A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (9 page)

Dad: “Jesus!”

Mom: “Honey, are you okay?” She jumped out of her seat and went over to Marjorie, stood behind her, and held her hair up.

Marjorie didn’t react to either parent, and she didn’t make any sounds. She wasn’t retching or convulsing involuntarily like one normally does when throwing up. It just poured out of her as though her mouth was an opened faucet. The vomit was as green as spring grass, and the masticated pasta looked weirdly dry, with a consistency of mashed-up dog food.

She watched Dad the whole time as the vomit filled her plate, some of it slopping over the edges and onto the table. When she finished she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “No, Merry. You can’t wear my hat.” She didn’t sound like herself. Her voice was lower, adult, and growly. “You might get something on it. I don’t want you to mess it up.” She laughed.

Dad: “Marjorie . . .”

Marjorie coughed and vomited more onto her too-full plate. “You can’t wear the hat because you’re going to die someday.” She found a new voice, this one a treacly baby-talk. “I don’t want dead things wearing my very special hat.”

Mom backed away from Marjorie and bumped into my chair. I reached out and clung to her hip with my right arm and covered my mouth with my left.

A third new voice; genderless and nasally. “No one here can wear it because you’re
all
going to die.”

“Marjorie?” Dad stayed in his seat and held out a hand to her. “Marjorie? Look at me. Hold my hand and pray with me. Please. Just try it.”

Mom was crying and shaking her head.

Convinced that he was only going to make it all worse, I squeaked out, “Leave her alone,” then covered my mouth back up quickly because it wasn’t safe to talk.

He said in his most patient voice, which seemed to be not his voice at all, as alien as the voices coming from my sister: “Marjorie is never alone. He is always with her. Let us pray to Him.” And I started crying
too because I was afraid and confused. I thought that Dad was saying there was someone inside Marjorie and that he wanted to pray to
him
. Dad pushed back his chair and knelt on the floor.

“Okay, Dad.” Marjorie slid out of her chair, leaking down toward the floor, and disappeared under the table.

Mom left me and bent down, next to Marjorie’s chair. “Sweetie, come out from under there. I’ll run you a nice warm bath upstairs, okay? Let’s go to bed early. You’ll feel better. . . .” She kept cooing promises of hope and healing.

Now I was alone, with my hand still over my mouth. Marjorie slunk and slid on the hardwood somewhere in the depths beneath the table. I could not see her and pulled my dangling feet up onto the chair. My toes curled inside the sneakers.

We waited and watched. Dad suddenly jolted as if given an electric shock and knocked into the table, shaking our plates and forks, and spilling more vomit off of Marjorie’s plate, which smelled of acid and dirt.

Marjorie’s hand reached up. Her skin was ash gray and her dirty fingernails were as black as fish eyes. Then her muddy voice echoed up from the bottom of a well. “Go ahead, Dad. Take my hand.”

He slowly reached out and did as she asked. She pulled his hand beneath the table, to where we couldn’t see. Dad was a statue bust, as cold and white as marble. He started a prayer. “In the name of Your son, Jesus Christ, please, Lord, give Marjorie strength. . . .” He paused and seemed unsure of what exactly to say, as though he knew he was an amateur, a poseur. A fraud. “. . . to help her deal with—with the affliction she’s struggling with. Cleanse her spirit. Show her the—” Then he screamed in pain.

The table rattled again as he pulled his arm out from under the table. The back of his hand was bleeding, had been slashed open. There were
two deep red lines dowsing a path toward his wrist. He clutched the hand to his chest instinctively, then held it out toward Mom, in an expression of childlike fear and incredulity at the unfairness of it all.

Mom: “Did she scratch you? Bite you?”

“Maybe. I—I don’t know.”

I scooted back in my chair, convinced that Marjorie would come for me next and drag me down beneath the surface and into the shadows, pry my mouth open for its pink wriggling worm.

Marjorie hummed her terrible song and crawled away from the table. Her hood was covering her hair. She stopped humming and spouted gibberish that I tried to spell inside my head, but it was made out of nothing but angry consonants.

My parents both said her name, saying it like her name was a question, and a call, and a plea.

