Chapter 17

I knew it was coming. I'd half-expected it ever since I saw the notes, and certainly since talking to Gail. Still, hearing it out loud felt like a fist to the gut. "Gran Mae is dead," I said, very carefully.

"I know that," Mom said, her misery tinged with exasperation. "I didn't say she wasn't dead, I said she wasn't gone. She's at the house. Haunting it, or whatever you want to call it. And she watches me. And I know you think I'm crazy."

"I didn't say that."

Her eyes were red-rimmed, but she gave me a wry look nonetheless. "Sam, I'm your mother. I know you. You crave rational explanations like I crave carbs."

"Yeah, but…"

"Do you remember that time I had to come get you at church camp? Because you made a counselor cry?"

"Oh come on! She tried to tell me that dinosaur fossils were put in the ground by Satan to test the faith of paleontologists. She had it coming."

"You were eleven."

"Eleven-year-old me is not proof that adult me thinks you're crazy."

Mom folded her arms and just looked at me. I resolutely kept my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, but I could feel that look burning into the side of my head.

"Well, it is a little unbelievable," I muttered finally.

"You think I don't know that?" asked Mom wearily. "Believe me, I thought I was cracking for months. But things keep happening."

"What sort of things?" I seized on this hopefully. Maybe there was a rational explanation, and we just had to get there.

"Doors slamming. Pictures falling off the walls. Not just one, so don't start in about the house settling." (Since I had, in fact, been about to say something about the house settling, this felt particularly pointed. I bit my tongue.) "You know all those little pictures I had hanging up along the stairs? The ones from Arizona?"

"Yeah?"

"They all fell off at the same time. I was standing right there and every single one just dropped simultaneously. Scared the crap out of me."

"Some kind of vibration in the wall…"

"The heads of the nails had been sheared through. Every single one of them."

"… oh." We passed another group of cows. They were no more impressed than the previous bunch. "What did you do?"

"Honestly?" Mom snorted. "I freaked the hell out and went to a hotel that night. Didn't even pick up the glass first. She won that one."

"Okay," I said, trying to pick my way through a conversational minefield. "But even if something is doing this—and I'm not saying it's anything but the house settling—how do you know it's Gran Mae? It could just be… I dunno, some random ghostly presence."

Mom was already shaking her head. "No. It's her. I know. She gets so angry sometimes. I can feel it, all through the house, just like when she was alive. You'd walk in the door and it was like this weight in the air and you knew it was going to land on you, but you didn't know when." She made a sound, a little half sob. "And it's almost a relief when it does, because at least it's over."

I had known that Mom's childhood was not exactly idyllic, but this made it sound even worse than I'd realized. "And it's like that now?"

"Yeah." She stared out the window. "Yeah. Sometimes I walk in the door and I can feel it all over again, and I know something's going to happen."

"Have you… uh…" I tried to think how to phrase it diplomatically. "Have you tried talking to a therapist about this?"

"That was the first thing I did," said Mom. "First she told me that it was normal to feel the presence of our dead loved ones sometimes, and to consider it a blessing. I told her it was terrifying and I hated it and I thought the house was haunted. She decided I had unresolved issues with my mother. Which yes, obviously I do, but I've had those since I was born, and the house wasn't haunted until last year."

"What happened last year?"

"I have no idea!" She slapped the dashboard in frustration. "Things just started happening. It was fine before that, and then all of a sudden she was back!"

I turned onto the highway. Was it the house? Maybe if I could just get her out of the house, things would resolve themselves. "Have you considered moving?"

"Oh yes," said Mom bitterly. "I considered it. I went so far as to have a Realtor do a walk-through. She kept telling me that it was in great condition but I should repaint because the color scheme was so fun and so quirky but buyers didn't understand that. Then she opened a cupboard and the shelves flipped up and twenty coffee mugs slid off and hit her in the face."

"Oh my god."

"Yeah. She chipped two teeth. I paid for her dental bills."

