A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (14 page)

The atmosphere was strange; sort of an almost-party. Crew exchanged fist bumps and handshakes when they thought no one was watching. Dad and Father Wanderly gravely thanked each person for their participation, told them they were all doing God’s work, reaffirmed that this process was going to help Marjorie get better. Ken kept to himself, appeared to be very nervous, and looked at me like he was wondering if my parents were really going to let me watch the episode. I walked around with my camera filming it all. I caught a snippet of a conversation going on among the tall man in the jacket and tie, Barry, and Father Wanderly. They used words like
capital, contributions
, and
campaign
. When Barry saw me, he waved for me to come over to them, and introduced me by saying, “
This
little star is Merry.” He never told me the other man’s name, or if he did, I no longer remember it. Barry said, “There would be no show without his help. His generous help.” The men all laughed, the one in the tie laughing hardest. I didn’t like him. He was too tall and stood like he had metal rods inside his back.
His brown jacket had dark patches on the elbows, his hair was a weird color, like an almost brown, not a real brown, his skin looked fake, and everything was too close together on his face. He told me I was a special young lady and that he was excited to meet me. I said, “I know. Thanks.” The three men laughed like I’d said the funniest joke in the world and then moved me along. So I went around the party stopping the people that I knew for a brief interview in which I asked them a purposefully silly question. I worked my way back to Father Wanderly eventually. He was standing alone next to the dining room table munching on miniature pretzels.

I asked him, “Would you rather have legs the size of fingers or fingers the size of legs?”

He said, “I can’t say I’ve ever been asked that before. Both options sound dreadful, don’t they,” and then he waved bye to the camera.

Marjorie and Mom were still upstairs. Marjorie was always in her room with Mom, Dad, or occasionally Father Wanderly and a cameraperson. Since my basement confessional all things Marjorie had been quiet. She ate lunch and dinner with us, went to school some days, and on others she did not. She listened to music a lot. She texted and received texts in random flurries. She occasionally watched TV with us, but mostly she was the ghost of our house, haunting her own bedroom. I began to really believe she was faking and that nothing was wrong with her. Despite my promise to not say anything, I thought about telling Ken what she’d told me. I didn’t want to risk doing anything like that right then because I wanted to stay under everyone’s radar and somehow manage to watch the show.

Right around my usual bedtime, which was forty-five minutes before the 10:00
P.M.
premiere of the pilot episode, Mom came downstairs and announced that it was time for me to go to bed. There would be no arguing.
The whole downstairs group waved at me and issued a reverent and relieved chorus of “Good night, Merry.”

Dad followed me up the stairs, kissed the top of my head, shoved me into the bathroom, and wished me a quick, “Good night,” before heading back down to the party.

In my room, Mom had untied my robe belt from the doorknob and was already sitting on the edge of my bed and fiddling with the alarm clock radio. She tuned it to a station that advertised playing “bedtime magic.” She said, “I’m going to leave the radio on in case things get too loud downstairs.”

I didn’t argue with her. I would just shut the radio off after she left. Instead, I breathed in her face.

“Yuck, what are you doing?”

“I just brushed my teeth. Smells good, right?”

“Yes, smells wonderful. Get in bed. Are you going to sleep in your clothes again?”

“Yeah, they’re comfy.” I was wearing a long-sleeved Wonder Woman T-shirt and blue sweatpants. I liked sleeping in my clothes in case I had to run out into the hallway at night.

I put my pocket notebook, my camera, and my glasses on top of my dresser, and I plugged in the power cord like Ken had shown me. The red light meant it was charging. I placed the camera where I could see it from my bed because I wanted to see when the light would turn to green.

I crawled over Mom’s lap and under the covers. She playfully smacked my butt.

“Mom!”

“Sorry. It was right there. Hey, did you put that blanket over your house today?”

“Yes,” I said, and ducked deeper into the covers. Earlier that afternoon,
I’d positioned my camera on the bed and had filmed myself throwing an old, thin, blue baby blanket over the top of my house. It was just big enough to cover the windows in the front.

