Apparition, page 11
She was staring at Ella.
Ella let her gaze slip off the old woman’s face, and looked around a few more pews before allowing her eyes to wander back to the woman.
She was still staring.
Ella started to feel uncomfortable. The old lady looked like she probably weighed less than an anorexic Chihuahua, hardly any kind of a physical threat, but Ella’s skin started to crawl.
She turned forward again, trying to ignore the feeling in the middle of her shoulder blades, the sensation that someone had a loaded gun pointed at her.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dad whispered suddenly, and she almost jumped right out of her Sunday dress.
“I….” She wasn’t sure what to say. “There’s an old lady giving me weird eyes” didn’t seem quite right, so instead she said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Now?” Dad whispered, managing to cram both surprise and irritation into his voice.
“Yes, now,” she whispered back, more because she didn’t like him challenging her God-given right to pee when she felt like it than because she had to go badly.
Dad sat back and stared forward, clearly trying to be a good example of listening and righteousness and such. Ella thought about sitting back herself and showing that she could be just as pious as anyone, but then she realized she really did have to pee.
She stood up – luckily she was at the end of the pew, next to one of the aisles – and moved to the back of the chapel and out the back door that she suspected would lead to a hallway with a bathroom.
She was right. The bathroom was just twenty or thirty feet down the hall. She went in and took care of business, then came out of her stall and washed her hands and dried them. She glanced in the mirror above the sink. Matthew said she spent too much time looking at herself in mirrors, but he wasn’t a girl so he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Satisfied that she still looked fine – or as fine as she could hope to look – she was about to turn around and head out when there was a click and the door opened.
In the mirror, Ella saw the old woman from church come into the bathroom. She walked in just far enough to allow the door to close behind her, but didn’t move to either of the two stalls. She just stood there. Staring.
And more than just staring this time: the woman looked like she was intentionally blocking the way out. Ella wanted to turn around and face the woman, but couldn’t move. She realized she was grasping the edges of the sink with both hands.
Get a grip, girl. She’s a thousand years old. Thousand-year-olds don’t go crazy and murder girls in the church bathroom.
Yeah, and mothers don’t try to stab their own kids.
The old woman spoke. Her voice was soft, the voice of someone who had spent most of a lifetime smoking and now carried only the smallest amount of breath in her lungs. “You’re one of the children, aren’t you?”
An icy shiver wriggled up Ella’s spine on centipede legs. She managed not to fully shudder, but only because of her deathgrip on the sink.
The old woman was still standing there. Still staring.
Ella managed to turn around, and leaned on the sink in a way she hoped communicated nonchalance. But she knew it didn’t. A carrot would have been able to sense her fear. She could almost see it, coming off her in waves.
“Ex… excuse me?” she finally said.
The old woman moved toward her. She sniffed the air like a bloodhound, and a strange expression scrawled itself across her face. “Yes,” she whispered, and the insectile fear that had been writhing up Ella’s back now began to burrow into her heart. “The children. One of the… children.”
The last word whistled out eerily, and Ella heard a mixture of fear and worry and… hunger in the old woman’s voice. A gnarled hand reached out, arthritic joints turning the appendage into a claw.
Ella instinctively tried to shrink away, but the sink was still at her back. She couldn’t retreat, so she darted sideways, skittering around the old woman. She threw open the door and rushed into the hall. Then screamed as she crashed into something. A hand grasped at her hair, and she lunged sideways again in panic.
“Easy, easy!” said a familiar voice, and she realized that it was her dad. He was looking at her with concern. Other people were in the hallway, too, and she realized that the service must have ended.
How long was I in there?
The other churchgoers were also looking at her with worried expressions, and the embarrassing fact that she was probably going to be branded the church cuckoo on her very first week was almost enough to chase the fear out of her mind. But not quite.
“You okay, kiddo?” asked Dad.
No, some crazy Asian grandma just tried to eat me.
She didn’t say that. Wanted to, but didn’t. Instead she swallowed and said, “I’m… I’m fine.”
Dad stared at her for a while. A hand touched her arm and she realized Matthew was standing there, too, looking at her with naked fear in his big blue eyes. She forced her face into a smile, for his sake.
“I’m cool, Dad.”
Dad looked at her a moment longer, then nodded quickly. “You’re sure?”
“Dad,” Matthew butted in, and she was grateful for the interruption. “I’m starving.” The fear was gone from her brother’s eyes. She wished she had the capacity to forget fear that fast.
Dad flicked his gaze to Matthew. “I doubt that, bud.” Matthew opened his mouth, clearly intending to expound on the massive proportions of his hunger, but Dad raised a hand and said, “But we’ll head home and see if we can’t rustle you up a snack before you expire of starvation.”
