by John Searles
“I seriously doubt that,” she’d tell them. And soon, she’d be back at it. “Oh, here’s a winner: Genesis 1:29: ‘And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which has the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.’ ”
From the front seat, our mother asked, “What’s so wrong with that?”
“Well, let’s see. Since a huge majority of plants and trees are poisonous, God’s advice is a tad reckless, don’t you think? I mean, would you tell Sylvie to wander out into the woods and eat whatever plants she found?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, lucky for Sylvie, otherwise she’d be dead. I guess you’re smarter than God who is apparently a moron.”
“Enough!” my father said, growing angry whenever she took things too far.
After that, my mother killed a few miles humming what sounded like a lullaby, one I’d never heard before. The tune climbed higher and higher until I think even she grew tired of it, and then she said, “Why don’t you read us some of your paper, Sylvie?”
I kept quiet, anticipating a groan from Rose. But my sister just pressed a cheek to the window, and her lack of protest led me to take out my paper along with the envelope announcing that I had won first prize for fifth grade, along with two hundred dollars.
“The Washington, D.C., riots that took place in early April of 1968, following the assassination of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr., affected at least 110 U.S. cities,” I read after clearing my throat. “Chicago and Baltimore were among the most impacted. The availability of jobs in the federal government attracted many to Washington in the 1960s, and middle-class African American neighborhoods prospered.”
“That’s a very good point you raise,” my father told me.
“It is, Sylvie,” my mother said. “Good job.”
Rose let out a humph.
“What?” I asked her.
“Nothing.”
Okay then, I thought, and I started reading again, “Despite the end of mandated segregation, the neighborhoods of Shaw, the H Street Northeast corridor, and—”
“It’s just funny that the people in the front seats agree with you,” Rose said, “since the Bible is racist and they are such big believers in everything the book says.”
“The Bible is not racist,” my mother told her.
My sister cracked hers open and began flipping pages. “Exhibit A: ‘If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.’ If that’s not enough, here’s another gem: ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property.’ Should I find more?”
“Some of the things in the book are from a long time ago. Back when the world was a different place.”
“So what you’re saying is the book is outdated.”
“In certain areas,” my mother conceded.
“So you and Dad get to pick and choose what is and isn’t worth believing in?”
“Enough!” my father said again.
After that we went back to being quiet. I waited to see if anyone wanted me to read more of my essay. No one did, so I pressed my cheek to the glass too.
Despite so many difficult moments on that trip south, there were times when my sister put away the Bible and nobody argued. We stopped at South of the Border, where my father bought us sparklers and people didn’t stare at our family as much as they did in Dundalk. At the motel where we spent a night to break up the drive, we ate Kentucky Fried Chicken in our beds while watching black-and-white movies on the small TV. When we crossed the state line into Florida, we pulled into the Welcome Center, where my father asked a woman to snap our picture in front of palm trees. Even though the wind gusted and the sky grew dark too early, we wore the sunglasses my mother picked up at a pharmacy especially for the trip. In the remaining hours of the drive, however, the wind continued to gust and the sky grew darker still. One by one, we pulled off those glasses and tucked them away.
At 3:25 in the afternoon, my father turned the Datsun into the hotel parking lot. No one would have guessed the time since things were dark as dusk. After we checked into our room on the second floor, I didn’t bother unpacking my bathing suit. Instead, I lingered by the window, staring out at the raindrops splashing against the surface of the pool. Somewhere back in Georgia, my father had confiscated Rose’s bible, but she wasted no time finding another in the nightstand and stretching out on one of the beds to comb through the pages. My mother clicked on the clock radio and spun the dial until she found a meteorologist who made the same prediction as the others we had listened to in the car: heavy wind, heavy rain for the next two days.
“Here we go,” Rose said, not caring about the weather. “A gem from Leviticus, which is quickly becoming my favorite source of all things ridiculous. ‘The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When any man has a bodily discharge, the discharge is unclean. Whether it continues flowing from his body or is blocked, it will make him unclean. This is how his discharge will bring about uncleanness’ . . .”
“Tell you what, tadpole,” my father said, ignoring her and putting a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been looking forward to a swim too. Let’s do it.”
“What about the rain?”
“We’re going to get wet anyway. What’s the difference?”
Across the room, Rose kept at it. “‘Any bed the man with a discharge lies on will be unclean, and anything he sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches his bed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening . . .’ ”
How desperate must my father have been for a break from her if he was willing to go swimming with me in the middle of a storm? But what did his reasons matter? I ran and got my bathing suit. When my mother realized what we were planning, she put up a fuss. Once my father promised to yank us from the water at the slightest threat of lightning, she gave in and even watched from the window, waving as we circled the pool before holding hands and jumping into the deep end.
With the wind blowing through the palm trees and rain splattering against our heads, I had the feeling we’d been tossed overboard from a ship during a storm. I flipped onto my back and kicked my way around the pool, squinting against the rain. In the shallow end, my father found a water jet and pressed his back to it. I watched him gaze up at the sky. More to himself than to me, he said, “I hope the weather doesn’t scare away the crowds.”
