Giving Up the Ghost (8 page)

He left behind a young daughter.

Kiss Junior was not listed on his resume.

“Eric?”

“What?”

“Spider.”

Giggling.

I’m not sure how that spider joke started. I’m not even sure it counts as a joke. It was just one of those things between brothers that’s kind of funny the first time it happens. It was probably a practical joke—saying “spider” to someone (implying that there’s a spider on or near him), then watching him go into a freak-out spasm, brushing and swatting to get rid of the nonexistent spider. Since so few things that little boys say are legitimately funny, you work with the material you have, repeating it over and over again, laughing even though you aren’t sure why it’s funny anymore.

In addition to “spider,” my brother and I regularly cracked each other up with other comedy gold mines, like farting in the sleeping dog’s face, imitating Mr. Hendler next door, and pretending to be scared by the noises coming from the attic.

We’d notice them every few weeks. Basically, it was just a loud thud coming from upstairs. Whenever we’d hear one, we’d look at each other with mock terror.

“Michael?”

“What?”

“It’s a ghost!”

Then we’d both put our hands up to our faces and pretend to scream.

Hilarious.

We noticed the thuds shortly after we moved into the house and never gave them much thought. It was an old house; it made lots of noises. At first, we assumed it was our cat, who loved to climb on top of tall furniture, then leap to the floor and run away. Eventually I started noticing the thuds occurring when the cat was sitting in the same room with us.

Around that time, I started taking the bus back and forth to junior high. Our bus driver always liked to keep us guessing. He seemed to change his route and stop order almost daily. We’d never be certain from which direction he’d arrive or at what time.

This resulted in a lot of downtime, during which I would stand with an assortment of kids from my neighborhood, trying to guess when our shifty bus driver would arrive. The inevitable boredom of standing around waiting usually resulted in one of two things happening: (a) some of the kids would start teasing me about something; or (b) I would make some kind of desperate attempt to entertain them in order to divert their attention. This was a lot of pressure—always having some conversation topics or jokes ready to go and having no idea when the bus would arrive to keep them from turning on me. Sometimes I even brought candy or some show-and-tell-type item.

One morning a kid named Jason walked up to me and asked if I was retarded.

“Pardon me?”

“Are you a retard?” he asked. Some of the other kids were starting to gather around us. I gritted my teeth. I knew what was coming.

“No, I’m not retarded,” I said.

“Well, you look like a retard,” countered Jason. “You act like a retard, too.”

I already knew the futility of trying to argue about subjects like suggested retardation. It was just impossible to win.

“I guess I’m whatever you want to see,” I said. “I guess I’m like a TV.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I guess I’m like a TV,” I repeated. “You can see whatever you want on TV. If you don’t like it, you can just change the channel.”

“Only a retard would think they were a TV,” Jason offered.

“No, here,” I said, placing my hand in front of him, palm upward. “Here is my remote control,” I said, gesturing to my empty hand.

“You
are
retarded!” Jason exclaimed.

“No, here,” I said, pantomiming reaching for an invisible remote and then offering it to Jason with my other hand. “Here, take it,” I said.

Jason cautiously put his hand forward to receive my invisible remote.

“Now press the channel button,” I said.

Jason just huffed as the other kids silently watched.

“Press the channel button,” I repeated.

Jason made an unnecessarily dramatic pressing gesture with his finger. I jerked forward and pretended to be a newscaster delivering news.

Jason pressed it again.

I changed into a sportscaster announcing a baseball game.

Jason pressed again.

I was a soldier fighting to save his buddies on the battlefield.

Jason kept clicking and I kept changing.

In my mind, the other kids would bust out laughing and find every character more hilarious than the last. But none of them laughed. Actually, none of them did anything. They just stood there, mouths open, watching me. I prayed that the bus would finally show up and save me from this. It seemed like it was never coming. Jason just kept clicking and I kept changing: Mork from Ork, then a damsel crying over a fallen lover, then Fred Astaire dancing and singing in the rain.