I reached for a rational explanation, even though they were getting increasingly hard to come by. "Maybe the screws holding the shelves in—"

"Nails," said Mom. "Cabinet nails. Sheared through, just like the ones on the stairs."

"Okay, I understand that must have been scary, but you can't think that a ghost is out there… what, cutting the heads off nails? Maybe someone's trying to scare you out of the house, to get you to move." (Why, I couldn't imagine. Lammergeier Lane wasn't in the way of any oil pipelines, so far as I knew, and developers had long since lost interest in Pondsboro.)

"If so, they're doing a pretty good job targeting Realtors." Mom folded her arms. "The next one who came over had everything on top of the refrigerator fall on him. Cookie jar, kettle, that one big ceramic teapot. He hadn't opened the fridge door or anything. And there's no way that the teapot could have just fallen off. It was at least a foot from the edge." She snorted. "It didn't seem like a good idea to talk to Realtors after that. They kept getting hurt."

"But you repainted anyway."

"I thought maybe she'd calm down," said Mom. "It worked too. At least for a while. The house didn't feel so angry. Then your brother and Maria came to visit."

"That's why you told her it wasn't safe. You thought Gran Mae didn't like her."

"Gran Mae dropped a glass door on her foot. If the glass had shattered, she'd have been cut to ribbons. As it was, it broke her foot in three places. Three! God, it's all my fault. I should have realized. She always pretended she wasn't a racist old bitch, but she'd have worn a bedsheet if she thought she could get away with it."

There was more life and anger in her than I'd seen since I came to visit. I wished I could believe that it was a good thing. On the other hand, at least I could stop trying to think of nice things to say about Gran Mae.

"So the jar of teeth…" I began, and didn't know how to finish that sentence.

"She could have put it there," said Mom. "No, scratch that. I'm sure she put it there. God." She shuddered. "When Dad died, she had him cremated and I saw her that night. I'd stayed overnight to make sure she was okay." She gave a brief, brittle laugh. "Insomuch as she was ever okay. She… she dumped out the ashes on the table, and then she dug through them with her bare hands. She pulled out bits. I didn't know what she was doing. I'm pretty sure she didn't know I was there."

I was staring at her so hard that I hit the rumble strip on the side of the highway and had to jerk the car back toward the centerline. "She what?"

"Teeth," said Mom wearily. "Teeth don't burn."

"No, I know." (Teeth and bone fragments survive burning pretty well, so these days they usually run the remains through a machine that crushes those bits into powder before they hand you your loved ones. This is going to be very annoying for future archaeologists.) "But you're saying she was picking them out?"

"Yeah. She threw a fit at the funeral home, said that she didn't want him ground up like meat, so they wouldn't do the final bit. I was so embarrassed. I apologized to the funeral director after." Mom shook her head. "He was so nice. He said that grief was strange and it wasn't even the strangest request he'd had that week."

It was just like Mom to remember someone being nice forty years ago. "And she picked the teeth out afterward?"

"I think so. And she was just as obsessed about my baby teeth as she was about yours."

"That must have been awkward," I said, which was incredibly inadequate.

Mom laughed hoarsely. "Oh god! When I had a tooth fall out at school, you'd think I had done it to spite her. I told her that I'd thrown it away and she threw an absolute fit. A scary one. Then she wouldn't speak to me for days." She scrubbed her hands over her face. "She wasn't a great mother," she added after a minute, which was possibly the understatement of the century.

"I'm so sorry," I said, and meant it. "I didn't know. I mean, I know what she was like to Brad and me, and I sort of figured she must not have been, but…"

"She mellowed a lot," said Mom.

"Jesus." The thought that we'd had the mellow version was alarming. "How did you come out so well?"

"I went to college," said Mom. "Away from home. Mother wasn't sure about having me live away from home, but if I was going to join a sorority, I had to live on campus, and of course I had to join a sorority, because… I don't know, she had some image in her mind that nice Southern girls did that. And it was the eighties and campus was full of Take Back the Night marches and AIDS activists and everything just clicked. Mother hated it, of course. