The Grownup (3 page)

“I can help you,” I said.

“Let me give you the whole tour,” she replied.

We walked down the long, narrow hall. The house was naturally dark. You moved away from a window and the gloom descended. Susan flipped on lights as we walked.

“Miles turns them off,” she said. “Then I turn them back on. When I ask him to keep them on, he pretends he has no idea what I’m talking about. Here’s our den,” she said. She opened a door to reveal a cavernous room with a fireplace and wall-to-wall bookshelves.

“It’s a
library,
” I gasped. They had to own a thousand books, easy. Thick, impressive, smart-people books. How do you keep a thousand books in one room and then call the room a den?

I stepped inside. I shivered dramatically. “Do you feel this? Do you feel the…heaviness here?”

“I hate this room.” She nodded.

“I’ll need to pay extra attention to this room,” I said. I’d park myself in it for an hour at a time and just read, read whatever I wanted.

We went back into the hall, which was now dark again. Susan sighed and began flipping on lights. I could hear a patter of feet upstairs, running manically up and down the hallway. We passed a closed door to my right. Susan knocked at it—
Jack, it’s me.
A shuffle of a chair being pushed back, a snick of a lock, and then the door was opened by another child, younger than Miles by several years. He looked like his mother. He smiled at Susan like he hadn’t seen her in a year.

“Hi, Momma,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her. “I missed you.”

“This is Jack, he’s seven,” she said. She ruffled his hair.

“Momma has to go do a little work with her friend here,” Susan said, kneeling to his eye level. “Finish your reading and then I’ll make a snack.”

“Do I lock the door?” Jack asked.

“Yes, always lock your door, sweetheart.”

We started walking again as we heard the snick of the lock behind us.

“Why the lock?”

“Miles doesn’t like his brother.”

She must have felt my frown: No teenager likes his kid brother.

“You should see what Miles did to the babysitter he didn’t like. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have money. Medical bills.” She turned to me sharply. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t…major. Possibly an accident. I don’t know anymore, actually. Maybe I am just goddam crazy.”

Her laugh was raw. She swiped at an eye.

We walked to the end of the hallway, where another door was locked.

“I’d show you Miles’s room, but I don’t have a key,” she said simply. “Also, I’m too scared.”

She forced another laugh. It wasn’t convincing; it didn’t have enough energy to even pose as a laugh. We went up to the next floor, which was a series of rooms, wallpapered and painted, with fine-boned Victorian furniture arranged haphazardly. One room held only a litterbox. “For our cat, Wilkie,” Susan said. “Luckiest cat in the world: his own room for his own crap.”

“You’ll find a use for the space.”

“He’s actually a sweet cat,” she said. “Almost twenty years old.”

I smiled like that was interesting and good.

“We obviously have more room than we need,” Susan said. “I think we thought, there might be another…maybe adopt, but I wouldn’t bring another child into this house. So instead we live in a very expensive storage facility. My husband does like his antiques.” I could picture him, this uptight, snooty husband. A man who bought antiques but didn’t find them himself. Probably had some classy decorator woman in horn-rims doing the actual work. She probably bought those books for him too. I heard you could do that—buy books by the yard, turn them into furniture. People are dumb. I’ll never get over how dumb people are.

We climbed some more. The top floor was just a large attic space with a few old steamer trunks all along the walls.

“Aren’t the trunks stupid?” she whispered. “He says it gives the place a little authenticity. He didn’t like the renovation.”

So the house had been a compromise: The husband wanted vintage, Susan wanted new, so they thought this outside/inside split might settle things. But the Burkes ended up more resentful than satisfied. Millions of dollars later, and neither of them were happy. Money is wasted on the rich.

We went down the back stairs, cramped and dizzying, like an animal’s burrow, and ended up in the gaping, gleaming modern kitchen.

Miles sat at the kitchen island, waiting. Susan started when she saw him.

He was small for his age. Pale face and pointy chin, and black eyes that reflected twitchily, like a spider’s. Assessing.
Extremely bright but hates school,
I thought.
Never gets enough attention—even if he got all of Susan’s attention it still wouldn’t be enough. Mean-spirited. Self-centered.

