The Invocation of Miss Helen Demmler
Jason and Jennifer Dyer got introduced to Helen Demmler shortly before they signed their PSA for the house she died in. They had dreaded the invocation and the pouring out of the Great Libation and all that, but Miss Helen was quick to put them at their ease.
Helen Demmler had been born in that house in 1900 to Dr. and Mrs. Stanton Demmler. Apart from a few years at Mississippi College for Women, she had spent her whole life there — girl and woman, teacher and principal. She died in her sleep in 1989, just a few months after retiring from the last of her Volunteer Council positions. The line of mourners at her viewing stretched out half a block from the funeral home.
“Well, it is lovely to meet you,” said Miss Helen to Jason and Jennifer, as they stood with hands politely folded in the living room set backwards for the occasion — decorated as close as might be to how it had been when Miss Helen lived there. As no one really remembered what this had been, Kathy the realtor had done her best with dusty-rose swag curtains, a loveseat with floral upholstery, a small coffee table and a number of cute old souvenirs for the mantelpiece. The agency kept this kit in its back room for the purpose, and no one had yet complained.
Miss Helen, who seemed to be composed of a number of Polaroid exposures, twinkled with kindness.
“Now is this your little girl? This is your only one, am I right?”
“Yes, this is Addison,” said Jennifer, gently prying her daughter away from her side and pressing her forward. “Addison, this is Miss Helen Demmler.”
Addison made a kind of noise in the back of her mouth that could charitably be interpreted as “Hi.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Addison. But, sweetheart, I don’t want you to worry,” said Miss Helen. “I know you rather would not have an old lady hanging around the place all the time. I mean to stay out of y’all’s way.”
“Oh, now, don’t say that. You’re always welcome,” said Jason, with the cheer of relief.
“No, I know how it is,” said Miss Helen, “I don’t belong where I’m not anymore. I have to stay where the Lord put me. I mean to take care of the place but I am not about to get in y’all’s business. You don’t mind about whatever it is you’re doing. I just will stay upstairs.”
“. . . Upstairs?”
“Oh, there isn’t an upstairs this year, just the attic,” said Miss Helen, with a wave of her hand. “The second story got knocked out — the next folks had some structural problems, so they just knocked down the stairs and put in a long ladder, which is all right — the second story was almost just my own little room with the dormer window and some storage closets — in any case, I can stay there. I don’t need to be in anybody’s business.”
“Well, that’s kind of you to say,” said Jennifer.
Miss Helen was as good as her word. She did stay out of the lives of the Dyers, and kept to her own business, which was to hold the lines of the property firm against anything that came against it from otherwhere. There was no other point in paying upwards of $500K for a half-wired pile like this, National Historic Register or not, if it didn’t have a Guardian for your kids. Everyone wanted one now, and not everyone could get a bound one, the kind you could depend on.
Since historic homes were at a premium now, the houses that were next most sought-after were murder sites — there, at least, you could expect a spirit. Murder victims made unreliable Guardians, though, since they were generally rather shaken, and unlikely to apply themselves to the task of protecting a young family.
You wanted a kindly spirit, dead after a long warm life, a benevolent soul. That spirit had to be strong and willing enough to hold the lines of its home against “them that went walking,” — as it was simplest to say, if you wanted to talk about the kind of trouble you got these days.
Without a Guardian for the house, it was no good anymore to tell your children that there was nothing under the bed, in the closest, that there was no such thing as anything that waited for them in the dark of their bedrooms. It was not so difficult for other spirits of the dead themselves to be Guardians against them that went walking, but it took a certain strength of will. And for all that, you’d be lucky not to get a spirit who wouldn’t read your internet over your shoulder, or send you to her church every Sunday, or worse. Jason and Jennifer were particularly lucky in the old Demmler house on Starling Street, and they knew it.
Jason had a good job — or, rather, a steady, well-paying professional job; he was associate city counsel. He did not smile much anymore, but at least he came home at six o’clock most nights, unlike the kind of attorneys who came home at ten o’clock or not at all. Jennifer taught English at Washington Academy, where she had graduated, and also taught advanced ESL at Yangxi Technical High School, where the pay and the students were better.
