The Turner House (4 page)

“Call me Alice,” she said. She did not ask if she should call him Charles, his full name, and Cha-Cha didn't tell her otherwise.

“Your report says you're the oldest of thirteen. Tell me about that.”

Cha-Cha pegged her question as some sort of shrink trick, a roundabout way to establish him as a person with too much at-home stress, then she'd be able to move on to his hallucinations with the pressures of his big, rambling family already lined up as an explanation. He started off carefully.

“That's right, there's thirteen of us,” he said. “But there's only about six or so here in the city. The rest are scattered around the country and getting along fine by themselves.”

Alice Rothman leaned back in her turquoise armchair—hotel furniture, Cha-Cha thought—and tapped her pen on her notepad.

“What are their names?”

“Francey, Quincy, Russell, Marlene, Lonnie, Antoinette, Miles, Donald, Berniece, Sandra, Troy, and Lelah,” Cha-Cha said, his cadence more like a song than a list. An image of his younger self, twelve maybe, came back to him. There'd only been the first six then, and he had made up a song for when he was “it” during Dark, a hide-and-seek game they played in the basement with its only light off. He sang in a whisper as he walked through the musty room, the low ceiling already becoming a problem for him, and when he thought he'd found someone's hiding place (behind the water heater, in an old box), he'd stand in front of it repeating the person's name (“Come on out, Quincy, Quincy, Quincy—hey!—Come on out, Quincy, Quincy, Quincy”) until someone came out willingly or their laughter revealed them. He'd added to the song for a few more births, but then the novelty of another body in the house wore off on him and he was too old to play Dark anyhow. He didn't share this memory with Alice Rothman.

After names she wanted to know nicknames and the explanations for the nicknames if possible. Cha-Cha explained that his younger sister Francey was named after his father because his parents had named him, their first child, after the preacher who had married them back in Arkansas, a man Cha-Cha never met. It seemed she'd planned a series of questions that had more to do with the Turner family than with Cha-Cha as an individual, maybe to ease him into talking about himself. She wanted to know who had children, whose children had children, who was in school, who came to visit often, who was deployed and where, and who was incarcerated (“Excuse me, miss,
no one
is in jail,” Cha-Cha shot back). Alice Rothman glided past this last misstep and switched the subject to memories of Viola and Francis, then to Viola being by herself on Yarrow, then on to Chucky and Todd, Cha-Cha's sons. Finally, when the hour ended, she mentioned Chrysler.

“They want me to send a decision about you sooner than later,” Alice had said, “but what do you say we push it to later? You could come again next week. Talk some more. I could move this earlier thing, and you could come at ten.”

“Alright,” Cha-Cha had said. It was just nice to sit and talk, he supposed, and not lead the conversation if he didn't feel like it, and hold back what he wanted without the other person being any the wiser. Talking to someone who didn't already think she knew his life story was new for him, and interesting.

Three weeks later Alice Rothman declared that Cha-Cha was not “personally culpable” for the accident, at least not from a psychological standpoint. They'd never talked about his haint in any of the meetings. Cha-Cha figured she must have been able to glean whatever it was she was looking for better by not approaching the issue head-on. If that was the case, Cha-Cha had no interest in upsetting his leave payments by bringing the haint up himself. She invited Cha-Cha to continue to come and talk to her, and he agreed. After his hip healed and he returned to work (no more driving; Cha-Cha would train new drivers now), he started using his own money to pay for visits.

Four months into the meetings, he sat in her waiting room and tried not to sweat. This was the day they'd scheduled to finally discuss his haint. Alice had said that with the “Chrysler business” behind them, Cha-Cha shouldn't feel pressure to hold back.

Her office door opened, and Cha-Cha, not trusting a porcelain hip to hold up his 230-pound frame, used his new cane to help him stand up.

“Good morning, Charles. Come in.”

