshoff gave a taffy stretch to the word
nooow
while resting his hands on his mountainous belly and steepling his fingers. Always, I looked up at his puffy pink face and watery blue eyes and fed him the obvious. I was an Advanced Honors student at the top of my class. My long, black hair was too stringy to stay in a ponytail. My skin was pale. Eyes, hazel. Sometimes, I informed him, I thought my head was too big for my body, my fingers and feet too small. I doled out those sorts of details before moving on to more minor things, like the flea-sized freckles on the inside of my right wrist. God kisses, my father used to call them. Hold them to the wind and they might blow away. By the time I started talking about how I used to make a triangle with those freckles by drawing on my skin with a marker, Boshoff unsteepled his hands and moved onto a new topic.

“I have something for you, Sylvie,” he said, after we finished that routine one chilly October afternoon. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a present, wrapped in polka-dot paper.

“What is it?” I asked as he placed the gift in my hands.

“You have to open it to find out, Sylvie. That's the way it works with presents.”

Boshoff smiled and clacked his cough drop around his mouth. Judging from his rumpled sweaters and stain-splotched khakis, he wasn't the neatest person. Somehow, though, he managed to do a careful job wrapping that present. I peeled back the paper just as carefully, to find a diary with a miniature lock and key.

It had been some time since anyone thought to give me a gift, and I wasn't sure what to say. Finally, I managed, “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

Except for the flippity-flip of my hand turning the diary's empty pages, things were quiet. Boshoff was the teen drug and alcohol counselor for all of Baltimore County, Maryland, and rolled through towns like Dundalk on a weekly basis. Unlike his regulars, I had never puffed on a joint or tasted a drop of alcohol. Even so, I was excused from study hall once a week on the principal's suggestion that an hour with him might be helpful, seeing as there was no budget to fund a professional who had experience dealing with my “situation.” The first time I went to his office in September, I asked Boshoff if me visiting him was like a person going to a vet to treat a burst appendix. He laughed and clacked his cough drop before using a serious voice to tell me, “I suppose most veterinarians could perform an appendectomy on a human if the situation called for it, Sylvie.”

That ruined the joke.

“I've come to realize in these meetings of ours,” he began now, so many weeks later, “that there are things you might not want to share with me or anyone else. But you might find it helpful to write them down in that journal, where they'll be safe.”

I fingered the flimsy lock. With its violet cover and pink margins, the diary looked meant for some other girl, one who would fill the pages in loopy cursive with tales of kissing boys, slumber parties, cheerleading practice. Instead, my father's voice rolled through my head:
People don't need to know what goes on inside our house, so you and Rose shouldn't say anything to anyone—no matter who it is.

“What are you thinking?” Boshoff asked, another favorite question of his.

“I'm thinking I don't know what I'd possibly write about in a journal,” I told him, even though I knew what he intended. But I'd spent so much time in other windowless rooms, recounting the details of that night at the church for a white-haired detective and a haggard-looking assistant district attorney, that I felt no desire to do it again.

“Well, you could at least start by writing about your day, Sylvie.”

I walk the hallways of Dundalk High School and people clear a path. No one makes eye contact or talks to me unless it is to taunt me about my parents and the thing that happened to them—the thing that almost happened to me too. . .

“You could write about what's going on at home with your sister now that things have, well, changed for you both.”

Rose refuses to bother with grocery shopping except when Cora is scheduled to come by with her clipboard. Most nights, we eat Popsicles for dinner. Potato chips for breakfast. Mayonnaise smeared on bread in the middle of the night. . .

“Or you could just open the book and see what memories come.”

To give the illusion that I was at least considering his suggestions, I turned to the first page and gazed at it, picturing the loopy cursive of that girl:
A boy kissed me in his car on Friday night for so long the windows steamed up. . . . My best friend slept over on Saturday and we watched
The Breakfast Club
on video. . . . I spent Sunday practicing cartwheels for cheerleading tryouts. . . .

Somewhere in the middle of her happy life, I heard Boshoff. “Sylvie, the final bell rang. Did you not hear it? You know, on account of your ear?”

My ear. I looked up from the blank page, my expression blank too. “I heard it. I was just, I don't know, thinking about what I'd write.”

“Well, good. I'm glad it's got you thinking. I hope you'll give it a try.”

Although I had no intention of doing so, I told him I would before sliding the diary into my father's tote. It used to be that he carried his notes in that bag when he and my mother went on their trips, but I'd been using it to haul my books around since so many break-ins had led me to abandon my locker. High school may not have been the challenge I hoped for, but it certainly was louder. Slamming lockers. Shrill bells. The roar that filled the halls at the end of the day. Any other student stepping out of Boshoff's office into the stampede risked getting shoved against the wall. Not me. As usual, the crowd parted to make room.

Normally, after last bell, I walked against the foot traffic to the rear exit and out onto the winding path through the woods, past the distant hum of the highway and along the fence behind Watt's Poultry Farm toward home. Today, though, my sister was picking me up to go shopping for school clothes at a place everyone in Maryland seemed to have been except us: the Mondawmin shopping mall. She never would have arranged the excursion if Cora hadn't shown up on a rainy Monday weeks before. When I stepped into the house that afternoon, I'd been thinking only of peeling off my wet clothes and taking a hot shower. Instead, I found a light-skinned black woman waiting on the sofa in the living room, gazing up at the wooden cross on our wall. In her pressed skirt and blouse, she looked too together to be someone who had come in search of help from my parents. And yet, I decided that's what she was.

