Goodnight Blackbird (4 page)

The dining room table began trembling in response. The half-eaten cake wobbled and slid. The silverware chattered and tinkled. Then the table bucked up and down, pounding an erratic drumroll on the carpet. The cake flew off and splattered on the carpet and the paper plates, cups and forks followed suit. Like an enraged bull at a rodeo, the table rose up and down, up and down, two legs slamming down hard on the floor while the other pair reared up high enough to almost touch the chandelier.

Darren fell off his chair and began backing away toward the back door. His legs were too rubbery to stand. To his surprise he found himself grinning. My house is angry, he thought, my house is very, very angry.

Darren managed to make it out the door with Julia and the kids. Julia belted Maddie into the backseat of their minivan. Maddie was crying. Brandon had a glazed, stunned look on his face.

"Julia, are you okay?" Darren asked. He put a hand on her arm but she shrugged him off.

"Get away from me!" she screamed. "Sam!"

Sam trotted down the porch steps and snatched the car keys from his wife. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the keys on the asphalt. Darren tried to pick them up for him, but Sam shoved him away.

"Julia," Darren said, "please don't leave like this. I'm sorry. Hey Maddie, are you all right?" But Sam and Julia wouldn't let him near the van.

"Just stay away," Julia cried. "Haven't you done enough? What the hell is happening in there?"

"Brandon, buddy, are you okay?" Darren asked. But of course Brandon wasn't okay, and neither was Maddie. They stared at him as if he were an accomplice to what had happened.
Freak
, their looks said.
Dangerous
.

Julia wouldn't even look at Darren as they backed out of the driveway. The van sped down the street, very much over the speed limit.

Half of him wanted to laugh and half of him wanted to cry. Annika, Laurie, Julia, the kids—it seemed as if everyone nowadays ended up leaving him. Everyone but the poltergeists.

He nearly stumbled on something soft in the driveway. He wasn't the only one who'd been left behind—Lulu stared up at him with her empty button eyes.

Darren re-entered the house.

He lingered by the stove, listening. The house was quiet. From his angle he could see a thin slice of the dining room but he didn't see any movement. He saw a frosting-encrusted fork lying near the leg of a chair.

He walked gingerly toward the dining room entrance, his legs stiff and tingling.

The tableau before him seemed anticlimactic: a cake on the floor, a mess of plates and forks at his feet, a disordered bookcase. There was a stillness, an
emptiness
, in the air that was in sharp contrast to the atmosphere a few minutes ago, when it felt as if the house had come alive—when it felt as if a wild animal had been let loose in the room.

He went upstairs to the bathroom, shut the door and put some water on his face. At first he thought the trembling of his lower lip was residual stress or anxiety. But after he dried his face and still felt wetness on his cheeks he realized with some surprise that he was crying.

"Why are you doing this to me?" he said out loud.

The childish self-pity in his voice was embarrassing but he couldn't help it. What had he done to deserve this? What kind of object lesson was he supposed to learn from having his family and potential girlfriends terrorized like this?

After a moment, he heard a deep growling.

At first he thought it was the sound of someone's motorcycle or muscle car cruising down the street. But it was not a mechanical sound coming from far away. It was an organic sound coming from the other side of the bathroom door. Adrenaline surged in Darren's veins. He could not move.

The growling faded away after a few seconds.

He still stood there staring at the door, his hands leaving sweaty prints on his slacks. It was several moments before he could reach out and turn the knob.

When he opened the door, there was nothing there except for the Mylar Snoopy balloon, which bumped lazily into the door jamb.
Job Well Done!
it said.

T
he e-mail in her inbox made her smile:

Dear Ms. Prentiss

I got the impression that perhaps you know one or two things about household pests of the decidedly non-corporeal variety. Was wondering 2 things: 1. how you got this knowledge, and 2. do you know if there is any sort of Craigslist for Ghostbusters.

