by Gary Jansen
In the great green room,
There was a telephone
And something really freaking weird.
I didn’t say anything to Grace or her mother or sister and quickly wrote it off in my mind as just a mixture of stress and feeling sick. After everyone left, I read Eddie his book on the couch and we all went to sleep early.
The following morning, a Saturday, I woke up at five a.m. and was feeling better. Whatever bug I had must have worked its way out of my system. At the time I was doing research for a book on prayer and was studying the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a sixteenth-century Catholic mystic, who believed that since God created all things, then God was in all things. The duty of all people, then, was to seek the divine in all of creation. This idea appealed to me very much theoretically—but Grace’s miscarriage was still in the forefront of my mind and I wondered where God was in all of this. I wasn’t angry, at least, I didn’t think so. I was just sad and perplexed.
FOR AS LONG AS I can remember, I have always felt drawn to God. Although I grew up in a religious household and had been Catholic all of my life, so much so that I thought for a time of becoming a priest when I was a teenager, it was only in my late twenties that I truly embraced my Catholicism. Part of it, I must admit, was an act of rebellion. Growing up, I had always felt like an outsider and by the time I was in third grade I made it a point to always reach out to the “uncool” kids in school. Friend of the friendless, I was. Well, for many people, being Catholic isn’t very cool and for a time I used to see the religion I grew up in as a big goofy kid with braces and headgear. Even though I believed its heart had good intentions, modern Catholicism always seemed to be knocking its head against the wall.
Moreover, almost everyone I knew, from relatives to childhood friends to coworkers to people I met in college, were either atheists or agnostics. God, I believed, had been pursuing me for years, so I made a decision. As David Mamet wrote in his play Glengarry Glen Ross, “I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion. If everyone thinks one thing, then I say, bet the other way.” So I bet the other way and began to read the great theologians such as Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and then modern spiritual writers like Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. I felt something stir inside of me and started praying the Rosary and soon thereafter started taking part in Penance and Communion, two Catholic sacraments, more frequently. I started attending Mass regularly and read the Bible every day. This is not to say I felt self-righteous or considered myself a moralist or that I didn’t sin on a regular basis. On the contrary, I have told more than one priest during confession that I think a lot of people are assholes, including myself (but not you, Father!) and though I’m not really sure what commandment I’m breaking for this belief, it’s been getting me into trouble ever since I learned that word (probably when I was five . . . thanks, Dad). Though I try to be a better person and do the right thing, my impatience and imperfections aren’t going away anytime soon.
Mornings back then were my alone time with God—our talking sessions—and up until recently I had had the same routine for months. I would wake up early, go downstairs to the living room, read, pray, meditate, and write and after all that sit quietly and listen for a response from the Almighty. Most of the time I would hear nothing, but every once in a while, I would get an impression or a feeling of peace that would move over me or a thought would come to mind that, once followed, would lead me to an unexpected place. But listening for God after the miscarriage was difficult. My mind was racing with questions: Why did this happen? What are you trying to tell us? How could we have prevented this? I had been doing a lot of talking over the last couple of days and had received no response. In retrospect, how could I have ever expected to hear any answers when my mind was constantly fizzing over like Pop Rocks in a can of soda?
Not to mention that God speaks in a language more difficult than Portuguese or Mandarin or HTML. He speaks in silence. I remember saying bullshit the first time someone told me that, but I’ve come to realize that if you are still enough you can listen to silence like listening to music, you can read silence like reading a book. Moreover, if more than 80 percent of the way humans communicate is nonverbal, couldn’t that mean that the majority of communication with the Divine is nonverbal as well? Prayer, meditation, listening—each was a tool for reading God’s body language.
Of course, this isn’t always an easy thing to do. That morning God had his arms folded, and everyone knows that’s never a good sign. After a half-hour of sitting there and waiting for something, anything, I heard Eddie stirring over the baby monitor. I went to his room, sat with him on his bed for a minute, and then carried him downstairs. I gave him some milk and we watched cartoons until Grace came down a few minutes later.
She said she felt cold and asked me to check the heat and fetch Eddie a sweatshirt from upstairs. The thermostat read seventy degrees and the radiators were warm, so I walked upstairs and started rummaging through Eddie’s drawers when the electric-like surge happened again.
And then it happened the next day.
And the next day.
And the next.
Whatever was transpiring in Eddie’s room continued throughout March and into April and it seemed to occur only when I was in the room by myself. I continued to blame it on stress and soon threw weather into my list of explanations to myself. It had been a cold spring and, since the room only had a single window on a side of the house that didn’t get much sun, I thought that seemed like a logical explanation. Still, something in my head was telling me it was something else. What that was, I just didn’t know.
I hadn’t told Grace about what I was experiencing. She was having a hard time after losing the baby and had been suffering from mild bouts of depression, a natural response to what she had gone through. In addition, Grace didn’t seem to be experiencing anything out of the ordinary and neither did Eddie—I would watch their expressions when we were in the room and never saw anything unusual—so I just kept it to myself. And really, what was there to tell anyway? That the room was chilly or that someone with an electrified needle had a voodoo doll of me?
