by Shari Lapena
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” Harold hollered, unable to go on. “Why didn’t they throw in the kitchen sink, too?”
He looked up at John, and suddenly saw himself, saw that John was feeling the exact same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, up under his lungs, and he remembered the twisted front end of the car—how much worse it might have been—and felt ashamed for the way he’d just made his son feel. Harold made a great effort, took a deep breath, exhaled heavily, and said, “Never mind. I’m guessing the insurance will take care of it. I’m guessing that’s what we pay insurance for.”
Harold flipped some more pages and snorted, “He’s claiming serious permanent injury! Didn’t you say there was no damage to his car, and that he just got back in his cab and drove away?”
John nodded, so pale his features were just a smudge against his skin.
“You’re sure about that.”
John nodded more vigorously, still speechless.
“Well,” said Harold. “We’re just lucky, I guess.”
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, Harold was back at the philosopher’s. It wasn’t a scheduled visit, but Will had agreed to see him on short notice, for an emergency philosophy appointment.
Harold hadn’t wanted to come, but Stan had insisted. Stan wanted him out of the office. Harold knew he had overreacted about the spider.
“I overreacted about the spider,” Harold conceded, nervously, to Stan. “I don’t need to go to the philosopher today. I have an appointment scheduled for next week.”
“Overreacted? I’ll say you overreacted, Harold. I can’t have you harassing the cleaning staff!”
Harold had come to work, discovered that his spider was gone, web and all, and had gone a little overboard. He’d charged down the halls yelling, “What the hell happened to my spider?” He’d stormed into Stan’s office while Stan was in a meeting and hollered, “I demand to see the cleaning staff!”
It had taken some time to calm him down. Stan had absolutely refused to let Harold talk to the cleaning staff—and had forced this appointment on him.
Now, the door with the Lucy cartoon swung open, the young, bearded philosopher popped his head out and said, “Ah, Harold, come in.”
Harold got up grudgingly and entered the office. He was embarrassed. He didn’t want to talk to the philosopher. What was he going to tell him about why he’d needed an emergency philosophy appointment? That his boss had made him come because he’d lost it over a spider?
“Something happened,” Will guessed, looking sympathetically at Harold.
Harold shrugged.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Harold shook his head.
“Give me a hint,” Will said, like a big kid.
He seemed so open hearted, so pleasant, that Harold felt he could hardly refuse him.
“I guess . . . I lost my cool at the office.”
“Hmm.”
“I lost my temper.”
“Hmm.
“I don’t like it when things aren’t where I leave them,” Harold said irritably.
“Hmm. My girlfriend’s always cleaning up. It drives me crazy. Can’t find anything. I don’t let her in here—obviously,” Will said, glancing around contentedly at the mess.
“The cleaning staff vacuumed up my spider! Just sucked it up, web and all! It was a living thing!”
Will looked at him, interested. “You had a spider?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
Encouraged, Harold said, “That spider made it fun to go to work. A spider web is a work of genius. That spider was an artist.”
“The natural world is fascinating, isn’t it?” Will said.
Harold nodded. He supposed it was. More interesting than departmental policy meetings, certainly.
“It has its own, often terrible, beauty.”
Harold nodded again.
“I understand, Harold. I do. I had an ant farm as a kid. Ever have an ant farm?” Harold shook his head. “They’re fantastic! Ant colonies are absolutely fascinating to watch. I got one for my birthday—I loved it. One day my little sister dumped it out in the backyard. I wanted to kill her.”
Harold was surprised. His philosopher seemed so . . . human.
“I guess I’ve always been interested in social systems,” Will mused.
His enthusiasm was contagious, and it reminded Harold of his own boyhood interest in bugs. “I used to catch grasshoppers and put them in pickle jars,” Harold exclaimed. He remembered it now very clearly—punching the holes in the lid of the Bick’s pickle jar with a nail and a hammer, so that his bugs could breathe. The faint trace of pickle smell lingering, even after his mother had washed the jar. Putting some grass in there. Studying their legs, how their bodies were put together. He used to watch his grasshoppers for ages, unaware of the passing of time. It had been like that again with his spider.
When, Harold wondered again, had he lost his interest in the natural world? Probably right around the time he discovered the supernatural one. Harold suddenly realized that his sense of curiosity and wonder had ended at about the same time as the ghosts had appeared. He’d had a general system shutdown around that time.
“We are part of the natural world, and I think sometimes we forget that,” Will said. “We humans like to set ourselves above the natural world, think of ourselves as its masters. But like it or not, we are part of it, subject to its laws and rhythms, and we forget that at our peril. The further we stray from the natural world, the more stressed and unhappy we feel. We’re part of that system. We need that context.”
Harold nodded, carefully.
“People need context. We get context in lots of ways—family, social relationships, work, race, country, religion—without context, we can feel like we’re in freefall.”
Harold was listening.
“We like to know where we fit. We like to make sense of things. Usually. But some of us only want to see what’s right in front of us.” He paused, as if considering whether he should finish what he was going to say. “I think you, Harold, want to look at the bigger picture, but you’re afraid.”
