Helens-of-Troy (4 page)

Ellie looked at her mom, bewilderedly.
“I do like you mom. Except when you treat me like a child. What did
you mean by that anyway? Don’t you like me? You said ‘pretend
we’.”

The remark stung Helen. “Nothing. I’m
sorry, Ellie. Of course I like you. I love you. This has just been
an emotional day for me, that’s all.”

“You can like someone without loving
them, and you can love someone without liking them,” Ellie said
thoughtfully.

Maybe she was growing up after all,
Helen admitted to herself. She reached over and flipped Ellie’s
long black hair over her shoulder so she could see her daughter’s
face. “I like and love you, Ellie. That’s also
possible.”

Helen thought for a moment she saw the
slightest beginning of a smile on her daughter’s face. It didn’t
last long.

“Then why are we moving to Nan's
anyway? To this Troy place? Why don’t we just move around the block
or something? That way I can still be friends with Dina and go to
the same school. We don’t have to move miles away just because
you’ve dumped your latest husband.”

Helen knew the tender mother-daughter
moment had passed. “I’m not sure being friends with Dina is such a
good thing for you. I think she’s going to get herself pregnant. It
will do you good to meet some new friends. Country
friends.”

“She already is pregnant.”

Helen sighed. “Okay, see that’s what I
mean. This move is going to be so good for us.”

“It’s not contagious or anything, being
pregnant.”

“It kind of is, Ellie. Sure, you won’t
get it from her, but if it’s going around, it’s going around. And
don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, because I know you
do.”

“Is that what happened to you? Didn’t
Nan move you to a small town in time?”

Ellie had wanted to hit a nerve in her
mother, and she did. A big one.

“Ellie, you’re driving me crazy. Can we
change the subject please?” Helen yelled, her voice hitting
decibels her daughter had never heard.

“Then let’s go back to the real
subject, which was, before we segued, why are we moving to
Nan’s?”

Ellie saw her mother panic and let go
of the steering wheel, if only for a moment.

“Mom? Are you okay? I mean, if it’s
some deep dark secret you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.
I don’t have a huge issue with the unknown. If you need to keep a
secret, keep a secret. I know this may come as a big surprise to
you but there are some things I don’t tell you. I have some secrets
too.”

“Oh God, I don’t know if I even want to
begin that conversation,” Helen thought to herself

She knew she had become too upset to
drive. Looking out the window towards the right, she saw some fast
food outlets coming up, off the highway. “Are you hungry, Ellie?”
she asked. Not waiting for Ellie’s answer, she pulled onto the
off-ramp.

“Well, I kind of had some pizza at
Dina’s earlier,” Ellie began, watching her mother’s erratic
behavior. She could see her mother was trembling. “Mom?”

Helen pulled into the nearest
drive-through and put the van in park. “I just feel safer at
Nan's.”

“Why? Are we in danger or something?
You’re acting really weird. Did Tony threaten you? Because if he
did, I can take him.”

Helen smiled. If it came right down to
it, Ellie probably could take him. “No, Tony didn’t threaten me. Or
you.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

Helen hesitated. “Won’t it just be nice
to live in a small town? Where everyone knows your name? Where all
the neighbors say hello? I want the best for you,
Ellie.”

Tears were beginning to well up her in
eyes. Not now, she told herself.

“The hookers outside Tony’s office say
hello to me all the time.”

Helen rolled her eyes.

“I get my eye-rolling thing from you,
you know,” Ellie offered.

Again, Ellie was right. She was right
about a lot of things, but still so wrong about others. It was all
part of growing up, Helen knew, but Ellie was special. Not special
like every mother’s daughter is, but special in a way that only
Helen and her own mother could ever possibly attempt to understand.
Sooner or later, and lately it was looking like sooner, Helen was
going to have to figure out a way to let Ellie understand how
special she was without scaring the shit out of her. For that, she
needed Helena.

“Look, let’s just give it a chance,
okay?” she pleaded. “Your Nan is so excited that we’re coming. I
know you don’t know her very well, but people say she’s really
nice.”

