Goodnight Blackbird (21 page)

Jacqueline could feel Darren looking at her but she couldn't meet his eyes.

"House," Percival said suddenly. "It's the house. Michelle says that's what you're concerned about. You don't need to be, according to her."

"Why?" Jacqueline asked.

"Wait, she's saying something else. 'Don't beat yourself up about how I passed,' she says. 'And don't beat yourself up about the other thing too.' Again, she's being vague." Percival took a deep breath and exhaled, shaking his head. "Whoa, lots of info here, some of it's getting jumbled. Take it slow, Michelle, my brain works at a slower speed than yours. She's talking about the house and how you don't need it anymore, and she's also saying something about 'the real reason you're here.' She says, 'You don't need to be forgiven because you did nothing wrong.' Not sure if she's talking about her passing, the drowning.... No, it's not about her death. She's adamant about that. Again, she's mentioning 'the real reason you're here.' She says it's the other thing you wanted forgiveness for, but she says you don't need forgiveness. You did nothing wrong. There's nothing to forgive. Do you understand what she's talking about? I don't."

Jacqueline's fingers were digging into Darren's palm. "Yes," she whispered. "I do."

Percival frowned, gazing over Jacqueline's shoulder. "She's telling me, 'But if you do want forgiveness, then you're forgiven.' Again, though, she stresses that it's nothing you need to be forgiven for. I wish she'd be a little clearer. Okay... okay." Percival nodded. For a moment he locked eyes with Jacqueline. "She's telling me that you were a good mommy, the best. But she's also saying that you really didn't want to be a mommy. That you just got caught up in what people wanted for you. The white picket fence existence. You thought it was something you were supposed to do. But in your heart it wasn't what you wanted."

Jacqueline's fingernails were drawing blood from Darren's palm but he said nothing, did not complain. She was trying not to hyperventilate. Her throat hurt.

"Michelle says she knows there was a part of you that never wanted her, never wanted to be a mother. That's why you're here. She says that it's okay. You don't need to be forgiven for that. We all make choices that seem right at the time. You're not a bad person. In fact, she's showing me an image of a medal, like you should get a medal for being the good mother that you were."

Jacqueline could not see for the tears in her eyes. She shut her eyes and tried to say the words "thank you" but nothing came out except for a gasp that turned into a half-sob.

"You think you didn't love her enough," Percival said. "And you think you need to be punished for that. But Michelle says that the pain and grief you feel is evidence that you did love her enough. Sometimes our only proof of love is the pain we feel when a person is gone."

Percival tilted his head, as if straining to hear a conversation in a far corner of the room. "She says you need to move on with your life." His voice took on a kinder, less matter-of-fact tone. "'Let me go,' she's telling you. She says the house is telling you, too. Let go of the house and it'll be better for you."

"It's all that I have left of you," Jacqueline said.

Percival shook his head. "She says no. The house has nothing to do with her anymore."

"If I leave," Jacqueline said, "will she still come visit me like she does? I don't want to lose the connection."

"There is no connection," Percival said. "Michelle says she doesn't visit you the way you think. 'It isn't me, it isn't me,' she's telling me. I'm not totally understanding this. There are apparitions? In your house?"

"Yes. Yes."

"'Those aren't me,' Michelle says."

Jacqueline struggled to say the word "who."

"'I only came to you once,' she's saying. 'In the dream about the lightning.'"

Jacqueline felt nauseous. She put a hand over her eyes. "Who's in my house," she tried to say again. Most of the words came out this time.

"Now she's sighing and shaking her head, like she's the parent and you're the child," Percival said. "'You're deliberately trying not to know, so it's no good for me to tell you.' Michelle is putting her arms around you now and giving you a kiss. She says she has to go back soon. But she has some questions for you. She wants to know what you want from your life."

Jacqueline stared at him.

"She wants to know if this is really what you want, to be alone and to be constantly punishing yourself in every way. Don't you want to be happy? Don't you want to feel love, or joy? There's someone you feel so good around, but you hold yourself back because for some reason all you want is punishment. She says, 'I came to you once because you needed to feel love. Why do you turn your back on it? Why do you choose a living death?'" Percival eyes had a faraway cast. "She says you never hurt her when she was alive, but you're hurting her now by punishing yourself. "I want to see my mommy happy.' Okay... she's starting to fade in and out now. Now she says she has to go back."