“Hi, Momma,” he said. His face was transformed, a bright, goofy smile cracking through it. “I missed you.”
Sweet-natured, loving Jack.
He was doing a perfect version of his little brother. Miles went to hug Susan, and as he walked, he assumed Jack’s slump-shouldered, childish posture. He wrapped his arms around her, nuzzled into her. Susan watched me over his head, her cheeks flush, her lips tight as if she smelled something nasty. Miles gazed up at her. “Why won’t you hug me?”

She gave him a brief hug. Miles released her as if he were scalded.

“I heard what you told her,” he said. “About Jack. About the babysitter. About everything. You’re such a bitch.”

Susan flinched. Miles turned to me.

“I really hope you leave and don’t come back. For your own good.” He smiled at both of us. “This is a family matter. Don’t you think, Momma?”

Then he was clattering in his heavy leather shoes up the back stairway again, leaning heavily forward. He did scuttle as if he bore an insect’s shell, shiny and hard.

Susan looked at the floor, took a breath, and looked up. “I want your help.”

“What does your husband say about all this?”

“We don’t talk about it. Miles is his kid. He’s protective. Anytime I say anything remotely critical, he says I’m crazy. He says I’m crazy a lot. A haunted house. Maybe I am. Anyway, he travels all the time; he won’t even know you’re here.”

“I can help you,” I said. “Shall we talk pricing very quickly?”

She agreed to the money, but not the timeline: “I can’t wait a year for Miles to get better; he may kill us all before then.” She gave that desperate burp of a laugh. I agreed to come twice a week.

Mostly I came during the day, when the kids were at school and Susan was at work. I did cleanse the house, in that I washed it. I lit my sage and sprinkled my sea salt. I boiled my lavender and rosemary, and I wiped down that house, walls and floors. And then I sat in the library and read. Also, I nosed around. I could find a zillion photos of grinning-sunshine Jack, a few old ones of pouty Miles, a couple of somber Susan and none of her husband. I felt sorry for Susan. An angry stepson and a husband who was always away, no wonder she let her mind go to dark places.

And yet. And yet, I felt it too: the house. Not necessarily malevolent, but…mindful. I could feel it studying me, does that makes sense? It crowded me. One day, I was wiping down the floorboards, and suffered a sudden, slicing pain in my middle finger—as if I’d been bitten—and when I pulled it away, I was bleeding. I wrapped my finger tightly in one of my spare rags and watched the blood seep through. And I felt like something in the house was pleased.

I began dreading. I made myself fight the dread.
You are the one who made this whole thing up,
I told myself.
So cut it out.

Six weeks in, and I was boiling my lavender in the kitchen one morning—Susan off to work, the kids at school—when I felt a presence behind me. I turned to find Miles in his school uniform, examining me, a small smirk on his face. He was holding my copy of
The Turn of the Screw.

“You like ghost stories?” He smiled.

He’d been through my purse.

“Why are you at home, Miles?”

“I’ve been studying you. You’re interesting. You know something bad is going to happen, right? I’m curious.”

He moved closer, I moved away. He stood next to the pot of boiling water. His cheeks flushed from the heat.

“I’m trying to help, Miles.”

“But you agree? You feel it? Evil?”

“I feel it.”

He stared into the pot of water. Traced a finger on its edge, then snatched the finger away, pink. He assessed me with his shining black spider eyes.

“You don’t look how I thought you’d look. Up close. I thought you’d be…
sexy.
” He said the word ironically, and I knew what he meant: Halloween fortune-teller sexy. Lip gloss and big hair and hoop earrings. “You look like a babysitter.”

I stepped farther back from him. He hurt the last babysitter.

“Are you trying to scare me, Miles?”

I wished I could reach the stove, turn off the burner.

“I’m trying to help you,” he said reasonably. “I don’t want you around her. If you come back, you will die. I don’t want to say more than that. But I’ve warned you.”

He turned away and left the room. When I heard him hit the front stairs, I poured the scalding water down the drain, then ran to the dining room to grab my purse, my keys. I needed to leave. When I picked up my purse, a foul, sweet heat hit my nostrils. He’d vomited inside—all over my keys and wallet and phone. I couldn’t bear to pick up the keys, touch that sickness.

Susan banged through the door, frantic.

“Is he here? Are you OK?” she said. “School called, said Miles never showed. He must have walked in the front door and straight out the back. He doesn’t like it that you’re here. Did he say anything to you?”