Harold realized that his philosopher was absolutely right—he was afraid of the bigger picture. He’d been afraid of the bigger picture since he was about nine years old. “How could you know that?”
Will smiled. “Why else would you come to a philosopher?”
Will, thought Harold, didn’t know about the Harold Walker Action Plan.
Will swivelled around in his chair and scanned his crammed bookshelf for a while. Then he grabbed at a book, tugging hard because it was so jammed in there, and handed it to Harold. It was thick, and hardcover. “I’d like you to start reading this, Harold, before our next visit.”
Harold didn’t want to take the book, but there was Will, all enthusiasm, holding it out to him, and he could hardly refuse to take it, since it looked like Will was prepared to hold it out there indefinitely, and especially as, to his surprise, Harold was beginning to actually like Will. Harold finally took the book and looked down at its cover. Philosophy: An Approach for Living.
“It’s really thick,” Harold observed with dismay.
“Just do your best,” Will said cheerfully.
But when Harold got home, climbed into his chair, and leafed through the book, which had very few pictures, it seemed too intimidating. He dropped it over the side of his La-Z-Boy and decided to take a nap instead.
Before he fell asleep though, he thought about getting himself an ant farm for the office. He didn’t see how it was any different from an aquarium, really, and there was one of those in the lobby. He didn’t think Stan should have a problem with it.
He’d be sure to put a sign on it, for the cleaning staff: DO NOT TOUCH.
• • •
FOR A FEW days, things were relatively calm. Audrey skittered around the house in a state of painful expectation, but no one from the other side demanded attention, and Audrey allowed hers
elf to hope that they’d moved on—to wherever it was they move on to.
She’d done enough preparatory reading about the Ouija board to significantly dampen her enthusiasm about trying it. If you could believe what you read, the Ouija board had the potential to unleash all the demons of hell into your home. So the Ouija board was packed up and hidden on the top shelf of her closet in their bedroom.
Tom, though.
She desperately wanted to talk to Tom, to implore him not to tell, but she was afraid to use the Ouija board. She was almost as afraid of Tom as she was of the Ouija board, but not quite. If Tom told Harold about their affair, she feared it would just about kill Harold. So she walked around the house when she was alone, calling out Tom’s name. “Tom? Are you there?” But there was only silence.
Still, in case he could hear her, she pleaded her case. She told him that they would soon know for certain whether he was Dylan’s father, and she hoped that once he knew, he could go to his rest. She reminded him that Harold wasn’t good at facing things, and told him that the decent thing to do—the right thing to do—was to keep their single, youthful indiscretion to themselves, regardless of the result of the paternity test. She asked him for some sign that she had his agreement on this.
Nothing.
Then Audrey realized—with horror—that Harold’s mother might be listening!
She was antsy being alone in the house, so she ran a lot of errands. She’d even done some early Christmas shopping. The house was absolutely spotless—it could be put on the market.
What she really needed, Audrey told herself, what she wanted— was a job. A job outside the home. She wanted desperately to be real, like the Velveteen Rabbit wanted to be real, like Pinocchio.
She started reading the job ads in the newspaper every morning with her coffee, once everyone else had gone. It was pleasant to fantasize about having somewhere else to go every day—about having an identity other than as a homemaker. She even fantasized about the extra money—what couldn’t they do with an extra few thousand dollars? A dream vacation. They’d never been anywhere, not even Disney World.
But she soon became discouraged by her lack of skills. The world had changed so much, and she hadn’t kept up. What had she been doing all these years? Where had the time gone? The only thing she seemed fit for was cleaning houses and minding children—but she was ready for a change.
Or maybe all this daydreaming about getting a job, Audrey told herself, was a way of avoiding the fact that the paternity test results would probably arrive tomorrow. She’d called to follow up—they’d been mailed out a couple of days ago.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For once, Audrey was happy about the TV. She felt like Damocles, dining under a sword that was hanging by a hair. She studied her two sons, steadily chewing their supper while they stared at the screen, their emotions playing over their faces like clouds moving over still water.
Of course the sword would fall and rend her in two; of course Dylan was Tom’s—he was nothing like Harold, while John was just like him. Dylan had to have gotten his particular gifts—his boldness, his perceptiveness, his almost greedy appetite for life—from somewhere. Also, he was sneaky and full of guile, like Tom. Whereas John, who was certainly Harold’s son, was utterly guileless.
Could she trust Tom not to say anything? It was absurd that she even had to ask herself the question. Tom was dead. Why couldn’t she rely on that, like other people? Why was she so lucky?
She couldn’t fathom why Tom was waiting around for the test results anyway. He’d never shown any curiosity about Dylan’s parentage while he was alive, even though he must have had his suspicions. There was the timing—and he’d been a gynecologist for God’s sake!
Perhaps she should never have done the test. Maybe then he wouldn’t be hanging around, because there’d be nothing to wait for. She’d done it because she wanted to know—she’d had no idea Tom would come back from the dead! He obviously hadn’t said anything to Harold about it—so far, anyway. Harold was just the same. And despite the way Harold was—the way he hated to look things in the face—she was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to ignore a bombshell like this, even though he’d want to.