MY PARENTS had divorced in 1994, and though my mom received the house in the settlement, she hadn’t felt at home there in a long time. She had rented it out for a while and tried for years to sell it, without success. Realtors brought potential buyers on weekends and after a short tour of the residence, everyone looked at each other and shook hands, but no one ever came back. While the old place may have been a little run-down—it needed a new coat of paint, the roof was old and weathered, and the kitchen, though clean and simple, was outdated and needed some work—it certainly wasn’t a disaster. My mom tried different real estate agents and even dropped the price considerably, but there were still no takers.
Grace and I married in 1999 and lived in a small apartment—the first floor of a two-family house—on a little cul-de-sac in West Hempstead, not too far from her family’s home across town. It was pretty and private and peaceful with a large backyard. Plus, our landlady, a little old Italian widow who lived upstairs, spent much of her time in Florida with her sister, so for most months out of the year Grace and I had the run of the place. It was in many ways a perfect setup for a newlywed couple.
But in the summer of 2001, my mom called me on the phone and asked if Grace and I would be interested in buying her house. The idea of buying a house, let alone the house I grew up in, hadn’t crossed our minds. We were perfectly content to stay where we were, renting and not worrying about a large mortgage payment from month to month. My mom didn’t pressure us, but I could tell from her voice that she was desperate to get the hell out of Dodge. For years she had wanted to start a new life in upstate New York, away from the congestion and memories of Long Island. She had recently found her dream home on the market—a small ranch that had once been used as a church in a hilly little town that straddles the New York and Connecticut border. But in order to move, she needed to sell the p
lace she had lived in for most of the last twenty-five years. She just asked us to think about it.
We didn’t have the money, and at first blush, I certainly didn’t want to return to the place I had grown up in. Still, I always felt a little sorry for the house. From my earliest memories the place always seemed like it belonged on the Island of Misfit Toys along with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. After a few days of talking it over, both Grace and I thought that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. We were both interested in starting a family soon and Rockville Centre had great schools. Not to mention my mom’s house was just a few blocks from the train station and it would cut my commute time by almost an hour every day. Maybe it was time to start thinking of buying and doing what grown-ups did. So we agreed that if we could get approved for a mortgage we would take a shot.
We applied, were quickly approved, and were supposed to close on September 11, 2001, but for obvious reasons we didn’t. After a bout of rescheduling we became home owners two weeks later.
This was a bittersweet time for me. Though I fully knew what I was doing, I still felt a bit like this was a step backward. I was happy to be helping my mom and excited about starting a new part of my life with Grace, but kids were supposed to move away from home, not back into it. I was thirty-one and I felt like I was spiraling in reverse, plus the place was in need of a makeover, which was going to cost time and money. The only thing that saved me in those early days was Grace’s reminders of the plan we came up with while we were eating scrambled eggs at a Greek diner at midnight a few weeks before: Buy the house, gut it, fix it up ourselves, and if we liked it, great, we’d stay. If we didn’t, we’d sell it and go somewhere else.
In late September I started demolition. The first order of business was tearing up the floors, which for the most part were layers and layers of peel-and-stick linoleum tile. My mom was someone who got bored rather easily and she was constantly laying down new flooring every year, never bothering to take up the old, which meant that by the time I was fifteen we had about a full inch of gaudy plastic beneath our feet at all times. As I took to the floor with a flat-edged shovel, bits of tile broke apart, revealing all the different colors and designs my mom had experimented with over the years. Shit flew in all directions and I began reliving my childhood. I remembered the white tile with pink specks from when I was seven years old, the year I received not just my first Holy Communion, but hands down my favorite toy of all time, the Weebles Haunted House (“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!”); the brown tile with fake gray grout from the time my five-year-old sister Mary fell on a toy, shattering it and in the process cutting her wrist; and the weird lemon-and-lime tile that looked like a bottle of Mr. Clean, which my mom put down a few months after tragedy struck our town in 1983.
ONE NIGHT IN MID-APRIL 2007, a little over a month after the initial incident in the house, Grace and I were downstairs at the dining room table. I was paying bills and she was sorting junk mail into two piles—tear (anything generic without our names on it) and shred (anything that had our names and personal information on it)—bemoaning the number of trees that were being cut down every year for paper and envelopes to advertise new cell phone plans and credit cards with introductory rates that skyrocketed to 75 percent interest after three months. Eddie was sleeping in his room upstairs and we could hear him stirring occasionally over the baby monitor receiver, which sat near the sink in the kitchen. From time to time this glorified walkie-talkie would hiss with interference. This was not uncommon. If one of us was wearing a sweater and sat down on the couch, it was enough to set off a nuclear explosion in its tiny speaker, akin to someone jacking up the volume on a television and then pulling out the cable antenna. That particular night, something different went down. As I was writing out a check and Grace was tearing glossy envelopes in two, we heard mumbling coming from the kitchen. At first we thought nothing of it. Not only does the monitor squeak with static, it has been known to pick up other people’s phone conversations. Unfortunately, it’s never anything terribly exciting. If something like that occurs, you want to hear someone admitting to a confidante that she is having an affair or you want to hear someone telling another person that they hid their mother up in an attic in order to keep collecting her Social Security check. Usually what we heard was more along the lines of “Did you go grocery shopping today?” “Yeah, I had coupons. I got lettuce.”
