A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (26 page)

Marjorie told her stories until the sun went down and her bedroom turned purple. Finally, she stopped and put a pen in my hand and flipped over one of my signs.

She said, “Mom is getting sick too. You know she is. She’s breaking down and can’t handle it. I’ve seen her down in the basement with him, praying, saying, and doing weird things. We have to do something before it’s too late. We have to help them, have to save them. We’ll do it by saving ourselves first. If we don’t do anything, Dad will bury us all in the basement.”

I wrote
What do we do?

Marjorie told me what we were going to do. And I made some new signs.

I WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN
with my
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
sign held up in front of my chest.

Mom sat by herself at the kitchen table. She smoked a cigarette and flipped through an entertainment magazine.

She said, “What’s this?”

I pointed at the sign.

“Are you not talking because we didn’t get the tree?”

Sign:
YES
.

“What do you want for dinner then? Do you have that written down on a sign?”

My next sign:
SPAGHETTI
.

“We can do that.”

Sign:
OKAY
.

“Do I get a kiss?”

Sign:
OKAY
.

I WENT BACK UPSTAIRS
. I still hadn’t seen Dad and assumed he was in the basement. I waited with Marjorie in her room. She let me keep one of her pens and a pocket-sized pad of paper, one with a glittery yellow cover, so I could write new signs more quickly. She also turned on her TV and let me watch
SpongeBob
. It was an episode that featured a pirate ghost that was big and green and kind of scary.

Partway through the show Marjorie dropped to all fours and stuck her arms under her bed. Her walking boot crashed heavily into the floor twice. She emerged with the glass jar of white powder that she’d told me about.

Sign:
IS THAT IT?

“Yes.”

Sign:
YOU SAID IT WAS FULL?
The jar was taller and skinner than I imagined, and it was only maybe a quarter full.

Marjorie smiled. “Nothing gets by you at all, does it, Merry? It was full. I dumped most of it out.”

I LET MARJORIE WALK DOWN
the stairs first. Her boot sounded like a bowling ball rolling down the stairs.

When we reached the foyer, Marjorie surprised me by putting the jar into my hands. This wasn’t part of the plan. I shook my head no and tried to give it back to her.

She whispered, “This will only work if you do it. You heard me walking down the stairs, yeah? I’m just realizing now that she’ll hear me clomping around the kitchen if I do it. Don’t worry. I’ll distract her for you. It’ll be easy.”

Marjorie put two hands in the middle of my back and pushed me away and into the living room. She limped into the dining room. The dining room table was covered in clean clothes as usual.

Marjorie called out, “Hey, Mom? Can you help me find my purple PJ top? I can’t find it and I want to wear it tonight. It gets so cold in my room.”

Mom walked out of the kitchen and said, “Wait, hold on a second. Don’t just go picking through all the piles. I killed myself folding everything!”

I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just going to stand there in the living room with the cold, glass jar in my hand and wait for someone to take it away from me. I swear, I don’t remember walking from the living room and into the kitchen and then next to the stove. But there I was.

I don’t remember if I’d taken off the silver lid, or if Marjorie had done so for me. The blue gas flame of the burner was low. The sauce bubbled slowly. Mom and Marjorie bickered in the dining room. I poured white powder into the saucepan and quickly stirred until it disappeared into the red, until it looked as though I hadn’t added anything.

I did it because I believed in Marjorie and I believed that her plan would work, that it would help everyone.

I tiptoed out of the kitchen and I heard Mom say to Marjorie in an exasperated voice, “Find it yourself, then.”

MOM SAID, “NO SAUCE, RIGHT,
sweetie?”

I held up my
YES
sign. I used a fork to mix the butter into my plain pasta.

Dad asked what all my signs were about.

I held up my hastily scribbled
CHEESE
sign.

Mom told him that I’d decided to stop talking for the day. She didn’t tell him why.

Dad passed me the Parmesan cheese.