“Hey, man, see if it has a Pause button,” one kid shouted.

“Sure it does,” Jason said. “Right here.”

He pantomimed one final button press—and I froze.

And stayed frozen.

The kids started laughing.

I could hear the bus pulling up behind me. The kids lost interest in me and started to line up. I stayed frozen.

After all the other kids got on the bus, the driver looked down at me and squinted.

“Hey, quit jerking around and get on,” he called out.

I stood frozen. I was in pause.

Even though I could feel everyone staring at me and hear them giggle and laugh, being frozen felt good. It felt like there was a barrier between me and them. It was like I had a protective shell between my feelings and the things that hurt them.

I guess the right thing to do would have been to listen to the driver and get on the bus, but being frozen felt so peaceful. I knew I’d never hear the end of it, but I just kept standing there.

“If you don’t get on this bus this minute, I’m going to leave you here, I swear,” the bus driver yelled. The kids on the bus grew silent.

I just stood there.

“Fine, I’m sure they’ll send Mr. Barnes down here for you when they hear about this.”

With that, he drove away.

I continued to stand frozen for some time after the bus left. I knew the school would never send Mr. Barnes out for me. They had a schoolful of other things to worry about. After a few cars drove by and asked me if I needed any help—then quickly drove away when I didn’t move—I got tired of being there and started walking home. I eventually called my mom at work and told her I threw up on the way to the bus stop and needed to stay home sick. I spent the day sitting in my room, periodically picking up an invisible remote control, pointing it at myself, and going into pause for a while.

It was around this time that my grandmother died; I was just past my thirteenth birthday. We always called my mother’s mother Bobalu. She was the anchor of our family. Despite a sometimes difficult life, she was a happy person. She could have a conversation with just about anyone. She also smoked like a chimney, suffering through a few heart attacks and lung cancer before she died at sixty-two.

I’d never experienced anyone dying before. When we first got word that she’d passed away, I wasn’t immediately sad or in shock or even that upset. I was curious. The rituals of death and funerals and mourning were foreign to me, and fascinating. Everyone in my family, which was normally so happy together, was suddenly sad and crying. I asked tons of questions
and wanted to know everything. What would her coffin be made of? Where were they keeping her body? Would she look different dead than she did when she was alive?

When the day of her calling hours arrived, I walked into the funeral parlor, took one look at Bobalu’s casket, and completely lost it. The casket was closed, so it wasn’t like I saw her remains. I saw a box. On the inside of that box was my grandmother’s body. Her death suddenly stopped being a curiosity and smacked me right in the gut.

In the following days and weeks, I became obsessed with thinking about what happened to Bobalu when she died. I came to believe that she went to heaven because she was such a good person. When she got there, God answered all her questions about her life. As a result, Bobalu no longer knew me as the bright, near-flawless grandson with unlimited potential. She saw me as I really was. She now knew the frustrations and disappointments. She also knew about my growing disconnection from the world. In death, Bobalu knew everything. She knew the truth.

One night a few months after the funeral, I was sitting in my bedroom when I heard one of the thuds. Not a distant thud, like something outside the house. It sounded close, like something heavy and thick hitting the attic floor directly above me.

I ran out of my room and up the attic stairs at the end of the hallway. When I got to the top, I could see moonlight coming through the windows of our playroom, one of the two attic rooms. While it was normal for toys to be strewn over the room, nothing seemed particularly out of place. There was nothing big on the shelves, so nothing could have fallen to make the noise I heard.

Without turning on any lights, I turned toward the door to
the room in the back of the attic. As soon as I looked at the door, I was overwhelmed with panic. I felt like I was stuck underwater and couldn’t breathe. We’d lived in that house for a few years by that point, and I’d never given that door or that room a second thought. Now the sight of it left me unable to move or even consider turning on a light, let alone try to find out what was on the other side. It just felt like something was present in that room that had never been there before. Something I wanted nothing to do with.

