by J. S. Bailey
She waited five more minutes for a response yet heard nothing. With any luck, the digital voice recorder she’d set on the floor would have picked up some kind of ghostly dialogue that had been below her hearing threshold.
Jessica rose from the uncomfortable chair and went upstairs to see if she would have better luck in the kitchen. At least the air would be warmer, and there would be no leaking plumbing or noisy crickets to distract her from her work.
She struggled to see as she ascended the dark stairwell into the living room. A candle had been left burning in the adjoining kitchen, and the light from its feeble flame cast eerie shadows over the walls.
The solitary flame reminded her of the aloneness she felt at being the only living person in the house. Hours before, both Shoushanians had left to go spend the night at their daughter’s house so they wouldn’t unintentionally interfere with the investigation.
Now Jessica wished that someone could be here to interfere with the absence of companionship. Neither Wayne nor Sidney ever wished to accompany her on these outings. Wayne frequently used the excuse that the sight of him might frighten away any self-respecting spirit, and Sidney—well, her excuses tended to change with the tides on a far-off shore.
Jessica sat down at the butcher-block table in the kitchen.
Other people her age were probably sitting at home watching dirty movies and getting drunk. Her parents should have been grateful that she was doing work in the name of faith and science. Just imagine if she found proof that ghosts truly did exist! The afterlife would no longer be viewed as myth but as reality. Hearts could be changed. Maybe it would even make some people start going to church. That would be the coolest thing of all.
She closed her eyes and waited.
The night outside seemed to sigh with the wind that rustled past the house. She heard countless dead leaves blowing over and under each other in their mad dash to the east, where they would no doubt pile up a foot deep along a fence and later serve as a soft playground for the neighborhood kids to jump in.
The candle on the table made a loud pop, and Jessica jumped. Maybe it was a good thing that her friends weren’t there, because they would have teased her for being such a coward. And a coward was something that Jessica was trying very hard not to be.
Suddenly, a soft, muted squeak echoed down from the second floor of the home. She was on her feet in an instant. She tiptoed over to the staircase. The noise was louder here but still hardly more perceptible than a whisper. She took the stairs one at a time, being careful not to let her footsteps be heard lest she frighten whatever was causing it.
She arrived in a short hallway that had a hardwood floor.
A door on the right was ajar, and a thin ribbon of silvery light spilled onto the landing.
She held her ear to the gap between the door and its frame.
The squeaking was coming from the room that lay on the other side. This was the moment she had been waiting for all evening. Before she chickened out and went running back downstairs (a sure-fire way to destroy her fearless ghost hunter image), she pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.
Jessica’s emotions made a split-second metamorphosis from anticipation to disgust to embarrassment. In a cage beneath the window, through which shined the light from a streetlamp, a hamster was racing on his exercise wheel, looking like he was having the time of his life.
A SHARP cry from the bedroom across the hall gave Sidney a start.
She had spent the last hour rearranging her small quarters to better accommodate Jessica’s twin bed. Jessica may have been her friend, but it irked her that Wayne had not given her fair warning about Jessica’s impending arrival in their household. She knew she shouldn’t complain. It was his house, not hers, and besides, Jessica had nowhere else to go. Well, she could have moved in with her parents. Sidney had laughed at that thought. That family had more issues than a magazine.
Sidney had finally finished scooting aside her furniture and floor lamp and settled down on her own bed to begin working on an English assignment (read “Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe, and write six whole pages about what you think it means and how it relates to you, blah blah blah) when Wayne’s unmistakable holler derailed her concentration.
She stared through the open doorway at his bedroom door that was shut, as usual. Of course he was just having a nightmare. He often did, which she knew because of the hair-raising screams she had heard on other nights.
She wished he wouldn’t talk in his sleep. Wayne had had a very unhappy childhood before he came to live with her family, and though he never spoke of those things during his waking hours, his subconscious mind never ceased to broadcast his memories through the house at night.
She wondered what Jessica would think of their friend’s nighttime utterances. Sidney had never told her about Wayne’s origins. Wayne probably hadn’t either.
Jessica was bound to receive a thorough education by the end of the week.
Sidney refocused her attention and began to read “Alone” out loud for the second time.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring…
She broke off. Her drowsiness due to the late hour was causing the words to blur on the page. She blinked a few times to clear her eyes, but she was too tired to concentrate.
Wayne let out another yell. She should probably check on him. She often feared that he might accidentally thrash around so hard in his sleep that he would roll off his bed and give himself a concussion on the nightstand. Even worse, he could fracture his skull and die, further decreasing the number of loved ones she had left in the world.
Wayne was almost eleven years older than she, but Sidney still felt a maternal duty to make sure he wasn’t hurt.
She rose from her bed and quietly opened his bedroom door. She could hear him weeping in the dark, muttering unintelligible words too low for her to hear. Suddenly his voice became louder, more plaintive.
