A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (4 page)

Marjorie said, “Well, this story happened like almost one hundred years ago in the North End. Back in the old days, they kept all their molasses in giant metal storage tanks that were fifty feet tall and ninety feet wide, as big as buildings. The molasses was brought in by trains, and not trucks like in your book.” Marjorie paused to see if I was paying attention. I was, though I wanted to ask why they needed all that molasses given that the only time I’d seen the stuff was in the Scarry book. I didn’t ask. “It was the middle of winter, and for more than a week before the accident, it was really, really, super cold, so cold people’s breath-clouds would freeze and then fall out of the air and smash to bits on the ground.”

“Cool.” I pretended to breathe some of that ice breath.

“But after all that cold, Boston got one of those weird warm winter
days it gets sometimes. Everyone in the North End was saying, ‘My, what a beautiful day,’ and, ‘Isn’t it the most perfect, beautiful day you’ve ever seen?’ It was warm and sunny enough that all kinds of people left their apartments without their coats and hats and gloves, just like little ten-year-old Maria Di Stasio, who was only wearing her favorite sweater, the one with holes in the elbows. She played hopscotch while her brothers were being cruel to her, but it was a regular everyday cruel so she ignored them.

“There was a rumbling sound that everyone in the city heard but didn’t know what it was, and the rivets on the sides of the molasses tank shot out like bullets, and the metal sides peeled away like wrapping paper, and the sticky, sweet molasses poured out everywhere. A giant wave began to sweep through the North End.”

“Whoa.” I giggled nervously. This giant molasses wave was exciting for sure, but there were so many things wrong with this story. Marjorie was using a particular place and time, and using people instead of the goofy-looking animals of the Scarry book, and using people who were not named after me. Plus, the story was too long already and I’d never be able to write this all in the book. Where would I fit it?

“The wave was fifteen feet high and it crushed everyone and everything in its path. The wave bent the steel girders of Atlantic Avenue, tipped railcars, swept buildings off their foundations. Streets were waist deep in molasses, horses and people were stuck, and the more they wriggled and struggled to get free, the more they got stuck.”

“Wait, wait—” I stopped her. What was going on with this story? I was normally allowed some input. I’d voice my displeasure or shake my head and Marjorie would back up and change the story until it was more to my liking. Instead of asking her to start over, I asked, “What about Maria and her brothers?”

Marjorie lowered her voice to a whisper. “When the tank exploded,
Maria’s brothers ran for safety and she tried to run too, but she was too slow. The wave’s shadow caught her first, sprinting up the backs of her legs, then up the length of her favorite sweater, and then over her head, blotting out the sun, blacking out the most beautiful day ever seen. Then Maria was caught and crushed in the wave.”

“What? She died? Why are you saying this? That’s a terrible story!” I jumped off the bed, and scampered to pick up the Scarry book off the floor.

“I know.” Marjorie sounded like she was agreeing with me, but her smile was back and so were her wide eyes. She looked proud, like she just told the greatest story ever.

I slunk back to the bed and sat across from Marjorie. “Why would you make up something like that?”

“I didn’t. It’s a real story. It happened. Maria and twenty other people really died in a molasses flood in Boston.”

“That’s not a real story.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn’t!”

“Yes, it is.”

We repeated this quid pro quo for another two measures before I relented.

“Fine. Who told you about this?”

“No one.”

“You found it on the Internet, right? Not everything you read on the Internet is true, you know. My teacher says—”

“You can find the molasses flood on the Internet, it’s there, I checked. Most of it is there, anyway, but that’s not where I heard it.”

“Where, then?”

She shrugged, then she giggled, then she stopped, and she shrugged
again. “I don’t know. I woke up yesterday and just sort of knew the story, like it was something that’s always been there in my head. Stories are like that sometimes, I think. Even real ones. And I know this one was a horrible, terrible, no good story, but I—I can’t stop thinking about it, you know? I wonder what it was like to be there, what it was like to be Maria, to see and smell and hear and feel what she felt that second right before the wave got her. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it well, but I just wanted to tell you, Merry. I wanted to share it with you. Okay?” Her voice was getting gravelly like it did when she was doing homework and yelling at me to leave her alone. “You okay with this, Miss Merry?”

“I guess.” I didn’t believe her and didn’t know why she was trying so hard to make me believe that she hadn’t first found the story online. I was eight now and not a gullible little baby anymore. When I was really little, she’d tell me that her room rearranged itself at night when she was asleep, and she’d be dead serious when she said it, pretending to be upset and freaked out, and then I’d get upset and freaked out with her, my emotions amping up and in danger of redlining, but she had the knack to stop me the moment before the flood of tears would come and would say, “Okay, jeez, I was only kidding. Chill, Merry-monkey.” I’d hated when she called me “Merry-monkey.”