There wasn't a typical leather couch in Alice Rothman's office. In its place stood a mauve suede chaise, a fainting couch was what Alice called it during that first visit. Vintage, she'd said, custom reupholstered. Something a grown man, especially one with a bad hip and a beer gut, had no business lying upon, Cha-Cha thought. He'd dragged a regular old armchair from the waiting room into the office during his first visit. Alice didn't say a word as he did this, and she hadn't said anything about it each time he did it again. Cha-Cha wondered when she'd stop removing his chair after every visit; there was enough room for the chair and the fainting couch both.

“How's your mother doing?” Alice asked.

“She's doing fine, just drugged up a lot from her shoulder surgery, but she's talking more than she's been doing since she came out the hospital.”

A pinched nerve in Viola's shoulder had begun giving her trouble recently. Before that, a series of strokes put her in a wheelchair and precipitated her move off of Yarrow. Before the stroke it was gallstones. Cha-Cha told Alice he feared his mother wouldn't make it through next winter.

“You never know, Charles. Your mother sounds like a fighter.”

“I hope so. I guess all we can do is pray,” Cha-Cha said, although he suspected praying for an old woman with a lifetime behind her to have a few more days on earth was futile, possibly sinful. He knew his wife, Tina, would call it sinful.

“So. Today is haint day, isn't it?”

“It looks that way.” He no longer wanted to discuss his haint with her. Back when the meetings were obligatory, before he'd come to know Alice, her thoughts about him and his superstitions—apparitions, whatever they were—hadn't mattered. Now things were different. Cha-Cha feared that after they had finally gotten comfortable talking to each other, Alice might still declare him crazy, and since he knew he wasn't crazy, he'd have no choice but to stop therapy altogether.

“We can start with the first time,” she said. She pulled out a new pad of paper from her desk drawer.

He told her about that night in the big room—the curtains hanging out the window, Francey coming to his rescue, his father's dismissal of it all.

Alice nodded but said nothing.

“What? You don't believe me? See, this is why we should've talked about this in the very beginning,”

“I didn't say anything, Charles. But have you ever considered that you might have imagined it?”

“Six people? I've never heard of six people imagining the same thing at the same time.”

“Sure you have,” Alice said. “A group of kids sit up late at night telling ghost stories, then they all think they've seen a ghost. Happens all the time. Isn't that what happened with the Salem witch trials?”

“I don't know anything about witches, Alice. But I do know a little about haints. And it wasn't just the one time when we were little. It came back.”

“Oh, I remember the insurance report. So let me play devil's advocate for a minute. You're driving in the rain on an all-nighter, and you think you've seen a ghost. A lot of people might attribute that to sleep deprivation, lightning, too much caffeine.”

Cha-Cha usually enjoyed the sparring nature of his and Alice's talks. She volleyed his answers right back at him like one of his own sisters would. But she took things too literally—a major character flaw, he thought.

“Charles? Were there more times than just those two?”

He didn't like how frequently Alice used his name. It was a way to keep their talks formal, which was fine, but he also thought it was a way to condescend.

“I don't see the point of waiting this long to talk about the haint if you were never going to believe me.”

“It's not important whether I believe or don't believe, Charles. I'm curious if there were more times than just those two.”

How many times did a body have to collide with the paranormal for it to count for the science-minded? Three? Twelve?

“Fourteen years old to sixty-four years old,” Alice said. “That's a pretty long gap, don't you think?”

It didn't seem like a long time to Cha-Cha. Fifty years, a wife, two children, one grandchild; they were not here one day, then all here the next.

“Do you believe in God, Alice?”

“Well, I don't usually discuss my beliefs, but”—Alice put her pen down on the pad—“I'm an atheist, Charles. Why do you ask?”

“An atheist?” Cha-Cha had never known an atheist. When his son Chucky was thirteen he'd declared himself an atheist, but Tina had prayed and whupped it out of him. “Did you
ever
believe in God?”

“I guess I thought I believed at one point,” Alice said. “But now I don't think I ever truly did.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask?” She leaned back in the chair but kept her arms on the desk, as if leaving her body open for attack.

Alice wasn't exactly Cha-Cha's friend, but she wasn't like anyone he'd ever met before, and he didn't want to throw their rapport out of sync.

