A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (6 page)

I SAT UP
in bed. All I knew was that I was in the house, which was this dark, expansive space, and that Marjorie was somewhere else in the same house, maybe lost, maybe in hiding, and she was screaming.

I couldn’t understand how Marjorie wasn’t right there next to me with her hands cupped around her mouth, because she was so shockingly loud. She screamed like I’ve never heard someone scream, before or since. Her hyperactive pitch was layered and schizophrenic, imploding down into a singularity, then going big bang, expanding and exploding all over everything. These dizzying changes in her voice were instantaneous and hallucinatory, as if she were somehow atonally harmonizing with herself.

I shimmied past my slightly ajar bedroom door, careful to not trigger my security devices, and Marjorie’s shrill voice echoed in the organ pipe of the hallway. My parents emerged from their room yelling Marjorie’s name and futilely cinching closed their open robes as they plodded across
the hallway. As scared as I was, I remember being angry at them; those bumbling caricatures of sleepy parents. How could they ever protect Marjorie and me? How could they ever keep us safe?

Mom saw me and pointed, rooting me to the spot at my end of the hallway, and shouted, “Go back to bed! I’ll be there in a minute!”

I didn’t go back to my room and instead curled up into a tight ball on the hallway floor. I made promises to Marjorie in my head. I promised her she could tell me any crazy-weird-scary-icky stories she wanted to tell me and I wouldn’t tell Mom if she’d only stop screaming.

Dad banged on the door and twisted the knob. The door stayed closed and he called out to Marjorie, but he called out weakly. There was no way she heard him. Mom pulled in tight behind him and similarly cried out to Marjorie, using the words
honey
and
sweetie
, cajoling as though trying to trick her into eating broccoli. They didn’t know what to do, how to proceed. They were scared too. Maybe even more scared than I was.

Then Dad finally pushed open her door and my arm-in-arm parents were awash in the bright, golden light of her room. There was a volcanic increase of volume that shattered everything in my head, which I tried to hold together with my little hands, but pieces slipped through. Pounding on the walls or the floor, or both, joined Marjorie’s screams and it all echoed and multiplied until everything was pounding, thudding, crashing, screaming, and I heard and felt it all with my insides.

Dad yelled, “Jesus Christ, Marjorie! Stop it!” and disappeared into her room.

Mom stayed behind in the doorway and yelled all sorts of staccato instructions that were directed at Dad. “Don’t! Easy! Gentle! John! Go easy! Don’t touch her! Let her calm down first! She doesn’t know what she’s doing!”

I crawled down the hallway toward Marjorie’s room, my palms and bare knees collecting grit and dust from the hardwood that hadn’t been swept for weeks.

The pounding stopped. Marjorie was still screaming and hysterical but she’d calmed down just enough so that I could make out what everyone said.

Marjorie yelled, “Get them out of my head!”

Dad: “It’s okay. You—You just had a bad dream.”

“They’re so old. They won’t let me sleep. They’re always there.”

Mom: “Oh, Marjorie. Mom and Dad are here. Everything’s okay.”

“They’ll always be there. There are too many.”

Dad: “Shh, no one’s here. It’s just us.”

“I can’t escape them.”

I was halfway to her room. Marjorie wasn’t screaming anymore. She sounded calm, detached; speaking in that normal teenager tone where she barely mustered the energy to grunt an answer to annoying parental questions.

My parents were getting louder, growing more desperate.

Mom: “Please, honey. Climb down!”

“We can’t escape them.”

Dad: “Marjorie, come down from there! Now!”

Then Mom yelled at Dad for yelling at Marjorie, and Dad yelled at Marjorie to knock it off, and Marjorie began screaming again at the both of them, and everyone was screaming, and I thought it would never stop.

I leapfrogged into the doorway, still crouched low to the floor. And when I looked up and saw Marjorie, I started screaming too.

