A Day In the Life of a Haunted Girl
By Abigail Leskey
My parents bought this house because they couldn’t put up with my having anxiety attacks in the middle of their sermons. The sermons didn’t cause the attacks. But they didn’t stop them. At home I can have them alone, instead of in the middle of a melange of charismatic Christians and people who may become more of those.
Unfortunately, even in swampy Maine woods, in a frog-guarded, ramshackle brown clapboard camp-house on a rutted mud road (my parents are poor), even when my parents are gone for weeks, I am nothaving my anxiety attacks alone. The house is haunted.
But it isn’t when they’re here, Mom singing praise choruses and cooking mini franks in the crockpot, Dad passionately weed-whipping and watching Bonanzatwo clicks louder than I wish he would. They say I am afraid because I have anxiety. They say I hear footsteps for the same reasons as I feel traces of grime on dishes they think are clean enough. They say I think the door opened itself for the same reasons I think I cannot touch the handle of the back door because Dad touches it after touching the trash.
But I’ve read up on OCD, and thinking your house is haunted isn’t one of the symptoms.
It is three AM, and they just drove away. They’re going to drive all day, and then preach in Ohio tomorrow. They’ll be back in time for Dad to fill in at our home church this Sunday.
I wave until they have bounced away through the mud, and then sit down on the porch steps and pull my hoodie strings so the front of the hood becomes a small hole, so mosquitoes cannot bite my ears physically as well as sonically. I do not want to go into the haunted house, even though the light in the living room is on.
The small light left of the door is on too, and every type of insect that lives in Maine is flying around it. Blackflies, mosquitoes, moths, multitudes. I watch them for a long moment as they whirlpool around the clear glass that covers the lightbulb.
Hinges creak. I forgot…. I turn my head, my fingers clenching one of the porch railing supports. The door of the white shed--white-painted particle-board, the size of a bathroom stall--is screeching open. It is too dark to see the wheelbarrow and ladder and shovels and hoes that are inside.
I hate the shed. I found a note in it, written in pencil on one of its two-by-four pine frame-boards. “I left because my husband beat me,” it said. Surely, the note wasn’t written by the ghost, before she was a ghost. She wrote that she left. But it is still an awful note to find in a dark shed. And that shed’s door opens itself at three AM.
I force myself to stand up. My parents say the door opens itself because it has a bad latch and is on slanting ground, and they say I must close it if I see that it is open. Last time I did not close it, and a skunk moved into it and sprayed Dad the day before he had to officiate at a fraternity friend’s father’s funeral.
Nothing is in the doorway, anything I see is just the shovels, and wheelbarrow, and ladders. Nothing is in the doorway. Nothing is in the doorway. I run across the wet grass, slippers sliding around on my feet. Nothing is in it. Nothing is in it. I grab the door and slam it closed and latch it.
Something thunks in the shed.
I run over wet grass, up the three steps, and into the house, and slam the door behind me. Every room is dark except for the living room. I lock the door and put my back against it, feeling the old paint chip off a little as my t-shirt-clad shoulders rub it. I have to exist today. I have to make meals, and do laundry, and I want to knit some more of the fair-isle sweater dress I am designing and knitting. I must calm down.
Any house with a bad foundation creaks. Wind blows doors. My mind makes me see things. My mind makes me hear things. The house probably isn’t haunted. My parents are saner and better than I am. They say it isn’t haunted. The house probably isn’t haunted.
I pull my hair into a tight ponytail, run to the kitchen, turn the light on, and make myself breakfast at 4 am. (If yogurt mixed with apricot fruit spread and flax seed and washed down with jasmine tea is breakfast.) The laundry room is between the kitchen and the bathroom. I put a load of laundry in, feeling as if someone is behind me every time I bend to put towels into the washer.
I have not been to bed, but I do not want to go upstairs. Or rather, I don’t want to come back downthe stairs. I trot back into the living room, sun rising outside, and curl up on the sofa with my back against the purple-afghan-draped sofa bac, and then pull the soft afghan down over me. Tightly, I close my eyes, and I count sheep, though they become too quiet, too white, as I count them, and begin to gather behind me, dark eyes in cloudy bodies, rather than leap the fence….
I am too warm. When I open my eyes, I see the ceiling, bright white in the afternoon sun, with two thin cracks in it. The white walls are bright, too, and the fibers of the purple afghan are the shade of crayola markers and plastic princesses’ gowns. I sit up, shoving off the afghan, and go to the bathroom to brush my hair and wash my face.