Marjorie slowly crawled away from the light of the kitchen and into the dark of the dining room. “I don’t bite or scratch,” she said in another voice, a new one, one that didn’t sound like anyone who had ever spoken before in the human history of speech. “He scraped the back of his hand on the rusty metal and bolts under the old table.” She slipped into more of the consonant-speak, and then added, “We always hurt ourselves, don’t we? I’m going to my room. No visitors, please.”

Marjorie hummed the song again, changing pitch and timbre so quickly and abruptly it was disorienting and it felt like my ears were popping. She crawled through the dining room, moving like a monitor lizard or something as equally ancient, and into the front foyer and to the stairs.

She said from far away, “I can do voices too, Merry.”

ANOTHER SATURDAY MORNING
. Everything in the house felt dead, even though I had no idea, at that time, what death felt like.

Mom had gone back to bed after making me a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Rice Krispies. She hadn’t put in the usual two spoonfuls of sugar and there wasn’t enough milk left to sufficiently soak the mouthy, complaining Krispies. I hadn’t dared complain though. Mom had had the look.

I ate until there was only a semi-mushy paste of cereal spackled to the bottom of the plastic bowl. We didn’t have any orange juice either so I drank water. I had the TV to myself and watched all the
Finding Bigfoot
s I’d saved to the DVR. Earlier that week my parents had said something about watching everything on the DVR before it had to be disconnected, so I was proud to accomplish that at least.

Around episode four, with the crew of Squatchers somewhere in the woods of Vermont, Dad shuffled down the stairs and into the kitchen.
He sighed at the empty milk carton on the table, muttered swears that weren’t quite under his breath, and slammed around the kitchen looking for breakfast. He settled on defrosting an English muffin.

When he came into the living room with his peanut butter–slathered muffin, he wordlessly took the remote control from me and flipped over to one of our many sports channels. I hated watching sports, and suggested compromise viewing, a show called
River Monsters
, which featured a charismatic British angler with terrible teeth, who traveled to exotic lakes and rivers to catch giant catfish and these living torpedoes called arapaimas. Dad refused to compromise.

I patiently waited until he was done with his breakfast and then I jumped into his lap, saying, “Dad, play with me. Catch me! You can’t catch me!” I bent down and pulled his folded legs out straight and away from the couch. “C’mon! The alligator game.” The alligator game: His legs were the jaws of the alligator, and I’d dance in, around, and between them, teasing the gator into snapping its jaws shut on me.

Dad did as he was asked, but it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it, that he was still preoccupied. I was manic in my attempt to have fun. If I danced fast enough, if I laughed heartily enough, if I shrieked loud enough when caught, maybe he’d forget about Marjorie for a moment.

His alligator mouth was too sluggish. He missed repeatedly. I pleaded with him to try harder. Then he blamed me for his own lack of motivation and purpose. He said, “Well, you stop being a chicken. You can’t dance in and out from out there. You’re too far away. You have to come closer to me, stand there longer.” When he still couldn’t catch me he criticized how I was jumping in his coach voice. He said that I was too flat-footed, too heavy on my feet, that I had to be on the tips of my toes, that I should walk light enough that he couldn’t hear my feet on the floor.

I humored him even though I wanted to drop to the floor in a boneless
heap and weave myself into the fibers of the throw rug, to disappear under everyone’s feet and to be forgotten. I danced on my toes until they cramped while he halfheartedly opened and closed his outstretched legs in weak attempts to catch me. Desperate, I escalated my attack, smacking and pinching his legs. It worked. Dad lunged off the couch with a fierceness and power that was as exhilarating as it was frightening, and he grabbed my arms and pulled me into him. He tickled me and rubbed his coarse beard on my cheeks while I giggled and screamed for him to stop. He stopped too quickly and let me slide off him, thudding to the floor.

“Ow, Dad!”

“Sorry. Look, I’m trying to watch TV. Go upstairs and see what Mommy is doing.”

I tried going after his legs again, but he crossed them and said, “Seriously. Stop bugging me.”

Fine. I ran up the stairs on my toes as quietly as I could. Thank you, Coach-Dad. I stopped at the top of the stairs and pressed up against the wall opposite the banister. I slowly peeked around the corner and saw Marjorie’s door was shut. I did not want her to hear me. I’d been avoiding being alone with her since the sunroom incident.

