A Head Full of Ghosts Read online

  I zigzagged my way up the stairs, tapping the wall, then walking diagonally to tap the railing slats, while stepping on the black stairs as though they were the keys to a piano. On the first landing I said, “What’s that song?” On the second landing I said, “Stop humming. You’ll get it stuck in my head.”

  When I made it upstairs Marjorie was not in her bedroom, but was instead lounging in the small sunroom that overlooked the front yard. She was all folded up on the puffy loveseat and fiddling with her smartphone. She wore short red shorts and a black sports bra.

  She stopped humming after I crash landed in the sunroom. “What is that song? Ew, put a shirt on!”

  “What’s ew? Girls wear this out jogging or to the gym all the time.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t like it.” Giggling, I reached out and patted the pushed-up tops of her small breasts. I made boing-boing-boing noises, then said, “I don’t want boobs. Ever.”

  “Merry!” Marjorie pushed my hand away, crossed her arms over her chest, and laughed, really and truly laughed for the first time in days, maybe weeks. I melted into relief and the blindest love. She was Marjorie again, my Marjorie: the one who hid under a blanket with me during scary parts of movies; the one who punched neighbor Jimmy Matthews in the nose after he’d dropped a dead fly down the back of my shirt; the one who made fun of Mom and Dad and made me laugh hard enough to snort after they’d yelled at me and sent me to my room because I’d dented the rusty old garage doors with my penalty kicks.

  Marjorie said, “Well, sorry, monkey. Girls have boobs. You’ll be getting them in a few years.”

  “I’m getting those in a few years?” I mock-screamed, covered my chest with my hands, and said, “Gross, no way!”

  That made Marjorie laugh hard again. “Where did you come from? You’re such a little goon sometimes.”

  “I know.” I put my hands on one arm of the loveseat and jumped up and down, kicking my legs out behind me, dancing my little goon dance.

  I asked, “How was school?”

  “It was great. I didn’t go.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, you know, I’m not feeling well.”

  “What’s going to the sie-kie-a-trist like?” I carefully broke up the word into its parts so I wouldn’t make a mistake.

  Marjorie shrugged. “No biggie. He asks questions. I answer them like a good little girl. Then I leave the room and wait while he talks to Mom.”

  “Is he nice?”

  “He’s like wallpaper to me. Just there, you know?”

  I pictured the psychiatrist covered in the yellow wallpaper of our sunroom.

  I asked, “Why are you sitting in here?” Maybe Mom and Dad told her she couldn’t spend so much time alone in her room anymore.

  “No reason.”

  I thought about the holes in her bedroom wall and imagined them weeping dust and plaster. I didn’t blame her if she’d rather be in the sunroom.

  “Who are you texting?” I said it singsong. I said it like I knew the secrets of her teen life.

  “Ugh. Just some friends, okay?” She wasn’t looking at me anymore, but stared down at her phone’s glowing screen.

  “What friends? Do I know them? Do they have Boston accents? Do they like green M&M’s with peanuts inside?”

  “You can leave me alone now,” she said, but there wasn’t much oomph behind it. She wasn’t really annoyed or mad, not yet. Not even close. I could still push her.

  Trying to sound playful, I said, “This isn’t your room, you know. I can be in here too if I want.” Unlike her bedroom, or mine for that matter, the small sunroom felt like a safe place with its bright natural light amplified by the cheery yellow walls and its simple, cozy rectangular shape. No closets or beds or cardboard houses; no shadows and no places to hide. Here, in this neutral space, we were equals.

  I asked, “Are you texting Father Wanderly?”

  Her head snapped up, and everything in her face furrowed, folded, or curled, skin turning inside-out to reveal a totally transformed and snarling face. My little goon dance died and I let go of the arm of the loveseat.

  Marjorie sighed heavily, as though she was the adult here. “Really, Merry, you don’t know anything. Stop pretending you do.”

  “I do know things. I just heard Mom and Dad fighting about him and about you. They’re still arguing right now, in the kitchen. Oh, Mom is so mad at Dad. You should hear her. Swearing and everything.” I stopped talking, but I didn’t really stop because my mouth kept moving, lips worming around silent words of self-affirmation: I really heard them. I did.

