It was darker under the blanket and warmer. Under the blanket was
the place to be
when the sky turned black and roared and poured rain. Thirteen year
old Eva Marie held
her breath. A wind blast broke across the bedroom window's panes, with
a BOOM,
rattling the glass, violently shaking everything, especially Eva Marie,
whose pale face stung
worse now than it had six days ago, when a few of her pop's hard slap-blows
struck.
Six days after the fact, and Eva Marie was still thinking of striking
back at her father. She
hated fighting with him. But the meaning of the fights was not lost
on her. The fights
connected her with her dead sister, Judith.
Judith entered Eva Marie's head like a ghost entering a haunted room.
Eva Marie lay still.
She heard Judith's high heels on the hard wood floor. The footfalls
weren't muffled by the
blanket or distorted by the noise of the wind roaring outside. The
sound was sharp, as
clear as a glass slipper tapping on a table top. The footfalls neared
the bed.
When Eva Marie heard Judith's voice say, "Girl, look at me now, " obliging,
she removed
the blanket from her head and looked. She saw nothing but darkness.
The room was blacker.
The glowing light from the street lamp outside her window, the light
that had been seeping
in through the closed blinds and drapes, was gone. She gazed at the
draped window. Behind
it everything was silent, except for the wind. She lay back under the
blanket, closed her eyes
and thought of Judith, floating like a white ghost across the room,
and she thought of Judith
alive, when they shared this room.
When Judith was alive, she and Eva Marie could have been twins, except
Judith was older
by three years and was much taller. Judith, now one year dead, even
her ghost was much
taller than Eva Marie. Except for the height, the floating ghost could
have been Eva Marie's
double.
Eva Marie remembered how Judith danced, and as she visualized Judith
dancing, she
remembered how her sister and their father argued.
"Why do you look like crap?" Came a rough, gruff voice that surrounded
Eve Marie.
The voice came from memory. "You dress like crap! Satanic! Have you
joined a gang of
Satan worshippers?" Eva Maria saw her sister dancing now, wearing the
Elvira dress and
the black boots, and the cool dark blue eye shadow. Her sister looked
gothic cool, wearing
clothes Eva Marie would love to wear.
As Eva Marie remembered her father ranting to Judith, she could see
herself dancing in
black, like a girl in a movie, like that girl in the dark movie she
had borrowed from a friend
and played again and again . "That is shit!" Judith replied, almost
sounding as gruff as their
father. Well, she vented anger like him.
"So now I'm shit, am I?" Came the harsh retort. "Are you telling me, I'm shit?"
"No."
Judith turned her tone down several notches. Their father upped his,
and began to lecture
like a patriarch, an Old Abraham, an Old Lot, espousing principles,
using punctuation, like
punctuation was an Isaac-axe, and using salt, -- a salty tongue-- ready
to sacrifice his
child for his god.
"You talk crap to your father! Girls who do that go to Hell!"
"Dad!" Judith hissed, "Hell is the absence of love. I am already there."
"Do you know you are talking to your father?"
"Christ!" Judith mumbled.
"Do you know you are talking to your father?" Their father asked again.
"My father . . ." Judith mumbled, searching for a word, or a phrase.
"My father . . ." she
repeated, then murmured, barely under her breath, "Hell!"
Their father's rage was frightful. He couldn't speak for a long moment.
Then he made a
noise that made both girls cower. He tried to bellow like a bear, but
his angry throat would
only let out a trembling scream. Eve Marie had half-forgotten this
scene and could not
remember what he said. Abruptly, the images in her mind went from dark
to black, as if she
had run out of memory, or the rest of this half-remembered thing was
blocked.
Garlands of baby breath adorned Judith's coffin. She was laid out in
a long, white flounced
dress that made her look like a sleeping teenage bride.
Judith's body was found down river two weeks after the cold night she
jumped from the
George Washington Bridge.
Eva Marie could hear the whistling sound of the wind pushing snow flurries
around, and
Judith's body falling down. Eva Marie could see a flurry of body motion
as her sister
pummeled. She could feel the screams, streaming through the air. Her
sister was decisive
when she jumped, but falling took a long time. Eva Marie imagined that
every cell of her
sister's body became a conscious entity, and became terror-struck,
aware of the unstoppable
doom, and snarled at her sister's brain cells, called them "stupid,"
and clawed to life. Her
sister's fingers tried to grab on to something. Her arms and legs tried
to fly. Her brain broke
with her mind and cried out to be spared. Her body fell into the cold
dark water and on to
rocks that cut and tore into her flesh. Eva Marie could smell the horrible
water, in which her
sister lay dead, her sister's body broken, mangled. Though the sky
was full of snow flurries,
the season wasn't winter but fall, early autumn, really. Fish were
in the river, that was a river
of death. Fish of many autumn colors, with streaks of silver, gold,
red, brown, yellow and
blue, bit into her sister's body in a frenzy to eat. The fish
ate much of the face and pulled
out some of the hair. Eva Marie could taste the hair. Her mouth filled
with the taste of foul
air that somehow called up memories of her sister's wet hair.