A loud smash came from upstairs. A wail. We ran up the stairs. In the hallway, hanging from a ceiling hook, was a tiny, primitive figure made of cloth. A face drawn in magic marker. A noose made from red thread. Screaming came from Miles’s room at the end of the hall.
Nonoooooooo, you bitch, you bitch!

We stood outside the door.

“Do you want to talk to him?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

She turned back down the hall in tears. Plucked the figure from the light fixture.

“I thought this was me at first,” Susan said, handing it to me. “But I don’t have brown hair.”

“I think it’s me,” I said.

“I’m so tired of being afraid,” she murmured.

“I know.”

“You don’t,” she said. “But you will.”

Susan went to her room. I went to work. I swear I worked. I washed the house—every inch of wall and floor—with rosemary and lavender. I smudged the sage and said my magical words that were gibberish as Miles screamed and Susan cried in the rooms above me. Then I dumped everything from my vomit-smeared purse into the kitchen sink and ran water over it until it was clean.

As I was unlocking my car in the dusk, an older woman, well powdered and plump-cheeked, called out to me from down the block. She scurried over in the mist, a little smile on her face.

“I just want to thank you for what you are doing for this family,” she said. “For helping little Miles. Thank you.” And then she put her fingers to her lips and pantomimed locking them, and scurried away again before I could tell her I was doing absolutely nothing to help this family.

A week later, as I was killing time in my tiny apartment (one bedroom, fourteen books), I noticed something new. A stain, like a rusty tidal pool on the wall by my bed. It reminded me of my mother. Of my old life. All the transactions—this for that, that for this—and none of it had made any difference until now. Once the transaction was complete, my mind was a blank, awaiting the next transaction. But Susan Burke and her family, they stuck with me. Susan Burke and her family and that house.

I opened up my ancient laptop and did a search: Patrick Carterhook. A whir and a grind and finally up came a link to an article from a university English Department: Victorian True Crime: The Grisly Tale of the Patrick Carterhook Family.

The year is 1893, and department-store magnate Patrick Carterhook moves into his splendid Gilded Age mansion in the heart of the city with his lovely wife, Margaret, and their two sons, Robert and Chester. Robert was a troubled boy, much given to bullying schoolmates and harming neighborhood pets. At age twelve, he burnt down one of his father’s warehouses and remained on scene to watch the wreckage. He endlessly tormented his quiet younger brother. By age fourteen, Robert proved unable to control himself. The Carterhooks chose to keep him away from society: In 1895 they locked him inside the mansion. He was never again to set foot outdoors. Robert steadily grew more violent in his gloomy, gilded prison. He smeared his family’s belongings with his own excrement and vomit. A nursemaid was sent to the hospital with unexplained bruises; she never returned. The cook, too, fled one winter morning. Rumors had it that she’d suffered third-degree burns from boiling water in a “kitchen mishap.”

No one knows exactly what went on in that house the night of January 7, 1897, but the bloody results are indisputable. Patrick Carterhook was discovered stabbed to death in his bed; his body was pocked with 117 knife wounds. Patrick’s wife, Margaret, was found struck down by an ax—still in her back—as she was fleeing up the stairs to the attic, and young Chester, age ten, was found drowned in a bathtub. Robert hanged himself from a beam in his room. He had apparently dressed up for the occasion: he wore a blue Sunday suit, covered in his parents’ blood. It was still wet from drowning his little brother.

Beneath the story was a blurry ancient photo of the Carterhooks. Four formal unsmiling faces peering out from layers of Victorian ruffles. A slender man in his forties with an artfully pointed beard; a blond, petite woman with sad, piercing eyes so light they looked white. Two boys, the younger blond like his mother; the elder dark-haired, black-eyed with a slight smirk and his head tilted at a knowing angle. Miles. The elder boy looked like Miles. Not a perfect match, but the essence was exact: the smugness, the superiority, the threat.

Miles.

If you remove the bloody floorboards and water-stained tiles; if you destroy the beams that held Robert Carterhook’s body, and you tear down the walls that absorbed the screams, do you take down the house? Can it be haunted if the actual guts—its internal organs—have been removed? Or does the nastiness linger in the air? That night I dreamt of a small figure opening the door to Susan’s room, creeping across the floor as she slept, and standing calmly over her with a gleaming butcher knife borrowed from her million-dollar kitchen. The room smelled of sage and lavender.