The Two-Knock Ghost

by Jeff Lombardo

  “Where have you been, Mom and Dad—heaven?”

  “Not quite, Robert,” my mother answered softly. “We’ve been in a place called Respite. It’s a lovely place where people who have unfinished business with their children or other loved ones go.”

  My father spoke next. “Respite is a place where people who have caused damage unwittingly to their children and loved ones wait for their loved ones to become in crisis mode because the damage becomes too much to bear.”

  I was shocked. “Are you saying that you and Mom caused me damage?”

  “We are, Robert,” my mother said softly. “We’re here now to reveal what we did to hurt you.”

  “But how did you know you hurt me? I honestly don’t remember anything but good things that passed between us.”

  “We always tried to be wonderful with you, Robert, but we were not perfect parents,” my mother continued.

  “But how did you know you hurt me? Was it some kind of mutual spiritual awareness? Or was it a person from Respite who told you?”

  My father gently took over the conversation as the three of us began eating barbeque flavored fried chicken, corn on the cob, coleslaw and baked beans—everything tasting exactly the way those foods tasted when Mom made them while she was alive.

  “When we died, son, we saw a white light. It wasn’t a brilliant light, but it was the only one we saw, so we followed it. We passed through an unusually lit vortex that was comprised of all the colors of the spectrum. We passed it thinking that this was the eighth wonder of the world, or the first wonder of the world beyond. We were both traveling through the rainbow vortex at the same time, holding hands because we had died at the same instant. We were just lucky to be traveling through the vortex together, I guess. All of a sudden the vortex slowed our speed little by little, until it deposited us on a white cloud that was strong enough to walk on. I was certain we were in heaven because everything I was experiencing was really cool and the laws of physics didn’t apply.”

  Then my father spoke again. “A hundred feet ahead of us was a great white wall that looked like it might be the outer enclosure of heaven. But directly in front of us was a huge golden gate with a giant gold knocker on the right side of the gate. There was no place else to go. There were only clouds at the base of the white walls. We walked to the gate, knocked with the knocker the way we always did when we were alive. First, I banged it once,” my father paused and looked at my mother.

  “Then I banged it once,” my mother said.

  “The gate opened immediately,” my father continued, “and standing on a cloud waiting to greet us was an angelic man I thought for sure, for a moment, was God. He said, ‘Welcome to Respite McKenzies.’ He explained to us what Respite was and explained what we had done to hurt you and expressed his confidence in us that we could rectify the situation when the time was right. Now is the time.”

  My father had said so many things that brought questions to my mind, but the thing that he had spoken that intrigued me the most was when he said that he had knocked with the knocker once and that Mom had followed doing the same thing. Two knocks coming upon Respite. Two knocks before saving me from the devil. Two knocks today. Countless two knocks that I had ignored or that had frightened me to death.

  “Dad,” I asked with an incredulous look upon my face, “why always the two knocks?”

  “Son, when I was in basic training in the air force, I was taught to only knock once on my drill instructor’s door if I needed something. Knock once and wait. No matter how long it took for someone to answer that door, knock twice or more when you became impatient and you would have to face embarrassing repercussions from one or more GIs.”

  “When I returned home after my tour of duty, I told your mother that story. She liked it so much she said …” He paused for a moment and he smiled at her as she finished his sentence. “Everywhere we go that we have to knock, why don’t you knock once and I’ll knock once. That will be one of our own things.”

  “And that’s what we did from that day forward until the night we died,” my dad said.

  “Don’t you remember that, Robert?” my mom asked.

  “I have no conscious memory of that guys,” I said sincerely. “None.”

  My mom had brought apple juice for the three of us. Before I was born, it had been my dad’s favorite drink. He got my mom into it. She liked it and when I came along, I loved it too. Time was passing slowly in the dream. My parents and I were enjoying a real picnic. There was only joy and one answer already to one of my deepest mysteries. There were no menacing clouds or lightening, no devil in sight. I was thinking, “I dare him to come into this loving scene after my parents kicked his ass in the concentration camp.” My father spoke next, as I took a drink of cold apple juice.

  “The main reason we are here to see you, son, is also the main of two reasons why we were assigned to Respite instead of heaven. Your mom and I made a bad decision in regard to you when you were a very little boy. We thought we were doing the right thing at the time, but we weren’t. We found that out when the Gate Keeper explained it to us.”

  “What was it, Dad? I don’t remember you or Mom ever doing anything to hurt me.”

  “Son,” my father said softly, “when you were two years old, your mom and I had a baby girl. We named her Lena in honor of your mother’s grandmother who had the same name. Lena was about two months premature. She was the tiniest of infants, and she was born with a serious heart defect. But she was a fighter and against all odds she was allowed to come home to us when she was six weeks old. We put her in a crib in your bedroom and it worked out well because she was a well behaved baby and maybe too because she was weak, she usually slept through the night and didn’t disturb you. From the first moment we brought her into your bedroom you were fascinated with her.”

  The tag team conversationalists that my mother and father were switched to my mother.