“It hurts!” he cried. In the low light she saw him lifting his arm over his face as if deflecting a blow. His skull appeared to be unharmed, thank goodness. “God, make her stop! Sweet Jesus, how did you? How did you? How’d…” This changed into a long string of garbled syllables that didn’t make any sense.
Wayne was fine; that was good. Time to leave him alone and go to sleep like she should have done hours ago.
She smirked as she backed out of the room and closed the door. Jessica was going to have a blast.
Daybreak.
Jessica staggered out of bed, wincing as she stood up.
Her arms and legs hurt like she had spent the evening climbing a mountain.
She had stayed up much too late. She arrived home from the Shoushanians’ place close to midnight and spent the next hour and a half sorting the rest of her things and piling them into boxes. Now, bleary-eyed and exhausted after a night that had been too short, she wished she could brew a pot of coffee—but like everything else, the coffee maker and carafe were boxed up and ready to go to their new home.
She wished that she was as ready as her belongings.
She went into the bathroom and stood at the sink, examining the dark circles that had appeared under her eyes.
Such skin blemishes were a tolerable side effect of the late, uneventful hours that Sidney had despised. Sidney had despised a lot of things about ghost hunting.
“Jessica,” she’d say, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nothing is happening. Can we please go home now?”
“Just give me one more hour,” Jessica would reply. “Something cool might happen.”
On one of those rare nights when something cool had happened, Sidney begged to go home for a different reason.
They had been sitting in the living room of an ancient house trailer a couple miles north of Eleanor when suddenly they heard a bloodcurdling scream right outside the window.
Sidney’s eyes had grown round as saucers. “Holy crap! Someone’s being murdered out there!” she cried, digging around in her purse for her cell phone as if planning to call 911.
“It’s just a screech owl,” Jessica said. She’d often heard them in the woods at her grandmother’s house when she was a little kid. “If you call the cops about that, they’ll haul you off to prison for being stupid.”
Jessica smiled at the memory of her friend’s petrified expression. She had taken the unbelieving Sidney outside and shined a flashlight up into a tree to illuminate the feathered culprit, who then took off in flight.
That was the last time they ever went ghost hunting together.
Jessica finished up in the bathroom and went to her room to put on the jeans and navy blue t-shirt she had left out before going to bed.
She put her pajamas into one of the boxes she had marked “clothes.” Next, she went from room to room checking closets and cabinets one last time to make sure she hadn’t missed anything during her fatigued round of late-night packing, and then, satisfied that every last corner was empty of her belongings, she drifted over to the picture window and stared out at her favorite view for the final time.
Her second-floor apartment in Hilltop Villa may have been cheap, but the view was priceless. Half a mile to the southwest, the Ohio River flowed by in all its brownish-blue glory. Most of the village of Eleanor lay below in the flood plain. The green hills of Kentucky rose up from the other side of the river, where another village—Iron Springs—sprawled out along the riverbank like a mirror image of the Ohio side. Even though she had seen the Kentucky town from afar every day of her life, she had never been there.
She drew back from the window and prepared herself a simple breakfast of a slice of wheat bread and a glass of water. Anything else would have required her to unpack more dishes.
A tear rolled down her cheek while she ate. This past year had been one of freedom. There was no greater feeling in the world than working hard every day to pay your bills and your rent and not having to rely on anyone else to do so. It had all been part of The Plan. She would save enough money to start taking classes part-time at either the University of Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky University (anywhere else was too expensive), and eventually she would earn a degree. In what, she had no clue—she would have figured it out eventually.
It didn’t matter now, anyway. The Plan had crumbled when she lost her job, and she had yet to come up with a new one.
Jessica decided to get a head start on emptying the apartment and began to lug some of the heavier boxes out to her Taurus.
When the back seat was full, she returned to the kitchen and unscrewed the legs from the table so it would be lighter to carry.
The digital clock on the front of the oven said that it was eight fifteen. If she hadn’t lost her job, she would be getting ready for work right now. She would be putting on her blue polo that had her name embroidered in white over the left breast, applying her makeup, maybe even singing a few of her favorite songs in her lousy, off-key alto.
American Dream Truck Stop, with its gas station and 1950s-style diner, had been a great place to work until the local bottling plant closed and cost two hundred people their jobs. Fewer commuters equaled fewer people needing to fill up their gas tanks. American Dream’s proprietor, Travis Suleman, had lost so much revenue that he’d had no other choice but to lay her off.
Well, he could have laid off Sidney instead. But no hard feelings.
There came a soft knock on the door. Jessica hopped up from beside the dismantled table and opened it to let Wayne inside.
As usual, Jessica felt an inexplicable lightness at the sight of him in his peach-colored polo and khaki pants. He had put styling gel in his hair again today, and Jessica could detect the faint scent of aftershave.
“You’re early,” Jessica said to him, giving him a welcoming hug. Yesterday on the phone he’d told her he’d get permission to take the day off so he could help her move. She’d figured he would take advantage of the break and sleep in.