Even with the town the way it was in these days, the Demmler house was a gentle place to live. The soft-blue craftsman bungalow nestled at the corner of Starling and McAllister Street, in the shadows of hundred-year-old oaks and thickets of artfully neglected English ivy. It was the sort of house that people said “had good bones,” even when it was at its worst, but it was well cleaned and freshly painted now.
By the time Addison was fifteen, it was a warm and well-used sort of life for the family, although it was sharply drawn around. You could not go three blocks down towards Moore Avenue without protection at night, because of them that went walking; but then, you never should have gone that way in the old days, either, because of the crackheads and the gangbangers.
In any case, there was nowhere to get in Greenville without driving in any case. Jennifer knew very well that it would be useless to tell Addison that she couldn’t go out riding with her friends, at least after dark. The best she could do was to demand to know which friends they were and who their mothers were, in order to exercise some kind of quality control.
Ethan Forrest was Chrissy Martin’s son, and Jennifer had grown up with her; she knew he made good grades, and never got caught drinking. This was enough for Jennifer to go on with, at least until the day that Addison came home at dusk, banging through the screen door, hiding something in her arm.
Addison had always been a good girl, but Jennifer had always been a good mother, and was not to be fooled. If a child keeps one arm pressed unnaturally against her bunched-up T-shirt while breezing past her mother and saying, “Hey Mama we had a great time we went and watched a movie over at Miss Chrissy’s I gotta go to the bathroom I’ll be right back,” then that is a child who needs to be stopped.
Jennifer could spot a dark stain between Addison’s white shirt and clutched hand. She did not know what this might be, and therefore moved forward on instinct.
“Hey, sugar, wait — ”
“Mom, I’ll totally be right back — ”
“C’mere, give me a hug — have you got some kind of cut on your arm here?”
She pulled the girl’s arm forward. Addison gasped.
There was no injury. There was, instead, a message written in laundry marker, in enormous headline letters, right down the veins of her forearm: I LOVE YOU ADDISON BELLE FOREVER.
Addison flushed like sunrise, and shut her wet eyes.
“Ethan loves me, Mama.”
“Oh. You . . .”
Jennifer struggled for something to say that would not end in a shriek.
“You — told him your middle name was Belle. Lord, you must love him.”
Addison had always hated her middle name. She shook her head, and giggled.
“It’s okay. It really, really is, Mom, it is. He’s for real. He’s — he’s the most real person I think I’ve ever known.”
Jennifer crushed her daughter to her chest, and held her there. Soon she was rocking back and forth, in the hopes it would disguise her sobs.
“Oh, jeez . . . Mom, are you . . . You’re crying! You’re really crying, Mama, what’s the matter? It’s like I was dying of cancer or something. It i’n’t even our wedding day yet!”
Jennifer laughed, and let Addison go so that she could wipe her eyes on her sleeve.
“Aw, sweetheart, don’t even joke about that kind of thing at your age. It’s just you’re growing up so fast and — ”
“I’m not joking, you know.” Addison was still alight. “He asked me to marry him. I mean we’re not telling anybody at school yet and we’re not gonna make any plans until after we graduate but I guess you ought to know he’s got honorable intentions and everything — ”
“Shhh,” said Jennifer, as gently as if Addison were the one who was crying. “Do me a favor, sweet pea. Don’t talk to your daddy about this, okay? Not until I’ve talked to him. Don’t talk to anybody — ”
“We weren’t gonna. It’s a secret!”
“I know,” said Jennifer. “I know.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t like Ethan. That was the trouble. Who wouldn’t like Ethan? He was so polite and so considerate — he really was sweet. She’d seen his baby pictures on Facebook, back in the day. She would be happy to hear that he had a scholarship to some music program, to enjoy his guitar in a school play. She would be happy to hear he had drowned.
No, that was not true, not true at all. Jennifer would not have done the boy harm if she could. It was simply that she could remember what polite sweet considerate boys were like, when you were in high school, when all the grownups were gone. Sometimes she still woke up in the middle of the night because of it.