“What’s expire?” said Matthew.
Ella rolled her eyes. Dad grinned and turned toward a nearby exit.
Matthew poked her. “Did you pee on yourself again?”
“Shut up,” she said, and poked him back, knowing that if she didn’t he would keep poking her until she responded in kind.
Matthew smiled again and, the poking ritual complete, ran to Dad and grabbed his hand. The two of them walked out the door and Ella followed. She threw a look over her shoulder at the bathroom door.
It stayed closed.
They stepped out the door, and ran into the pastor who had preached the sermon. He was fairly old and creaky looking, but he had a jaunty step and a twinkle in his eyes that Ella couldn’t help liking. Apparently he had been waiting for them specifically, because he immediately introduced himself as “Joshua – just call me Josh” (which Ella found almost as weird as Jesus rock) and engaged Ella’s dad in a quick conversation. Joshua-just-call-me-Josh asked if the family needed anything, said the congregation was so glad to have the Wills family with them, asked Dad to let them know if they needed anything, blah, blah, blah.
He didn’t ask where the family’s wife and mother might be. Ella couldn’t tell if that was because he already knew somehow, or was just being polite. Either way, no one brought up the lack of a female parent.
A draft tickled her back, and she realized that the door they had come out of had opened again. She turned around, and came face to face with the old woman.
At least this time the old gal wasn’t staring at her. Instead, she put her head down and hurried past the family and the pastor. Ella smelled something bad as the old woman passed, an odor she hadn’t picked up on in the bathroom. She couldn’t pinpoint it. It wasn’t just the musty smell that some old people got. There was something under it. Something ugly and noxious.
The old woman rounded the corner of the building. But before she disappeared from view, she glanced back. Ella locked eyes with her again. The old woman mouthed something, and then she was gone.
The drive home was uneventful. Matthew and Dad kept trying to engage her in conversation, but she didn’t want to talk.
She was pretty sure she knew what the old lady had said when she turned the corner: the same thing she had said in the bathroom. The same thing that Mom had been saying on the night they lost her.
“The children.”
***
Chapter 13:
Toy
***
Another time at Mount Shade, my food seemed to move around on my plate at lunch. Some people see Jesus in their food, but Jesus didn’t show up on my plate. The food was dancing, but no Jesus.
A woman named Debora burned two of her kids to death in their own beds. She pleaded no-contest to murder charges. At one of the hearings she said she loved her family very much, and wanted to spare her husband and remaining child the agony of a trial.
I think I saw Debora in my peas. She had yellow eyes.
Shane “silly-tucked” Matthew into bed, pushing the blankets under his son around the entire perimeter of his little body until he resembled a chrysalid.
Matthew giggled. He had lost a tooth a few weeks before, and the gap in the front of his mouth was incredibly cute. Before having children, Shane never would have believed he would use the word “cute” – possibly the most thoroughly unmanly word in the English language – in anything but a sarcastic way. Kids had changed that. They had changed everything. He had discovered that he wasn’t a real man until he had changed diapers, powdered baby bottoms, spent long nights rocking a colicky child, and could freely use the word “cute” in a sincere way.
“Tighter, Dad!” said Matthew. “I can still move.”
Shane pushed some of his son’s hair aside so he could kiss his forehead. “Any tighter and you’ll never get out.”
Matthew giggled again. Cute.
“You were really good today, bud.” Shane was always impressed at how grown-up Matthew could be – maybe that was why they had never called him Matty or Matt: he was fun and energetic and had a wonderfully childlike smile, but at the same time Shane could sometimes catch a glimpse of an incredibly old soul in his child’s eyes. Like Matthew was there to enjoy his life, sure, but at the same time already had enough wisdom packed away to take him through whatever storms life might bring. At church, Matthew had sat quietly and even talked a bit about the sermon afterward.
He was so like his mother.
Shane kissed his son again. Matthew tilted his head up at the same time and Shane felt his son plant a quick kiss of his own on his neck.
“You go to the bathroom already?” said Shane. He knew the answer, but didn’t want to leave. Not just yet. Not with his son’s smile still so wide, not with his neck still cool from the boy’s kiss.
Matthew nodded. “Pooped and everything.”
“Everything come out all right?”
Matthew rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. “You’re a goof, Dad.”
Then something strange happened. Matthew glanced to the side, and his face changed. Shane saw a quick flash of fear in his son’s eyes. He looked over as well. The window was the only thing that Matthew could be looking at. The lights were on in the room, so Shane could hardly see through the glass; mostly he just saw a dim reflection of himself and his son, ghost-versions suspended in the dark half-life of the place in the glass. But behind them he could just make out the hazy outline of the trees beyond the house, and a few muted stars.
Matthew shuddered.
“You okay?” said Shane. “Cold?”