“Hey, look at what I drew.” Marjorie scooted over to where I was sitting and opened
All Around the World
and rested it on both our laps. The city page was Amsterdam but she’d mangled and re-formed the letters to roughly read Boston. She’d drawn a giant cylindrical tank with a vicious, jagged gash in its front, and out spilled brown marker all over the city. Marjorie had drawn Richard Scarry–esque cats and dogs wearing sport coats and ties, and they were stuck in the molasses, thrashing around. The molasses wave crested above a doomed train, its passengers, made to look like cats and dogs, screaming in horror.

I wanted to punch Marjorie, punch her stupid smiling face. She was making fun of me and my silly book and its silly stories. Still, I couldn’t look away from the page. It was terrible and would give me nightmares, and yet there was something wonderful in its terribleness.

Marjorie said, “Look. There’s Goldbug,” and she pointed at a small yellow figure with X-ed-out eyes and stick-figure arms and hands reaching out of the molasses flood to no one and everyone.

I shut the book without saying anything. Marjorie put the book on my lap and then rubbed my back. “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you this story.”

I was quick, too quick to say, “No. Tell me anything. Tell me all your stories. But tomorrow, can I get a story like the old ones? A story that you made up?”

“Yes, Merry. I promise.”

I slowly slid off the bed, purposefully looking away from Marjorie and to the wall and the cluster of posters. I hadn’t really noticed when I first came in the room, but they were hung so that they overlapped one another. Only certain pieces of the assorted singers, athletes, and movie stars were visible; disembodied hands, legs, arms, hair, a pair of eyes. In the middle of all those collaged body parts, everything seemed to focus on a mouth that was either laughing or snarling.

“Hey, what do you think of the posters?”

I was done with this. I had both books in my arms and they were impossibly heavy. “Lame,” I said, hoping it would sting her a little.

“You can’t tell Mom or Dad because they’d lose their minds, but when I woke up, my room was like this, I swear, and when you look at the posters in the mirror—”

“Shut up! You’re not funny!” I ran out of her room, not wanting her to see me crying.

MY STUFFED ANIMAL
companions became my sentries, strategically placed around the room. I turned my cardboard house so the mail slot faced my bedroom door. I spent the rest of that weekend in the house, looking out through the slot, totally convinced that Marjorie would be back to apologize, or to prove that she could sneak in whenever she wanted, or to steal my books again, or something worse, like her coming into my cardboard house to rearrange my drawings in the awful way she’d done with her own posters. I was good at imagining the somethings worse.

With each passing minute that she didn’t come into my room, I grew more frantic and paranoid and convinced that she was indeed coming. So I rigged my bedroom to try to catch her in the act. Wouldn’t she be in trouble with Mom and Dad then, given how much of a surly-teen stink she put up whenever I went near her room. I took the belt from my fuzzy purple robe that I never used and tied the ends to a bedpost and the doorknob.
The belt had just enough slack that my bedroom door opened so only someone my size could wiggle safely through. I also balanced an empty plastic orange juice jug on top of the slightly open door so that it leaned against the door frame. If the door opened beyond the constraints of my robe belt, the jug would crash to the ground, or better yet, on the door opener’s head. No way would Marjorie sneak in without getting stuck or making enough of a ruckus to be heard by me.

I didn’t feel 100 percent safe so I built motion-detecting surveillance cameras and a laptop computer out of cereal boxes. I spent Sunday morning conducting quite a few background checks on one Miss Marjorie Barrett. Oh, the things I found.

Despite Marjorie’s promise to tell me a real, made-up story the following day, I would make her wait this time. I would make her come to me. So I stayed in my room and only ventured out for food and bathroom breaks.

Still not satisfied, I built a tower of books with
All Around the World
and
Cars and Trucks and Things That Go
as part of the foundation. To remove either book without everything crashing down would be impossible. I tried it twice and earned a bruise on my thigh from one of the falling books.

When I woke up Monday morning, Marjorie was already in the shower and my parents were loudly stumbling and mumbling about the house. I slowly sat up and a folded piece of paper tumbled off my chest.

I flung the covers off me and checked for security breaches. The robe belt was still tied and the empty orange juice jug was in place. My stuffed animals were still on watch. I scolded them for falling asleep on the job. I checked my cameras and laptop. Nothing. My tower of books was intact, but
All Around the World
was gone, stolen, and replaced with
Oh, the Places You’ll Go
by Dr. Seuss. Did she just yank the book out and stuff in the replacement without the tower falling? Did she patiently break down
the book tower piece by piece to get to the book and then rebuild? Maybe I forgot to put the book back after one of my structural integrity tests, but no,
All Around the World
wasn’t anywhere else in my room.