Then I started to wonder if whatever was in that room had come over into the playroom and pounded on the floor, summoning me, knowing that I was right underneath, knowing I would come upstairs to investigate. Now it was in the room across the hall, waiting for me to come to it, or to come after me.

I stood there in the dark, not sure what to do. Going back downstairs meant walking right by that door, easily within arm’s length of whatever was on the other side. Eventually I mustered up the courage to run back downstairs to my room and sit with my heart pounding in my throat. For the rest of that night, any noise I heard was evidence that whoever or whatever was up there might be coming downstairs.

For a long time afterward, I would do anything to avoid going up there. I’d swap chores with Michael, find an alternative to whatever was stored up there, not play with certain toys. Anything to not be in the attic, especially at night.

Eventually, I had to go up for some reason or another. I was nervous but felt nothing even remotely similar to what I experienced that first night. In fact, it felt so confusingly unscary that I ended up exploring the entire attic—each room, closet, and crawlspace. I was fine.

But every so often I’d be up there and I’d get that feeling.
It was like being surrounded by something you felt sure was there but wasn’t. I could feel all the warmth drain out of the room, then an abrupt and extreme sense of danger. My heart and mind would both race, I’d start to hyperventilate, and everything would suddenly go out of control. It always happened when I was looking at the closed door to the spare room, and always when I was alone. I would be overcome with fear, drop whatever I was doing, and run.

I can’t tell you when the dreams started exactly. Or why they started. Around the time I entered my teens, they just suddenly became part of my life.

Standing in the woods. Then the clearing. Then the picnic table. Then the people, including the guy in the cheap wolf costume pointing to the other side. Then the second path.

Then Her.

She is probably eight to ten years old. She has straight blond hair that goes a few inches past Her shoulders. She wears a simple powder-blue dress with no ornamentation or frills. She is dripping wet. Her cheeks are a little hollow, but otherwise She looks perfectly fine. Our eyes lock as soon as I see Her. She doesn’t look sick or dead or particularly stressed about anything—until I get close.

Then She starts talking in something that sounds like gibberish or an evangelist’s prayer tongue. The closer I get, the louder and more agitated She becomes. It’s like She’s scared of me; She doesn’t look angry. It’s almost like She thinks our time together is running out and She becomes more and more desperate to connect, for me to understand what She’s saying. Except for Her eyes—empty, dark, and still. Then, when I’m close enough that I could almost reach out and touch Her, She starts to shout at me.

Then it’s over.

I’d wake up in an absolute panic. My heart was racing and about to push itself out of my chest. I’d bolt up and scan the dark room for any sign of Her. Then I’d spend hours trying to calm myself down to the point where I could sleep again. I’d tell myself anything, just to feel safe closing my eyes, even for a moment.

Sometimes the dreams would occur in the standard order. Sometimes the scenes were mixed up or I’d just see a few fragments and not the whole thing. I remember a few occasions when I’d only see an image—the wolf guy, or Her standing there speaking Her gibberish. Regardless, they all ended exactly the same way—with me sitting upright in bed, breathing hard and fast, disoriented, scanning the darkness for Her, convinced She had finally come for me.

Those who’ve heard the story of these dreams have all asked the same question: What is so scary about a little girl?

You see, that’s always been the rub. There is nothing inherently scary about a little girl.

Which is exactly why She was so terrifying to me.

It wasn’t what I knew about Her or the dreams that frightened me; it was what I didn’t know.

The unknowns about the Little Girl in a Blue Dress felt like puzzles or enigmas or mysteries to be solved. Like, why was She wet? Was She sweating? Had She been in water?

Who were the people sitting around the table? I didn’t recognize any of them. They all seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties. Nothing about them rang a bell. Nor did I have any clue where the cheap wolf costume came from.

And what was with the gibberish? You’d think that someone motivated enough to come back from the dead, bang around my parents’ attic, and worm Her way into my dreams
would have figured out how to deliver the message. A million times I’ve thought about what I remember Her saying, to see if there is even a pattern or anything that sticks out. To be honest, I’m not even sure She repeated the same thing—it could have been different every time.