The 'Geisters (13 page)

Placebo.

She looked it up on Yahoo after he left that night. A substance with no medical ingredients, but which tricked a patient into believing that it provided a cure. Enabling the patient to provide the cure to herself.

Good
.

Behind her, Laurie was using her own words, about the valley of the shadow of death, and Philip was saying “Easy, easy,” and her mother twisted around and reached and held Ann’s hand tight as the sky became a deathly yellow, like flypaper, and the pincer closed, and the van became black and the vents blew hard, lashing snow, and gravity shifted.

It’s all right. You’re safe. Shh. Hush. You’re safe with me.

Ann was cold.

She couldn’t breathe. Not at first. She coughed, and she drew a great wheezing breath so hard it seemed to crack her ribs. She was cold. And wet.

She sat up. Her ears were ringing, and she was dizzy. She was at the bottom of a ditch. She had cracked through ice and was sitting in swift, running water. She got up, a sloshy, muddy job, but not impossible. Her arms and legs all worked, and although she was dizzy, she wasn’t blacking out. Three years ago, she’d fallen down the short flight of steps from the deck, and those were the questions her dad has asked her:
Do your arms and legs work? Are you dizzy? Does it seem like things are getting darker? How many fingers am I holding up?

There was no one nearby to ask her that last question. But Ann thought she could get the answer right if anyone did ask her.

She was cold. Colder than it had gotten in the van—when she’d fallen against the seatbelt, and the air had filled with the moaning sound of metal tearing, and the yowling of tires slid sideways, and a cracking sound . . .

And, as the seatbelt released her—

Ann leaned forward to climb the edge of the ditch. It was sunny again, and the heat of the sun felt good on the back of her hands, her shoulders. Her thighs stung under her sodden jeans. She slipped on the icy mud, and fell. “Help,” she murmured, reaching up.

Her fingers found a hand. It was warm, and she reached up with her free hand and grabbed it too. “Thank you,” she said, and found purchase in the muck. Three pushes, and she was over the top—alone, on the side of the highway.

Ann hugged herself and shivered as a bright red SUV crested the hill ahead of her, sped past. She couldn’t even tell which way it was going.

“Help!” she said as its taillights vanished around the bend in the other direction. “Help!” She started to run after it, stumbled, and fell into gravel.

She remembered sky, first that awful yellow, then blue—and then rotating, and looking down. The van rolled across the highway like a toy underneath her. She had thought it was a toy, hadn’t had time to put it together as she turned again.

And saw someone.

A tall figure—standing at the crest of the hill, from where the car had come.

Help!
Ann didn’t articulate it this time, as the figure turned towards her, and raised two arms, and then two more, longer than those two, beneath that.

Ann let herself go. She felt the gravel, sharp against her face, and although it hurt, she pressed it there. And waited.

The next car that came by announced itself by its siren. The hands that helped her up were warm, and brought with them a blanket.

And when they crossed the crest of the hill moments later, the figure was gone.

They hadn’t gotten far enough to go to the hospital in Barrie, but that wouldn’t have done any good anyway. The only one who needed serious medical attention was Philip. Their mother had died at the scene—the doctors and police wouldn’t tell Ann exactly how it had happened, but Ann remembered her mother, twisted around dangerously in the front seat, holding Ann’s hand. Ann imagined that she had been torn in half when the van hit the bridge abutment. Their father had lived long enough to be put into an ambulance. But there was internal bleeding, or something, and they hadn’t been able to keep him alive even as long as Laurie, who had made it to the E.R. before she was pronounced dead.

Philip needed help. He had suffered head injuries, and had cracked his spine at the second vertebrae when the van had whipsawed back into the road and begun to roll out the other side of the bridge. When he arrived at the hospital, doctors took a look at him and called for an airlift to get him to Toronto.

Ann stayed at Fenlan. She had relatively few injuries, but the water and the cold had put her into a state of acute hypothermia. This was something the doctors and nurses at Fenlan knew how to deal with, given the local snowmobile club’s propensity for racing across the lake in the dead of winter.