“People? She’s your mother. Don’t you
think she’s nice? Everyone else seems nice to you. You still think
Tony is nice, and you’re leaving him.” She paused for a moment.
“I’ve heard you tell Tony that Nan is nuts.”

“Did I?” Helen winced. “I was
exaggerating. She’s just a little eccentric.”

“So, is she nuts in the way I think
you’re nuts sometimes? Just because you’re my Mom?”

“Yes. Exactly like that. She drives me
crazy. Even more than I do you.”

“Impossible. Like what? Tell me, what
does she do?” Ellie begged.

“Well, for example, I know you hate the
way I dress as much as I hate the way you do. I’m much too
conservative for your taste. You think I’m stuck in the eighties
with big shoulder pads and big hair. I’ll have you know I have let
go of the shoulder pads.”

“You still have a lot of
hair.”

“Which is why I wear it up or pulled
back. Having said all that, the way you dress is too deep, dark and
depressing for me. I would rather see you in something a little
less funeralesque. But I try to live with it. Your Nan however,
well she’s just in a world of her own.”

Ellie was suddenly enthralled. There
was something about her grandmother that drove her mother batty.
“What about her? Is she muumuu-ville or something?”

“How on earth do you know what a muumuu
is? That’s way before your time.”

“I sometimes watch reruns of Three’s
Company. They’re those curtain-like dresses that Mrs. Roper wore,
right?”

“Yes, but no. Your Nan is definitely
not muumuu-ville. You really don’t remember much about her do you?”
Helen asked. “She’s more like…”

“Like what?” she asked
excitedly.

“Like the slutty schoolgirl/pop
star.”

Ellie howled. “I love her
already.”

“And that, my darling,” Helen said,
reaching across Ellie’s seat to tussle her hair, “is exactly what I
am afraid of.”

CHAPTER THREE

By evening, a cold wind from the north
began to blow through Troy. The autumn leaves, neatly raked and
piled only a few hours earlier, were now whirling around in the
air. Neither the cold nor the leaves seemed to bother the little
ghosts and goblins out trick or treating. For them the night was
full of adventure.

Most parents in the city preferred to
bring their costumed kids to a supervised Biggie Mart party down at
the mall. This wasn’t the case in Troy. Every house on the block
had the porch light on, awaiting cries of “shell out, shell out,
the witches are out.” The small town streets were safe enough for
the excited ghouls to scamper door to door uninhibited. A few of
Troy’s teenagers could be counted on to get out of hand later on in
the evening, but it was only seven o’clock and there not a burning
leaf bag in sight.

One thing was for certain that night;
everyone, no matter how old they were, paused to look at the LaRose
house. The full moon cast an eerie shadow through the branches of
Helena’s now leafless maple tree, the barren limbs forming an
effigy of a hunchbacked crone. Every thirty seconds or so, Helena’s
rented strobe light added to the illusion, making the shadow figure
appear to boogie to a danse macabre. “Step on a crack, break the
old hag’s back,” the children sang, as they hopped over the walkway
to avoid stepping on the silhouette.

“I can’t believe it’s the same house,”
Wendy Robinson remarked, holding her young daughter Annie by the
hand. “All summer long the porch had the most amazing display of
pink and purple fuchsias, hanging down from moss-covered baskets.
Helena won a blue ribbon for them from the horticultural society.
What on earth is hanging there now?”

“I think they’re spider webs,” her
husband said. “It looks like the stretched cotton batting we use
down at the mill. The dead guy on the porch looks pretty real.
Let’s go take a closer look.”

“How about if we just move along to the
next house?” Wendy replied. “If you think I’ve forgotten the skimpy
cat outfit Helena LaRose wore last year, you’re wrong.”

As the family moved on to the
neighbor’s house, a little girl, dressed in blue gingham ran behind
their backs. She disappeared around the corner as fast as her
little feet would take her.