Matthew shook his head. The fear-light was still there. “You see something?” asked Shane.
“No.”
“What are you looking at?”
“The window.”
“Something bothering you about it?”
“I….” Matthew’s face wrinkled and Shane could tell he was searching for the right words. “I had a dream.”
Shane waited for his son to say more. Finally he said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Matthew shook his head. Shane gave his son another kiss and stood. He was worried about his son – Lord knew the family had been through enough – but could tell that he wasn’t going to get anything out of him right now. Matthew could be as stubborn as he was fun and wise.
Shane went to the door and flicked the light switch. Darkness instantly clasped the room in its soft embrace. “Good night,” said Shane. Matthew didn’t answer.
Shane started to swing the door shut.
“Wait,” said Matthew. Shane halted.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? You want me to stay?”
Shane could see that his son wanted to say yes, but at the same time had determined to be brave. Matthew shook his head. “No. But just… could you leave the door open?” Shane nodded. “And leave the hall light on?”
Another nod. Shane reached into the hall and flipped the nearby light switch. The hall light was a low-watt bulb that sent only a subdued glow into the bedroom, but Matthew relaxed a bit.
“Thanks.”
Shane blew him a kiss, then walked across the hall to Ella’s room. The door was closed per usual, but there was no answer when he knocked so he opened it slowly and went in. The room was dark and Ella was already asleep in her bed.
Shane looked at her for a long while. She had always been a pretty girl, but she was rapidly becoming a beautiful young woman. The reality of that both excited and terrified him. He was thrilled to see her growing, to see her coming into her own and developing a sense of who she was as a human being. But she was also his daughter, and a part of him wanted to lock her up forever and do everything he could to keep her a child; to keep her his little girl.
She inhaled suddenly, and he thought she was waking up, but her eyes stayed closed. He was worried about her. She had acted strangely since church, but neither his own attempts to talk nor Matthew’s relentless stream of upbeat chit-chat had gotten her to speak more than a half dozen words at a time.
No one had told him that being a father would entail a constant state of fear. Not just the obvious fear of child molesters or kidnappings or drugs or gangs, but the unrelenting terror of knowing in your heart that your children were going to turn out wrong in some way and it would be all your fault. The realization that no one was perfect, and that meant you were doomed to screw up your children in some way or other.
He heard a low sound, tinny and jangling, and realized that Ella had fallen asleep with her iPod playing. He tiptoed across to her bed and removed her earbuds, wincing at how loud they were – Ella was going to end up deaf if she wasn’t careful.
His daughter didn’t stir when he removed the headphones, but when he leaned down to kiss her she turned away, as though even in her sleep she was aware that he was a bad father, that he was no replacement for the mother she had lost, and that he was never going to be what she needed in this often terrifying world.
Shame stung his cheeks. Ella was asleep, and he knew it was ridiculous to attribute a sleeping movement to any conscious emotion or to a real feeling of dislike toward him, but knowing something didn’t always mean believing it.
He straightened up and left the room as quietly as he had come, the only proof he had even been there at all the fact that her iPod was on her nightstand instead of in her bed. He wondered if all fathers felt like that about their little girls, that they were at best there to clean up after them, to offer them love that they would never fully accept, but ultimately to fail to understand them in the way that only a mother could do.
He went downstairs to his office. The main part of the hardware was set up, but he still had to hook a few things together. Printers and several other peripherals had wireless connections, and he figured he would wait until they got connected to the internet before bothering with them. He checked the connections he had already made, turned on the computer, turned it off, and realized that he wasn’t doing anything. Not really. Just killing time.
He missed Kari. The time when the kids went to bed was always their special time, their time to shed a layer of the responsibility they bore as parents each day. The kids asleep, they could smile like teenagers, could watch television that wasn’t good for them or educational enough for the kids, could eat cookie dough that wasn’t cooked. They could make love, and talk softly in the darkness. They talked about the kids as often as not, but even then it was different. Special. Like they were the only two people alive in the world for a few minutes, and that was all right because they were the only people they needed. Just each other.
A knot tightened in Shane’s throat, and realized he was going to cry. He bit back the feeling. He didn’t think it endangered his man-status to cry, not anymore, but he didn’t want to deal with that emotion right now. He pushed it back, like a box on a dark shelf in the attic space of his mind. A memento he would deal with at some point, but not now. Not now. Now he just wanted to forget. He thought about getting out some wine and pouring himself a glass, decided not to. As a practicing Methodist – at least since what had happened to Kari – he wasn’t even supposed to have booze in the house, but some nights he needed a drink to get to sleep. And that need had gotten worse in recent months, so many nights he sat alone with a glass of wine, staring unseeing at the television until it was time to crawl into bed.
