The Wedding Gift (24 page)

C
hapter 31

We got back late that
night. I had to drive us home because George had hit his flask
pretty hard all during the movie. It’s sad to say but I guess I
didn’t think about why George was drinking or using as much as he
was. I never thought to ask him if he was sad or disappointed about
things too. I just worried about myself, and I’m sorry for
that.

She came again that night.
I mean I didn’t see her or hear her, but I had the same horrible
sensations of being made to sit up out of my body, and being pulled
from it. I was tugged back up to the ceiling and towards the door
again. I promise you that I was not asleep. If I had been, then how
could I have been weighing my terrible fear and the sense of evil
against Jessie’s advice to just go with it?

Go with it and let Robina
show me what she wanted.

Fear won out hands down. I
started praying frantically and, exactly like before, I was back in
my body, but paralyzed. I felt her, this time, just hovering over
me, right over me, maybe an inch from my face.

I didn’t smell anything,
but I heard her breathing. I felt her emotions, too. It wasn’t
sadness or disappointment; it was rage … the purest form of rage I
have ever encountered.

After a minute, the
paralysis left me, but I could tell she hadn’t. Oh God, it’s hard
to tell you how much I did not want to get up. I wanted to scream
for George, even knowing he wouldn’t believe me. He still would
have been someone living that was awake and talking to me. But I
had to pee, worse than I ever had before in my life. For a minute I
thought of just letting go there in the bed!

I really did. That would
for sure wake up George but, shoot, even in the middle of the worst
crisis of my life, and that’s counting the miscarriage, I just
couldn’t do such a disgusting thing. So I ran to the bathroom as my
mama would have said, as if all the devils of hell were following
me, and one apparently actually was, because as soon as I sat down
on the toilet, the door closed shut.

It didn’t slam this time,
just very slowly began closing. I sat there paralyzed. I felt an
awful deep fear, one that must live inside every human since the
beginning of time … a fear of something that could not be, but
was.

I tried to call out for
George but I couldn’t make a sound except this little squeak which
she answered it with a sigh. I began to pray and beg at the same
time.

“
Please, God, save me from
this. Please, please, Robina, will you stop? Please stop. I have
never hurt you. I have never hurt anyone. Please leave me alone,
please, God. Please Robina
.”

The bathroom filled up with
the scent of some flowery perfume and then the laughter. It was the
ugliest sound on earth, or so I thought then. Until she spoke to me
the first time, and that really is the ugliest sound on earth. Not
her voice, her voice mostly sounded like a whisper; it was the
knowing that what I was hearing was the voice of the dead that made
it so ugly, so wrong.

Right then, when I first
heard her, I remembered Donny saying that he still didn’t know if
she had spoken outside or inside his head. I understood now because
I could hear her clearly, but it felt like her voice was echoing in
my head. She said my name.

“
Leeann, Leeann, don’t run
from me. This is my house. You have to see my pretty pictures. I
want to show you the pretty things I made. Leeann, Leeann, it makes
me angry when you resist me. You can’t resist me, Leeann, I’m
irresistible. Why just ask your brother, he’s right here with me.
Do you want to talk to Charlie, Leeann?
”

That did it. I might not be
able to make a sound, but it turns out that I could faint dead away
- pardon the expression. I guess George must have heard the thump I
made because I woke up back in bed with him looking down at me,
worried as hell. He asked me what had happened. So, shoot, I told
him. I knew he wouldn’t believe me, but I didn’t much care right
then what George believed or didn’t believe. He patted my
shoulders, and said the same old poop. “
You’re tired, Sugar. You just had a
miscarriage
.”

Blah blah blah.

As soon as I knew I wasn’t
going to pass out again, I stood up, grabbed a pillow, and went
downstairs to the living room. I turned on every light I could hit
on my way downstairs, and then turned on the TV and laid there
curled up on the couch. George followed me like an idiot, him now
being the last person I wanted to talk to, and I told him so. He
just nodded, all pathetic, and asked if I minded if he sat with me
anyway. To be strictly honest here, I did not want George, but I
did want someone in the room, so I told him fine but not to talk to
me anymore.