I don’t remember where in the house Dad came from. What I mean is, I don’t remember where he was before we were all in the kitchen eating dinner. I only remember him being there at the kitchen table like he’d always been sitting there, like a gargoyle. He was hunched and his unkempt beard jutted out in random places, and his eyes darted around the room like he was always looking for an emergency exit. Dad prayed silently to himself as Mom served herself a bowl of pasta and covered it with red sauce. The saucepan was avocado green and dinged up. It’d been used a lot. Dad served himself when Mom was finished.

Marjorie was the last to come to the table. She had been in the downstairs bathroom for a long time. She tickled my neck with freshly wet hands as she scooted by me and sat down. Using her fork instead of the wooden serving ladle, Marjorie speared a staggering amount of spaghetti onto her plate. It all clumped and stuck together like a ball of tangled yarn.

Mom said, “Wow, someone’s hungry.”

“I could eat the world. Merry, pass the sauce, please,” Marjorie said, and winked at me. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.

I didn’t know what to do or what her asking for the sauce meant. And when I looked around the table I thought Mom and Dad were staring at me extra hard, like they knew I’d done something wrong. The empty glass jar Marjorie had given me was still in my sweatshirt pocket. My skin tingled with fear as I thought Marjorie had told them what I did to the sauce, had told them our plan, and had told them it was all my idea and my fault.

I held up my
NO
sign.

Dad said, “I got it.” He reached his big paw across the table and passed the saucepan to Marjorie. She said, “Thank you, Father,” in her faux-British accent and poured the rest of the sauce onto her pasta. She
twirled her fork in the middle of the red mess and shoved the glob into her mouth. She chewed, swallowed, and watched me watching her.

The moment I saw the sauce pass between her lips, I was as angry as I’d ever been in my life. Marjorie had fooled me again. I’d believed her. Tears filled my eyes so I kept my head down near my plate. She had lied to me, made it all up: her theory about Dad, the family stories, and our plan. Our plan: Have Mom cook us spaghetti and we’d spike the sauce. I famously didn’t like sauce, and Marjorie would say her stomach hurt so she’d have her pasta plain just like me. We’d put enough of the powder in the sauce to just “knock out” (Marjorie’s phrase) our parents or make them sick enough so that we could then run away, escape the house. We’d bring the poison jar to the police as proof of what Dad had planned to do to us and then we’d be safe. Dad would get taken away, yes, but he’d also get the help he needed and maybe someday he’d be well enough to come back home to us, just like how every time Marjorie was sent away, she came back to us. This made sense to the eight-year-old me. People went away and they came back and would continue to come back because they had always done so previously.

So it was clear that Marjorie had tricked me into pouring a mix of sugar and flour into the sauce. I was the dummy again. Right? I mean, why else would she eat the sauce too?

I held up my
WHY?
sign to her.

Marjorie said, “This is the best sauce ever. You should have some, monkey.” She was laughing at me behind her big, red smile. I hated her so much right then. I whispered it as I chewed on my plain pasta so no one else could hear me. But I did. I whispered, “I hate you. I wish you were dead.”

Marjorie said, “You eat pizza with sauce. You love pizza! I don’t understand why you don’t eat it with your spaghetti. It’s crazy. Right, Dad?”

Dad said, “Whatever. I’ve long given up trying to figure anyone out.”

Mom said, “Leave her alone. She’ll eat sauce when she wants to.”

My sister and my parents talking about my not eating red sauce were their last words. No explanations or realizations or regrets or pleas for forgiveness. No good-byes.

And it happened quickly. I still can’t believe it happened so quickly. The high-pitched
scritch
of forks rubbing against the ceramic dishes stopped. Breaths became heavy and as loud and as infrequent as whale spouts. Chairs groaned, slid back. Hands dropped forks and squished into their plates. Glasses knocked over. My stack of signs slid to the floor. Elbows banged on the table. Legs kicked out. Eyes fluttered and closed. Heads dropped. Bodies slouched and sank.

