Help for the Haunted

by John Searles

  “There,” Marnie said, tapping her nail against the windshield.

  “There’s the bastard.”

  I scanned the narrow parking lot. Datsun. Ford. Plymouth. Ford. GMC. My heart banged away, thinking of what usually came next. My mother hated bars and would almost always send me inside to nab my father. “A person could waste a whole life in one of those places,” she liked to say.

  For me there was nothing better than stepping inside the crowded brick caves—the smells of wet wood, stale beer, and smoke forever mingling in the air. I loved being surrounded by the cracking of pool balls, women with tight jeans and cigarette voices. They were so opposite from my mother with her smooth, young skin, flowery blouses and chinos, timid movements and soft hum of a voice. My mother had the air of a churchgoer, even though she never went to church. She was Sunday afternoon, and those women were Saturday night. Whenever my father saw me, he would pat his heavy hand on my shoulder and introduce me to all his pals. My father was like a movie star inside a bar, probably because he wasn’t bald or potbellied or sloppy like the rest of the guys. He had straight teeth and a wave of dark hair, muscles and a flat stomach. He wore the same rugged denim jacket all year long and held his cigarette like a joint. While he paid his tab, I’d grab a fistful of straws so Leon Diesel and I could twist and snap them at the bus stop in the morning. Some nights I’d shove my sweatshirt pockets full of maraschino cherries and a couple green olives for Marnie. The neon fruit stained my hands and the inside of my pockets a strange artificial red that never completely came out in the wash.

  The thought of the whole routine made me smile when my mother signaled and braked. We all squinted at the truck parked between Maloney’s Pub and the Dew Drop Inn. Even in the summer, faded garland Christmas bells and angels dangled from the wires that hung between buildings and across Hanover Street. Every December the Holedo town maintenance crews put up new decorations, only to let the weather slowly take them down the rest of the year. Under the wiry remains of a golden bell sat the truck Marnie had spotted. Red and silver. Snow chains on the tires even though it was June. “No,” my mother said in the softer-timbre voice she used for disappointment. “Roy’s truck has that dent in the fender. And he took his chains off last March.” “Honey,” Marnie said, “that man took his chains off long before that.”

  My mother glanced in the side-view mirror and pulled back onto the street, not laughing at the joke.

  “Get it?” Marnie said. “Ball and chain.”

  Neither of us smiled. After all, none of this was funny. For the last two days my father had been on what we called a “big bender.” It meant he left for work on Wednesday morning and hadn’t been seen since. I took the opportunity to dig at Marnie for picking out the wrong truck. “Those weren’t even Massachusetts plates.” My voice cracked a bit, which took away from the slight. I had the froggiest voice of any guy my age and was glad the magic of my long-awaited puberty was finally beginning to deepen it. Marnie looked at me and shrugged like she didn’t care. But we both knew she had lost a point or two in the game. She went back to her eyebrows, and I tried not to be distracted as she plucked. Hair after hair. Hair after hair. She was one of those women who had great faith in the transformative powers of makeup and jewelry. Marnie was so different from my mother, who kept her thick, soot-colored hair in a neat little headband. My mother had tattoo-green eyes and a smile that didn’t call for lipstick or gloss. On her ring finger she wore a tiny silver band with a diamond no bigger than a baby’s pinkie nail.

  We rolled to the end of Hanover Street, where the entrance ramp led to the highway out of Holedo. The bar lights blurred behind us, and my mother started checking and rechecking her watch, probably realizing how long we’d been searching. I stared out the window at a row of gray apartment complexes, an auto body shop with a half dozen mangled vehicles in the lot, the steady row of streetlamps that cast white light and shifting shadows inside our car as we moved. Marnie clicked on the radio and left the dial right where she found it. Whatever was playing when she hit the button—country, rock and roll, Bible preachers telling her she was headed straight for the pit of hell—suited her just fine. Tonight the car filled with the sound of violins. My mother was too distracted to care, and when I reached to change the station, hoping to catch the last inning of the Red Sox game, Marnie brushed my hand away. “We’re not fussy, sweet lips,” she said. “Let’s just listen.” “My name is Dominick,” I told her, but she was already entranced by the music and didn’t seem to hear. I could have hassled her some more, but I wasn’t dying to listen to the game anyway. Just trying to follow the Sox so I could keep up with my father, something I hadn’t done all season.