“We can take the house back downstairs tomorrow if you want.” She didn’t ask why I’d covered it with a blanket, and she didn’t say anything about who or how or why someone had put it back in my room.

“Okay.”

The overhead light was still on in my room. Mom brushed my bangs off my forehead, and had trouble holding my stare. She looked older with her puffy, bloodshot eyes. She gave me an unsure, sad smile. I thought about telling her that her teeth looked really yellow, that she was smoking way too much.

I turned over onto my side, away from her, and asked her to rub my back. She rushed through singing a quick song, her go-to song, about falling down an avalanche.

“Are you going back to Marjorie’s room or are you going downstairs to watch it?”

“I’m going to go downstairs, have a glass of wine, or four, and I’m going to watch it. I don’t want to, but I think I have to.”

“I want to watch it.”

“I know you do, honey. You’re being such a good girl with all of this. I love you and am so proud of you.” Mom’s voice was quiet, quieter than the radio.

“Is Marjorie going to watch it?”

“No. She’s not.”

“Does she want to?”

“She hasn’t asked.”

I was out of questions so I closed my eyes. Mom shut off the light, then stayed and rubbed my back for another minute. When I opened my eyes
again she wasn’t there anymore and it was a little after one in the morning. I sat up, mad at myself for having missed it all. If nothing else, I’d wanted to try to hear the show, or hear them watching the show.

The charging indicator light on the camera was still red. I didn’t care. I got up and brought the camera and notebook back to bed with me, shutting off the radio on the way back. I left my glasses on the dresser. Things were fuzzier around the edges but I could see well enough without them.

I sent my ears out as far as I could but I didn’t hear anything happening downstairs. I turned on the camera’s LED light and pointed it at the notebook. I reviewed the day’s work and decided I could delete the following: my full-sprint tour of the house and backyard; the ten minutes of spy-camming who came in and out of the crew’s trailer; the eight minutes of long-distance footage of the Cox kids playing basketball in their driveway; my taping Jenn taping me, with her turning away from the camera first and giving me a raspberry; the footage of Marjorie’s closed door.

I put my notebook under my pillow. I popped out the camera’s flip screen, deleted some of the files, and played back the most recent footage of the crew party downstairs. I watched the conversation between Barry, Father Wanderly, and the jacket-and-tie man. The mic didn’t pick up what they’d said, but they clinked their plastic cups together and passed handshakes all around their little circle. Then I watched everyone saying
Good night, Merry
; their collective call crackling in the camera’s small speakers, their faces jumpy and blurry as I walked past them. I kept rewatching and I tried to pick out individual voices to hear who really meant their
Good night
.

I may have fallen asleep while watching the video, because what I remember next is the camera resting on my chest, the flip screen dark but the LED light still on, pointed at my feet. There was a scratching noise
coming from my left, from the other side of the room. It wasn’t loud, but it was constant, rhythmic.

I sat up, hit record, and aimed the camera out across the room like it was a powerful weapon. Its white light diffused through the room along with the scratching noise, which grew louder. The closet door was shut, the blanket on the cardboard house still there, my piles of books and stuffed animals intact.

I whispered, “Marjorie? Stop it. Who’s there?”

The scratching noise stopped. I thought about running from the room, pictured it in my head, but I saw my feet hitting the floor and then thin, skeleton-white hands reaching out from under my bed and pulling me under.

I sat and waited and heard nothing, and the nothing seemed to last for hours. I waited. My camera bleeped at me, and I yelped. A red number blinked on the flip screen. I didn’t have much battery power left.

I watched the blinking red of the screen and then looked over at the blanket-covered house. In the LED white light the blue blanket looked like it was the same white color as the cardboard house, or the same white the house used to be before its growing-things transformation. I stared at or into the blanket, trying to see the blue that I knew was there but wasn’t seeing, and then the blanket was sucked inside the house through the shutters of the front window, as though that window was a ravenous black hole. It was pulled in so roughly that the blanket rubbing against the cardboard sounded like the house was being torn open. The chimney piece flew off and landed on the foot of my bed. It all happened so fast, I didn’t lose my breath and drop the camera into my lap until after the blanket had disappeared.