The next morning, Mom told me that Marjorie wouldn’t remember any of what had happened because she was sleepwalking or something. And I asked her about the holes in the walls and Mom tried to joke, saying,
“Yes, Marjorie was sleep punching too.” I didn’t get the joke. Mom explained that Marjorie was having some sort of night terror, which was a really strong nightmare that scared you so much it made your body seem awake to everyone else but you weren’t really awake, and Marjorie was so scared that she punched holes in the plaster, probably trying to get away from whatever it was she was dreaming about. Mom assured me that Marjorie had the strength to punch holes in the walls, and that plaster, particularly the old and crumbly plaster of the second floor, wasn’t very strong at all. I was supposed to find comfort in Mom’s explanation, but I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around what a night terror was, and I was equally concerned to hear that our walls were so weak. What kind of house had crumbly walls?

That night, standing in Marjorie’s doorway, when I knew nothing of night terrors and old plaster, I saw Marjorie clinging to the wall like a spider. Her circular poster collage, her collection of glossy body parts, was her web, and she hovered over its center. Her arms and legs were spread-eagled, with her hands, wrists, feet, and ankles sunk into the wall as though it were slowly absorbing her. Marjorie squirmed and writhed in place, her feet at least my height above the floor. Dad had to look up at her and he tugged on her sweatshirt, demanding that she wake up and come down off the wall.

Marjorie’s head was turned toward us. I couldn’t see the side of her face because her hair was everywhere. She yelled, “I don’t want to fucking listen to them anymore. I don’t want to fucking listen to fucking anyone anymore! Fucking ever fucking again!”

Mom grabbed me by the hand and led me down the hall to my room. She shushed me the whole way, the sounds from Marjorie’s room receding until we were at the end of the hallway. Mom powered my bedroom
door open, busting through my tied robe belt that fell to the floor, a dead fuzzy vine. My plastic orange juice jug came tumbling down from the top of the door bouncing off Mom’s head. She absently brushed a hand across her forehead and kicked the jug toward my open closet. I tried to explain what had just fallen on her head, but she shushed me again and hustled me into bed.

Mom lay down next to me. I cried hysterically, and repeatedly asked her what was wrong with Marjorie. She rubbed my forehead and lied to me, telling me that everything would be okay.

I turned away from Mom, but she still held me tight, winding and wrapping her arms and legs around me. I squirmed, trying to break free without knowing where I would go if I did escape. She hummed a lullaby into the back of my head. Marjorie’s and Dad’s screaming was now the soundtrack to some horror movie that was trying too hard, and somehow, eventually, everyone stopped yelling and screaming and humming, and we fell asleep.

Later, I woke with Mom still asleep in my little bed. All of the blankets were wrapped around her, and she had flipped over and faced the wall. The rise and fall of her back was gently rhythmic, up and down, up and down. I faced out toward the rest of my room and my little cardboard house. I couldn’t remember when I’d last looked at the house. I couldn’t remember if it had looked like this back when I’d originally gone to bed so many hours ago, or when I’d first awoken to Marjorie’s screaming, or when Mom had brought me back to my room and hummed her song into the back of my skull.

I was calm; there would be no more tears from me. But I wouldn’t fall back to sleep for the rest of the night as I tried to puzzle out when Marjorie had been in my room again and if she was in here while Mom
and I were asleep. I groped around the bridge of my nose for signs of her pinching it shut.

My cardboard house’s outer walls, the windowsill flower boxes, the slate roof, and even the chimney, were scarred with detailed vines and leaves drawn in sharp black outlines and colored in green with Magic Marker. Her growing things choked my house. In the window was a piece of paper with two Richard Scarry–style cats drawn so they were peering out of the window and at me. The cats were sisters. The bigger sister wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and looked ill, her eyes glassy and droopy lidded. The little sister was wide-eyed, determined, and had glasses on.