Eva Marie's father hired an undertaker, a mortuary artist, who knew
his business. This
man put Judith's face and body back together, with air sprays, makeup,
pins, needles
and threads, and wax, and laid her out for viewing. Judith looked almost
like she was alive.
During the last week of life, Judith's relationship with her father
deteriorated. They
argued everyday and he threatened to throw her out of the house. Finally,
their arguments
grew so ugly that she left home and went to the bridge, where on that
cold night of light
swirling flakes of early snow, as the wind slammed against her and
yelled abuse at the
world, she, a lone figure on the railing, was seen screaming!
What did she scream? Eva Marie imagined her sister screaming: "Shit on you all!"
At Judith's funeral, her mother and sister spoke about what her life
meant to them. Both her
mother and sister broke down several times. Her father who had remained
totally calm, under
control, even impassive, up until then, choked back tears and wiped
his eyes.
"He will turn over a new leaf," her mother said, later.
"Yeah," Eva Marie thought, "He's closing the barn door after the horse has run off."
His eyes said: "I have another heifer here."
"Sure," Eva Marie thought, "He's closing the pot after the steam has escaped."
An unpleasant whiff of scent that at first she couldn't identify, penetrated
Eva Marie's
fortress of solitude, her home inside her home, where she could imagine
herself super,
strong, well, not so vulnerable. She pulled the blanket from her head
and took a sniff of the
room's air, and was suddenly overwhelmed by a surging, thick, sulfurous
stench that could
gas a maggot. "God! That stinks!" she gasped. She had no time to seek
its source. The
stench unsettled Eva Marie's stomach and almost caused her to vomit
on the bed. She got
up, with her hand over her mouth, and ran to the hall toilet, making
it just in time. She
retched the little she had eaten at supper into the toilet bowl.
When the vomiting stopped, she looked in the mirror. She saw how white
her face was,
and how red her eyes were. She looked as sick as she felt. She opened
the medicine
cabinet, saw her mother's medicines: a half a dozen little white bottles.
Saw her father's
razor, his shaving cream, his aspirins, saw her own pills in the back,
took two.
A wind-howl rent the air outside the house and kicked against the bathroom's
window,
as though the window had taken on the physical form of a person whom
had to be smashed.
Eva Marie's back was to the window. She went to her knees again, bent
her head to the
toilet bowl. She began to vomit again. She vomited and vomited, hoped
the vomiting would
end and the discomfort that her stomach was giving to her body would
stop.
Five minutes passed. She stood on her feet and took a breath of air.
The wind howled
outside the bathroom window again and again, like a dark demon cursing,
with its mouth
dribbling bile and its nose running snot. The window was shut, its
blinds and curtain drawn.
"Demon or just plain wind, what ever you are, whether supernatural or
plain natural, what
is outside can not get inside," Eva Marie mumbled, remembering lines
she'd heard a movie
heroine say. Her feet were shaky. Intense intestinal fires burned a
swelling in her stomach.
Her legs were wobbly. She would have fallen, if she hadn't sat on the
bath tub's rim. She
pulled her pants down. She thought she might be bleeding again. But
no, that blood hadn't
returned. She felt soiled, with the need to shower. Every time she
bled she felt dirty, though
her mother told her the bleeding was natural.
"I wish I didn't," she said to her mother.
Her mother laughed.
"I don't want to bleed like that, mom!"
"You have no choice."
"It's like a vampire bit me down there!"
"You have too much horror in your life, too many horror movies," her
mother said, and
stopped, silencing the thought. Perhaps, suddenly, her mother remembered
the horror of
Judith's death.
Eva Marie heard the ghost using a deep voice this time, calling her. "Eva Marie . . ."
She pulled up her pants. "I'm tired now. Tired!"
"Eva Marie."
"I'm tired."
"Eva Marie!"
A feverish dream? Delirium? Eva Marie's stomach felt sicker. "Oh, God!"
She asked,
"Why am I being haunted by my sister's ghost?" Eva Marie was tired,
very, very tired.
The bathroom faced the back of the house, her bedroom the front. Those
nights that
Judith sneaked out, she returned through the bathroom window. The bathroom
faced the
large back yard and many trees, but nosey neighbors saw Judith sneaking
home and told
her parents.
"Girl . . ." Again, the ghost. "Are you angry?" the ghost asked.
"What?" Eva Marie groaned. She was feeling sicker than ever.
