The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  “That’s ridiculous,” I snapped. “Listen to what you’re saying. It makes even less sense than what you were saying before and has nothing to do with the dirt. And anyway, the cops don’t know about the bracelet.”

  “Don’t you think you should tell them? You might be withholding important evidence.”

  “It’s not relevant.”

  “You obviously didn’t see Trina’s face the first time she noticed that bracelet hanging out of Gram’s jewelry box.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You’ve got to face the fact that Trina’s an ex-drug addict without a lot of options.”

  “She’s got SafeHaven.” And possible access to cocaine.

  “My point exactly.”

  I was too weary to argue, to play my usual role in our ongoing liberal vs. conservative debate. “I’d rather believe in ghosts.”

  Beth took my remark as a concession to her superior logic and nodded graciously. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Damned if I know.” But as I said the words, I was overcome by that creepy, shivery feeling that someone was watching me. That sixth sense that tells you someone else is in the room. I swung around in panic. Michael was leaning against the doorjamb; he looked tired, but not devastated. I closed my eyes in relief.

  “Damned if you know what?” he asked.

  I jumped up. “How’s your mom?” I came around the desk toward him, then stopped, not knowing what to do: hug him? shake his hand? wave? I stood awkwardly behind Beth’s chair.

  “Good,” he said. “Much better than they expected. The doctor gave me the usual ‘the next 24 to 48 hours will tell the tale,’ but I think she’s going to pull through just fine.”

  I decided to give him a hug. “I’m so happy,” I said, pulling away quickly.

  “Me too,” he said.

  Beth stood and picked up the cups from the desk. “I’m happy too, Michael. It’s great news. I’m just going to go make us another pot of tea.”

  I waved him into Beth’s chair when she left the room. “Sit,” I said. “You look exhausted.”

  He sat. “So do you.”

  “A fine pair.” I settled into the chair next to his. “Tough day all around, I guess.”

  He leaned over and touched my thigh lightly; I felt a tingle outlining the place where his fingers had been. “Did something else happen?” he asked.

  “Later,” I said. “Tell me about your mother.”

  He explained that the operation had run an hour shorter than expected, which cut down considerably on the trauma, and his mother had come through it remarkably well. She had been awake and lucid when he left the hospital, ordering him to go home and get some sleep and not to show his face in her room until tomorrow.

  “She sounds pretty tough.”

  “Oh, she’s one tough old bird, all right.” Michael ran his fingers through his scraggly hair, which was in desperate need of a good cut. “But I’m going to stay with her all day tomorrow—no matter what she says.” My face must have registered disappointment at his words, because he added, “But I’m here now to get going on closing up that tunnel.” He seemed to notice the dirt on my clothes for the first time. “Have you been digging?”

  I nodded.

  “And that’s why you had a bad day?”

  “Part of it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and lifted an ankle to his knee. “Then I think it’s your turn to—”

  A scream pierced the air, high and thin and full of terror. Before either of us could move, Beth stumbled into the parlor. She was holding her right arm stiffly in front of her. It was bleeding profusely.

  I ran to the doorway and grabbed her before she could fall. “Beth, honey, what happened? Are you okay?”

  “The knife,” she gasped, her face an ashy gray. “It cut me.”

  Michael ripped his jacket off and twisted it around Beth’s arm, trying to staunch the flow of blood, but there was so much of it, more and more pulsing out with each beat of her heart. I raced to the bathroom for towels, and when I returned, he was leading Beth to the chair. He replaced his bloody jacket with a towel and twisted again. “Breathe deep,” he told her. “Breathe deep and try to stay calm.”

  I dialed 911, begged them to come right away, then knelt down next to Beth’s chair. “Just hang in there, honey, the ambulance will be here in a minute.”

  She looked at me as if she hadn’t heard me talking to the dispatcher. “The knife attacked me.” The sentence began as a murmur and ended as a wail. “It leapt out of the rack and came after me. It slashed my arm as if it knew I was there—as if it could see me!”

  I wrapped my arms around her and glanced over her head at Michael. He looked as concerned as I felt. “Don’t worry about it now, honey,” I said, trying to calm her. “You’re probably in shock. Let’s get you to a hospital and then we can talk about what happened.”

  “No!” Beth screamed, her voice laced with hysteria. “You don’t understand. You’re not listening to me. The knife came at me out of nowhere. It wasn’t being held by anyone!”

  It took a few moments before I understood what she was saying. “You mean …?” I began, then stopped. “You don’t mean?”

  “It was your ghost,” she said in a raspy whisper. “It had to be.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The plastic chairs in the emergency room were lined up in haphazard rows facing a television set mounted near the ceiling. Although there was no way any normal-sized person could reach the “on” button, and there didn’t appear to be a remote control anywhere, the TV was turned on and it was loud. The show was about a trio of young couples—all of whom fought a lot and looked alike—and it featured one of the worst laugh tracks I’d ever heard. Michael and I were waiting for the surgeon to finish suturing Beth’s arm.

  The ambulance had brought Beth to the hospital; Michael and I had followed in his truck. After a quick preliminary examination, the doctor had assured me Beth was going to be fine: she was just going to need a lot of stitches. He said I could sit with her in the curtained cubicle, which I did for a while, but I left when they started sewing. I had seen enough gore for one day. Russ was on his way.