Nan came. She sat by Ann’s bed, and held her arm, and told her how much she loved her, and how things would be fine, and she would see, unfortunately underlining it all with jags of tears and curses. Ann had never heard her Nan curse before, and Ann suggested, through trembling lips, that Nan should stop cursing because it was not very ladylike.

That was the sort of joke that Nan normally might appreciate but she gave no indication of doing so this time. She became quiet, her mouth drawn, her eyes narrowed.

“You’re a good girl,” she said.

But she didn’t sound as though she meant it.

It grew warmer. Ann felt her fingers and toes. A man came from the Ontario Provincial Police—Constable Reid. He had a red face and blond hair that was a bit darker at the roots. He was the one who’d found her by the side of the road. He brought her a stuffed dog, with soft furry ears and big sad eyes. She took it, and held it close. He asked her if she remembered how she got there, in that ditch, how she’d gotten out of the van before it crashed. Her Nan sat on the other side of the bed, looking down at her hands.

“I remember being in the air,” Ann said.

“Were you wearing your seatbelt?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Do you know if your daddy was doing anything?”

“He was driving.”

“I see. Just driving?”

“There was a lot of snow,” she said. “It came up all of a sudden.” And she told him about how the heat hadn’t worked, and how her dad thought it might be the radiator, and how it had started up again, right before the snow. Nan asked if this was necessary, and Constable Reid rubbed the back of his neck and seemed to make up his mind.

“Okay, Ann. I’m not going to trouble you about this any more than that.” He put a hand on the edge of the bed. “I’m so sorry. I guess . . . you’ll be heading home with your Grandma soon.”

“No,” said Ann, and Constable Reid gave her a look that suddenly had a raft more questions, and Nan gave her a look that nearly broke her heart.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “don’t worry. We’ll make a nice room for you, and—”

“Not yet,” said Ann. She thought of the man on the ridge, with an extra set of arms, and that hand that had pulled her from the ditch. . . . And as she flew through the air . . . the face.

And she said, “I can’t go anywhere right now.” She didn’t add,
It isn’t safe for you.

The Fenlan Medical Health Centre was the name of the hospital. It wasn’t big enough to have its own full-time grief counsellor; for this, it employed volunteers. But just because they were volunteers was not to say that they weren’t good at their job. For Ann, they called in their best. His name was Mr. Small, and he was the sort of fellow who took pains to live the opposite of his name. He was kind of heavy, and had a bushy head of whitening hair, and a long beard that was fully white. He used to be a negotiator for the teachers’ union, and was spending his retirement in Fenlan, he told Ann, “For my sins.”

“I’m sorry you had to miss Christmas,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “We’re here for you right now. I see Constable Reid has given you a nice present.”

Ann nodded and held the dog close.

“You given him a name?” asked Mr. Small.

Ann shook her head.

“I’ll think of one. I promise.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I wouldn’t give him a name either right now.”

“My parents are dead,” said Ann suddenly. The words came out fast, like she’d upchucked them. She didn’t know what to do after that, and Mr. Small didn’t seem to either. They were sitting in the pediatric room, which was a playroom for kids much smaller than Ann. There were wooden blocks all over the table between them. Mr. Small picked one up and turned it in his hand, as though studying it for clues.

“It’s okay to cry,” he said finally. “But it’s also okay not to cry.”

Ann nodded. She thought that she wouldn’t cry, not then in front of Mr. Small. She had cried a lot—when she got into the back of the OPP cruiser on the side of the highway, again when they drove past the ambulance and the other police cruisers, and she caught a glimpse of the van, or its underside, exposed obscenely to the passing road. . . . When she saw Philip, on a body board, wheeling through the emergency room. She couldn’t even talk to him, or see him properly.

“I was talking to your Nan just now,” said Mr. Small. “She’s a really nice lady, isn’t she?”

Ann nodded. Her Nan was a very nice lady, she guessed.

“She loves you and Philip a great deal.”

“I love her,” Ann whispered.

“That’s good,” said Mr. Small. “But Ann, can you tell me why you don’t want to go with her?”

Ann thought about how to phrase it.

“Are you afraid?”

Ann nodded.

Mr. Small set down the block, slid it to one side, as though it were actually a barrier between them. “Now you can be honest with me,” he said. “Are you afraid of your Nan?”