"Not yet," Jacqueline said. "Please."

"Signal's fading. She says that she thanks you for being her mommy. And that she loves you very much." Percival blinked. He put down his pad on the coffee table. "Okay. She's gone now."

In the elevator to their floor, Jacqueline could not look at Darren. Her legs felt weak and rubbery. She had to grip both Darren's arm and the elevator wall to keep from losing her balance.

Darren's voice seemed to be coming from far away. She could only make out fragments of what he said: "... need anything? Are you all right?"

The only thing she managed to say was, "Who's in my house?" The skull
was
significant. But how was Jacqueline "deliberately trying not to know"? What the hell did that mean?

She fell onto her bed. Immediately her body was wracked with seizure-like trembling. Maybe her body was breaking down, the way her morality had broken down and the way her façade of the loving mother had broken down, exposing the rot at the core. She had the impression of Darren crouching beside the bed, and she felt his hand on her back, heard his voice, but she couldn't bear to look at him, couldn't stand to have him looking at her. She could imagine the disgust in his eyes. He was probably counting the days until he could flee to Portland and get away from this human black hole, this poor excuse for a mother who had not truly wanted her child. She wanted to die. Death was preferable to feeling like this. But since there was an afterlife what if she had to spend eternity with this sickening, naked part of herself, like a deformed shadow she could never shake?

Darren was asking her questions—did she want some water? Something to eat? Aspirin?

She wanted nothing. She wanted to be left alone.

Eventually he was no longer in the room. The golden sunlight turned a deep, rusty copper, and then the purplish shadows crept in. Occasionally there would be a knock at their adjoining door and Darren would ask if she was all right. She only stared at the wall. For hours she stared.

Around two in the morning she stood at the door between their rooms. Darren had left it ajar.

She went inside.

He was awake. "You all right?" he whispered.

"You know the drill," she said and climbed into the bed fully clothed. He held her and she buried her head in his chest and wept—wept as if something had ruptured in her heart and an ocean was pouring out of her. She screamed into his chest and he held her, and it was startling how right Michelle was. Jacqueline felt guilty about how good it felt to be in Darren's arms.

When dawn came, as dispiritingly grey as a gun barrel, she was standing at the sliding glass door of the balcony, considering the six-floor drop. Darren slept, tossing and turning, wrestling with a nightmare. Once he murmured something that sounded like "don't."

The man who loved me at my worst, she thought. Something even her husband couldn't do. How do you say thank you for something like that?

She had a crazy, passing urge to make love to him as he slept. One for the road. Maybe that would chase away his nightmare. Better than Ambien.

She turned back to the sliding door. There was a large crow perched on the outside railing. Its gleaming, doll-like eye was fixed on her.

Crows were carrion-eaters, she knew. It was probably drawn by a dead mouse somewhere. Or the stench of her rotting soul.

She recalled an afternoon when Michelle was four and they'd been walking home from the Beachwood Library. Jacqueline had seen the bird on the sidewalk a second before Michelle did. It was a grackle or a fledgling crow, deflated and partially mauled, its beak gasping and its ruined wing flapping sluggishly like a broken wind-up toy that was winding down. Jacqueline, a coward to the core and allergic to all images of suffering, took her daughter's hand and they walked to the other side of the street and Jacqueline picked up the pace. Too late. Michelle had seen it.
Mommy, is the birdie dying?
Michelle asked.
Can't we help the birdie?
Underneath the childish plaintiveness in her voice had been the tinge of accusation: How can you walk away, how can you let the birdie die.

The crow on the railing preened.

It was making Jacqueline uneasy. What are you, she thought, some supernatural messenger? The guardian of the Underworld? Begone. Deliver your message and begone.

The crow continued to stare at her, an empty, alien stare. Then it spread its enormous wings and took flight.