  “You’re doing the mouth thing again. Stop it. You’re not a baby anymore.”

  When I was a preschooler, I moved my mouth after I finished talking. Mom thought it was cute. Dad said my mouth just couldn’t keep up with everything that I had to say. Marjorie would speak half sentences and then mouth the rest at me. I knew she was only making fun of me but I would still focus on her moving lips, hoping that she was unknowingly giving away instructions on how to be a proper big girl. I used to overturn the wastebasket in the upstairs bathroom so I could stand on it, look in the mirror, and practice speaking, or practice stopping to speak without my lips stubbornly fighting for their phantom last words.

  I thought I’d grown out of it. Horrified that my mouth had gone rogue again, I said, “I know. Sorry.”

  “I don’t know what you heard Dad say, but I didn’t talk to the creepy old priest, okay? I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even say ‘hi’ to him. He and Dad did all the talking and the stupid praying, and I just sat there in the car. I totally ignored them.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Our fun sunroom sister-time had deteriorated quickly into crumbling pieces so obvious and so there, just like the imperfections of the curling and stained yellow wallpaper on the sunroom walls were there if you looked long and hard enough.

  “Shut up, Merry. And you better start minding your own business.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Stop talking for one goddamn second. Listen.” She didn’t lean forward, she didn’t move her body at all. Her posture remained relaxed with the phone in her hand and she sounded so matter-of-fact, which made it all worse. “I know you told Mom about our new stories, about the growing things. And what was that shit you made up about the growing things taking over the soccer field? I didn’t say anything about that.”

  I slumped and shrugged at the same time. “I’m sorry.” I fought to keep my lips still, to keep from saying or not saying You shouldn’t swear, Marjorie. I don’t think she ever realized or appreciated all the little things I tried to do for her.

  “Mom told Dr. Hamilton everything you told her, you know. Now he wants to up my meds, turn me into a fucking zombie.”

  “I’m sorry! Please don’t use those words. Marjorie—”

  “Stop it! Just stop it! Listen to me. You tell on me to Mom again I’ll rip your fucking tongue out.”

  I jumped backward and crashed into the wall behind me as though she’d struck me with a fist. We’d play-fought all the time. I practically used to go begging for her older sibling abuse as her ignoring me, her not caring that I existed within her vast universe would’ve killed me. I was the compliant recipient of a fair share of dope slaps, dead arms and dead legs, wrist burns, finger flicks, crow pinches, monkey bites, and twisted clam-ears, with maybe the worst being ponytail rodeo, but she never really hurt me. She’d never before threatened to really hurt me, either.

  Marjorie kept texting, fingers crawling over the phone’s keyboard screen while she talked at the same time. “I’ll wait until you’re asleep because you never wake up when I’m there. I’m in your room every night, Merry. It’s so easy.”

  I imagined her standing over my bed, pinching my nose shut, drawing on my hand, hovering her face close to mine, breathing my breaths.

  “Maybe the next time I’m there I’ll reach into to your mouth with pliers, no, wait, I’ll just use my fingers, clamp the
m up real tight, turn my hand into a claw, and I’ll pinch that fat, wriggling worm between my fingers and tear it right out of your skull, as easy as pulling dandelions out of the ground. It’ll hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt before. You’ll wake up moaning around my hand, choking on blood, and seeing white stars of pain literally exploding in your head. And there’ll be so much blood. You never realize how much blood there can be.”

  Even knowing what I know now, I’ll never forgive Marjorie for what she said to me then, and I’ll never forgive myself for staying in the sunroom and taking it all. I just stood there.

  “I’ll keep your tongue and put it on a string, wear it like a necklace, keep it close against my chest, let it taste my skin until it turns black and shrivels up like all dead things do. What an amazing fucking thought that is: your never-ending tongue shrunken and finally stilled.”

  She kept talking and she kept talking. I thought she would never stop. Standing there, I felt the sun pour through the windows, setting and rising on my back. The sunroom had become a sundial measuring the geological age of my psychological torture.