Of course that had been years ago, it had been her fault anyway for being such a fool, and there was never any real trouble about it, no pregnancy or anything. Jennifer had always taken responsibility for herself. But for all of Addison’s life — from the very day she learned she would have a daughter — Jennifer had said to herself: if I have got to save that child from the chance to be as stupid as I was, then by God I will do it.
The whole business of Addison and Ethan was as ancient and predictable as a set of pop lyrics. Talks were had; voices were raised; tears were shed and doors were slammed.
Your Father and I Have Decided
YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND
You’re Too Young for This Kind of Relationship
YOU DON’T KNOW WHO HE IS
You Don’t Understand What This Means
YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM
You Have to Concentrate on School Right Now
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS
And so forth.
Jennifer had married a good man. She had always known it. Jason was a gentle soul, especially for a Delta man. He had never been the kind of father who looked for an opportunity to clean guns in front of teenage boys who had come to court his teenage daughter. This was something that occurred strongly to Jennifer the night that she went to Addison’s room to see if she was done with her algebra homework, and found the window open.
One hour, one drive around the block, and two fits later, Addison was returned to her room.
“We were safe the whole time I told you his truck has a Guardian Hand and everything Mama would you listen to me — ”
“I been listening for long enough, Addison. Give me the phone. Go to bed. I mean it. I will be checking on you, do you hear me?”
Silence.
“Get some rest, baby. Let me get some rest. Love of God,” said Jennifer, rubbing her swollen eyes. From Addison’s bedroom, she could hear soft and possibly strategic sobbing, but she did not turn back.
There was a warm old leather armchair in the master bedroom, with a feeble yellow lamp beside it. Jennifer sat there to read before bed, or, as she did tonight, to stare out the window for twenty minutes with a tablet untouched in her lap.
“It’s the boy keeping you up, i’n’t it,” said Jason, behind her.
“That is an excellent guess,” snapped Jennifer.
Jason set his arm across her shoulder.
“I don’t know what else to tell you, honey,” he said, eventually. “You know and I know what this kind of thing has got to come to in the end. It burns out or — it doesn’t, and maybe . . . hell, maybe they do get married. I mean, my parents met in high school.”
“Your parents got divorced twenty-eight years ago.”
“Well, sure, whose didn’t? They had two kids, right? And we turned out fine, and everybody still talks to everybody — ”
“You’re not helping.”
“I don’t know what the hell else I can do to help,” Jason said gently. “You are doing your job, do you know it? We’re doing our damn best, and we caught her tonight and tonight she’ll be fine, at least, okay? You’ve about worn yourself to a stump. You can’t send her to a convent, can you? We — you know, we got to live.”
Jennifer clutched his arm, kissed it, and pushed it firmly away.
“Go on to bed,” she said. “I’ll be along.”
Jennifer had never told Jason about why, particularly, it hurt her so much to see Addison around Ethan. She had met Jason in their last year of college. With so much trouble as there was in the world — as hard it had been to hold everything together, get Jason through law school, get certified, get decent jobs — it never had occurred to Jennifer to burden him about all the foolishness that went on in high school. No damage was done, after all. Jennifer always believed that she would be stupid to carry around that kind of trouble all her life, just as stupid as she had been to get into it in the first place. Her job was the present and the future.
That was why she sat now in her cotton nightgown in the dark, cross-legged on the floor, with a chalice of wine and the blood of the living. The chalice was one of a set of six wineglasses from Wal-Mart; the wine was boxed Chardonnay; the blood was hers. This was, in its parts, the Great Libation. Jennifer had nothing to redecorate with at this hour, so she could not set the place backwards, but she had put some old Precious Moments figurines on the mantelpiece to show willing. She was not, of course, supposed to make this invocation, but Miss Helen seemed singularly unlikely to wax wroth and destroy the place on that account.
Had any of it worked? Jennifer could not say. There was nothing of Miss Helen to be seen, not five minutes after she had finished the summoning, not for ten minutes. Still, there was no reason for Jennifer not to speak, and so she plunged ahead.
“Miss Helen? I . . . don’t know that you’re there. I don’t know that you’ll wanna be here. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask, only there isn’t anybody else I can ask to watch out for Addison like this. I know you know kids. Girls. You see, the problem is — there’s this boy.”
No response.