I stood up and backed away from the table slowly, initially afraid that a sudden movement from me would make the scene implode further, with the table and chairs and everyone sliding and sinking into the basement. Mom’s and Dad’s heads lay on the table as though they were schoolchildren napping on their desks. I tried poking Mom in the shoulder and her arm dropped below the table. I jumped back, banging into the counter and rack of dishes behind me and no one reacted, no one moved. I screamed as loudly as I could and paced the room.

Marjorie’s head was tilted back, face pointed at the ceiling. Her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and hung down behind her, a half-drawn curtain. Red saliva bubbled out of her mouth and dripped down the length of her long, white neck. Her eyes were half open. I stood next to her on my tiptoes and craned my face over hers.

I said her name three times. I didn’t use my signs. I asked her what we were supposed to do now. Her eyes were dark and reflected the light above her. Her skin had turned to clay.

I asked her how long it would take for the powder to wear off. I asked her how long it would take them to wake up.

I told her that this was a bad idea, that she didn’t have to eat the sauce like they did. I told her I needed her and I didn’t think I could go to the police by myself because I didn’t know where they were.

I put the empty glass jar in Marjorie’s hand, wrapped her fingers around it, tried to make her hold it like she was supposed to. But it kept falling out, so I took it back.

I sat in my chair and waited. None of them was breathing. I stood up, covered my eyes and told Mom and Dad that I was sorry I played such a mean prank on them, and that it was all Marjorie’s fault. I started crying.

I went down into the basement. I was terrified but I had to see what was down there, see if anything that Marjorie had told me was true. I ran down the basement stairs. I wanted extra light with me, so I carried two jumbo flashlights, and the beams danced and bounced off the stone foundation walls.

There was no shrine with tapestries and pictures and altars. There was none of that. Up against the back wall of the basement, next to the shelves of food there was the giant pewter cross that had briefly hung on the wall in Marjorie’s room. A dirty rag covered Jesus’ head. His body was tarnished and smeared with dirt.

I sat on the basement floor and I waited for Marjorie’s growing things to come bursting out of the ground, wrap me in their green tentacles, and pull me underneath the house, or pull me apart, piece by piece, bit by bit until every part of me had been torn away.

Everything gets foggy after the basement.

“
WHAT I REMEMBER
is going to the second floor and leaving everyone’s bedroom door open in case they wanted to come upstairs. I left my door open so they could find me. I had my Richard Scarry book and the empty poison jar with me. I was in my bedroom three days later when Auntie Erin came over to the house and found me. Found us.”

Rachel says, “Merry—” and holds up her hand to stop me. But I’m not done talking. Not yet.

“But apparently, that last part didn’t happen. I know I sort of insinuated before that I hadn’t read the police report. But I’ve read the police report. So I know that Marjorie’s psychiatrist came by for her appointment, found cars in the driveway, a locked house, and called the police after no one answered the door or the phone. I know the police broke in and found me in the kitchen with my family. I know that I was underneath the kitchen table. I know I was sitting in the filth and foul of three-day-old
bodies and I know I was sitting down at the foot of my mother, leaning up against her legs, sitting there with her thumb in my mouth.”

I finally stop talking, for what feels like the first time in days, and take a deep, greedy breath. I’m not crying, but I am trembling all over. My hands wiggle in my lap like dying fish. I’m cold and reach for my jacket. I say, “Is it me or is it now totally freezing in here?”

Rachel stands up and slides her chair over next to me so that she can put an arm around my shoulder and hug me. I lean into her. She’s warm and comfortable. I close my eyes and we sit like that until Rachel lets me go. She wipes her eyes with a napkin from the table.

I say, “That memory of Auntie Erin coming into my bedroom, saving me, carrying me downstairs to her car, it has faded a little, but it’s still there. Only it’s been reassigned, or shuffled off to be part of another more appropriate memory of the years spent living with my amazing aunt. Maybe it’s not the same as actually remembering, but what the police report describes as having happened in terrible detail, I can see it now, and I can almost feel it.”