  “And your mouth, stupidly opening and closing, gaping like a fish drunk on too much air. You’d feel that loss. You’d learn the oldest lesson there is. The lesson of loss. We all learn it eventually. You’d feel that ragged stub of flesh cowering and hiding down by your molars. Or maybe your stupid flesh won’t have learned anything and it’ll wiggle and stretch toward the vowels and consonants forever out of reach.”

  I stood there as still and as silent as if my tongue had already been extracted.

  “The flooding black river of blood will be the only thing to ever pour out of your mouth again. No more words. No one will listen to you. That’s the worst part, Merry. You will not be able to speak ever again, which means you will never be able to tell anyone about what will happen next to you and everyone else in this house. All the awful, terrible, unspeakable shit that will happen to you, and it will happen to you, and to everyone else. . . . I know. I’ve heard about it and I’ve seen it. No one escapes.”

  Marjorie finally stopped talking and texting. She gently placed her phone on the side table and folded her hands in her lap.

  Wide-eyed, I stood up, my back against the wall, and sobbed into my hands that bravely cupped my mouth.

  Marjorie sighed again. “Oh, come on, I’m just kidding, Merry. Jeez. I would never do that to you. You know that, right?”

  That made me cry harder, because I didn’t know that. Not anymore.

  “Okay, that was a mean joke, I know, but it wasn’t that bad. Come here.” Marjorie pulled out of her slouch, sat up, and patted an open section of the loveseat.

  I stayed where I was, shaking my head. The sunlight flashed brighter outside and we both had to squint.

  “Please, Merry. I am sorry.”

  Still crying the kind of tears that don’t fall right away but instead build a wall on the lower lid, making everything blurry, I sidled over and sat down with my back to her, like I was supposed to.

  Marjorie drew a capital letter between my shoulder blades with her finger. “Guess the letter.”

  “M.” I was uncannily good at the back-letter-drawing game. Even in a state of emotional cataclysm.

  “I shouldn’t have said all that stuff to you, but I was very upset that you told Mom on me. I thought we were sisters, and that we had secrets.”

  “E.”

  “How would you like it if I told Mom you came up here pawing my boobs, feeling me up?”

  “H?” It wasn’t H. I was flustered. I didn’t know what she meant by feeling her up, but I knew her telling Mom about it wouldn’t be good.

  “No.” She drew the letter on my back again, moving slower, adding more pressure.

  “R.”

  “Yes. What if I told Mom that you were teasing me, spying on me, following me around, generally making me crazy? I know she told you that you’re supposed to be nice to me, to help out.”

  “R. I’m sorry about your boobs. Please don’t tell Mom on me.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

  “Okay. Y. Merry.” She’d written an easy word on my back to calm me down. It worked. I wasn’t crying anymore, but my eyes felt heavier than ever.

  “Then we have a deal, Miss Merry.” Marjorie rubbed her hand over my back, like a teacher erasing a blackboard, and she started writing again.

  “G.”

  “So, that song you heard me humming, it just sort of popped into my head.”

  “L.”

  The song. The reason why I’d come up the stairs. Marjorie hummed it again. It sounded even sadder up close.

  “O and O. Did you make it up?”

  “Yes and yes and no! It’s a real song.”

  “M.”

  “Mom and Dad don’t listen to it. I know I haven’t heard it anywhere. Like I said, and just like the stories, I woke up one morning and it was just sitting there in my head.”

  “Y.”

  “It sounds so sad, doesn’t it? Like a song about the saddest day ever.”

  “S.”

  “But when I hum it, it tickles something behind my throat, and it feels sort of good.”

  “V?”

  “Not V. Sometimes it’s good to be sad, Merry. Don’t forget that.”

  Marjorie didn’t repeat the letter I’d missed, but moved on to a new one. The new letter had two slow vertical lines that walked up and then down the length of my back, and one hard diagonal slash to connect them.

  “N.”

  “Yes. It’s weird, but I even know the lyrics too.”

  “D. Sing it.” I only asked her to sing the words because I knew she wanted me to ask. I didn’t really want to hear the words. I was afraid that if she sang it, it’d be about a sister stealing another sister’s tongue.