I got out of bed quietly and didn’t wake Mom. I plucked the picture out of the window. Written on the bottom was the following:

There’s nothing wrong with me, Merry. Only my bones want to grow through my skin like the growing things and pierce the world.

It was even darker inside the cardboard house than it was in my room, like how deeper water is darker than the shallows. I backed away from the house but my traitorous eyes kept staring at the window. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things or not, but the shutters appeared to be moving slightly, as though the house were breathing. And I stared hard past the window and into the house, my eyes starved for patterns, desperate for data, clues, for something to process. The longer I stared and saw nothing, the more I could see Marjorie there, huddled, nesting in my blankets, waiting to reach through the window and grab me if I got close again, or maybe she was giggling to herself and spidering around the cardboard walls and ceiling, waiting to drop and sink her fangs into my neck. Or worse, maybe she was the victim trapped inside and she wanted me to help her. But I didn’t know how to help her.

I told myself that maybe in the morning I would hang up the sister-cats inside the cardboard house. I folded the picture and put it in the top drawer of my bureau, next to the other note that Marjorie had written me. When I took my hand out of the drawer I noticed there was a green leaf with a curlicue stem carefully etched on the back of my hand.

MOM AND DAD
were having a talk in the kitchen.

Having a talk
was another buzzword phrase in our house, one that meant something was wrong. More often than not their talks were controlled arguments that generally centered on housework (laundry piles still on the dining room table!) or the handling of us girls. Revelations gleaned in a typical talk: Dad didn’t like the condescending tone Mom often used with us; Mom didn’t like his yelling and its wildly inconsistent usage; Dad thought she was too quick to punish; Mom didn’t like having her discipline edicts questioned in front of us. Initially acrimonious, their talks somehow managed to end like a pregame pep talk: rote promises to be rational in the face of our irrationality, a renewed commitment to presenting a unified front, team play, then hands in the middle: Go, parents, on three, ready, break!

On this afternoon they were trying to be quiet and discreet, or as
discreet as you could be in our house. I hid under the dining room table and watched their feet, ankles, calves, and knees. Mom’s legs twitched up and down when she talked, and swayed side to side when Dad spoke. His legs were still, as though they didn’t know what they wanted to do. I wanted to roll up their pants legs and draw funny faces with huge, puffy red lips on their knees.

I traced the ghost lines of washed Magic Marker on the back of my hand. I’d scrubbed Marjorie’s green leaf off as soon as I’d gotten up, and I regretted doing so.

Initially I could only make out some of what my parents were saying: snippets about doctors, appointments, prescriptions, health insurance, and one or all being too expensive. Most of the words, in and of themselves, didn’t mean much to me. But I understood their tone, and the word
expensive
. They were very worried and so I was very worried, and hiding under the table spying on them was no longer any fun at all.

Then Dad said, “Hear me out on this.”

Mom crossed one leg over the other. “Go ahead.”

Dad rambled about being sorry for the last few weeks, that he hadn’t been going out in the mornings and afternoons on job searches, but instead going to church to pray for a clear head and for guidance. He said that phrase numerous times as a measure of its importance.
For guidance
. He said it so fast and so often it became one word in my head and it sounded like a mysterious, foreign land, a place that I would’ve asked Marjorie to write a story about if things were different, normal. He’d been meeting with a Father Wanderly and he’d been very helpful, calm, soothing, and there was nothing else going on there, he wasn’t seeing him with a greater plan in mind, only seeing him forguidance forguidance forguidance. But now he thought Marjorie should meet with this Father Wanderly and talk to him, too.

“Jesus Christ!” Mom said.

I covered my mouth with my hand, feigning shock that Mom swore. I had to stop myself from jumping out from beneath the table, wagging a finger at her, and telling her not to swear. She usually only swore in the car when another driver was being a jackass (her favorite swear).