Would appreciate a referral. Also, do you know how to get chocolate frosting out of carpet? Tried Resolve carpet granules but stain now for some reason just smells like a combination of ass sweat and oranges.

Yours very truly,

D. Ciccone

Media/Communications Director, Northeast Aerospace

"Bringing Analog/Digital Interface Solutions to Avionic Systems Architecture"

On her lunch break, she replied, sidestepping the first question: "Actually, there is a sort of Craigslist. It's called the Archangel Society. Check out their website. You'll probably be underwhelmed—first of all, they misspell 'society' a couple times, but nobody's perfect. They seem to be a loose confederation of New Agers, low-rent psychics and crystal healers who bring human/spectral interface solutions to residential systems architecture. They even have a state-by-state listing of kooks with their contact info. Beware of Kat Shakespeare, from Akron! One guy wrote in asking how to get rid of the ghost of a woman who kept playing—badly—the piano in his living room in the wee hours of the morning. Kat advised a complicated ritual involving 88 votive candles and daily recitations of some incoherent Sanskrit Vedic chant about music being the voice of God filtered through imperfection. You're on your own with your citrus-smelling carpet—I have hardwood floors."

Darren Ciccone e-mailed, "If music be the food of love, play on! I checked out the website—the guy never wrote back to say if the ritual worked. But I sent Ms. Shakespeare an e-mail anyway. At least she's local. Thanks for the website info. And you never answered my first question."

Jacqueline's fingers tensed over the keyboard for a long while before she responded. "It's something I prefer not to get into over e-mail. And I don't exactly know the circumstances of your haunting, either. Care to share?"

He replied: "If you're free for coffee tonight, we can discuss it—the Starbucks at the mall like last time? 9 p.m.? Sorry it has to be so late—gotta hang around here to sit in on a conference call with some California people."

She typed "See you then" and hit SEND. Was this how friendships begin? She couldn't remember. It would be nice to have a new friend.

Not that she didn't have friends—she had quite a few. But the word "friend" was a big, threadbare tent that covered a lot of party guests. It included girls she knew from high school and college, girls who were really just friendly acquaintances and who still didn't know about Michelle's death or Kevin moving out. It included a few people at work with whom she'd sometimes go out to lunch—and those lunchtime conversations always had a superficial late-night talk show sheen to them, never touching on the truly personal, always centering on movies, work gripes, the best places to vacation, the worst baby shower gifts. Like a well-trained street cop, she waved traffic around the accident scene in the middle of her life. No one was the wiser. She was very good at it. The Jacqueline they knew—quiet, a bit aloof, friendly in an understated way—was a serviceable paraphrase of the real thing.

A few people did know about Michelle, of course. Hard to keep something like that secret. There were her old high school friends Allison and Kayla, there were some friends of Kevin, there were other young mothers she had known from Michelle's kindergarten. Allison and Kayla were perhaps the most problematic. Though Jacqueline still considered them friends, she always felt a flare of bitterness when she saw them now. They seemed to ooze pity—irritating enough in itself, but occasionally she sensed that the pity had a slightly theatrical quality, like they were just trying to prove to themselves how bighearted and caring they were. Look at us, we're being nice to the woman with the dead daughter.

Maybe Jacqueline was just being paranoid—maybe they genuinely did care. But for the life of her Jacqueline couldn't see what they were getting out of the friendship. Spending time with Jacqueline wasn't exactly a million laughs. And she wasn't getting much out of the deal either. She was enough of a realist to understand that friendships can become exhausted, like overcultivated fields. After a while, the soil has nothing left to give. But Allison and Kayla refused to let the ground lie fallow. Every couple weeks they would call and ask her how she was doing, was she getting out, et cetera. Like she was a dying invalid.