“They're . . .” I said, my heart kicking into a speedy ticktock, “ . . . they're not here.”

“Oh, hello,” she said, glossy lips parting into a smile when she saw me. “Who's not here?”

“My mother and father. You must not have heard, but—”

“I know that. I came to see you, Sylvie.”

“Who are you?”

“Cora. Cora Daley. From Maryland Child Protective Services.” Her smile froze as she took me in. “No need to look so worried. I just want to check in on you. That's all.”

Had our previous caseworker, a man whose primary focus had been studying for his real-estate agent exam rather than me, mentioned that another person would come in his place? I remembered talk of interest rates, square footage, appraisals, though I'd lost track of the rest. “What happened to Norman? And how did you get in?”

“Norman is no longer working with you. I am. And your sister let me inside. I was waiting in the driveway when she got home. Poor thing was wet just like you. She went upstairs to change. I didn't have an umbrella, but I used this clipboard to cover my head. So long as my hair stays dry, I'm a happy camper. My mom's the same way. Don't mess with our hair and don't make us break a nail. Then we're happy.”

As she rambled, I studied her hair, yanked into a bun, and her long nails, perfectly manicured. Her clothes looked so creaseless and new that I would not have been surprised to see a price tag poking out from a sleeve. I noticed down by her ankle what looked to be a small dolphin tattoo—or was it a shark? Despite her efforts, Cora Daley looked too young for the job, not much older than my sister, in fact.

“Do you want to change into dry clothes, then we can chat, Sylvie?”

Yes, I wanted to change. No, I did not want to chat. “I'm okay if you just want to get started.”

“Well, all right then.” Cora glanced at the damp papers on her clipboard. Her hands shook ever so slightly, and I wondered if being inside our house made her nervous. “Let's see. There are plenty of questions my supervisors tell me I'm
supposed
to ask. But the most obvious one that comes to mind is not on here.” She looked up, flashing her warm brown eyes. “I'm wondering if that's what you wore to school today?”

Standing before her, dripping in my capris and T-shirt and flip-flops, what answer could I give but yes?

“If you don't mind me saying, Sylvie, those don't seem like the most appropriate clothes. Especially on a day like today.”

“I guess we don't pay attention to weather reports around here lately.”

“Well, I am going to have a talk with your sister about that. As well as the missed doctor's appointments for your ear that I see noted here on these pages.”

Good luck,
I wanted to say.

As I waited in front of school, weeks after that rainy Monday, dressed in nearly the same outfit and shivering in the cool October air, I looked over at a smoking area tucked beneath an overhang. Ratty couches and recliners were scattered so haphazardly it might have been mistaken for a rummage sale if not for the derelict students flopped on the furniture, squeezing in a last smoke. I'd seen most of them coming and going from Boshoff's office too, their clothes a kind of uniform: hoodies, thermals, ripped jeans, pentagrams and 666's doodled on their knuckles.

“Hey, Wednesday, you see something you like?”

This question came from Brian Waldrup, a freshman who lived in the golf course development, when he caught me staring. Brian was not the only person at school to call me by that name: Wednesday Addams. I reached into my father's tote and pulled out the diary, if only to look like I was doing something. As I stared at that empty first page again, I wondered what memories would come if I allowed myself to break my father's rule.

“You know what?” Brian said. He had folded up his recliner and was making his way closer. When he reached me, I felt his breath, skunky with tobacco, against my good ear. He paused, and I thought of so many things I wished he'd say:
I see you leaving Boshoff's office too. Are you okay?
Or,
I remember the homemade paper hearts you handed out on Valentine's Day in first grade. You gave me two because I'd broken my arm and you felt bad.
Or even,
I know what happened to your parents—we all do—and I hope at the trial this spring the jury puts that psycho, Albert Lynch, behind bars.
Instead, he asked, “What did your parents keep in the basement?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't lie, Wednesday. Gomez and Morticia wouldn't approve.”

“I'm not lying. There's nothing down there.”

Impossible as it seemed, Brian came closer still, his tight body pressing into mine as he whispered, “You're lying. Just like they did. And you know what else? Your mom got what she deserved. Your father too. Right now, the two of them are burning in hell.”

That might sound like the worst thing a person could say, but I tried not to feel bothered. It was a lesson I used to get every Sunday, when my family still went to Mass in the gym at Saint Bartholomew's Catholic School, where we arrived early and sat in the front pew at the edge of the three-point line. As we followed along with Father Coffey in the epistle—my sister and me in Sunday dresses that I loved but she hated—whispers came from the pews behind us. Even if I didn't hear what was being said, I understood that it had to do with us, the Mason family, and our presence in that makeshift church.

I smiled at Brian Waldrup. After all, despite those symbols and devil numbers drawn in pen on his knuckles, he was just a kid my age whose mother picked him up from school in her Volvo every afternoon. I had seen them rolling out of the parking lot on their way to that pretty yellow house on the golf course, where I imagined her sliding a roast or chicken into the oven most nights, flipping pancakes or scrambling eggs most mornings. Thinking of the differences between Brian's life and my own made it less difficult to smile because I was reminded how harmless he was. And when I finished smiling, I tucked the diary back into my father's tote and headed toward Rose's enormous red truck rolling up the drive at last, AC/DC screeching from her speakers.