  “You would go to the side of the bassinet and stand there for the longest time watching her. Then you wanted to rub her head and face and we both taught you about her soft spot and that when you touched her you had to be extremely gentle, almost as if your fingers were feathers. You would spend hours in that room with her, fascinated with her breathing, her falling asleep, her waking up, why she cried, how she moved her tiny fingers. From the time we brought her home there was no doubt that you spent more time with her than any other person. You doted on her as much as a two-year-old boy possibly could. You even asked us if you could feed her and we taught you to sit on a chair outside the bassinet that was the perfect height for you and you would hold that bottle in her mouth and sit there like a statute until the bottle was empty and you would call out for Mommie.”

  Dad’s turn.

  “But Lena was a weak baby. She had to go into the hospital for periodic procedures. When she was gone, you would spend long periods of time in your room. You would look at Golden Books then you’d get up to check the bassinet to see if Lena had magically reappeared. Then you would color and after a while you’d check the bassinet. You might play with your toy instruments or your big Tonka truck or your small Tootsie Toy cars that were from my childhood. But no matter what you were doing, you would always stop yourself and check to see if Lena had returned.”

  “When your mom would finally carry Lena home from the hospital and put her in the bassinet, you would become the happiest little boy there ever was.”

  Then my mother said, “While Lena was away at the hospital you would always ask us, ‘When that little baby coming home again?’ And as the first year passed completely by you started asking, ‘When that baby gonna come outside and play with me?’ But Lena was so sick because her heart problem never got better and never went away. A few days after Lena turned one and you were just slightly past three, we had to take Lena in for another procedure. This time her weak little heart couldn’t take it. She died and never came hom
e again.” Mom’s eyes welled with tears even after all the years removed from Lena’s death.

  Dad continued when he saw Mom’s tears, “But that didn’t stop you from asking about your baby sister. Time after time, day after day, you would ask, ‘When that baby coming home again?’ No matter what answer we gave you, your questions never stopped. Shortly after Lena died, your mom and I decided to take the bassinet, all her clothes and her precious toys out of the room and put them in storage in the attic so you wouldn’t think about her so much. But you still continued asking. One time we told you that Lena had gone to heaven and you asked, ‘What’s heaven?’”

  “We talked it over between ourselves and decided about three months after Lena died never to talk about her again, because we knew that even though you were merely a little boy, you were hurting over the absence of your sister. You asked about her for over a year. Every day you would go into your bedroom and sit on your bed reading or playing with Linkin Logs or your Erector set for hours.”

  Dad’s turn again.

  “I’d go in your bedroom to see what you were doing in there so long. You’d say, ‘I’m waiting for Lena to come home.’ So I’d ask you to come outside and play baseball with me. You’d always say yes. Then we’d play catch and I’d pitch a baseball to you and you got pretty good at throwing, hitting, catching and fielding. When you were three, four, five we would play in our backyard, but after you were six, I promised I would take you to the ‘big boy’ park. That just happened to be Mark White Park—right across from Bridgeport’s famous quarry. Then on an unused diamond, I hit thousands of ground balls and fly balls to you. And every once in a while we’d hear them blasting in the quarry and we’d feel the ground tremble beneath our feet. Do you remember that, Robert?” my father asked proudly.

  “I do,” I said thankfully with a warm smile upon my face.

  While my dream father—half of the Two-Knock Ghost—seemed to relish his memory of our ball playing, my mother chimed in.

  “After about three years, we thought that you had forgotten Lena. You behaved like a perfectly well-adjusted little boy, who was growing into being a wonderful young man. But the Gate Keeper told us we were wrong, that you had pushed your pain regarding Lena deep into your sub conscious, that someday it would catch up to you and cause you immense grief. We were explained that when your time of pain arrived, that would be our time to come to help you.”

  The three of us had finished the main part of the meal and we were enjoying Mom’s famous lemon meringue pie.

  Dad continued, rather ominously. “Son, there is one other reason why we are here and it is not pleasant. Through all of your boyhood we sent you to Catholic school. From first grade through fifth grade you attended St. Anthony’s at Twenty-Seventh and Wallace. In the summer between your fifth and sixth grades, we bought a house on Thirty-Second and Low, only four short blocks from our Union Avenue house but from sixth through eighth grades you were enrolled in St. David’s on Thirty-Third and Emerald. Do remember those facts, Robert?”

  “I do,” I said once again, as a river of memories from each school came flooding into me.

  “The problem was your second grade nun, Sister Mary Timothy. She was a very devout, overly zealous, utterly unhappy and punitively oriented teacher. She was always talking about the devil, teaching her students about how the devil was always watching you, relentlessly stalking you, always tempting you to turn away from goodness to the Dark Side, long before Darth Vader.”

  “How did you know about Darth Vader? Didn’t you die before Star Wars came out?”