  There were only three other people in the waiting room: a father and his son, who seemed far too lively and rambunctious to be very sick; and an old man who was asleep in the front row, oblivious to the fake laughter blaring from the TV over his head. Michael and I sat in the back.

  “Do you think it really could’ve been a ghost?” I asked, keeping my voice low so no one but Michael would hear my question. “Does any of this make any sense to you?” On the drive to the hospital, I had told him everything that had happened since he left Harden House last night.

  “We live, we die,” Michael said. “I don’t think it’s deep, and I don’t think we’re special to anyone but ourselves. I don’t believe in an eternal soul or a personal God or any of the shit they tried to stuff down my throat when I was a kid.”

  “Doth the gentleman protest too much?”

  He stretched his arm across the back of my chair. “Yesterday, I would’ve told you there was no way a ghost was wandering around that house.”

  “And today?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “After what just happened, I’ve got to tell you, I’m not all that sure anymore.”

  “Me either.” I lay my head on his shoulder and stared at the TV, but even though the show was clearly pegged to the intelligence level of an eight-year-old, I couldn’t follow it.

  “I keep running through it,” Michael said, “and there seem to be only three possibilities.” He held up three fingers and ticked them off as he spoke. “One, someone came into the kitchen, tried to sever Beth’s arm, then ran away; two, Beth tried to sever her own arm; or three, the ghost did it. Number one is clearly the most rational explanation—except for the fact that Beth didn’t see anyone going in or out of the house, and neither did either of us—and, as I can’t imagine Beth inflict
ing that kind of injury on herself, that leaves number three.”

  “I’ll take number four.”

  “What’s number four?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Seems like this is where I came in.”

  For a moment I was confused, then I remembered: just a couple of hours earlier, Michael had come into the west parlor as I was telling Beth that I’d be damned if I knew what it all meant. “Circles,” I said. “We’re just going around in circles.”

  We both stared at the television screen, and I could tell Michael didn’t understand what was happening on the show any better than I did.

  “But why would the ghost go after Beth?” I asked. “I can almost see why he might want to hurt Gram—if he actually is a runaway slave and she was filling in the tunnel he was digging to escape—and it’s the same with the stair. He might have pulled it apart to keep people away from his tunnel, but why attack Beth in the kitchen? How did she threaten him?”

  “You’ve got to remember we’re just seeing one side of the story—what it looks like to us may not be what it looks like to him.”

  I sat up and stared at Michael, astonished by his words. “You say that as if you really believe it.”

  He shrugged. “Like I told you before, just because I don’t believe in something doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I put my head back on his shoulder, relieved that a man as sensible and grounded as Michael Ennen could be thinking the same insane thoughts that I was. “I’ve got this feeling that it’s all somehow wrapped up with Sarah Harden. The man was calling out to her, asking her to help his brothers …” I let my words trail off, afraid I was going too far.

  But Michael didn’t seem to think so. “Maybe Sarah was more active in the Underground Railroad than anyone in your family ever knew. It makes sense if her father was a big abolitionist that she might have been one too.”

  “I keep wondering if she was ever able to save the brothers.”

  It was a clear conversation stopper, and we watched the young father valiantly trying to distract his squirming son with the bright-colored ads in an old Time magazine. The little boy ripped the magazine from his father’s hand. “Who’s this?” he demanded, pointing his pudgy finger at the enlarged, blurry photograph on the cover. It was a picture of James Byrd, the black man who had been dragged to his death on the back fender of a white supremacist’s car. “I don’t remember his name,” the father said, “but a very bad thing happened to him. Very, very bad.” He quickly opened the magazine and showed his son an advertisement for a Lexus SUV. “Isn’t this a pretty car?” he asked. The little boy wiggled out of his arms and began to jump on a nearby chair.

  “From the way you’ve described him,” Michael said, “the runaway slave in your dream doesn’t sound like the vengeful type, so maybe Sarah was never able to do anything to help his brothers. Maybe that’s why he’s still hanging around.”

  “According to Hans Holzer—the guy who wrote that book we were talking about the other day—tragic death is the most common reason a person becomes a ghost in the first place. He says the ghost’s caught by the violence of his death, unable to ‘move on.’ So from that perspective, the revenge motive doesn’t work. He wouldn’t know if she saved his brothers or not because it happened later.” I couldn’t believe I was using Holzer’s theories to buttress my argument as if he were a reliable source.

  “Maybe it’s like you were saying the other night, maybe the ghost’s so confused about what’s happening to him—where he is in time and space, who we are—that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he doesn’t know he’s hurting people.”

  “The guy I saw digging looked like he knew what he was doing. He looked mad enough to annihilate the entire white race.”

  “It could’ve been frustration.”

  I thought about the fury that filled every muscle of the man’s massive body, the anger in every movement. I slumped in my chair. “If we follow that logic chain, our next step is to go down there and explain it all to him—that’s supposed to be the only way to free him and let him move on.” I wasn’t going into the cellar to talk to that man, even if it did bring him the freedom that had eluded him for his entire life—and for his entire afterlife. He scared the shit out of me.