  We cruised to classical, and I thought of Leon at the bus stop. Every Friday morning the band kids lugged their clarinets and flutes to school in black cases like miniature caskets, and it set Leon off. “That’s the problem with this fucking town,” he said. “They waste time teaching pansies how to play useless instruments. Give me an electric guitar, and then I’ll join the band.”

  More than once I had suggested he take up drums because he seemed genuinely troubled by the lack of cool instruments in our high school. But Leon said he wasn’t interested in playing backup for a pansy band.

  I had known Leon since the first grade, when his family moved to the basement apartment downstairs from ours. In that time he had grown to be one of the toughest guys in school. His body had transformed into a lean muscular form. He kept his wispy hair perfectly feathered with the help of a wide-tooth comb carried in his back pocket, the handle forever jutting out of his jeans. Leon’s biggest badge, though, was the slight trace of a mustache above his lip. For some reason he didn’t seem to notice that I had ended up a lot like those band kids, with my thin voice and splash of acne on my forehead. Over the last year I had shot up in height, but I was reedy and long-legged, which left me feeling awkward all the time.

  “Look at you,” Marnie said whenever she caught my eye in the visor mirror, her lipstick dried into the wrinkles around her skinny lips. “You’re such a doll.”

  That was my problem. I was the type of a kid that weirdos like Marnie, old ladies, and nuns found attractive. “He is so gorgeous,” they would say to my mom. “He must be a real lady-killer.” Leon had already fooled around with half a dozen girls and even claimed to have finger-fucked one. I had yet to kiss.

  The violin rose and fell. A car with one headlight passed. We were alone on the highway, moving toward our exit. A police car was parked off the road in the parking lot of the Holedo Motel, behind a scattering of raggedy pine trees. The inside car light glowed yellow, and I caught a glimpse of the officer’s mustache. If my father was cruising by, he would start muttering his usual speech about all the cops in this town being crooked, that they were a bunch of lazy cowards banned together in their own little boys’ club. He’d light a Winston and then his speech would work into bitching about President Nixon, tax increases, and layoffs. My mother just glanced at the cop car, looking too worried for someone going fifty-five.

  “Maybe it’s time to start a new life,” she said absently.

  Excerpt from Strange but True

  Chapter 1

  “Sinister and complex. . . . You’ll race right through it.”

  —Janet Maslin, New York Times

  ALMOST FIVE YEARS after Ronnie Chase’s death, the phone rings late one windy February evening. Ronnie’s older brother, Philip, is asleep on the foldout sofa, because the family room has served as his bedroom ever since he moved home from New York City. Tangled in the sheets—among his aluminum crutch, balled-up Kleenexes, TV Guides, three remote controls, and a dog-eared copy of an Anne Sexton biography—

  is the cordless phone. Philip’s hand fumbles in the dark until he dredges it up by the stubby antenna and presses the On button. “Hello.” A faint, vaguely familiar female voice says, “Philip? Is that you?” Philip opens his mouth to ask who’s calling, then stops when he realizes who it is: Melis
sa Moody, his brother’s high school girlfriend. His mind fills with the single image of her on prom night, blood splattered on the front of her white dress. The memory is enough to make his mouth drop open farther. It is an expression all of the Chases will find themselves wearing on their faces in the coming days, beginning with this very phone call. “Missy?”

  “Sorry, it’s late. Did I wake you?”

  Philip stares up at the antique schoolhouse clock on the wall, which has ticked and ticked and ticked in this rambling old colonial for as long as he can remember, though it never keeps the proper time. Both hands point to midnight, when it’s only ten-thirty. Back in New York City, people are just finishing dinner or hailing cabs, but here in the Pennsylvania suburbs, the world goes dead after eight. “I’m wide awake,” Philip lies. “It’s been a long time. How are you?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  He hears the steady whoosh of cars speeding by in the background. There is a thinly veiled tremble in her voice that tells him she is anything but okay. “Is something the matter?”