“I don't know,” Cha-Cha said. “There are ghosts all through the Bible, and angels, and even demons, not to mention the Holy Ghost himself.”

“I'm not sure how that answers my question,” Alice said.

“I'm trying to explain.”

“Okay, explain then,” Alice said.

“Thing is, after that first time on Yarrow, maybe I saw that blue fill my bedroom, and maybe sometimes I felt a certain way, like someone was watching me, but what I would do is hop out the bed, get on my knees, and pray. And after fifteen minutes or so of that, I wouldn't feel or see anything in my room.”

Alice scribbled a quick note, possibly a single word, in her notebook.

“So you've been doing this off and on for fifty years?”

Cha-Cha certainly hadn't prayed on his knees, outside of his bed, in ages. Tina prayed like that most nights, and other nights she sequestered herself in their walk-in closet for a half hour, the door closed, the light switched off, trying to get that much closer to God. But just because he didn't hit the floor in prayer didn't mean the haint never paid him a visit. When Cha-Cha was seven he'd had the job of cleaning up the kitchen at the end of the night. He washed whatever dishes remained after dinner, swept the floor, and wiped down the counters. If he waited too late to take care of it, he'd flip on the kitchen light and find cockroaches scampering across the counter, some as long as his thumb, claiming their territory for the dark hours. In the beginning it had made him sick, but he learned to tolerate fighting the insects in silence as his siblings and parents slept. The haint might be similar, something that had always been around but no longer an out-of-the-ordinary nuisance. Except, of course, when it tried to kill him.

“I don't know. Maybe,” Cha-Cha said. “Maybe I've seen it, or hints of it a few times over the years.”

“And you've never told anybody about it again? Not even your father?”

Cha-Cha laughed.

“No, especially not my father. He said there weren't any haints in this city. I wasn't gonna change his mind.”

Alice sat with this last statement a minute and munched on her bottom lip, a habit Cha-Cha noticed she indulged in when devising some sort of plan for him. Lip munch: you need to hold your siblings accountable when they say they're going to pitch in with your mother and don't; it's only fair. Or, lip munch: I think you could use a hobby, Charles, maybe something active, like swimming. Otherwise she kept her face very still.

“This is what I think,” she said. “I think you need to pay more attention these next few weeks, find out if this thing is still appearing for you, in any kind of form. Think about patterns. Do you feel a certain way when it shows up? What did you eat that day? Take a note of those things. Then we'll have a better sense of what to do next.”

“Okay,” Cha-Cha said.

“Good, and maybe later, when you're ready, you can take a visit to your mother's house and spend some time in that room. Could be that you have some loose ends there that need tying up.”

“Maybe,” Cha-Cha said, but he had no desire to do anything to get closer to the haint. It seemed foolhardy, like thrusting your hand in a faulty garbage disposal, or parking a brand-new Cadillac on the street on the east side overnight.

Whereas the house on Yarrow Street sat high and narrow, full of straight lines, steep inclines, and sharp corners, Cha-Cha and Tina's house on the edge of Franklin Village sat low, round, and wide. The kitchen—which bled into the dining room, which connected to the den—was at the very center of the building. From the den a hallway led to the house's five bedrooms, 3.5 baths, garage, and finished basement. If you kept going, the kitchen inevitably reappeared. Francis Turner suggested such a layout, arguing that in his old age Cha-Cha would want a house that went out and around instead of up and down. It was optimistic advice from a man who in the end never lived to see seventy. In the wake of his accident and bringing Viola here to stay, Cha-Cha appreciated his father's wisdom. He'd bought the land at a considerable discount; the old house was destroyed in a fire, and the owners opted not to rebuild. He took his time planning the layout, aware that with only one above-ground story his neighbors' estates would dwarf his own. He made sure to add touches elsewhere to help his house fit in—a generous back deck, large bay windows, a wide, curving driveway. Now, a few of his neighbors' places featured foreclosure and For Sale signs on the lawns. Cha-Cha's house still stood, deep in the heart of a cul-de-sac and on its way to free and clear.