  “We did in fact, but the Gate Keeper allowed us to see what was happening on earth from time to time. It was like watching a news reel for your mother and I. But back to Sister Timothy. She used to have special little classes for the girls only and special classes for the boys only. God only knows what she told the girls, but you would come home and tell us what she told you and some of it was pretty disturbing to us. Here’s some of the things she told you. If you masturbated the devil would punish you. If you had sex before marriage, the devil would punish you. I didn’t even know if you were old enough to know what sex was, but she taught you about Lucifer none the less. She told you that if you got divorced, or hurt your wife, or if you became a drunk, the devil would find horrible ways to punish you. You would come home and be absolutely terrified of the things about the devil and his brutal punishments that Sister Timothy would tell you.”

  “We almost went to speak with her on a couple of occasions,” my mom said, “but at that time of our lives we believed the nuns spoke the true words of God like the priests did. As we grew up ourselves, we began to think that might not be the case. We found so many things we began to believe were inconsistencies. One of them occurred when we realized that when a movie was too brutal or too frightening or both, the Catholic Church might condemn it so you wouldn’t go to see it. But there was never a limit on what the nuns and priests could preach to you about what the devil and the fires of hell could torture you with for eternity. Your father and I came to believe that stories of the devil and hell could be infinitely more damaging to the psyche of a young child than practically any movie. Threatening someone’s one and only eternal soul as a young child by a creature as hideous as Lucifer could stick with a child for the rest of his life.”

  The rotational conversation continued when my dad said: “By the time we realized these what we believed to be awareness, it was too late. You were growing into a beautiful young boy and Sister Timothy was long gone. We thought you had outgrown her scare tactics. But when we died and went to Respite the Gate Keeper told us we were wrong. He told us that what Sister Timothy told you, not once, but scores of times, had hurt you deeply and would catch up to and damage you even more deeply later. He very lovingly told us that we should have admonished Sister Timothy the first time she ever frightened you and you came home and told us about it.”

  “Quickly, the years went by. We had asked the grandparents and the older folks in the family never to speak of Lena again and no one ever did. It was as if Lena had never existed.”

  “So we hoped,” Mom added contritely. “But she had existed, and that’s where we went wrong.”

  The real me couldn’t believe what was happening. The dream me couldn’t believe it either. The Two-Knock Ghost was my parents and they were explaining why I was so screwed up, under my favorite tree while sharing my favorite foods. Beyond that, I believed that this was the most dialogue I had ever experienced in a dream. I was certain that I would remember all of it, just as I remembered notes I had dreamed then woke up and played them on the piano. But was what they were telling me true? Or were they just spoken words without meaning. It was after all, a dream. How could I prove or disprove any of it? I was fighting to cling to every fact so I could begin to research everything tomorrow. Certainly it would be easy to check the birth records for a Lena McKenzie born in Chicago in mid to late 1950. I was born in Luis Memorial Hospital. There was not any reason, I assumed, for my mother to choose a different hospital for her second child. And finding whether Sister Timothy was my second grade teacher would be a snap. No doubt the mammoth Chicago Archdiocese would have that record somewhere.”

  “How did you like the meal, Robert?” my mother asked.

  “It was wonderful,” I answered. “But the conversation was better. Besides, how did you prepare all that stuff in Respite?”

  “We have a great deal of tiny little miracles there, Robert, especially when we appear in a dream. That affords us a great deal of flexibility in our cooking process. Almost anything is possible.” He had a wry smile on his face as he often did when he tried to make me laugh. I smiled. That was it. As soon as I did so, my mother’s happy face was replaced with immediate sadness.

  “We have to leave now, Robert,” she said softly.

  “Will you come back again?”

  Dad answered, “That depends on you and
how you handle the information we’ve shared with you and whether the Gate Keeper tells us our work here is finished. It’s been a wonderful blessing to see you, but your mom and I are excited to see what lies beyond Respite.”

  “I understand completely, Dad, but if I get to see you two again, that would be a true blessing for me.”

  Cleanup of the picnic site was fun to watch. Mom opened the top of the big picnic basket and one by one things started lifting themselves in slow motion, as if in a Disney movie, and placing themselves neatly into the basket. As I watched, I thought that the only thing missing from the scene was accompanying music. I thought of the song “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and played it in my dream mind as the eating utensils floated weightlessly into the basket. The finale was the folding in on itself of the cream colored sheet, which had been placed on the lush grass to hold the food. My music ended perfectly as my mother closed the lid. Then she came to hug me and we gave each other our perfunctory kiss on each other’s cheeks, then my father came over and hugged me while we blew fart kisses on each other’s necks with our lips and laughed hysterically when we did it. Strange, I always thought of my father as an extremely sophisticated man, but not when we were making fart sounds on each other’s skin. Then we quickly switched sides, blew some more fart sounds, and laughed even more the second time.

  “I love you, son,” he said, still smiling.

  “I love you, Robert,” my mother said elegantly.

  Then each of them grabbed a handle of the picnic basket simultaneously and began floating backward slowly toward the golden glowing open door that rested in the southeastern sky.

  “I love you both,” I said from the depths of my soul, knowing that they had sacrificed years of eternal bliss for the opportunity to help me when I needed it the most.