“It won’t,” I told him, though what did I know?
He looked across the rippling water at me. Without glasses, and with rain dripping down his face, he looked younger, less serious. It made me think of years before when he and my mother would take us swimming at a pond in Colbert Township near Dundalk. Back then, they used to swim with us too, though we never went there anymore. “Listen, tadpole,” he said. “Your mom and I agreed that you and your sister are going to wait in what they call the greenroom during our talk this evening.”
I said nothing, kicking my feet and picturing a room with green walls and a green carpet, maybe a green ceiling too.
“They’ll have lots of food for you both.”
Green M&M’s. Green Jelly Beans. Green grapes and kiwis and limes.
“You can read or play a game,” he said.
“Or listen to weird bible passages.”
He smiled, water dripping from his chin and from the cross nestled in his wet chest hair. “Or listen to weird bible passages. Anyway, we figured you’d prefer that to sitting in the audience.”
I dipped beneath the water, swam closer before emerging. “Sounds good to me.”
“Sylvie, you know how your mother gets her f
eelings sometimes?”
I did know. Everyone in our family knew. “Yes. Why?”
“Well, she keeps saying that she has an unsettled feeling about tonight. My guess is that she’s worried about Rose.”
“What about her?”
“That she’ll, let’s just say, act up. And I know it’s unfair to put this on you, seeing as you’re the youngest, but I’d like it if you could do your mother and me a favor. Will you promise to keep your sister in line?”
“Promise,” I said right away, because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But then I thought of that night with Dot and how helpless I’d been to stop Rose. I thought, too, of how little control my parents seemed to have when it came to her.
My father must have sensed what I was thinking, because he wriggled his back against the water jet and sighed. “It’s probably more than you need to worry about. But your mother and I are aware that your sister has developed some, well, behavioral issues. We are trying to figure out the best way to handle it. In the meantime, whatever you can do to keep her under control is appreciated. You’re a good girl, Sylvie. And prominent lectures, like the one tonight, are very important. Unlike those silly talks I get suckered into doing every Halloween, these can make all the difference. They build our careers and notoriety.”
I bobbed in the water, thinking about his desk in the basement, that paperweight with the inscription about God lighting the dark, his old dental chair in the far corner reminding me of how much I wished he still had a job like that. “Do you want to be famous?” I asked, the words tumbling from my mouth before I even realized what I was asking.
The question surprised my father as much as me. “Famous?” He shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dropping from his lashes. “Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.”
“Show who?”
“My parents.”
My mother and father rarely said much about the families they had come from, so I knew little about them, other than that their parents were deceased. The only extended family I knew of was my father’s brother, Uncle Howie. “But they’re gone, Dad.”
“Your parents are never gone from you, Sylvie. You’ll see that someday, hopefully, a very long time from now. But I don’t just mean my parents. I suppose it would be nice to prove something to your uncle. Not to mention so many of the people who used to laugh when I told them about the things I saw. Really, though, what I want most is security for our family. To put you and Rose through college. But you don’t need to worry about all that.”
Thunder rumbled in the sky just then, startling us both. Seconds later, a flash of lightning.
“That’s our cue,” my father said, climbing out of the pool. “Come on, tadpole. Let’s head for dry land.”
I swam to him, feeling the urge to reach my arms up so he could lift me from the water like a much younger girl. On account of his back, I scurried up the ladder instead. As we made a mad dash for the room, our feet sounding a quick slap-slap-slap against the walkway, I thought of my mother’s feelings about the night that lay ahead. To look at her waiting in the doorway of that second-floor room, no one would have ever guessed her concern. She smiled as we ran closer, then wrapped us in the scratchy hotel towels. While helping us to dry off, she kissed my forehead, my father’s too, before shutting the door to keep out the driving rain and rumbling thunder and crooked branches of lightning that crackled in the daytime sky.
Chapter 7
Out There, in the Dark
It used to be that every Halloween my father was invited to give a lecture at Fright Fest in Austin, Texas. Those talks paid the best, though he liked them the least. “The audience lacks serious interest in the subject matter,” he’d complain while packing his brown suits, yellow shirts, and pills for his back, which acted up in the cramped airplane seats. When we were little, Rose and I reminded him to bring us something from the trip, and every year he arrived home claiming to have forgotten. He’d hold up his empty suitcase, shaking it to prove there was nothing inside, and only once we believed that he really had forgotten would he laugh and reach into a compartment, pulling out cowgirl statuettes, plastic cactuses, or some other surprise.
Still, the next year we reminded him all over again while he packed and leveled the same complaints to my mother: “Those crowds want nothing more than the cheap chills they get watching that phony Dragomir Albescu, with all those ridiculous rings on his fingers, as he carries on about the ghosts and goblins he encounters on his trips home to Romania. No one is interested in hearing from an actual deacon in the Catholic Church with actual knowledge and years of experience with the paranormal.”
My mother used her most soothing voice as she pulled clothes from his suitcase, folding them more neatly than he had, before putting them inside again. “If that was true, dear, the organizers wouldn’t keep asking you back.”