I stormed into my cardboard house and I opened the folded note she’d left on my chest. Surely, it was from Marjorie and not Mom or Dad, though Dad was an occasional trickster if he was in a good mood.

It was written in green crayon.

I sneak into your room when you are asleep, Merry-monkey. I’ve been doing it for weeks now, since the end of summer. You’re so pretty when you’re asleep. Last night, I pinched your nose shut until you opened your little mouth and gasped.

Tonight it’s your turn. Sneak out to my room, after you’re supposed to be in bed, and I’ll have a new made-up story ready for you. Pictures and everything. It’ll be so much fun! Please stop being mad at me and do this.

xoxo
Marjorie

WE ATE DINNER
in the kitchen, never in the dining room. Our dining room table, as far as I could tell, was not for dining, but for stacking the clean and folded laundry we were supposed to bring upstairs to our rooms and neatly put away, which we never did. The piles of folded clothes would grow to dizzying, unstable heights and shrink into sad little leaf piles of socks and underwear after we’d cherry-picked what we wanted to wear.

Mom made spaghetti and sighed loudly in the general direction of my father because he was still in the living room, sitting in front of the computer. We all heard the traitorous keyboard keys clacking away. Dinner was ready five minutes ago. Marjorie and I sat with our full steaming plates of pasta; hers topped with red sauce, mine with melted butter, pepper, and a blizzard of grated cheese. Mom said that we weren’t allowed to start eating until “
he
showed up.” Our not eating was supposed to be some sort of punishment for him.

I grabbed my stomach, swayed in my chair, and announced, “I’m gonna die if I don’t eat! Come on, Dad!”

Marjorie was all slumped and disheveled, lost in her sweatshirt. She whispered, “Shut up, monkey,” to me, apparently low enough that only I heard her, because Mom, who was standing right behind us, didn’t admonish Marjorie.

Dad tiptoed into the kitchen and poured himself into a chair. I was always shocked by how quietly graceful he could be for such a large man. “Sorry. Just had to check a few emails. Didn’t hear back from any of the places I’d hoped to.”

Dad had lost his job more than a year and a half ago. When he graduated high school he’d started working at Barter Brothers, a New England–based toy manufacturer. By the end of his nineteen-year tenure he was in charge of the corporate office mail room. Barter Brothers hadn’t been doing well for years and Dad managed to survive a few layoffs, but didn’t survive the sale of the factory, and he was cut loose. He hadn’t found another job yet.

Mom said, “I’m sure it could’ve waited until after dinner.” She was extra agitated tonight. Surely a carryover from earlier, when she and Marjorie had come home from wherever it was they were. Marjorie ran upstairs to her room before the front door shut. Mom threw her keys on the kitchen table and went out back to smoke three cigarettes. Yes, I counted them. Three meant something was wrong.

Our kitchen table was round, a light shade of brown that had never been in style, and its legs were as wobbly and unsteady as an old dog’s. So when Dad did a quick drum roll with his hands, our plates and glasses bounced and clinked together.

He said, “Hey, maybe tonight we should say grace.”

This was new. I looked to Mom. She rolled her eyes, pulled her chair in tighter to the table, and took a large bite of garlic bread.

Marjorie said, “Seriously, Dad. Grace?”

I asked, “What’s grace?”

Mom said, “You get to explain that one.”

Dad smiled and rubbed his dark wirehair beard. “You don’t remember? Has it been that long?”

I shrugged.

“It’s something we used to do all the time in my family. Someone at the dinner table says a few words about how thankful we are for the food and for everyone in our lives, right? It’s like a prayer.”

Marjorie grunted a laugh and twisted her fork, entangling it deep in her red spaghetti.

“This isn’t technically a dinner table, Dad. It’s just a kitchen table,” I said, proud to have found a loophole in this grace thing. I was good at finding loopholes.

Mom said, “Why are you bringing this up now?”

Dad held up his surrender hands and stammered through a nonexplanation. “No reason. Just thought it would be nice, you know? Just a nice family thing to do at dinner.”

Mom said, “It’s fine,” in that way of hers that meant it wasn’t fine. “But starting a new dinner tradition is a big deal. It’s something we can all discuss later.”

I said, “Yeah, we can have a family meeting about grace.” Big family decisions and to-do’s were supposed to be discussed during family meetings. Generally, we only seemed to have family meetings to share bad news, like when Grampy died and our dog Maxine had to be put to sleep. Or we had meetings to try to enact a new set of chores for Marjorie and me. Democracy was a pretense in those new-chores family meetings, where Marjorie and I would get the honor of choosing from a list of options that never included anything we really wanted to do, like sit on the
couch, watch TV, read books, make up stories. The meetings never quite worked out the way any of us wanted them to.