A cheese sandwich and an apple consumed, I walk to the bottom of the stairs and take a deep breath. My sweater-dress-in-progress is upstairs, and I want to work on it this afternoon and evening. With nothing else I ought to do, I can probably make it five or six inches longer. I must go up the stairs to fetch it. But going up is the safe direction….
A couple minutes later, I stand on the highest step, left hand clutching a sailboat-patterned totestuffed with half-knitted sweater-dress and the russet and loden and tan yarns that will become the other half of it, right hand clutching the rail. I never really fall. Never rea--
I am falling, my shins slamming the edges of uneven wooden steps, my chest crushed against them as I tumble and slide, the landing coming nearer to my eyes faster than an essay’s deadline.
I am standing on the highest step, sweating, realizing that I have been holding my breath. I let it out and walk down, holding onto the rail tightly because my knees are weak, not because I am afraid I will falsely fall again; that only happens once per descent, or less. I suppose it’s a symptom of some mental illness I don’t know the name of yet.
Or is the house haunted because someone fell? The wallpaper under the mint green paint was splattered, when Mom stripped and repainted the stairwell, as if somebody had dropped a gallon of dark juice on the landing and it had splashed up.
But of course it was stained. This house used to be dirty, and it is still stained, moldy, marked, dented. I force myself to stop thinking about the ghost, and knit.
The sweater-dress grows, a row of green vines diagonally crossing a russet stripe. They begin, grow, and reach the end of the pattern for them that I drew on a piece of graph paper. There was a thin tan stripe before them; I knit another thin tan stripe after them, and then decide to have an area of green and tan checkerboard pattern below all of that. The yarn snags on the cracks in my hands that I have made from too much washing, but I focus on making three stitches in green and then three in tan, over and over and over again.
The sun sets at five, thanks to the pines and aspens--unhealthy, root-bogged, but leafy--that surround this house. The room darkens grey, and the tan and green of my yarns do not look sufficiently different from each other. I finish my stitch, stand up, and take two steps toward the light switch near the front door.
The floor of the upstairs creaks. I forget to breathe, my heart accelerating like the sticks of a drummer who has ended a folk lament and is beginning a hard rock anthem. It creaks again, and again, and then--the top step….
The creaks upstairs never sound as if anyone has come lower than the top step. I almost wish they would; I would not have to hypothesize about whythey terminate on the stair from which I am always falsely falling.
I scurry across the floor, turn on the light, grab my knitting and run into the kitchen, where I left the light on after lunch. I always leave it on, when my parents are not home.
I open a can of cream of mushroom soup and pour it into a bowl, add half the amount of water the can says to add, put it in the microwave, and stare at it as it twirls on the turn-table. The microwave door window reflects my pale, big-eyed face, with hair messily bunned up so that it cannot possibly contact anything germy. Behind me I can see the crooked ceiling light, and the doorless closets full of pots and glass baking dishes. And then--I cannot see any of it. The microwave is still there, my soup is still pirouetting, but there are no reflections in the door. It’s--it’s--
I hear myself squeak, and I slash my hand erratically through the air between me and the beeping microwave. Frigid air? Feverish hand? I’m not sure. But I can see reflections in the door again. Something invisible, invisibly reflected, hid them. I spin, looking all around me, and see reflections in the windows, a dim reflection in the mirror that hangs over the sink in the dark bathroom, reflections in the microwave. I take a deep breath. Maybe I hallucinated. Maybe the--the light changed?
I get my soup out of the microwave and sit down and eat it. One of my legs keeps vibrating. Living in a haunted house is not good for people with anxiety disorders. Or maybe only people with anxiety disorders think their houses are haunted.
Footsteps upstairs, and then on the top step. A moth flies into the window. I gulp down my soup, detesting each clink of my spoon against the bowl.
I sit down on the floor, back against the wall, and recommence knitting green and tan checks. Three green, three tan, three green, three tan, three green, a moth hits the window, three tan….
I wake up, neck and bottom and shoulders all sore, and stiffly stretch. I am still sitting against the wall and holding my...knitting….
Above the green and tan checks is a band of knitting I never intended to make and fell asleep without having knitted, a broad stripe of green with russet letters knitted into it:
HE MADE
ME FALL