The ghost said, "Come to the window."
"No."
"Don't be scared of me. I'm just a ghost. I can't harm you in any way."
Marie thought she heard curses and deceit in the ghost's mouth, heard
these under the
ghost's tongue. The ghost made sweet sounds. "C'mon, girl."
"What?" Eva Marie mumbled.
"The window, Eva Marie, " whispered the ghost.
Eva Marie wondered if this was truly her sister, or a monster crouched
outside, behind
the drapes and blinds, and the shut window. She'd seen such monsters
in the movies.
"Eva Marie, I have to see you."
"No." Eva Marie mumbled.
"Eva Marie, the window."
"What is this? I'm tired." Eva Marie mumbled.
"It's me, girl, let me in. Would you reject your own sister? You are making me so sad."
"No! My sister is dead. She ran from our father to her death." Eva Marie mumbled.
"Eva Marie, I escaped father. Come to the window, please."
"I'm tired. I must get back in bed." Eva Marie mumbled.
"Eva Marie, I escaped. Escaped because children are the prisoners of
their parents. I've
returned because I miss you! I have come to help you. I love you."
"No."
"I'm not mad with you because you told father I went out with -- Forget
that, silly. I love
you, baby sister. Eva Marie, girl, I love you."
"Judith!" Eva Marie stood, her feet no less sure. The remembrance of
her love for her
dead sister was the Judas that betrayed her.
"Eva Marie, pull back the curtain, pull up the blinds and open the window.
Hurry, girl!
Hurry!"
Eva Marie went to the window to obey the ghost. She pulled back the
curtain and stared
at Judith's ghost, whose skin was white as the snow of cold mountains.
Her eyes were
such a dark shade of red that they looked black in the center, like
a black pool of spilled
crude oil, blighting a barren field of red Georgia clay.
"Judith?" Judith's ghost smiled and waved.
Eva Marie mumbled, "No, no. I don't know."
Judith's ghost cooed, "Girl, why do you look so sad? Did father do anything
to you? Did
he hit you? Did he dare touch you!"
"I'm not sad," Eva Marie said. "I'm just tired."
"What is the delay? Hurry up! Eva Marie, get that window up!" Judith's
ghost pressed,
and smiling sweetly, whispered, "Isn't my make-up cool?"
"That is you!" Eva Marie whispered back.
"Eva Marie, please, don't be afraid."
"I'm not!" Eva Marie exclaimed.
"Keep quiet," Judith's ghost replied. "Do this, okay? Let me visit you.
I have come a long
way to help you."
"It is you!" Eva Marie began to sob. "It is really you!"
"Oh, you little baby, stop those tears. Look at you, your running nose.
Don't drip now. I
am going to pinch you good. Get this window open now."
Eva Marie unlocked the window at the top and started to pull. The window
was stuck.
Eva Marie, exerted herself, drew on the full strength of her muscles.
She knew only a
pane of window glass separated her from her sister. She yanked on the
window hard.
"It won't budge!" Eva Marie said. "I can't do it!"
Eva Marie pouted and stopped like she was ready to give up.
"Eva Marie," the ghost urged with rising anxious urgency, "You can do it!"
"I can't do it by myself, I'll go get mom," Eva Marie replied.
Anger, rage, hate, indignation, and a hunger too, took hold of the ghost.
"Mom will be no help! You know that! Now, get that window open! NOW!
Or I shall
leave and be through forever with your dumb ass!"
"Judith!" Eva Marie trembled, crying.
The ghost calmed, spoke very lowly, "Girl, did I scare you?"
"No," Eva Marie said and tried to push the window up.
"Alright, now get that window up," Judith's ghost said, sweet.
This time Eva Marie did, straining herself and even bruising her right
arm. Eva Marie
couldn't wait until her sister was all the way inside, before she grabbed
her in an embrace.
"Aw, girl!" the ghost laughed.
Eva Marie laughed too. "I must tell mom!"
"You are happy to see me?"
"Yes!"
"Tell no one. Not mom and not that son of a bitch father of ours. He
can kiss my damned
ass."
Eva Marie was sadden by her sister's anger. "Not mom? Surely you don't mean mom?"
"Not her! Not that cow!"
"Judith, mom will want to see you."
Judith's ghost was through the window, and was impatient now. She pulled
Eva Marie to her
and against her, pressed her tight.
"I miss you, girl!"
Judith's ghost kissed Eva Marie's head, face, and then neck, and then
her hand and finally
her arm! And the ghost became like the vampire returned to consume
its kin.
"Oh!" Eva Marie went faint. Her body slumped. She fell from the bath
tub rim. Blood
poured from her neck. Blood flowed from her arm and fled from the red
razor on the
floor.
## END