Jacqueline watched the sky grow brighter. Soon she lost interest in watching the sky. Eventually she slipped back into bed. Darren still grappled with his nightmare. She put a hand on his cheek. After a while, the nightmare went away.

D
arren watched the lights in the Northeast Aerospace parking lot wink on. It was almost seven p.m.

"The problem is," the guy on the phone told him, "we get offers like this about ten times a month. Of those ten, maybe one is a legitimate haunting and more often than not the haunting is little more than a cold spot in the sitting room. I'm not traveling three thousand miles for a cold spot."

"Did you even read my e-mail? This is a bit more than a cold spot."

"I read it, Darren, and all that's wonderful, but what happens when I show up? Invariably your ghost will play possum and you'll look like a jerk and I'm out nearly a grand in plane fare, not to mention the time. It's simple. I'm more than willing to spend a couple days looking the place over—for $1,000. That will take care of airfare and rental cars and any other expenses. You send me a check, I can be there next week. What's the big deal? If the place is as good as you say, you'll be able to name your own price. Within reason, of course."

Unbelievable. Larry Steinbach, Mr. Hotshot L.A. Writer, was nickel-and-diming him over airfare and rental car fees. "How many haunted houses do you own?" Darren asked.

"Three. Got one in Pasadena, another in Fresno, a third in Georgia, just outside Savannah."

"What do you do with them?"

"I buy them."

"Yes, but what do you do with them after? Do you turn them into funhouses or something?"

"What does that matter to you?" Steinbach asked.

"I'm just asking."

"Whether I turn them into funhouses or Arby's franchises is pretty much irrelevant, isn't it? So long as I can meet the asking price. Do you vet the homebuyers that come to you through a Realtor? No. You'd sell to Jack the Ripper as long as he had a good credit score. So do you want to do this thing or not?"

Darren told him he'd send out a cashier's check tomorrow. Then he spent a few minutes Googling the life and times of Larry Steinbach. He found a couple pictures—smug thirtyish asshole, lots of hair gel and capped teeth. His wife, Lydia, was a frosty blonde who looked bored. Considering Steinbach's résumé, she had every right to be. Steinbach was co-writer and co-producer of
Spooked!
, a tongue-in-cheek series on the USA network about teens investigating haunted houses (
X-Files
for tweens!). It had lasted exactly two episodes. Steinbach had also written two direct-to-video horror flicks, one of which was called
Sex Demon II: It's Gettin' Hot In Here
.

This was who he was going to leave Rachel with?

His next call was to Jacqueline. Things were looking up; she actually answered the phone. Yesterday she'd ignored his three messages. "How are you?" he asked.

"Tired."

"Have you gotten out of bed at all today?"

"Yes."

"Other than to go to the bathroom?"

"Well, if you're going to prohibitively narrow the definition of 'out of bed'...."

"I'll stop over with some take-out. I'm assuming you haven't eaten anything, either."

"I'm not hungry."

"You're going to eat something. I'm not going to leave until you do."

When he arrived, the aroma of the lo mein at least got her to a sitting position on the edge of her bed. She was still in her pajamas. Darren noticed the vial of Xanax on the nightstand next to a bottle of Tylenol PM. Both were sitting on a pile of old photos—the visual record of a younger, happier Jacqueline LaPierre.

"Can you make it to the kitchen?" he asked.

She shrugged. Her whole body seemed deflated.

"You probably won't believe it," Jacqueline said, "but this isn't totally depression."

"Then what is it?"

She ran her fingers through her unwashed hair. "I made some calls yesterday. Went on the Internet. Tried to find out what I could about the previous owners of this place. As far as I can tell no one has ever died here other than Michelle. And that person from the fifties."

"You're back to that."

"Nothing else fits."

"What does this have to do with you not getting out of bed?"

"This thing—whatever it is—it comes when I'm near sleep. I need to know what it is."

Darren came close to saying something, something he'd almost said to her at the hotel. Instead, he stood up. "Let's eat."

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

"No crazier than I am." Darren went into the kitchen and pulled out a plate from the cabinet.

As Jacqueline poured herself into a chair and began eating, Darren strolled back into the bedroom and swiped her Xanax and sleeping pills.