The hallway was dark and the old, brass-plated, push-button light switch was right next to my face. Nose to nose with my distorted reflection in the brass, I didn’t press the little black button, thinking it was best not to change or disturb anything up here. I considered going back downstairs and trying to get Dad to play with me again, or sulking next to him quietly on the couch.

My room was too far away, at the other end of the yawning chasm of hallway. The bathroom door, which was adjacent to Marjorie’s room was also shut, but inside the fan was on, running roughly; revving then slowing
like a lawn mower about to run out of gas. Marjorie had been spending more and more time in the bathroom, usually with the fan on, sometimes with the sink running water, much to Dad’s consternation. Water wasn’t free, you know.

I relaxed. Marjorie wouldn’t hear me creeping in the hallway; the fan was too loud. Instead of the long walk and then barricading myself in my room, I bounded across the hall to Mom’s and threw open her door.

I said, “Dad said I should see what you’re doing,” fully knowing that Mom would be mad at Dad for sending me up there to bother her when he should be watching and/or playing with me.

The comforter and sheets had been kicked off the foot of my parents’ bed. Mom wasn’t in the room. Marjorie was. She sat propped up against the headboard with pillows folded and stuffed behind her back. Her breathing was shallow, but rapid, and she grunted, snarled, sighed; a sputtering engine, the dying fan in our bathroom. Her head was thrown back, chin pointed at the ceiling, as sharp as the tip of an umbrella, eyes closed so tight, like she was hiding them deep inside her head. She had on a too-small black T-shirt, tight enough to outline her rib cage. No pants, no underwear. Her hands were between her long, skinny, pale legs. Both hands, and they gyrated up and down, making wet sounds.

I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there and watched. I wanted to yell
What are you doing? I don’t know what you’re doing!
even though I did know this secret that wasn’t a secret. I felt myself flush, turning red on the outside and white on the inside, and then vice versa. I didn’t exactly feel sick to my stomach, the feeling was lower, and deeper.

Her hands moved faster and she grew louder, and I didn’t want anyone else in the house to hear her, so I quietly said, “Shh,” and thought about shutting the door but I couldn’t. I was afraid to look at her hands
and look between her legs, but I still leaned hard to my right, peering around the hard corner of her knees and thighs.

Marjorie rocked in place, her entire body moved in rhythm with her frantically working hands. She opened her mouth and released a deep sigh.

Politely peering wasn’t enough. I tiptoed down to the foot of the bed, and with the new vantage I saw that her hands were red with dark blood, and so was the white sheet beneath, and so was between her legs.

I ran out of the room, stumbling into the hallway, and banged on the bathroom door. “Mom! Mom! Something’s wrong with Marjorie! She’s bleeding.” I tried shouting directly into the wood of the door. I didn’t want Dad to hear me.

Mom couldn’t hear me over the fan and yelled back, “What? Just give me a sec. I’ll be out in a minute.”

I turned and Marjorie was in the hallway behind me, perched precariously on her impossibly thin legs, back arched up against the wall, her body a new punctuation mark. One hand still manipulated herself, the other left red smears on the wallpaper. She panted and spoke the same gibberish made of rocks and broken glass that she’d spoken that night in the kitchen. Her eyes opened and then rolled into the back of her head, showing off those horrible bright whites with their convoluted red maps. She laughed, groaned, and said in small, tight whisper, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god . . .” Then something that might’ve been nonsense or it might’ve been
I can still hear them
. She stopped talking, and she grunted loudly, like she’d just taken a punch to the gut. Her body shook, and she urinated and defecated right there in the hallway. The smell of shit, blood, and piss was overpowering and I tasted pennies in my mouth. She slid down the wall and sat in her own puddle, rubbing her hands on the floor, herself, and the walls.

I screamed for Mom to please help, to please let me in. I closed my
eyes and I hung on the doorknob, turning it with both hands. The bathroom door shook and rattled in its frame. Mom was yelling now too, sensing my panic on the outside.

Dad bellowed our names from down below, those powerless one-word prayers for peace. And he thundered up the stairs, shaking the railing and banisters, sundering the house beneath him, sounding like the end of the world.