  “I don’t feel like singing the lyrics. I like humming it.”

  “A.”

  “I like keeping the words to myself.”

  “Y.”

  “You wouldn’t like the lyrics, anyway.” She stopped drawing on my back. “So I’ll just keep humming it. Maybe, I’ll hum it to you in your sleep.”

  “Marjorie!”

  She laughed and tickled my armpits. I didn’t laugh; I gave her a quick, high-pitched whine and a snort. “Stop!”

  “Stay there. Don’t move.” She hummed the song as she stood up on the loveseat. I bounced around the cushion as she shifted and adjusted her balance. She swayed over my head like the branches of a willow tree in a storm. I felt the weight of the song; its minor key squeezing the air out of my chest.

  Marjorie jumped off, flying above my head. I ducked and rolled back into the loveseat cushions as her shadow passed over me. She landed loudly, and her knees buckled, pitching her almost straight into a window.

  Somewhere down below us my father shouted, “What the hell was that?”

  Marjorie said, “My dismount needs work. Practice makes perfect, right?” She pinched my belly, and then ran out of the room and into her bedroom with me yelling, “Stop it!” after her.

  Marjorie still hummed the song in her room. I sat, listening, and then I hummed along with that simple but heartbreaking melody. I dangled a foot in one of the sunroom’s fading sunbeams. I wondered if I would still be able to hum the song when I didn’t have a tongue. I decided that I would.

  CHAPTER 12

  ON OUR TV show, the following is presented as a dramatic reenactment and as the penultimate piece of evidence regarding Marjorie being possessed by an evil spirit. The reenactment is a raw and undeniably effective set piece full of disorienting jump cuts, an ominous if not over-the-top voice-over narrative, and what I have to assume were some low-level CGI special effects along with digitally altered/enhanced sound.

  In the scene, the Barrett-family actors lounge in the living room, watching Finding Bigfoot. Everyone in the room happily watches some pseudoscientist bellow his Bigfoot call into a night-vision-enhanced forest. Actor-Mom (plain,
dash of freckles, very pretty, even for TV) and Actor-Dad (too heavy and too old to be our dad, and his beard was as patchy as a summer-burnt lawn) sit next to each other on the couch, each wearing button-down shirts and wrinkle-free pants. Both Barrett children actors are on the floor, lying on their stomachs, cheeks in fists, feet dangling in the air, heels knocking into each other. This twenty-first-century Rockwell scene of quaint familial tranquility quickly devolves when Actor-Dad asks, “So how did school go today?” The ensuing tornado is not to be contained to the living room, but instead cuts a swath through the house, until everything finally culminates and crashes in Marjorie’s bedroom.

  It just didn’t happen that way. But, I must admit that I was once obsessed with the show Finding Bigfoot and would insist that everyone in the family watch the show with me. I’d also have playful arguments all the time with Dad about the existence or nonexistence of Bigfoot. I was the believer and he was not. The unspoken ground rule of our ongoing debate was that neither of us was ever going to change our minds. I was fervent in my belief that the mythical beast was real and I would practically spit on any suggestions to the contrary. While I know he enjoyed the give-and-take, Dad remained coolly rational and scientific in his approach to our arguments. Using the Socratic method of Sasquatch debunking, he’d ask me questions, thinking I’d eventually hit upon the truth. His go-to question—particularly when I’d filibustered my way through previous questions about population density or evolution or ecosystem sustainability—was why had no one ever found the body of a dead Bigfoot? Well, of course it was because they buried their dead and buried them in secret, sacred places. Duh, Dad.

  I don’t remember us being in the living room that night watching Finding Bigfoot, nor do I remember the incident happening there. However, I could be misremembering. Maybe how our TV show presented the living room scene was, save a few dramatic embellishments, how it actually happened. The writers and producers contractually consulted Mom and Dad, and consulted them extensively. Maybe the show relied on Marjorie and whatever it was she told them during their numerous interviews. To my recollection, no one asked me about that night. It’s possible that night was such a traumatic experience that I’ve blocked it, or have somehow conflated the general unreality of our show with what actually happened.