It was understandable right after Michelle's death. Most people were like that. The pitying half-smile/half-grimace, the whispered solicitude ("Are you really okay?"), the whole grueling performance. But Allison and Kayla kept it up far too long. And they acted so damned apologetic whenever the subject of their own kids came up, as if the very subject of children would send the now-childless Jacqueline into an emotional death-spiral. Allison and Kayla had four children between them. Jacqueline knew from personal experience that young mothers couldn't shut up about their kids—their potty habits, their allergies, who was "acting out," who had the early signs of ADHD. With Jacqueline around, though, Allison and Kayla became grimly ministering angels always trying to make Jacqueline's fragile mental well-being the center of attention. How are
you
doing, Jacqueline, are you sleeping all right. It all seemed so phony.

I'm fine, she'd say. Hanging in there. Phony answers to phony questions.

She had the inescapable feeling that there was a definite phoniness—or at least a maddening superficiality—to their friendship. To friendships in general, probably. The Facebook episode last year proved that to Jacqueline.

Allison and Kayla had been bugging her for months to join Facebook. They were concerned Jacqueline was spending too much time alone. And Facebook wasn't just for high school kids, they said. Everyone was on Facebook. "I know you like your privacy, but Facebook can give you the best of both worlds," Allison told her. "You don't even have to leave the house, but you can talk to me or Kayla or Brenda—remember her?—and find out how everyone's doing, right there on the computer."

"But if I want to talk to you I can just pick up the phone and actually talk to you."

"Just give it a try," Kayla said. "You'll love it. You'll become addicted."

But it wasn't enough to just register and slap up a digital photo. You had to fill your page with something, otherwise you'd have a ridiculous, uninviting wasteland of white space there. What was the point of joining if you didn't share things from your life? It would be like going to a party and not talking to anyone.

So Jacqueline posted some of her interests, some tidbits about her life. "Alumnus of John Carroll University. Love Marvin Gaye and the Chi-Lites. Love Dillards, especially in February when they have their clearance sales." Like everyone else, she created her own little digital altar of cheerful self-absorption.

And people would "friend" her! A few coworkers, some friends of friends, some girls she had gone to elementary school with, even actual strangers, would request to be her friend. For a while, it was nice. Every day or so she would end up in one of those bubbly, breathless, punctuation-free instant message conversations with someone she hadn't seen in years:

"OMG Jackie I haven't seen ya in YEARS!!!! Howsit goin I have 3 kids now LOL!!!! Bruce & I are expecting AGAIN in late mar/early apr... yr picture is so BEAUTIFUL do u have kids are u married?!"

No, Jacqueline would usually reply. No kids. Not married.

Like a catchy pop song, these chats were fun at first, cloying after a while... then they set her teeth on edge. When she friended Cassie Christopher, who was rumored to be the most promiscuous girl in their high school graduating class, her other Facebook friends immediately leapt in with the sort of mean-spirited gossip more appropriate to bitchy junior high schoolers than women in their thirties. "Did you know she works in an ESCORT SERVICE downtown?!? She always was such a HO!!! LOL!" (The great irony was that Cassie seemed kinder and less superficial than Jacqueline's other Facebook "friends.")

After a while, Jacqueline realized she didn't have much to say to these people. And she lacked the ability to have mind-numbing, stream-of-consciousness gab sessions overflowing with the cheery, superficial flotsam of life. "Have u been to key biscayne it is so FABULOUS u should stay at the kenilworth resort chuck & I are thinking about home schooling what do u think we're putting in granite countertops I gained so much weight u wouldn't BEELEEEEVE how fat I got!!!!"

Well, in all fairness, it wasn't superficial. Their kids were important to them, their vacation choices were important too. This was their lives. But Jacqueline felt so far away from them now. They were speaking a language she had forgotten how to speak.

After a while she began to ignore the friend requests. She went on Facebook less and less.

"You haven't put up any status updates on your page in a month," Allison told her reproachfully. "Come on! Have some fun. Put up a list of your favorite restaurants. Put up some more photos. People would love to know what's going on with you."

Would they really?