That’s just where we were
when it finally got light outside. I looked over at George asleep
on the loveseat and just shook my head. I waited until seven a.m.
as I figured that was late enough and then, still in just my
nightgown, I grabbed George’s spare Jag keys and went outside and
got into the car and drove to my mama’s house. I did not bother to
leave him a note.

Chapter
32

When I got to Mama and
Daddy’s house, I could see the kitchen light on and Mama bustling
around inside making coffee. I just sat there watching her, tears
in my eyes. Had I really only been gone from this safe happy place
for just over two weeks? I had no idea how one person’s life could
go so wrong in so little time.

Mama opened the back door
then to get the paper and she saw the car. She squinted her eyes
and walked over to me. I unrolled the window.

“
Leeann, Honey, what are
you doing out here?
”

I just looked at her. By
then I was crying hard. She pulled open the door and told me to
come into the house right this minute. I got out of the car and
followed her into the kitchen. Her eyes got big when she saw my
nightgown and bare feet, but she didn’t say anything. When we got
inside the house, she just pulled me to her and started rocking me
side to side and stroking my hair. It felt so good that I just
cried harder. It was a long time before I let go off her and went
and sat down at the kitchen table.

Mama poured two cups of
coffee, and added about a pound of sugar and cream to mine, and
came over and sat down beside me. She handed me the coffee and,
when I had taken a big gulp of it, she took my hand, and said
“
Is it George, Baby, did he do something
to hurt you and you had to run away?
”

I actually laughed when she
asked me that, which made her narrow her eyes.

“
Leeann!
” she hollered at me, but I
said to her “
No, Mama, I’m sorry. No, I
can’t say George hurt me exactly, but this is his
fault
.”

She was totally worked up
by that time, not sure if she should be mad at me or at
George.

“
What is his fault,
Leeann. What in the Sam Hill is going on? You better start talking
little girl, and I mean now!
”

So I did. I talked and
talked. I told her every single thing that had happened from the
moment I first walked into the house and saw those children’s
rooms. I told her Donny’s story and the truth about how Charlie
died.

Mama looked like she had
been hit, while I was talking about Charlie.

I told her what Daddy had
told Jessie and me, and about being pulled out of my body twice
and, finally, what Robina had said in the bathroom. I said
everything except, of course, about what Donny and I had done in
the yard. Not telling Mama that made me have to leave out
yesterday’s dream where Robina had swum out to the dock with him,
but I had surely given her more than enough to think about as it
was because, when I finished talking, Mama’s face was dead white
and her hands were shaking so bad she had to set her coffee cup
down.

Now you have to understand
that my mama is a staunch Christian woman; Mama had only missed
church on Sunday three times in her life, and that was to have me
and my brothers. So if she did believe in ghosts, then I had sure
never heard about it. I didn’t think I could take it if my own mama
looked at me like George had and started telling me I had been
under a strain, etc. But, from the look on her face, I didn’t think
she was going to say that. She looked, I don’t know, shocked, which
was normal, but she didn’t look as shocked as she should have
been.

She inhaled real deep then
and said “
I should have never let you move
into that house. I knew! I knew that house could never be clean,
not after that. I blame myself for this baby. I was so worried
about you being an unwed mother, and the disgrace, that I let you
go into that slaughter house. Me, and after what I had seen there
with my own eyes. I know that what Donny told you is the truth
because, God forgive her, no woman ever born could rest peacefully
after what she done
.”

Now it was my turn to be
shocked. “
Mama, what do you mean after
what you saw there?
”

She was crying now.
“
Baby, I didn’t plan to ever talk about
this again. When I came home that night, I told your daddy what I
saw, and then I told Reverend Pete. He prayed with me and I didn’t
see any reason to ever talk about it again, though God knows, as do
I, that I have never been able to forget it
.”