“Where’d she go?” a young boy dressed
up like a cowboy asked his friend. They had just come around the
corner themselves and the little girl had almost knocked them over
in her rush to get away.

“Brooke runs pretty fast, for a girl,”
his ghostly companion said. He adjusted the huge sack of candy he
was lugging over his shoulder. They had been to almost every house
on the street and his bag was getting heavy.

“Yeah, but…”

“Forget her,” the ghost said to his
lasso-laden friend.

They appeared to be about the same age,
but the ghost was a little bit taller and quite a bit pudgier than
the cowboy.

“Let’s see what Mrs. LaRose is giving
out this year,” the bigger kid said. “Last year I reached into that
big cauldron on the porch and pulled out a roll of dimes. Five
bucks!”

“I only got a chocolate bar,” the
cowboy lamented.

“Everybody knows she puts the good
stuff at the bottom, Stan. I dare you to do it this year. Put your
arm all the way into the pot.”

Stan Lachey was not so eager.
“Something might happen to it. You don’t know this house like I do,
Kevin. I heard a kid went missing here last year. Somebody dared
him to go into the back yard and he’s never been seen alive since.
I’m not taking any dares, that’s for sure. A chocolate bar’s not so
bad. If that’s what’s on top.”

Stan pulled the string under his chin a
little tighter, ensuring his black faux-Stetson wouldn’t fall off.
His hand reached down to the toy gun in his plastic holster, like
he had seen many an officer do on COPS. It did little to comfort
him. Taking a deep breath as he gazed at the house, he wished he
had brought his inhaler. He could feel his chest tighten and wasn’t
sure if it was his asthma acting up or whether he was truly going
to be scared to death, right there on Maple Street.

“Don’t be such a wussie,” Kevin
complained. “If the story was true, the place would have been
crawling with cops. Mrs. LaRose would be in jail, not treating my
mom for her sciatica, whatever that is. I'm going up to the porch.
Remember last year she had that awesome scarecrow propped up in the
rocking chair? There was blood coming out of his nose and his ears
and white frothy stuff gagging out of his mouth—it was totally
wicked.”

Stan shuddered. He wasn’t much for
blood and gore. “Shut up Kevin. Maybe I’ll just give it a miss this
year.”

Stan’s older brother Ryan, who had been
casually observing the situation from his spot behind a hydro pole,
approached his younger sibling. Being sixteen and too old for trick
or treating, Ryan Lachey and his friend Tom Williams found
themselves babysitting Stan on the annual candy raid. It would only
take an hour or so, and besides, Ryan’s mom had slipped them a
twenty for their troubles. They weren’t quite sure how they had
gotten stuck with Kevin, but Kevin was an okay kid and Stan’s only
friend, so they had let it slide.

“We’ll use the money to get Old Man
Wagner to get us some beer,” Ryan assured Tom. “And we can prowl
for chicks while we’re out here. It’s like a job with benefits.
That’s how I see it.”

“Old Man Wagner’s a beer scalper,” Tom
complained. “That twenty will barely get us a six-pack if we ask
him to get it. He’ll make us throw in another five. He’s been
ripping us off all summer.”

“What are ya gonna do?” Ryan shrugged.
“No one else believes we’re twenty-one.”

“He doesn’t believe we’re twenty-one,”
Tom replied. “He just does it. He says he’s too old to worry about
jail, but not too old to make a buck or two. Cheap
bastard.”

It took a while for Tom’s assessment to
register with Ryan, and even then, Ryan didn’t want to believe
it.

“He’s okay though, for a guy who’s
almost dead,” he assured his friend. “My mom said he was a fucking
sly dude when he was younger. The cops were always hauling his ass
off for something. They ripped out his whole garden one summer in
the sixties, or so my granny told her.” He took an imaginary toke
and shrugged. “He probably figures—what the hell? Give the dudes
some brew. Tell you what, if my mom knew he bought us beer, he
would be fucking dead. So he’s okay by me. Even if he is a cheap
bastard.”