  Michael put his arm around me and drew me close. “We don’t have to figure this all out tonight,” he said, brushing my hair back from my forehead.

  “Sarah,” I mumbled into his shirt. “Somehow it all goes back to Sarah Harden.”

  June 2, 1868

  The weather has been most pleasant, and every day this week I have walked through the apple orchard, smelling the new fruit hiding within the elbows and fingers of the gnarled trees, holding Silas’ hand in mine. I tell him of my days, but not of my heart, for I am afraid to be as open as I might be. Silas does not seem to know of Levi, as perhaps he would not, having died months before the babe was born, and I do not wish to remind him of the boy, as then I shall have to tell him it was I who lost his child.

  Instead, this afternoon I told Silas about my recent discovery that Nancy Wallace, nee Southwick, was correct when she told me so many years ago that George Elliot was a woman. Silas was no more surprised in my imagination than he would have been in life. “More is possible than you might think,” he told me kindly. “Perhaps you, too, could become a famous writer.”

  I started to laugh at his silliness, but then, right before my eyes, Silas began to change! He grew more solid, more opaque, most real. At first, I was suffused with happiness, believing my husband was returning to me, but then I saw that Silas’ features were taking on a hardness I did not remember in life, and I knew something was not right.

  And it was not, for the voice that spoke from Silas’ mouth did not belong to my husband. “Much more would be possible if men like your father allowed it to be so,” the man who would be Silas spat, his eyes icy cold. “Your wonderful Papa may think he has stopped me, but he has not! Nor, as God is my witness, shall he stop my brothers!”

  I cried out in alarm, reaching to take Silas’ hand. But there was no one there. I was standing alone amidst the neat rows of apple trees.

  June 3, 1868

  All week, Caleb has been watching me with a worried countenance. “Are you ill, Sister?” he asked just this morning. “You are pale and seem disturbed by the slightest of noises.”

  This was perhaps the longest speech Caleb had made since my arrival, and I was touched by his concern. I assured him I was fit, although I know I am not.

  June 4, 1868

  I have come to the difficult decision that I must cease my conversations with Silas. It shall be extremely painful for me to be alone again, but it is for the best. I fear I am making myself mad, for I am beginning to believe that Silas is actually, really and truly, here with me, that he is still alive, even though I know not who, or what, he may be.

  I shall also admit to you, dear diary, that sometimes I believe Levi is with me also, right here at Harden House! And at this thought I become most distraught, for if I believe Silas is with me, and I know Silas to be dead, what does that portend for my sweet baby?

  June 5, 1868

  I wake in the darkest hours of the night to the distant scrape of metal against metal, of stone against stone. The sounds come from deep within the house and can be none other than Silas digging his tunnel.

  I tell no one, for these are not the sounds made by a man who is at peace; these are the sounds made by a man full of hatred and vengeance. A man to be feared.

  Michael and I drove back from the hospital in silence. It was a thoughtful, tired silence, not quite comfortable, but not really uncomfortable either, tinged with a tightness, a subtle tension that was both nervous and nice. We weren’t discussing it, but we both knew he was spending the night. There was no way I was staying alone after what had happened to Beth, and Michael had once told me his studio apartment in Brighton was barely big enough for him and the cockroaches.

/>   Russ had arrived at the hospital just as the nurse was helping Beth to the waiting room. He looked terrible, worse than I had ever seen him: unshaven and red-eyed and clearly very upset. He blustered until the doctor came out and assured him that Beth was perfectly fine. Twenty-seven stitches, but a clean cut that would heal quickly, a scar that would fade with time.

  Then there was some problem with the insurance. Michael and I sat with Beth while Russ argued with a weary administrator. Beth had allowed her husband to bundle her into the blanket he had brought with him—why, I wasn’t really clear—without any of her usual wisecracking. She was pale and looked depleted, perhaps still a little scared. And who could blame her? I put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder.

  Russ finally told us to leave, that it was going to take longer than he had anticipated. The administrator was saying something about being sorry and canceled subscriptions, but Russ waved him into silence.

  “Bureaucracy,” he muttered to me. “Fucking bureaucrats.”

  I had never heard Russ swear like that before and decided it was best for us to take our leave. I kissed Beth and told her I’d call in a couple of hours. She nodded absently and closed her eyes.

  Michael pulled the truck into the driveway behind Beth’s Range Rover. Although I had more reason to be afraid now, I wasn’t as frightened as I had been earlier, sitting in the Rover with Beth. I was either worn down by all that had happened or had acquired a protective numbness as a result of it. Either way, it was a relief to look at the house and just see home.

  Michael cleared his throat. “I’ll come in with you.”

  “Thanks.” I jumped down from the truck, but waited for him to come around to my side before I started toward the house.

  As we approached the back door, I took Michael’s hand, but when we got inside, I gasped and dropped it. I had forgotten about the blood. It was on the countertop and on the wall behind the sink and all over the refrigerator door. It was on the floor, a wide trail of rusty brown leading across the kitchen to the dining room, and I knew, although I couldn’t see it from where I stood, into the west parlor.