Outrage seemed to finally wake her up. "Put those back. Those are mine." She stood, armed with a noodle-tangled fork.

"No more. You're halfway to a coma already."

"I'm not going to kill myself. You have no right to take those—"

"Make sure you eat something." Darren slipped on his coat. "I'm coming over tomorrow and if you're still in your pajamas I'm going to take you to a doctor."

"You're acting like Kevin now?" She flung her plate of lo mein at him, spattering the thighs of his dress slacks. "Every goddamned man in my life thinks they can blackmail me into doing what they want. I thought you were different."

"You're not thinking clearly right now, Jacqueline."

"The hell I'm not. I never judged you on how you handled what was going on at your house. Why can't you do the same for me? I guarantee you if this were going on at your place, you'd want to know what this thing is. See, at least you
know
it's Rachel in your house."

"All I'm saying is I don't want you staggering around here in a drugged-out stupor. It's dangerous."

"I didn't realize I was supposed to ask your permission."

The next day, October 20, Darren stopped over her house around lunchtime. Her car was gone. There was a note taped to the back door. It said:
Darren—Gone to mall to buy more Tylenol PM, which you stole from me. I am not in my pajamas. Truce? Sorry about your pants
.

He tried to think of some witty comeback but given the circumstances being a wiseguy probably wasn't the best course of action. He settled for scrawling,
OK. Call you in a day or two
.

As he drove away past the promenade of birch trees lining the street, their leaves a luminous, fiery yellow, a bit of Milton occurred to him:
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night
.

That evening Bethany Barkley called while he was doing a load of laundry. She managed to say her name before the lights went out and the phone went dead.

Darren stumbled around in the kitchen, groping for his coat and for his wallet, which he was pretty sure contained Bethany's business card. "Rachel, please."

It took nearly ten minutes of driving around in a steady, light rain before he found one of the few remaining pay phones in the neighborhood—outside the Walgreen's on Mayfield Road near the grocery store. A spectral mist clung to the parking lot, writhing slowly like a snake.

"Bethany? Sorry we got cut off. My neighborhood's been having electrical problems."

"You living in a UN refugee camp? Looks like we're liberating you just in time."

He bent closer to the phone to hear her over the white noise of the rain. "Liberating. Are you saying—"

"We're prepared to make an offer. We'll FedEx the official offer sheet in the mail in the next few days and we can haggle about the details from there, but I just wanted to let you know it's yours if you want it. Congratulations!"

"Are you sure? It was only one interview. Usually a candidate goes through two or three interviews."

"Sometimes," Bethany said. "Sometimes they don't."

"Don't you want to interview some other people first before you make up your mind?"

"Please, this gushing of enthusiasm is unseemly. What is with you?"

"I'm sorry. It's just a bit sudden. Thank you."

"Look, I know picking up your life and moving from one side of the country to the other ain't exactly like switching brands of dental floss. We'll give you till the middle of November to make up your mind. But I should warn you that if you stay put at Northeast because it's comfortable and familiar, things are going to get pretty uncomfortable and unfamiliar over the next year or so. Goodman's really big on consolidating its operations. They probably aren't going to touch your core of engineers and designers yet. But the sales guys, the marketing guys, all the non-core people—including you—will be looking for work by summer. Guaranteed. We're throwing you a lifeline, Darren. I'd grab it."

The phone rang him out of a light sleep a few minutes after four a.m., October 22.

Jacqueline's soft, hoarse voice said, "Can you come over?" Then the line went dead. Darren's digital alarm clock likewise blinked out.

"Rachel, goddamn it." He groped around for clothes and hoped to Christ she hadn't boobytrapped the stairs.

Traffic was nonexistent; most of the lights were blinking yellow. He was surprised at how calm he felt. Four a.m. phone calls were rarely good news. But he thought he was becoming good at reading Jacqueline's voice, and this time her tone was just Mildly Urgent with a Chance of Emergency. Code Yellow. A crisis, but perhaps not a big one.

All the lights were on in Jacqueline's house, as if a party was going on. Inside, drawers were open and paperbacks on psychic phenomena littered the carpet. He found her sitting on the twin bed in the bare room that he presumed had once belonged to Michelle. She held a tumbler filled with two fingers of something he guessed probably wasn't water.