“Now Addison is a smart girl. She — she knows better than this. But the kids these days just are so good with the texts and the internet and — they just get around us and they get at each other. They can communicate, I mean. She’s sneaking out. I mean, I set the alarm, I set the motion detector and the webcam, but — she knows better than any of that. Half the time we have to ask her to fix our things for us. She knows that. I . . . Could you — look in on her for me? Just take care he can’t hurt her too bad?”
There was nothing to hear but the call of the crickets outside, the rumble of 18-wheeler traffic on US-82. Jennifer shook her head, and stood.
“Thanks. Thanks anyway.”
Years afterward, when everyone had forgiven everyone else and her juvenile record had been expunged, Addison knew very well that there would have been no hope for her with Ethan in any case.
Ethan had left her seven months later, of course, but he had never actually lied about being totally completely in love with her, or the next girl, or the next. He certainly believed it at the time. Ethan was not cruel; he simply never amounted to more than a kind of weather pattern in women’s lives. From what Addison heard, he married hastily and twice by twenty-five. By then she had long ceased to wonder where he was, or care. Still, it was sweet to remember sometimes what it was to be fifteen, and in love — in love with a boy who had ideas.
The most interesting idea was not his own, but it was important that Addison heard someone else discuss that idea aloud. She never had. She had read about it sometimes, in a few thoughtful articles that promptly turned around to deny it soundly. What she herself thought, she had never allowed herself to know, exactly, until after Ethan spoke of it.
Three weeks after Addison had gotten herself caught, one day after she had quietly figured out how to reset the new motion detector and loop footage to show on the webcam, Addison lay in the back of Ethan’s pickup truck on an old moving blanket, staring peaceably upwards at the stars.
They were on the outskirts of Greenville, parked in a rich deep thicket off the levee at the Mississippi. Ethan had a Guardian Hand in his truck, dangling from the rearview mirror; it was not the strongest thing, but it took care of you while you had it. The hand had belonged to a gentleman named Duane, who, Ethan said, was from the ’70s and was actually a pretty cool guy if you invoked him. Addison was unhappy about the nearness of the Hand of Duane, under the circumstances, but she did not want to be unsophisticated, and, again, she was in love.
Ethan lay with his head between her bare breasts, toying with the ends of her hair. They had been talking, in fragments full of soft interruption, about what they would do with the future which was theirs. Addison thought she ought to start college before they got married. Ethan was not sure about college. He was not sure, he said, about Mississippi at all.
Suddenly Ethan shifted and pulled himself up somewhat to face Addison, eyes full of his deep and upsetting sincerity. He said,
“Have you ever thought that they might be right?”
“What — my parents? No!”
“No, no, I mean them. Them that go walking.”
Addison sighed, and said what she supposed was the thoughtful thing about it.
“I think everybody with half a brain thinks at least once in their life about all the terrible trouble, and just what exactly they would do if it was them that got woken up to go out walking — if it was their families that all that happened to . . . but it’s . . . I mean, you can’t just get after people’s children. You just can’t, and if you do, folks are gonna Guard against you and that’s just how it is. That’s just no way for them that woke up to — to act against a whole society.”
“But look. What’s a society?”
“Oh, hush.”
“No! I mean it.” Ethan fumbled for his flask of schnapps. “What is a society? Is it, I mean, is it human, is it real and natural? Is it what people are supposed to have, or do we just believe that because that’s what everybody is beaten down to believe from, like, from when they’re children? What kind of a thing is society when people are hanging people from trees or burning down houses — ”
“Shh, not so loud — ”
“And before that we had the slaves, and before that we killed the Indians, and blood crying out from the ground, hundreds of years, and then so they came out — don’t sometimes you think that we should be on their side? Just sometimes at least?”
Addison did not answer. She took the flask, drank, and stared skyward.
“I’m sorry, baby, did I scare you?”
“No,” said Addison, briefly irritated, clutching her arms around her chest. She had simply wanted to be alone with the thought for a moment.
When Ethan took her home, he parked two blocks away and walked her along the black and amber-lit streets, Guardian Hand in hand, until they reached the corner by her house. Then he stopped just out of sight, behind a great catalpa tree, and watched her till she disappeared into the side door, the old kitchen entrance to the house.
