The Wedding Gift (20 page)

After I did my lines, I
went over and sat on his lap and wound my arms around his neck.
“
Hey Baby, I have something I need to ask
you
.”

He grinned at me and said
“
What do you want now, Miz Willets, a new
car? I been meaning to get you one because I sure as hell don’t
want you driving either of mine
.” He
grinned at me, and I forgot about the exorcism for a minute. A new
car, that was something. I had never had any car at all, new or
old.

“
Oh, Georgie, a car -
really? What kind are you going to get me?
”

He laughed and said as how
he thought a little BMW roadster would look awful good on
me.

Damn it, now I did feel
horrible about Donny. I leaned into George and started kissing and
fondling him until he pushed me back and said that maybe I should
sit somewhere else until we could finish what I was starting. I
moved over to one of the fancy chairs and sat there grinning at him
until he told me that he had invited his mama and daddy over for
dinner next Friday night and he hoped that would be okay. Now I was
determined to be as perfect a wife as possible to make up for my
transgressions, so I said sure and that we would have my mama and
daddy over too.

He said he didn’t think
that was such a good idea, but I told him it better be because if I
didn’t have Mama and Daddy over too, then I couldn’t ask her to
cook the dinner, and what would we give his parents to eat -
tamales from Maria, or should I call in Domino’s? He thought that
was funny as all get out, and said what the hell, bring on the
in-laws too.

Seeing as how I had agreed
to hostess my horrible mother-in-law, and that George seemed real
pleased with me, I waited till he did another couple lines and then
told him what had happened up in the bedroom earlier
today.

He got real still and just
sat there looking at me, not saying a word. I asked him why he was
staring at me and he said, real slow, that he was just wondering if
I was still taking those pain pills that Doc. Miller had given me
after the surgery? I knew what he was implying and it made me mad
right away, but I stayed calm … more flies with honey and all that
stuff.

I said no, that I hadn’t
had a pill for days and that I wasn’t crazy either, thank you very
much! It had really happened. Why he could ask Maria about the
slamming door and how I couldn’t have done it, being trapped
outside on the balcony, behind doors I might add (my voice got a
little high pitched here I will admit) that were locked … even
though there was no damn lock on the doors. I asked him how he
might like to explain that.

He was real calm, which
just made me madder, but I held my tongue, as he explained that the
doors to the balcony were old and the wood must have expanded;
after all, no one had been opening or closing them for years. And
as to the door slamming, well it was just like Maria had told me,
the window was open and the draft shut the door. So then I asked
him, well what about me seeing a dark haired woman come in and even
look at my luggage. Was that the damn wind too, huh, was it? But of
course he had an explanation for that. George was real smart all of
a sudden. He told me that people see what they are expecting to
see, and I had been nervous being in the house for the first time
and what with the shock of seeing those kids’ rooms before. And he
said as how I had just recently had a bad shock and surgery, well
he figured that when I got shut out on the balcony, my
“
little girl’s imagination just took right
over
.”

I didn’t say anything to
that; it was too stupid to answer. Shoot, I wondered if old Roger
used to say stuff like that to Robina and if it made her go crazy
and decide to go on a rampaging killing spree.

It was obvious that George
was never going to believe me and that if I wanted help I would
have to get it myself. I decided to get Jessie in on this thing
first thing tomorrow, and then maybe she and I together would go
talk to Father Moray and see what he thought we should
do.

The rest of the night me
and George watched reruns of the Sopranos on HBO. He just loved
that show. George drank a few more Johnnies and I stuck to soda as
my nerves were kind of jittery from the coke earlier, and I didn’t
feel like getting loaded along with George.

After about three hours of
Tony and crew, I started getting real sleepy and asked George if we
couldn’t go on up to bed now? He told me to go on ahead, he’d be up
in awhile … that he wasn’t tired yet which, given how much coke he
had done, wasn’t much of a surprise. But I didn’t want to argue
with him anymore. I just wanted him to come upstairs so I could go
to bed. So I said real sweet “
Come on,
Baby, you can watch TV in our room.”

He said no again, that he
wanted to stay downstairs, so then I started to cry and told him I
was afraid to be up there by myself. That exasperated him plenty, I
could tell, but he just called me a big old baby, and said he would
come to bed “
but that he probably wouldn’t
go to sleep for hours, so not to whine about the TV keeping me
up
.”

Normally, I would have to
agree with what George had said about me whining if the TV was on
…I normally did surely prefer my bedroom all nice and quiet and
dark to go to sleep in, but right then I was so tired that I
thought I could sleep through the Dallas Cowboys playoffs in my
room … besides which, dark and quiet and alone did not sound too
tempting in a room that I now knew for sure held a ghost … a mean
horrible ghost that could and had already killed someone, my own
brother as a matter of fact, in that very room or at least in the
tree outside.

Despite everything that I
had learned (and done) during the day, I fell asleep right away.
But then I woke up right away too, or at least I thought I was
awake. I could see the TV on, but I couldn’t hear it. Maybe George
had muted it. The room wasn’t dark, the curtains were open and the
moon was out.

Like I said, I thought I
was awake, I even felt myself sit up. But … and this is very hard
to explain … it was like I was tugged to a sitting position and
somehow I knew it wasn’t my body being tugged but my spirit. Like I
said, this is hard to explain. Whatever it was, it was a horrible
feeling.

I was struggling against
something that was making my spirit sit up outside of my body and
was still tugging on it to make more of me slip out. I was trying
to hold onto my body like it was a blanket that I wanted to cover
me, but I couldn’t. Whatever it was that was tugging me was too
strong, and then it won. I was out of my body
completely.