"It's a shapeshifter," Jacqueline said. Books were strewn on the bed and on the floor—volumes with titles such as
A Guide to the Paranormal World
and
Spirits Caught on Film
—and she selected one. "Here. 'Occasionally malevolent entities will assume the guise of a loved one or another non-threatening persona in order to more easily entrench themselves in the lives of their victims—to become, as it were, invited guests.' Read it."

Darren glanced at the dog-eared page. "What happened?"

Jacqueline leaned forward, her breath a cloud of sour alcohol. "I saw it. I saw its face. In the bedroom. For a second."

"What did it look like?"

She stood up suddenly and swigged the rest of her drink. She stumbled over the books on the floor as she trudged barefoot into the living room. Darren followed. She rummaged among more books heaped on the couch and coffee table. "There's another one here that talks about an evil spirit that took on the form of a mother's dead child," Jacqueline said. "This family in Vermont. So there's a precedent. But what does it want? Is it trying to possess me, get my soul, what?"

"Jacqueline. What did it look like?"

"Me, okay?" She grabbed a photo off the sideboard, which was littered with a mess of family pictures. She shoved the photo at Darren. A short-haired, teenaged Jacqueline smiled and held up a swim team trophy at an awards banquet.

"You were a beautiful girl," he said. "You still are."

"You're missing the point. It pretends to be Michelle, then it pretends to be me. Why? What's the point? It hasn't asked anything of me. It hasn't told me to do anything. It's just... there. But why?"

Darren pushed aside a couple of books so he could sit on the couch. Not all of Jacqueline's frenzied early-morning reading was about ghosts and demons. One of the books near him was titled
Inside the Human Mind
. Another was an old college textbook on abnormal psychology. "Maybe it was never pretending to be Michelle," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"You once told me you never actually saw it before. You just assumed it was her."

"Darren, it was her, I smelled the chlorine, I sensed her—"

"But you never saw her until tonight."

"That is not the point. The point is what does it want and why is it suddenly taking on my shape?"

Darren watched her pace and glare.

"Just spit it out," she said. "Christ, you've looked like you wanted to say something since you walked in."

"I think," Darren said, putting the psych textbook on the coffee table, "maybe you're not totally convinced there's an 'it' here to begin with."

"Are you saying I'm crazy?"

"No." He studied his hands. "It's been a pretty rough few years for you."

"You are saying I'm crazy. Look at me, Darren. Is that what you believe?"

"What do you believe? Seriously. You can make a show of storming around here with your books about evil spirits, but maybe you're just trying to convince yourself. Because you're not sure."

Jacqueline was silent for a long time. At last she said, "If—and this is a big if—this is some hallucination, then why? What's the precipitating factor? Michelle died six years ago. These things just started relatively recently."

"You've been under a lot of stress."

"These things started happening before I lost my job, Darren. Before the divorce. They started when things were actually going pretty well for me. Don't give me this crap about stress."

"'Going pretty well.' That's your definition of isolating yourself, eating less than an anorexic and praying each night for a ghostly visit from your daughter?"

Jacqueline's hand was squeezing her glass in a throbbing, white-knuckled grip. Darren wondered whether she was going to squeeze it until it broke or hurl it at his head.

Her voice softened. "Why is this happening? I don't see any point to it, if it is some psychological... disorder. If it's the onset of schizophrenia or something like that, I may as well put a gun to my head because this is the last thing I need right now."

"I don't think it's schizophrenia."

"Then what the hell is it? What's a doctor supposed to say to me when I tell him I'm being haunted by the seventeen-year-old ghost of myself? It means I'm fucking crazy, Darren."

"Stress and insanity aren't the same—"

"Would you stop with the stress? I'm hallucinating things and that is not normal."

"No, it isn't. But there are a few miles between that and being crazy."

He jumped when she flung her glass at the far wall. It exploded with a sudden popping sound, like an old-time flashbulb going off. "You're so goddamned naïve. If I tell a doctor about this, he'll have me committed, Darren."