Addison did not rush these things. There was no way to move silently in a house like this, all age and hardwood — the best she could do was to move slowly, so slowly that the creaks of the floor were just more of the kind of noises the house made every night. She slipped out of her sandals, and let them hang from her fingers by the thongs. Her parents were hard sleepers, and she was patient.
She had made it out of the kitchen and into the deep hallway before the gray thing appeared at the edge of her vision. Reflex turned her head. There, hanging fixed in the middle distance, a double exposure on the spacetime between Addison and the ceiling, was Miss Helen.
Addison could not, did not scream. How could she? It would have been rude. Miss Helen was a part of the house. She remembered meeting her around the time they moved in; she had been nine, maybe, or ten. But why would Miss Helen be called out now? At four in the morning?
“Um. Hey,” she ventured.
“Hello, Addison,” said Miss Helen.
“How long has it been? A . . . couple of years now? Sure is good to see you around here again . . .”
No answer.
“Well, Miss Helen, it’s late.”
She didn’t move.
“It’s real late. I oughta be in bed. I — ”
“You knew you ought to be in bed, child,” said Miss Helen. “It’s too late for that now.”
With that, she bobbed and glided forward, a film of an old woman walking projected into the mahogany night of the house, absolutely soundless. Addison staggered backwards, dropped her sandals, tripped over herself.
“Oh God ma’am please don’t hurt me — ”
“Get up, Addison.”
Miss Helen had the impassivity of a thousand-year schoolteacher; she did not flicker at Addison’s fear. Addison panted, sobbed once, and stared up at her, hoping for a reassurance. But Miss Helen only remained. She did not hover or float; she merely existed, framed in the world, and waited for Addison to move. At last, the girl got to her feet.
“Come along now,” said Miss Helen, and swept past her, and up the stairs, the ones that no longer existed.
Addison could only stare. Her skull felt emptied with the effort of taking it in. The stairs were there again, in the hall, where they had last been twenty years ago. They seemed to be part of the same photograph that Miss Helen would have stepped out of. She moved up these ghost stairs with the pained steps she must have had in the last of her life. Addison wondered, somehow, if the stairs were part of her or if she was part of them, if the ghost that was Miss Helen was also the ghost of the house —
“Addison?” Sharp and acid. Miss Helen stared down from the top of the wide, white, handsome stairs, her glasses only silver crescents in the streetlight.
“Miss Helen,” said Addison, slightly strangled, “how can I come up a . . . the . . . a, a ghost stairway?”
Miss Helen huffed.
“Get up here!”
Addison did as she was told, expecting to step through the image of the first stair. But she did not. The stair bore her weight — indeed, it did more than that. Addison, although she walked from one stair to the next, felt gently propelled. The stairway didn’t give and bear like wood; it was as if she had stepped into a gentle current. She found herself at Miss Helen’s side as soon as she realized this.
“Where . . .”
Miss Helen did not answer, but reached into the shadow at the side of the banister, took a cane from the cane stand, and walked heavily past her. Addison turned and stared into the ghost story of her house.
It was not black, as she was expecting; the house she knew was black at night. But here, moonlight seemed to stream through the window and outline the world. The banister gleamed, as did the cane stand, a sideboard, framed prints, the lines of the pale walls.
Miss Helen stopped in front of the round window at the end of the hall, framed in the blue of the night, and nodded sharply at Addison. The girl followed. Again, she felt light, as much swimming as walking.
Addison expected a word like “this way” or “through here”, but the Guardian said nothing. She went, and Addison merely followed, as if she were in a dream and knew already where to go.
They turned to the right, into a tiny room heavy with furniture. At the corner of this room’s ceiling, a flat panel was outlined against the ceiling. Miss Helen tapped, then shoved against this with her cane tip, sliding the panel away. A rope ladder, wooden-runged, tumbled noiselessly out.
“There was . . . there’s more attic?”
“Is as it was,” answered Miss Helen. “Come on, now.”
Addison went awkwardly, intending to offer Miss Helen some kind of help up the ladder, but Miss Helen, though she moved like an old woman, was beyond such trouble. She pulled herself with all due dignity up the ladder. Addison followed.