Rachel says, “I wish I knew what to say, Merry.”

“I’ve never told anyone what I’ve admitted to you. The police, psychologists, my aunt; no one. I imagine there’ll be a giant shit storm when it comes out in the book. But I think I’m ready for it. I’m ready to live with the truth, anyway.”

Rachel writes something down in her notebook and lets loose a long sigh. She says, “Wow, Merry. You break my heart and I—I don’t know what to do now.”

“What do you mean?”

Rachel slips into her coat and says, “It has gotten cold in here, hasn’t it?” She opens and closes her notebook twice. “What is the truth, Merry? And please, I don’t mean that to sound accusatory or in any
way callous to the horror you lived through, that you live with. It’s just given what I knew, or what I thought I knew going into this, and what I’ve read and researched and now heard from you, I’m not at all sure what really happened.”

I say, “There are days it all seems like something that happened to someone else, and in a way, that’s a truth. I haven’t been that little Miss Merry in a very long time. There are days when I want to believe it was all some horror movie that I’ve watched repeatedly, and in that horror movie, a demon inside Marjorie magically made the poison appear under the bed and it was the demon that tricked an innocent child into killing her family. There are days when I want to believe that Dad only got the potassium cyanide because he was desperate to polish up that ugly pewter cross in the basement. There are days when I like to think that Marjorie was right and that she truly believed in the plan she pitched me but mistakenly thought the supposedly smaller amount of poison in the jar wouldn’t be enough to kill them.

“Most days, I really don’t know what to think or believe. All that I do know with one hundred percent certainty is that Marjorie and perhaps my father were very sick, our entire family was put under impossible stresses and strains, we were all manipulated, and we were all irrational, maybe even willingly so. And when I was eight years old, I was manipulated into poisoning my sister and my parents.”

We sit in silence. A young, giggling couple bursts into the coffee shop, slamming the front door open. The bell rings angrily. They both make loud
brr-we’re-freezing
noises as they walk toward the counter. The barista reappears. He rubs his hands and arms furiously, trying to keep them warm. He sees me watching, winks, and says, “Heat’s off, but it wasn’t me.”

Rachel starts in with questions about the police report, about there
being some inconsistencies regarding my story and some of the gathered evidence, including the glass jar. She says that most of the prints on the jar were smudged and unreadable and the only partial they could lift belonged to my father.

“Yes, I’d read that about the prints, but I don’t know what else to tell you about the jar. I told you everything I know and everything I remember. Anything else would be speculation or two-bit detective work on my part. I’ve given you everything that I have to give regarding my story. The rest is really up to you. You wanted my story. Now you have it, and I trust you with it.” I stand up slowly and say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound snippy. I really do mean it when I say that I trust you with this story. If anyone is going to write it, I’m so very glad it’s you, Rachel.”

Rachel smiles, stands, and says, “Merry—”

I interrupt. “I’m exhausted and suddenly not feeling that great. I think I need to go home and lie down now. Okay?”

“Yes, of course! You need to take care of yourself, Merry.”

We share a long hug. We declare ourselves friends. Rachel offers to give me a ride home. I politely refuse and tighten the belt of my red coat.

Rachel puts on her gloves and wraps a scarf around her neck. She promises to check in with me after she gets back from Amsterdam. She says that we should have dinner or lunch together sometime and not talk at all about the book. I tell her that I would like that very much, but I doubt the just-for-fun lunch/dinner will happen. She’ll be too busy writing our book and busy with interviews and assignments for her new one. And despite how friendly and motherly she’s being, the way she looks at me now, it’s different.

Behind the counter, the barista is on the phone with someone and grumbling about the heat not working. I turn and walk toward the front door
thinking that it must not have shut all the way after the couple entered because of how cold it is in the coffee shop now.

Rachel calls out to me, “Merry! Don’t forget your umbrella.” Rachel hands it to me and it’s still wet. I thank her. After an awkward silence, and after Rachel and I say our good-byes again, it’s cold enough that my breath is a visible mist.