The legs of Ann’s chair made a groan as she pushed her chair back, and she shook her head. She saw where this was going, and it wasn’t what she meant. Mr. Small thought Ann was afraid that Nan was . . . maybe a pedophile, or hit her and Philip, or drank too much and said things.

“That’s not it,” said Ann. “I’m not afraid of her. I’m afraid . . .
for her.”

“Can you explain that?”

Ann sat still again. She could explain it, sure. She could explain that Nan might find herself driving back to Barrie with Ann in the back seat of the car, and how the windows might frost over and the snows might come, and how a great wind might lift the front wheels of the car off the road, and flip it around, and kill Nan too and maybe Ann and maybe Philip too. She could tell Mr. Small that Nan might go down to her basement and check on the furnace one night a week from now, and find the door to the basement locked behind her, and then see . . . see it, just an instant before it got to her.

Yeah. She couldn’t tell Mr. Small any of that. He’d think she was crazy. Maybe she was—or maybe it would be best to be treated that way: taken away to a hospital where she could be filled with drugs and just shut down.

Ann sighed, and looked up. Mr. Small met her eyes, blinked twice—expecting an answer.

“I’m bad luck,” she said. “Really bad luck. I’m afraid . . . it’ll rub off on Nan.”

Mr. Small nodded. He actually seemed to relax. He set back, and pushed the blocks even farther to the edges of the table. Like he was clearing the very last of the debris between the two of them, and they could just level with one another. He tucked his chin down.

“It’s easy to think that. Take it all on yourself. Sometimes, that’s how we make sense of things, when really terrible things happen. But you have to know, Ann. You really had nothing to do with what happened in the car. It wasn’t your fault.”

Ann looked at him and thought about that, and thought about how it might be true. It wasn’t her fault—any more than it was when light bulbs burned and exploded, or a wind came up and lifted the surface of the lake into the sky. It was the Insect at work; not her. The best she could do was control it—keep it dormant. That was what she’d learned at the lodge. That was what she did every night, when she listened to her tapes and whispered the mnemonics that Dr. Sunderland had made her memorize. She was the gatekeeper, and the Insect was the wicked one—the mischief-maker.

The murderer, now.

And yet. Ann
was
the gatekeeper. She had kept that gate shut for many years, following the instructions that had been given her. She’d been diligent; a good student. A good girl, Dr. Sunderland had told her.

Had she gone bad? Had she betrayed the virtue she’d held on to so strongly? These thoughts tugged at her, as Mr. Small sat across from her, surrounded by blocks of wood that, she knew, could fly into the air at once and pummel him bloody.

Had she gone bad? Or had she simply opened her eyes—seen what Dr. Sunderland and the clinic provided, were nothing, really . . .
nothing but a placebo.

“I know it wasn’t my fault,” said Ann finally. “But I need to have some help.”

“Of course you do,” said Mr. Small. “We can talk as long as you want.”

“Thank you.”

They sat quietly for another moment. Mr. Small asked her if she wanted to pray, if that was maybe what she meant, and Ann shook her head firmly.

“No,” she said. “But I do need to talk. Can I please call a friend?”

She could, of course.

Christmas made it easier.

Ryan and his folks had just finished dinner. His father answered after the first ring. He was a little tipsy, his words slurring a bit. He called for Ryan in a sing-song, “It’s a gir-ul, Ry. Anything you want to share?”

And as the phone clattered, and for a moment Ann could hear the din of a Christmas at home: glass clinking—a squeal, from some baby who’d stopped in—condescending laughter from a crowd of adults. And then it all cut off, as Ryan took the phone, sheltered it from the noise of the room.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Ry,” said Ann.

“Ann?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s up?”

Ann didn’t, quite, get the nerve to tell him everything then. She wasn’t crying—she was feeling pretty strong, for the moment. But telling Ryan the story would crack all that. More important, she wouldn’t be able to rely on Ryan to do what she needed to have done—right away, really, as soon as possible. Mr. Small was sitting at the low table, surrounded by all those blocks, and her Nan was out in the waiting lounge . . . waiting, to take care of her.