For her, again, it was as if she was taken up the ladder, rather than climbing it. But when she reached the attic floor, this vanished. The pain of the splintered wood on the ball of her hand, the effort of bringing herself to her feet — Addison coughed at the choking scent of dust and horsehair. This was the attic itself, as real as her own room. She crawled a few paces across the floor to grab a rising rafter, terrified of standing up too quickly and tripping backward down the entrance. Then she looked behind her.
There was no entrance. It was boarded up, smoothly enough, but with a different shade of wood; it was only a scar on the floor. Of course, Addison thought. There was no hole in the front hall ceiling — only a panel entrance through a closet, now —
Miss Helen was in a far corner of the attic, so distant from the window that she might only have been a trick of the light. She was frozen in a gesture of pointing, pointing towards nothing Addison could see, beside her. Her fresh indistinctness, or perhaps the reality of the attic, gave Addison a moment of courage.
“Why? What is it, Miss Helen?”
There was no answer.
“I won’t — I won’t just come over there. Not until you say!”
“Then you may stand there, Addison,” said Miss Helen. “I have all night and all day.”
Addison tried to stand her ground, but only for a moment. Miss Helen was right.
“I don’t know that the floor’s safe,” she answered sullenly. “Mama said not to come up here ’cause somebody could fall through, and . . .”
Miss Helen said nothing. Addison’s words faded away. Somehow, it did not seem worth inhaling to say any more.
Addison stepped forward. The floor yawed and moaned in protest, but nothing more.
“Look here, Addison,” said Miss Helen at last.
Addison knelt by a rafter at Miss Helen’s feet, ducking to miss the slope of the ceiling. She peered into the darkness, towards the join of the rafters and the floorboards. The only light was Miss Helen’s faint silent-film glow.
“Ma’am, I don’t see anything.”
“Look harder.”
Miss Helen’s finger jabbed towards the lowering boards of the ceiling. Helpless to see what she meant, Addison reached forward and ran her fingertips over the wood.
“Just about there,” said Miss Helen.
Addison squinted. The boards were — she pushed slightly. The boards were loose. Now she saw what she hadn’t — there were five short boards in the wall, soft to the touch, where all the rest were long and more tightly joined.
“Open it up,” said Miss Helen.
“I — um — ” Addison looked hurriedly about herself. “I need a screwdriver or a hammer or something — ”
“No, you don’t. You just open it up with those long old nails of yours,” said Miss Helen, disapprovingly.
“That’ll hurt!”
“No,” said Miss Helen, rather more softly. “Trust me. It won’t hurt. They come right out.”
Addison found that they did. The first board took some encouragement, but the others were simply slotted or wedged in beside it. As she took them away, she saw a mass of newsprint, crumpled and brown.
“Is — it something in the newspapers?”
“No. Take them out.”
She began to do so —
“What are . . . There’s a lot of these. Um . . . here’s a dress . . . what am I looking for? Is this — ”
And then Addison screamed.
“That,” said Miss Helen.
Addison dropped the dress, a potato-sack print now matted with thick brown stains, and screamed, and screamed. Her first words of any coherence were,
“God, why? Why?”
“Why?” said Miss Helen. She paused, looked heavily aside, and then held Addison’s gaze.
“Because someone told me he loved me. When I too was a child. Even as he tells you now. And he left. And he will leave you, too.”
Addison staggered backward and half-sat, half-fell on the floor.
“You . . . killed your own baby?”
“It was not like that,” said Miss Helen, “once, it was not like that. Women had to do this for themselves. A good woman didn’t know where to have these things taken care of. Some women could ask their doctors. But my doctor was my father. And I would have died first.”
Her light inflamed her glasses.
“I had to hide it. I had to make a place in the attic, to hide it afterwards. And I had to hide here in the night when it came. Be sure it didn’t draw breath. It never cried. It never had a soul, don’t look so frightened. It’s just as it takes place by law, now. You don’t see a ghost, do you?”
Addison only cried.
“Now do you?”
It was the voice of the teacher; there could be no failing to answer.
“. . . No.”
“Can you tell me why I brought you here, Addison?”