I somehow found my voice and said, “I’ll scream for Mom. You’ll get in big trouble, Marjorie.” I pointed the camera back at the house and, feeling
more angry than scared, and wanting to ensure Marjorie’s torment of me was on video, to have this as a part of the official, permanent record, I added, “This isn’t funny.”

The shutters had rebounded and again covered up most of the window. There weren’t any noises coming from inside the house. From the bed, the LED camera light didn’t penetrate the small opening between the shutters. I couldn’t see Marjorie.

“I’m videoing this, you know.” I waited for a reaction. There wasn’t any. So I hit her as hard as I could with, “I know you’re faking. You told me you were faking.” Letting out her biggest secret while recording, I thought for sure that’d she come out of the house, mad at me, telling me that I was a baby and couldn’t take a joke, and that she was doing this just to make the show better, and didn’t I want to help? And I would say yes, but I’d also cry and make her feel bad so that she’d stay in my room and sleep in my bed, and then we’d delete what I’d recorded and I would’ve been happy doing so.

“Marjorie, come on.” I hopped off the bed, looking at what was in front of me through the flip screen of the camera, which was much easier for me than seeing the real thing. I tapped the front door with my foot. Still no reaction. I peeled back one of the shutters and slowly traced the house’s interior and floor with the camera’s headlight. The crayon drawings on the back wall were crudely drawn cave paintings and they hung at skewed angles. My blue blanket was in a lumpy heap on the floor. I whispered my sister’s name, and when I did, the blanket started to rise slowly. The rising part was long and thin. It was her arm. It had to have been her arm; she was raising it so that it looked like a snake head, or a vine. I whispered her name again and the rising part stopped. The blanket bubbled with activity underneath it, and then the rising part widened, fattened, to the size of her head, a costumed Halloween ghost without the
eyeholes or mouth hole, as she sat there under the blanket with her legs crossed, or maybe she was crouched, balanced on the balls of her feet, her body concealed by the blanket and by the house’s window frame.

I told her to get out, to leave my room, to go away.

Those skeleton-white hands I’d previously imagined shooting out from under my bed came out from under the blanket and wrapped around her neck. They pulled the blanket down over her face, skintight, and the blanket formed a shroud with dark valleys for eyes and mouth, her nose flattened against the unyielding cloth. Her mouth moved, and choking growls came out. Those hands squeezed so the blanket pulled tighter and her blanket-covered mouth opened wider, and she shook her head, thrashing it around violently as she gasped and pleaded with someone to stop, or maybe she said she was trying to stop. Her hands were still closed around her own neck, and I’m sure it was some sort of optical illusion or a trick or kink of memory because her neck couldn’t have gotten as thin as I remember it getting, and then the rest of her body began to spasm and lash out, knocking into the house, her feet jabbing out from underneath and recoiling like a snake’s tongue.

I took another step back and suddenly the cardboard house exploded and shot out toward me. The roof smashed into my face and knocked me over. I fell backward, landing hard on my butt and with my back pinned up against my bed. I managed to keep hold of the camera, which, along with my arms and hands, was stuck inside the chimney slot of the house. I couldn’t see Marjorie over the house she’d dropped on me but I heard her run out of my room and into the hallway.

I punched and kicked the fallen house, the now loose flaps and folds tangled in my arms and legs like thick weeds. The house finally gave in, slumped off, and rolled away toward the closet. I scrambled onto my feet. My blanket was on the ground, in a harmless heap pinned under the collapsed
cardboard. Determined to video an escaping Marjorie, I ran out into the hallway.

She wasn’t there. The light from my camera failed to reach the end of the hallway and the open mouth of the confessional room. The hallway walls faded and frayed into the dark. I strained to hear movement from Marjorie, from anybody, and all I could hear was my own revved-up breathing.

I walked down the hall to her door, the whole time expecting Marjorie to jump out of a darkened corner, the bathroom doorway, the top of the stairs, or from the confessional room. Her door was closed. I tried pushing it open with my foot but it was latched shut. I turned the knob and threw my body weight into it, and stumbled inside.