“
Oh God help me, please
help me
,” I was praying, but just in my
head because whatever I was now couldn’t make an actual sound. I
got flung upwards all the way to the ceiling and, when I looked
down below me, I could see myself and George lying there in the
bed. Then I was being pulled across the ceiling to the doorway and
that’s when I really started struggling with whatever it was that
was doing this.

I started trying to hold
myself inside the room, grabbing at the top of the doorway with my
hands, but the wood just went right through them. I tried praying,
frantically, saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over. I could feel
it was working because, without warning, I shot back into my body,
but I still couldn’t get it to move. It was like someone had poured
cement on top of me.

I was paralyzed and that
thing, whatever it was that had yanked me out in the first place,
it was still close by. I could feel it right beside me, trying to
pull me out again. My feelings of being watched and surrounded by
something dark and powerful, by a force exuding pure evil was so
strong that it’s impossible to describe.

I just lay there, and I
kept praying hard and fast and, in a minute, or an hour - it’s hard
to say - it lifted. I could move my head and this time I sat up and
it was really me sitting up, body included. I switched on the light
by my bed and half walked, half crawled to the bathroom. I made it
just in time to vomit harder than I ever had in my life.

I was standing there,
shaking and rinsing out my nasty mouth when I heard the laughter
again; the same laughter that Jessie and I had blamed on Muffin
back at the old house. Oh I knew then, I knew it had been her all
along, that somehow she must have known I was coming here to her
house and it made her laugh. And, oh, this thought was bad, but I
couldn’t help wondering if maybe her being able to move around like
that, well didn’t that make her more powerful even than Donny said
she was?

Because, see, I had always
heard that ghosts were stuck in one place, but apparently no ghost
rules applied to Robina. She could come to visit me at my mama and
daddy’s house, she could kill my brother and try to kill Donny, and
she could pull me out of my body while I slept and take me
somewhere.

Oh Christ Jesus, where was
it she had been trying to take me? I don’t remember going back to
sleep that night, but I must have because George woke me up with
his cursing.

Chapter
27

“
Where in the hell has
that stupid Mexican put my nine irons?
”

I rose up and looked at
him. “
Hey, Sugar, what are you
doing?
”

He smiled at me.
“
Hey yourself, Sugar. Sorry I woke you. I
have an eight a.m. tee time with Daddy down to the club, and I
can’t find my damn nine irons! You don’t have any idea where that
girl put it do you
”

I told him that Maria was
real nice and not a damn Mexican; well I mean she was Mexican, but
he didn’t need to say it like an insult. And I said that, yeah, I
remembered him telling Jack to put his clubs in the garden shed by
the pool.

He gave me a big kiss and
told me that it was great having a little wife to take care of him.
He said that he would see me tonight and not to forget we were
going into OKC to see the Indiana Jones movie. I told him I hadn’t
forgotten (which I had) and to have good game. Then I got up and
without showering or anything. I just threw on a t-shirt and
shorts, and ran downstairs. As soon as I saw George back down the
driveway in the Jag, I grabbed the spare keys to the Humvee and ran
outside and jumped in and drove over to Jess and Mark’s
apartment.

Britney’s daddy, who ran
the Piggly, had built a couple apartments upstairs where the old
storage rooms used to be, if you could call them apartments. They
were just one big room each with a bathroom. The kitchen pretty
much consisted of a mini-fridge and this little tiny stove and you
had to use the bathroom sink for washing your dishes. They were
real cheap though, two hundred a month, and that included
utilities. Of course that wasn’t as good a deal as you might think
because there was no air conditioning.

I didn’t know how Jessie
stood it, but then she was with Mark, and he was her true love.
Also her weird old mama wasn’t there. And even though I had a huge
mansion all to myself, it was infested with Robina, like the Piggly
was infested with rats. Heck, Jessie’s apartment probably was too,
now that I thought about it. And still I think maybe Jess was
better off than me.

I went on up the outside
stairs to her door, making a lot of noise in case the rats were
sitting on the steps taking a break from the over full dumpsters
which you could smell three blocks away. I don’t know why the mayor
didn’t make the Piggly pay for garbage removal like everyone else
had to do. Daddy said there was a payoff situation going there, and
maybe he was right.

Anyway, I had to pound on
the door and holler Jessie’s name about fifty times before she
finally opened it. When she did, I knew I was in deep shit. Jess
isn’t exactly a morning person to begin with and I knew she had
worked till late last night and then probably had homecoming sex
with Mark till the wee hours, but this was an emergency and she
could sleep another time.

She just stood there
looking at me, and then she started in. “
Shit Leeann, what the hell? It’s the butt crack of dawn. Me
and Mark just got to sleep like two hours ago. You get on home, and
come back at a decent hour when God fearing people wake up, like
three p.m. or so
.”

I swear Jessie can make me
laugh no matter what. I brushed on past her and walked inside. I
told her that I didn’t think God fearing people got up at three
p.m. just for her information. Mark woke up then and he looked
pretty pissed too, till he saw I had brought them lattes and donuts
from the new Dunkin Donuts we had just got here in Dalton. He got
up and wrapped the sheet around himself and disappeared into their
bathroom, saying “
Hey,
Leeann
” on his way out of the
room.

That was just like Mark, to
do something nice like that and leave Jessie and me alone so we
could talk. Everybody always said that about Mark, what a nice guy
he was, and it was true. I still didn’t know what the heck Jessie
saw in him though.

Mark was a long old string
bean of a boy. He had real nice thick sandy colored hair, but he
wore it to his shoulders which didn’t go over so big in Dalton. And
he didn’t like sports - never even tried to play any of them, not
that Jessie gave a tinker’s damn. Ever since she had set down next
to him in kindergarten and punched his lights out for stealing her
play dough (she claims he ate it), she had never looked at another
boy. I will say this about him …in addition to being a real nice
guy, he was different than any of the usual boys in
Dalton.