Dad said, “That’s a fantastic idea, Miss Merry.” He loudly sucked in one long piece of spaghetti for my entertainment.

“I think it’s a bad idea.” Marjorie managed to hide most of her face behind her untied hair and her oversized sleeves.

“You always say my ideas are bad!” I said, looking to pick a fight. I patted my leg to make sure I still had Marjorie’s confession letter in my front jeans pocket. I hadn’t been able to analyze it with my cardboard laptop yet, but no matter. I had written proof that she’d been sneaking into my room and stealing things. I would surely use it if she continued being mean to me.

Mom said, “Relax, Merry, she’s not talking about you.”

“So, what’s a bad idea, Marjorie? Please, explain,” Dad said. We knew he was angry because he was obviously trying to act not angry.

“All of it.”

Mom and Dad shared a look across the table. Marjorie had managed to get my parents on the same team again.

“Did you have practice today?”

“Nice change of subject, Dad.”

“What? I’m just asking.”

“I had an
appointment
.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Dad’s not-anger deflated instantly, and he shrank in his chair. “How did that go?”

I had no idea at the time what they were talking about, which made me very nervous.

“Just awesome.” Marjorie didn’t change her posture or position, but her voice lessened and drifted far away, like she was on the verge of sleep. But then she turned to me and said, “Dad wants us to say grace so that we’ll all go to heaven someday.”

I patted her letter again and made a mental note to tighten the security in my room. Perhaps I could put baby powder on the floor around the door to track any footprints that weren’t mine.

Dad said, “That’s not fair. Now look, Mom’s right, we can talk about this later—”

“Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub,” Marjorie said, then scooped half of her spaghetti into her mouth, comically distending her cheeks with pasta, but no one was laughing. Spaghetti and sauce leaked out of her mouth, down her chin, and onto her plate.

Mom and I said, “Marjorie, don’t be disgusting,” and “Ew, gross,” at the same time.

“Hey, listen, I’ve always tried to respect you guys and not force my beliefs on you, so—”

“By trying to get us to say grace, right?”

“So!—You will respect mine!” Dad’s volume escalated until it was louder than his drumming hands had been earlier. Dad had a bullhorn hidden inside his chest, one that rattled the walls and shook the foundation. He put his head down and harpooned his pasta.

I couldn’t read Mom. Usually she’d get all over Dad for yelling and he’d be quick to apologize to us all. In our group silence Mom sat with her hands folded under her chin, and she watched Marjorie.

“Hey, Dad, I actually talked about heaven today. At my appointment.” Marjorie wiped her face with the back of her hand and then winked at me.

Dad had stopped taking me to church when I was four years old. My only memories were of boredom, wooden benches, and the big hill out behind the church on which we used to go sledding. So heaven was this vague, uneasy, almost cartoonish concept, a confusing cultural mashup of puffy clouds, harps, winged angels, golden sunlight, a giant hand that
may or may not belong to a giant man with a flowing white beard named God. It was this exotic place kids at school would sometimes talk about, telling me their dead grandparents or pets were there. I didn’t understand it, what it was, why it was, and I didn’t really want to.

Marjorie asked Dad, “Can I ask you what I asked Dr. Hamilton?”

“Sure.” Dad moved food around on his plate like he was the petulant child being scolded.

“You believe in heaven, right?”

“Yes, I very much do, Marjorie, and—”

“Hold on, I didn’t get to my question yet. So, in heaven, do you believe that the ghosts or spirits or whatever of your loved ones are there, waiting for you to share in eternity?”

“Yes, but—”

Marjorie said, “Wait,” and giggled. “I’m still not to my question, yet. How do you know for sure that in heaven, the ghosts of the people you love are real?”

“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking how would you know if you were really talking with the ghost of your father, of Grampy, say, and not some demon totally faking it? What if that demon was perfectly impersonating Grampy? That’d be pretty horrible, yeah? Picture it: You’re in heaven with who you think is Grampy. The ghost looks like him and talks like him and acts like him, but how can you be sure it’s really him? And as more and more time passes you realize you can never be sure. You can never be sure that any of the other ghosts around you are not all disguised demons. So your poor soul is forever in doubt, expecting that in any one moment of eternity there will be some terrible, awful, horrible change in Grampy’s face as he embraces you.”

Marjorie got up, clutching her glass of water to her chest. Her chin was stained red with spaghetti sauce.

Sitting around the small circle of our kitchen table, I looked at Mom and Dad and they looked at each other as though they didn’t recognize anyone. No one said anything.

Marjorie slowly walked out of the kitchen. We listened to her footfalls, to her progression deeper into the house and then upstairs to her room, and we heard her door click shut.