But then the mumbling continued—a low, indiscernible voice. Grace asked if that was Ed and I wrote it off as just more static. But the sounds grew louder. Grace thought that maybe he was dreaming and decided to go upstairs and check. I went with her.
We opened the door to the bedroom and looked around, but we saw nothing unusual. Eddie was sleeping silently and we watched him for a few moments and he didn’t move or make a sound.
Then we heard a faint low voice come from across the room.
Both of us stood still, forcing ourselves to be silent, and listened to the air. And then it happened again. This time we could tell it was coming from the bookshelf.
Now, the distance between Eddie’s bed and the shelf is about seven feet, but that night those seven feet seemed like a mile. I walked over to the bookcase and there, peering down at us, was a stuffed Kermit the Frog doll, which let out a low rumbling sound like you would hear from a music box in slow motion.
We both stood still for a moment and I then reached up and took it off the shelf, its white eyes staring at me. I never realized how creepy something like this could look in the dark. I looked at Grace and she looked back at me, not scared, just puzzled. Neither of us even knew this thing made a sound but we quickly agreed that it must have had a dying battery in it.
Eddie began to stir in his bed and Grace and I tiptoed outside, closing the door behind us. In the light in the hallway I squeezed the doll, to confirm that it had a voice box. It did. So I turned it around and looked for a zipper, but there was no place to change the battery.
“Piece of crap,” I said, trying to mask the fact that I felt a bit unnerved. Grace seemed unfazed by it all. As we walked downstairs, I thought I was just letting my imagination get the best of me, until the toy started speaking again in my hands.
I don’t know if Grace saw the look on my face or not, but she grabbed Kermit from me and told me her brother could fix it.
I was spooked and I didn’t really know why. I thought about the bizarre sensations I had been experiencing in Eddie’s room and as I stood there looking at the toy sitting now on the dining room table I started to remember how this wasn’t the first time odd things had happened to me. Nor was it the first time strange, unexplained phenomena had occurred in the house.
There was a long history I had tried to forget about, but I soon learned that some things you try to bury don’t stay buried for long.
Chapter 2
One morning when I was a first-grader at St. Agnes Elementary School in Rockville Centre, New York, one of my schoolmates, a boy two years older than I was, told me a story I still remember, since it scared the hell out of me.
“Do you know the old, broken-down house on Lake-view Avenue?” he had asked me. “You know, the big one that’s the size of the school? The one everyone stays away from?”
I told him I did.
“Well,” he had said, “I heard from my sisters that the house is haunted.”
He had my attention, but even as a first-grader I was a bit skeptical. I asked him how they would know.
He told me that the house was up for sale, and his parents and sisters had gone to look at it.
My skepticism eased a bit. This was not unlikely. My family, too, had looked at the house before they’d settled on a smaller, even more run-down place across town.
The story he had heard from his sisters, and was passing on to me, was that there had been a very unhappy man who lived there and had done horrible things to kids.
I asked him what kinds of things, but he didn’t know. His sisters wouldn’t tell him, but they must
have been really terrible. One day, according to this boy, the man felt so guilty about what he had done that he hanged himself in the bathroom.
Now, this was possible. I had been with my parents when they were looking at that house and it had the creepiest bathroom I had ever seen: dark blue walls, a tiny, dirty window that let in only the faintest light, exposed pipes, and a toilet with an overhead watershed and chain you had to pull to flush. The chain had reminded me of the cord the Addams family always used on TV to summon Lurch from whereabouts unknown. I had never seen anything like that before. As he continued telling me the story, I imagined some old guy with his tongue dangling from his mouth, hanging from a pipe, his feet inches above the place where moments before he had dropped a deuce.
But all I said was, “Really?”
“Snapped his neck!” he replied.
I told the kid what Father Bennett had said in church one day: you’re not supposed to kill yourself; if you do, you will go to hell.
The boy continued telling the story and I was listening with rapt attention when a Polaroid flash of disbelief went off in my head.
“The owners told your parents this?” I asked. I was pretty sure, even in my seven-year-old mind, that I was probably being set up. If you’re trying to sell a house the last thing you want to tell someone is that some creepy guy was found hanging above a crapper.
“No, stupid,” my schoolmate said, “My sisters heard from their friends at a slumber party.” That made more sense to me. I was satisfied by that response. Maybe he was telling the truth.