“And you’re packed.” Wayne’s eyes made a quick scan of the room. “To be honest, I expected to walk in here seeing you still cramming things into boxes.”
Jessica grinned to mask her feelings. “You underestimate me.”
Wayne adjusted his glasses and planted his hands on his hips. “So what are we taking out first?”
“This table’s fine. It can lay flat in the bed of the truck.”
“Whatever my lady wishes.”
Jessica watched with mild trepidation as Wayne bent down and lifted his end of the tabletop off the floor. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might not be able to handle this.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked. He could lose his balance under the weight of the table and stumble down the stairwell into the parking lot. She should have recruited Sidney to help her instead. Sidney wasn’t as strong, but at least she didn’t have any trouble walking.
Wayne rolled his eyes. He always seemed to know what she was thinking. “What, has Sidney been rubbing off on you? If I didn’t think I was going to be all right, I wouldn’t have volunteered to do this for you. Now help me lift this thing.”
She did as he instructed. There was no use arguing with him. He always won anyway—one of the many things she had learned about him over the years. Like how his first name was actually Robert. When they had first met, he explained to her that for personal reasons he would never go by Robert again and that he was perfectly happy to be “just plain Wayne.” With his brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses, he was plain enough to blend into most crowds, except for the facts that he was born with cerebral palsy (spastic diplegia, to be exact) and would only buy clothes from Macy’s.
His pickiness for apparel could have been cured by a trip to J.C. Penney or some other store. However, the spastic muscles in his legs that resulted from the cerebral palsy made it difficult for him to walk. Since his balance and gait were poor at best, it would be easy for him to trip on the stairs and get hurt.
She and Wayne made it to the truck without any trouble, though the trip down had been slower than she would have liked. Wayne had backed the truck into a handicapped space (perfectly legal, since he had a handicapped tag hanging from the rearview mirror) and already let the tailgate down. He’d even been thoughtful enough to lay a tarp down in the truck bed to prevent her furniture from getting scratched. They slid the table top aboard with ease.
Wayne stopped for a moment to catch his breath. “See?” he said. “I made it.”
“Of course you made it,” Jessica teased, pushing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “You’re more stubborn than a herd of mules.”
They started back toward the open-air staircase. Jessica led the way so she could get the door for Wayne when they got back to her unit. “I wasn’t aware that mules traveled in herds,” Wayne said.
“Well, they sure don’t travel in flocks.”
“Swarms, maybe?”
Jessica laughed. “Mule swarms. I think I like it.”
Back inside her soon-to-be-former kitchen, Wayne gathered up the detached table legs and held them over his shoulder like a bundle of sticks. Jessica picked up a box of dishes and followed him out the door, staying close to him in case he needed assistance.
“I went on another investigation last night.” She panted, feeling the sore muscles in her arms strain against the weight of her cargo. “Ellen Shoushanian called me and asked if I’d drop on by, so I did.”
“And you still got all your packing done?” He glanced back at her. “That’s an even bigger miracle.”
She wasn’t going to argue with that. “Hey, in my line of business, you don’t pass up a good deal like hers. That house is the oldest one in town.”
Wayne snorted. “Line of business? It’s not a business when you don’t get paid.”
“So it’s a non-profit,” she said. “Big deal.”
They deposited their loads into the t
ruck and went back upstairs.
“Once I’ve compiled all my footage into a documentary and start selling copies, it can be a business,” Jessica said. It had been one of the many ideas she’d considered while brainstorming a new plan, though she doubted that she’d ever make enough money from that endeavor to amount to anything. “Ellen told me she’d give my phone number to everyone she knows so I can increase my client base.”
Wayne tucked Jessica’s wastebasket under one arm. “So, was la casa de Shoushanian crawling with restless spirits?”
“If it was, I didn’t see them. I thought I heard a ghost upstairs, but it turned out to be a hamster running on one of those metal wheel things.”
“Was it see-through?”
“Was what see-through?”
“The hamster.”
It was Jessica’s turn to snort. “I wish.”
She went into the bedroom and looked around to determine which item would be the most logical thing to carry out next.
The room was already so empty that it bore little resemblance to the way it had looked only the day before. All of her personal touches—the posters and framed artwork and photographs—had already been packed away. She felt tears brimming in the corners of her eyes.
Quit it, she told herself. This was just a dinky apartment. Not home. Home is where the heart is, and her heart was in her chest.
The tears abated.
She pulled two of the drawers out of her dresser then stacked one on top of the other and headed out of the room.
Wayne was in the kitchen already. His shirt was darkened with sweat. “I heard a joke about a hamster once,” he said.
She shifted the drawers to get a better hold on them. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. There was a woman who went to see a priest and said, ‘Father, you’ve got to help me. My son has been possessed by the spirit of an evil hamster. You must perform an exorcism right away.’ And the priest just looked at her and said, ‘Lady, what do you need me for? If you want the hamster exorcised, just buy it a wheel.’”