For the hell of it, she posted a list of all the antidepressants she'd been on since that day six years ago when she came up from the basement and saw Michelle at the bottom of the pool. Wellbutrin, Paxil, Effexor, Zyprexa, Cymbalta. She put a couple photos on her page. There was the headstone in Marymount Cemetery. "This is where my daughter is buried" was the caption. A shot of the dirty, drained pool, speckled with dried leaves and twigs. "This is where Michelle drowned," she typed below it.

For one of her status updates, instead of something like "I'm looking forward to my vacation" or "Bought the newest Michael Bublé CD & loved it," Jacqueline wrote this:

"Am starting to wonder if only idiots want to see this life through to completion."

Allison and Kayla doubleteamed her after that. "Jackie, you can't put stuff like that on your page," Allison said. "It's creepy."

"It makes people uncomfortable," Kayla said in a more conciliatory tone.

"I've been so inconsiderate," Jacqueline said.

Allison said, "If something's going on with you, you should be telling it to a therapist. People on Facebook aren't therapists. They're just there to hang out and have fun."

Hang out and have fun. Well, that was Jacqueline's cue to leave. To hell with the Facebookers. She pulled down her Facebook profile that day, smashed her digital altar like Sampson bringing the temple down around him. From then on when the three women were together it seemed as if Allison and Kayla looked at her with an uncomfortable wariness, as if Jacqueline wasn't someone they had known since puberty but a virtual stranger.

In a very real sense, though, they didn't know her. The Jackie LaPierre they had known in high school was dead.

When they called her, Jacqueline would try to be pleasant and upbeat. They would ask how she was doing. But there was always a palpable reluctance in their voice, as if they were saying,
I'll only ask how you're doing as long as you tell me you're fine
.

She hoped Darren would turn out to be a good friend. She liked being alone but even that got tiresome after a while. And she had felt compelled to contact him after that night at the coffee shop.
Tonight your life begins again
. Maybe he was part of the puzzle. To her, everything about that evening had a sacred glow to it, as if Michelle was the electricity illuminating it from within. She had a crazy but not unpersuasive feeling that maybe Darren held the secret of how she could—

(What? Bring Michelle back? Christ, was she becoming that unhinged?)

—no, not bring her back, but maybe strengthen the strange, frail lines of communication she had with her. And apart from those coldblooded reasons, Jacqueline simply liked him. She didn't know him at all but for some reason she got a comforting feeling from him, as if he were the glove her hand had been searching for.

She was late by a few minutes. When she pulled into the mall parking lot, there was a lone blue Honda by the Starbucks. But there was no Starbucks. The store was dark, with black construction paper all over the door and windows. Even the big green Starbucks sign had been taken down, leaving faint ghost letters.

Darren was sitting in his car, reading a
USA Today
. Jacqueline knocked on his window.

"You waited," she said. "My hero." She nodded at the coffee shop. "What happened?"

"This is what's known as a very bad economy."

"There's another coffee shop around the corner. Next to the dry cleaners. Let's try that."

But their two-car caravan arrived four seconds before the pair of twentysomething baristas began turning off the lights inside.

Darren stood by the door waving his arms in the universal sign of
What the fuck?
The baristas mouthed the word "closed."

Jacqueline chuckled. "Foiled again."

Spreading out his arms like a latter-day Sinatra, Darren began bellowing to the empty parking lot,
"'I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps!'"

"Maybe we ought to do this another night," Jacqueline said. "Unless you want to hit that IHOP down near the Wal-Mart."

"Not crazy about that place. The tables are always sticky."

She had an idea.

Five minutes later they were in the open-24-hours Giant Eagle supermarket on Mayfield Road. She piloted a cart and Darren settled for a basket. "May as well get some shopping done," she said. "And don't give me that look. It's not like this was a date or anything."

"I didn't say anything."

She dawdled in the produce section, debating whether to get peaches or red seedless grapes. "Did your Kat Shakespeare contact you yet?" Jacqueline asked.

"Got one of those 'out-of-office' automated replies. She's out of town until late July."