Dad said, “Wait a minute. I know how you feel about the church, but—”

There was no but. Mom’s crossed-over leg started swinging out like a club. She whisper-yelled that their daughter was sick and needed real medical attention, and how could he suggest such a thing and no matter the cost—they’d sell the house if they had to—they would continue the appointments and follow the treatment.

And Dad, he stayed calm, saying, “I know,” a lot, and that he just wanted to explore other options as well, that it couldn’t hurt. Mom was having none of it. She claimed the last thing Marjorie or anyone in the family needed, including Dad, was Father What’s-his-face filling their heads with mumbo jumbo, which could most certainly hurt any chance she might have of recovery. Marjorie was already confused enough as it was.

I whispered “mumbo jumbo” to myself, testing out the words, making a mental note to use it whenever possible.

Dad said, “You don’t know that. How could you possibly know that, Sarah?”

“That’s my point! We can’t go messing around with Marjorie and her treatment when we don’t know if it would set her off, make her worse.”

Dad sighed, and it was a long one; he’d sprung a leak. “You’re going to be pissed, but I already, um, took Marjorie to see Father Wanderly.”

“You what? When?”

“Yesterday.”

“After her appointment?”

Dad didn’t answer and even though I couldn’t see their faces, I hid my face from them, just in case the dining room table split in half and fell apart around me, leaving me exposed and vulnerable. I needed to be safe from the looks they must’ve been giving each other.

Dad, finally, said, “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? You couldn’t have taken her before—” Mom paused and then her voice dropped down into her toes. “John, you didn’t.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, and I didn’t do it on purpose. I swear to God. She was freaking out in the car on the ride over, just like the other night, only it was worse.”

“You are such a—”

“You don’t understand! The things she was saying and doing right there in the car!”

“You don’t think I understand? Like I haven’t been the one taking her to all the other appointments? Like I wasn’t the one apologizing to the secretary and nurses every goddamn time? Like I wasn’t the one getting spit on and scratched, John?”

“I—I didn’t know what to do. She was going . . .” Dad stopped.

“Go ahead, say it. Crazy. Right? Your daughter was going crazy. So why not stop at church? Makes perfect sense to me.”

“Marjorie was freaking out and I was crying, fucking bawling my eyes out right there in the front seat and she was laughing at me, growling, making animal noises, telling me that I wanted to do all kinds of sexual things to her, Sarah. My baby girl saying that stuff to me. She ever say that to you? Huh? And the church was on the way, it was right there, so I just stopped.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I just stopped and parked in front of the church, and it seemed to
work, Sarah. She calmed right down. Father Wanderly came out and met us there in the car. He sat in the backseat and he had a great talk with her, and before we knew it an hour had gone by.”

“You’re telling me you missed her appointment, the one that Dr. Hamilton specifically requested you go to?”

“How much good has Dr. Hamilton been, huh? Seen any improvement yet? She’s getting worse. I thought Father Wanderly could help her. Now I know he can help her. Help us.”

“Have him help you find a job, have him help us pay our mortgage, then, but keep him the hell away from Marjorie.”

They both started stuttering and yelling at each other, worse than ever. I couldn’t take it anymore so I crawled away, weaving through the legs of the table and the chairs, then out of the dining room and into the front foyer. They must’ve seen me crawling out from underneath the table because they stopped arguing. I waved and gave them an all-teeth smile like I hadn’t heard anything. They gave me matching weak smiles back and Mom told me to go upstairs, and that they were almost done.

I shrugged, because everything was cool by me. Everything they’d said jumbled and swirled in my head, and this Father Wanderly person my dad has been talking to, I wondered what he looked like. Was he was young or old, tall or short, skinny or fat? Then I focused on more particular and peculiar details, like, what if he had big knuckles on his hands, or what if one leg was shorter than the other? Could he touch the tip of his nose with his tongue like my friend Cara could? Did he like pickles on his cheeseburger? Did his smile crinkle up the skin around his eyes? Would he yawn if he watched me yawn? What did his voice sound like that Dad would like him so much?