  “I need to talk to you and your parents.”

  If she wants to talk to his father, she’ll have to track him down in Florida where he lives with his new wife, Holly—the woman his mother refers to simply as The Slut. But Philip doesn’t bother to explain all that, because there is too much to explain already. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Before Missy can answer, his mother’s heavy footsteps thunder down the stairs. A moment later, she is standing at the edge of the foldout bed, her worn-out white nightgown pressed obscenely against her doughy body. A few nights before, Philip had caught the second half of About Schmidt on cable. Now he thinks of the scene where Kathy Bates bares all before getting in the hot tub—this moment easily rivals that one. He shifts his gaze to his mother’s curly gray hair springing from her head in all directions like a madwoman—which is fitting, because to Philip, she is a madwoman. “Who is it?”

  “Hold on,” Philip says into the phone, then to his mother, “it’s Missy.”

  “Melissa? Ronnie’s girlfriend?”

  Philip nods.

  And then there is that expression: her eyebrows arch upward, her mouth drops into an O, as though she too has been spooked by the horrible memory of Melissa’s prom dress splattered with Ronnie’s blood. “What does she want?”

  He gives an exaggerated shrug, then returns his attention to Melissa. “Sorry. My mom just woke up and wanted to know who was on the phone.”

  “That’s okay. How is she anyway?”

  All the possible answers to that question rattle around in his mind. There is the everyday fact of his father’s absence, his mother’s binge eating and ever-increasing weight, her countless pills for blood pressure, cholesterol, anxiety, and depression. But all he says is, “She’s fine. So what do you want to talk to us about?”

  “I’d rather tell you in person. Can I come by sometime?”

  “Sure.”

  “When would be good?”

  Philip thinks of his life in New York, the way he asked perfect strangers over to his camper-size studio in the East Village at all hours. The buzzer was broken, so he had to instruct each one to yell from the street. “How about now?” he hears himself say into the phone. “Now?” Melissa says.

  He waits for her to tell him that it’s too late, too dark, too cold. But she takes him by surprise.

  “Actually, I’ve waited too long to tell you this. So now sounds good to me.”

  After they say good-bye, Philip presses the Off button and tosses the cordless back into the rumpled mess of the bed. The skin beneath his cast itches, and he jams two fingers into the narrow pocket of space just above his kneecap, scratching as hard as he can. His mother stares down at him as an onslaught of questions spill from her mouth like she’s regurgitating something and she cannot stop: “Aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on? I mean, why the hell would that girl call here after all this time? What, she doesn’t know how rude it is to phone someone so late? For Christ’s sake, aren’t you going to answer me?”

  Philip quits scratching and pulls his fingers free from the cast, which looks more like an elongated ski boot with an opening for his bruised toes at the bottom, instead of the plain white casts kids used to autograph when he was in high school only a decade ago. “If you shut up for a second, I’ll answer you.”

  His mother crosses her arms in front of her lumpy breasts, making a dramatic show of her silence. The other night he’d watched Inside the Actors Studio and one of those actresses with three names (he could never keep track of who was who) had talked about playing her part for the back row of the theater. That’s how his mother has gone through life these last five years, Philip thinks, her every move broad enough for the people in the cheap seats.

  “She wants to talk to us,” he says.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, she’s going to tell us in person.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? She can’t come over now. It’s the middle of the night.” “M,” he says. The letter is a nickname Philip has used for her ever since he moved home one month ago. She’s never questioned it, but he assumes she thinks it stands for mother. By now you might realize that it stands for that other M word: madwoman. His own private joke. He goes on, “Two A.M. is the middle of the night. Technically, it is still early evening. In New York, people are just finishing dinner.”