Everything would be all right, Audrey told herself, if the test revealed that Harold was the father. Then she thought Tom would go. But if not? If Tom was the father—would he be content to leave? To say nothing? Somehow, she doubted it.
In which case, she concluded reluctantly, chewing her meatloaf without tasting it, she would have to try to talk to Tom tonight, and that meant she must consult the Ouija board after all, whether she liked it or not. She would have to do it in the middle of the night, when everyone else was asleep. Her fear of Tom and the test result was stronger—now that the result was so imminent—than her fear of the Ouija board.
She wished that she hadn’t procrastinated, that she’d tried the Ouija board in broad daylight while everyone was out. It would have been far less creepy.
• • •
AUDREY DIDN’T WANT to wait forever for Harold to fall asleep, so she’d put a little Sleep-Eze in his bedtime milk, just this once. They always kept some in the medicine cabinet, but they hadn’t been using it, because neither one of them wanted to become dependent on sleeping aids.
Fortunately, once he was down, Harold was a heavy sleeper. Audrey unclasped herself from his death-like grip, put on her housecoat, and tiptoed across the floor to her bedroom closet to get the Ouija board out. It was hidden at the back of the top shelf, behind the extra pillows, and she had to be careful not to make too much noise—she would have a hard time explaining what she was up to. Harold’s bedside table light was still on, which made it easier.
With the Parker Brothers game clutched tightly under her arm, she tiptoed out of the room, closing the door carefully behind her. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she paused. If she was able to contact Tom, she didn’t want to be overheard. The nice thing about the Ouija board was that the spirit spelled things out, and Audrey herself would be careful to speak only in a whisper. But could she be sure that Tom, if she got him at all, would use the board to speak to her instead of his own, loud voice? He apparently spoke out loud to Harold. So she wondered if she could do this in the living room, or whether it would be better to go downstairs to the basement.
But she was creeped out enough as it was; she couldn’t face the basement. She set herself up in the living room. She sat down on the sofa, her back to the stairs, turned the end table light on low, and stared at the box she’d placed on the coffee table. The Mysterious, Mystifying Game—It Glows in the Dark! She lifted the lid off the box. She took out the board and opened it and laid it down on the coffee table. It looked simple enough: a pale board with old-fashioned black lettering; the words Yes and No in the upper corners; all the letters of the alphabet, in capitals, in two arcs across the middle of the board; and the numbers 1 to 9 and 0 underneath. At the bottom, somewhat ominously, was Good Bye.
It looked conventional enough, no scarier than Monopoly, she told herself.
She tentatively touched the white, triangular piece of plastic that was used to spell out the messages from beyond. The rules said there was supposed to be a minimum of two players, but she couldn’t help that. She figured it might work anyway, because they already had a head start in the communicating with the dead department.
She closed her eyes and gave a somewhat desperate little prayer to God to protect her from evil spirits. Audrey didn’t believe in God, but right now she was willing to reconsider. She was in that peculiar, modern position: she didn’t believe that God exists, but she really feared that Evil might.
First she stumbled through the Lord’s Prayer, then she ad-libbed: I know I haven’t been perfect, but please protect me and my family from evil spirits, and I’ll try to do better in future. Amen. She recognized that this sounded a bit too much like saying grace when you were in a hurry to eat, but it was the best she could do.
She began. Wit
h her fingertips placed lightly on the plastic triangle, she attempted to invoke the spirit world: “Anybody there?” she whispered.
She waited. She asked again. Nothing happened. She turned out the table lamp and noticed that the game really did glow in the dark.
“I call Tom Grossman,” she whispered, realizing she might as well be specific.
She waited and waited.
Damn. Now that she was convinced it wasn’t going to work, she was feeling much braver. “Stupid game,” she said, forgetting to keep her voice down.
It moved.
Audrey jumped, lifting her fingers off the plastic triangle as if she’d received an electric shock.
For a full minute she sat absolutely still and argued with herself. Put your fingers back on, what do you think you’re here for?
At last she put her fingers back on the plastic triangle. She whispered, “Tom?”
The triangle moved, of its own accord, to Yes. Audrey knew she hadn’t pushed it there. Her heart began to pound.
“Tom Grossman?” She had to be sure.
The pointer pulled back and nudged Yes again.
“Are you here because of the paternity test?” she whispered.
“Why else?” he barked out loud, and laughed.
Audrey screamed.
As soon as the scream was out, Audrey clapped a hand over her mouth. She was gripped by the fight or flight response, pumping with adrenaline. After a few seconds, she got up and tiptoed over to the bottom of the stairs and peered up, listening intently, to see if they’d woken Harold or the boys. There wasn’t a sound. She struggled with her decision—should she turn back and face Tom, or bolt back up the stairs and climb under the covers with Harold?
But Audrey remembered what was at stake. She turned back to the living room, hugging her housecoat around her. “Keep your voice down,” she whispered into the air.
When he didn’t say anything she whispered, “Are you still here?”
“I’m still here,” Tom whispered. She knew it was him—there was no mistaking that voice, that whisper.