This time I yelled at her.
“
Mama, tell me. You have to tell me what
you are talking about. What did you see?
”

She nodded.

“
All right, Leeann, I’ll
tell you. See back when it all happened, your daddy and I were real
young, and we had Charlie, and Randy was just a baby. Money was
tight. This was a long time before I had my
princess
.” She smiled at me sadly with all
the love in the world in her sweet eyes. “
And the dress business, well that was long in the future.
Your daddy was working at Peddy J’s, and even doing double shifts,
and we were barely making it. So, when Miz Bethany offered me a job
cleaning for her a couple days a week, I jumped at it. When the
murders happened, she called me up a few days later and asked if I
wanted to earn some extra money cleaning up the place. Well I just
had to say no and she got real snooty about it. But I didn’t think
there was any amount of money in this world or the next that she
could offer me that would tempt me to go walking into that house
where those poor little children had been slaughtered like
animals
.”

I nodded sympathetically at
her, but she shook her head at me. “
Well
then she up and offered me two thousand dollars and that was just
too much money to turn down
.”

She sighed and gestured at
our worn out old kitchen.

“
It doesn’t look like much
now, but that money paid for this kitchen. Heck, before that, your
daddy and the boys and me were using a barbecue out back if we
didn’t want soup off the hot plate.”

A hot plate! Damn we were
worse off than I knew. I said that to Mama, and she laughed, and
then started talking again.

“
Yeah, well, it was bad
back then like I said, though God help me sugar, if I could choose
between poverty and having my baby boy back … well, never mind that
now. I was telling you about the house. So I told Miz Bethany I
would do it early that morning, it being a Tuesday, I took Charlie
to kindergarten and dropped Randy off at Maddie’s house, and went
on over to Willets House. It was raining, I remember, and there
were still the children’s little toys and things scattered around
out front. I let myself in with the key Miz Bethany had given me.
The house was real dark, on account of all the curtains being taped
shut, so that those media people couldn’t take pictures. I was
afraid of making Miz Bethany mad if I opened them, so I didn’t. I
just turned on every light I could, but it didn’t seem to brighten
it up none. Maybe I’m wrong, but the way I remember it is that the
rooms stayed dark grey. Who knows? I was real jumpy. God help me,
the smell, oh Baby, it was like every slaughter house, and then ten
times worse. And there wasn’t barely a foot of wall downstairs that
wasn’t covered in streaks and splashes of what had to be dried
blood and maybe other things too. In the end, even after all my
scrubbing, the Willets’ had to replace all the wallpaper and
repaint. Anyhow, well there were words in the blood too. I didn’t
want to look, but I had to because I was trying to wash the words
off, and so I read them, God help me
.”

Mama broke off talking then
and just looked down at her coffee and cried. I gave her a minute
and then asked her what the words said. She looked startled to see
me there. For a few seconds I guess she was right back there in
that house, back in that day. She shook her head a little, and said
“
Oh the words, well they didn’t make much
sense. There was his name, written in blood everywhere ‘Roger,
Roger’, and then she had written ‘Why’ a couple times, and ‘You see
what you did’, and then, ‘Not me’. Oh, and this was the most awful
-up at the top of the landing she had written all her children’s
names and their dates of birth. I guess that must have been in her
own blood, because that’s where they found her, up against the wall
on the landing. I guess that was the last thing she did… write
their little names and birthdays on the wall while she was bleeding
to death up there. She had stabbed herself, you know, and not slit
her wrists like you might have thought. No, God forgive her, she
had stabbed herself in her own stomach over and over again. His
name wasn’t on that wall, though. She had made a special letter to
him in the dining room. Right by his body in the dining room she
had written, ‘Die today, die tomorrow, die again and I’ll wait’.
God, the poor girl must have been mad as a hatter… well
obviously
.”