  At the mention of the city, she squeezes her lips into the shape of a volcano and shoots Philip a disgusted look. It makes him think of the only time she came to see him there, after the police called to tell her that he was in the hospital. She took Amtrak in. His father caught a JetBlue flight up from Florida. They had a Chase family reunion, right there on the tenth floor of St. Vincent’s as Philip lay in bed, the wound on his neck buried beneath a mummy’s share of gauzy bandages, his leg freshly set in its ski-boot cast, his body black and blue beneath the sheets. “This is not New York,” she says before turning and thundering back up the stairs, offering him a glimpse of her dimpled, jiggling ass through her threadbare gown.

  A whole new meaning to the words rear view, Philip thinks.

  When he hears the dull clamor of her opening drawers and slamming them shut, Philip reaches for his crutch and uses it to leverage his thin, aching body out of bed. The lights are off in the family room, but there are tiny ones everywhere: the red dot on the cable box, the flashing green numbers on the VCR, the blinking green light on the charger of his cell, the orange blur on all the dimmer switches. Together, they leave him with the vague impression that he is gazing out the window of an airplane at night. That image stays with Philip as he limps down the wide, echoing hallway. He takes the shortcut through the dining room no one ever uses, with its long mahogany table and Venetian glass chandelier, then crosses through the foyer into the bathroom beneath the stairs, which is about as small and confining as one on an airplane.

  Philip’s face in the mirror looks older than his twenty-seven years. There are no crow’s-feet or creases in his brow or any of those obvious signs of aging. There is, however, a distinct pall of sorrow and worry in his eyes. It is the face of someone who has seen too much too soon. Then there is the matter of that wound—well on its way to becoming a fat red zipper of a scar across his throat that the doctors said would fade but never go away. Philip finds one of his baggy wool turtlenecks on top of the hamper, puts it on for camouflage, then combs his tangled brown hair and brushes his teeth. He’s about to go back into the hallway when something makes him stop and open the medicine cabinet. The inside is still untouched, just like his brother’s locked bedroom upstairs. He reaches in and pulls out the retainer. Ronnie’s most obvious imperfection: an underbite.

  “What are you doing?”

  He turns to see his mother dressed in her librarian clothes, or rather the kind of clothes she wore when she was still a librarian. A beige cowlneck sweater and beige pants that
she must have bought at the plus-size store at the King of Prussia Mall. She should have picked up a new nightgown while she was at it, Philip thinks. “I don’t know,” he tells her. She steps inside, bringing with her a cloud of Right Guard for Women sprayed on upstairs in lieu of a shower. Her pill-swollen hand snatches the retainer from him and returns it to the exact shelf where he found it, between a dusty peroxide bottle and a tilted pile of cucumber soaps. When she closes the cabinet, her reflection in the mirror speeds by him in a dizzying flash, causing Philip to flinch. “I don’t want you touching his things,” she says.

  It is an argument they’ve had before, and he won’t allow himself to get caught up in it. Melissa will be here any minute, and the last thing he needs is to get his mother more worked up. He steps past her and heads down the hall to the kitchen, where he snaps on the lights. After making do with the camper-size kitchen in the studio he sublet in New York from that kook, Donnelly Fiume, Philip can’t help but marvel at how sprawling this one is. It has dark wood cabinets, recessed lighting, and a porcelaintiled floor that’s made to look distressed, as though it belongs in a Tuscan monastery rather than a house on the Main Line of Philly. Most of their meals have been microwaved these last four weeks, but no one would ever guess, judging from the mountain of pots in the sink and bowls scattered across the granite countertop, all smeared with green. A few nights before, his mother had been possessed by one of her cravings. Pea soup, this time. Years ago, they had a cleaning woman who came twice a week for just this reason, her services paid for by his father’s hefty salary as a heart surgeon at Bryn Mawr Hospital. Not anymore. Philip pulls open the refrigerator and takes out a paper sack of coffee to brew a pot the way he used to in the city when he was waiting for one of those strangers to shout up to him from the street.

  “You’re making coffee now?” his mother says from behind him. This time, he doesn’t turn around. He scoops two tablespoons into the filter for every cup, remembering how his heart used to beat hard and fast after he tossed his keys out the window and listened to the clomp-clomp-clomp on the crooked old stairway. “Yep.”