Addison did try to answer this, but sobs muffled everything she had to say besides, “Yes, yes, I know what you think but . . .”
“But what?”
“But it’s different. It i’n’t like that!”
“Child,” said Miss Helen, “it is never different. You know I taught children, but those children grew. And I knew all about them. I knew a few of the girls who’d been in my class, some of the finest young women in the world. I heard when they were in trouble. But I never knew first. I never had a chance to tell them what they learned despite me. Now I have you. And I mean to show you by all that is in my power, what happens when you trust in a man’s word alone.”
“Oh, God, Miss Helen,” cried Addison. “Oh, God, no.”
“You’re swearing, Addison,” said Miss Helen, “and I don’t care for it. But I won’t blame you. It is a fierce lesson to learn.”
“No — no, no, no, no, no. God damn it. God damn it, you old woman!”
Miss Helen took no notice of the shouting. Addison reared and curled upward, wiping her gravedigging hands on her pants.
“I’m telling my mama and daddy on you!”
Aware too late of how this sounded, Addison drew herself up to her height and shook a finger at the Guardian’s nose.
“You’re not supposed to do this. You’re not my grandma! You’re not supposed to have, to, to have to do with our lives!”
“You certainly may tell them,” said Miss Helen, “if you like. Your mother asked me specifically if I might look in on you.”
“My mom . . . What, you told them there was your dead baby in the attic?”
“No,” said Miss Helen, “that was no concern of theirs. Whether they learn it or not, I am not terribly concerned, myself. Not now. This little grave has served its purpose. My father died without the shame, and so did I. But it is a little mummy. It never gave me any trouble.
“Now, Addison, you go on and get some rest, do you hear me?”
Addison was suddenly dizzy. Something inside her skull seemed to be folding inwards. She fell to a crouch, then dug her nails into the splintering floorboards.
“How . . . How do you . . .”
“Easy now,” said Miss Helen, “I’m taking care of you.”
“Don’t you — no, don’t you come near — ”
Addison crawled to standing, then swayed, then pitched forward, into and through the floor, with the kind assistance of Miss Helen.
It was a Saturday morning, and Jennifer did not get up till eight-thirty. Jason was left snoring behind her as she padded towards the kitchen, in slippers, glasses and bathrobe. Just as she was shutting the refrigerator door and setting creamer on the counter, her eyes brushed across a thing on the hallway floor just outside, a thing that had not been there when she went to bed: a pair of Addison’s sandals.
Jennifer blinked, stared for a moment, and let the refrigerator door swing shut; then she snapped awake, ran to Addison’s room, and threw open the door.
Atop the wrought-iron bed, there was a small curled mound in the shape of her daughter. She was still in yesterday’s shirt and shorts. The bedcovers were untouched, except for a brown smudge of dirt across the comforter where Addison had dragged her bare feet across and atop it. Jennifer bent over the girl — there was the smell of cigarette smoke, of course, of cheap booze, but more than that, there was dust. There was the smell of must and mold. Where had she — where had he taken her?
“Oh, sweetheart, what did he do? What did he do to you?”
Jennifer tried to cradle Addison, but the girl would not move from the fetal position. With much whispering and prodding, she at last got Addison to straighten her legs, and set her feet on the floor.
“Come on — come on, baby, we’re gonna get you to the doctor — ”
“I’ll burn it down. That woman, that woman. I’ll burn her all down,” said Addison.
Jennifer clasped her daughter’s dusty head to her terrycloth chest. She was filled, of a sudden, with the lightness of the worst happening — the certainty of emergency, absolving her of everything but her love and her care. She brought Addison forcibly to standing, and began to walk her gently towards the hallway.
“Oh, sweetheart. I know it. I know what it is. You feel like you want the world to burn down right now, baby. I know it. We’re going to get you taken care of.”
This was true, after a fashion. Jennifer did remember what it was be a girl and lie in bed alone and hurt and want the world to burn. Right now, it did not even occur to her to be hurt by anything Addison might say in all her pain, or even to hear very much of it. It was her job to take care of things, now and in the future; it was her job to take care of the girl.
Nevertheless, as it happened, she would later wish that she had listened to Addison on this occasion.