“Yeah, well, maybe one of these years they’ll realize their mistake. The experience is downright degrading. I’d make a request to appear with someone else, but I’m afraid I’ll end up in what they call the ‘odditorium’ speaking with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Now that would truly be the bottom of the barrel.”
“Elvira who?” my mother asked.
“Never mind. You don’t want to know.”
“Well, are you sure you wouldn’t like me to come too? We’re a team, after all.”
My father took a shirt from my mother and set it aside. He held her hands, looked into her eyes. “It’s bad enough I have to share the stage with a man as legit as a sidewalk fortune-teller. I won’t allow you, who is every bit authentic as he is phony, to play second fiddle to a fraud.”
After that, my father said he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. They finished filling his suitcase as he joked that he better not forget to pack wax fangs and a tube of fake blood. Once he had left for the airport, my mother’s mood lightened. She loved trick or treating with us, and even if there had been other houses on Butter Lane, I still think she would have made the twenty-minute drive into Baltimore every year and led us along the narrow streets of Reservoir Hill, where she and my father had a tiny apartment when they first married. The old women who remembered her carried on at the sight of Rose and me dressed as vampires or princesses or aliens. One ancient, heavyset woman with a name that sounded like it should be flip-flopped, Almaline Gertrude, insisted on inviting us in each year. Her kitchen smelled of spicy stews that I imagined came from the deli downstairs, since there was never anything but crumpled dollar bills and envelopes on her stove. While Mrs. Gertrude sat at the table with my mother, sipping microwaved tea from dainty cups that clanked against the saucers, she told us to help ourselves to her candy basket.
My sister may not have been good at school, but she was a master at the art of moping. That’s exactly what she started doing as the years went on and she grew into her teens. One Halloween night, we made the pilgrimage to the old neighborhood and found ourselves once again in Mrs. Gertrude’s kitchen, where the air was thicker than usual with the smell of spices, though there was still nothing but money and mail on her stove. I was dressed as a scarecrow, stuffed with real hay my father picked up from Watt’s Farm before leaving for his trip. Never mind that the straw poked and scratched my skin, never mind that I smelled like the livestock section at a state fair, I was thrilled to be wearing a genuine costume.
My sister, however, refused to wear any costume at all. “Not including her mope,” my mother joked when Mrs. Gertrude asked about it. Everyone but Rose laughed. And the more she moped, the more the old woman made an effort to cheer her up. “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Gertrude said when all her attempts, from cookies and milk to free rein of the TV, failed. “No costume. No appetite for sweets. Something has changed about you, Rose. Why the long face?”
My sister looked up from where she was sitting at the table with the rest of us. I thought she was about to participate in the evening at last. Then she said, “Because I’d rather be
at a party with friends my own age instead of being forced to spend the night in a stinky, disgusting apartment with a dumb old fatty bat like you.”
My mother’s mouth dropped open. Her hand shot up and slapped Rose so hard across the face my sister slipped off the chair and crumpled on the floor.
“Rose!” Mrs. Gertrude shrieked, but she was not talking to my sister.
My mother jerked her hand back and brought it to her mouth, horrified by what she’d done. Neither of our parents had ever taken a hand to us, never mind with such force. The next thing I knew, my mother was ripping us out of the apartment, spewing trembled apologies to Mrs. Gertrude, Rose, me, and most of all, God.
Now, on the first Halloween without my mother or father, I looked away from the sight of Rose and Cora kissing and walked into our house, twisting the locks behind me. In some ways, my sister’s behavior was no different from all the other surprises she delivered over the years, from that night with Almaline to the morning last year when she came downstairs with a shaved head, still nicked and bloody from the razor. But hadn’t she done those things to antagonize my parents? What could be her reason now?
With the Hulk standing guard, I figured I’d seen the last trick-or-treaters. I helped myself to dinner—a handful of Mr. Goodbars—clicked off the lamps, and made my way upstairs. My sister didn’t make a habit of telling me where she was going and when she’d be back, so I felt a sense of freedom as I pushed open her door. Squashed soda cans, scratched off scratch-off tickets, her old globe—those things and more littered the floor. A humidifier puffed away, mold gathered at its mouth. The tub of witch makeup sat on her dresser, the epicenter of a green fingerprint storm that moved from the window to the walls to the tissues scattered everywhere but the wastebasket.
It had been eleven weeks exactly since we heard from my uncle. After the courts rejected his request to be made my guardian, he promised to return to Florida, “tidy up his affairs,” then move closer and be part of our lives anyway. Instead, all spring we had received late-night calls with rambling explanations about leases, debts, and so many other reasons why things were taking longer than he hoped. When the calls stopped, letters arrived, claiming he had devised a plan to help us all if only we’d be patient. After that: no word at all. Good riddance, my sister said, though I’d taken it upon myself to finally write him without telling her, if only to make sure our sole living relative was okay. It would have been much easier if I could’ve checked our mailbox for a return letter, but when a car came by and kids batted it off the post, Rose set up a P.O. box in town. Carrying mail home from that box put her in an even worse mood than usual, so it didn’t help to ask if anything was for me.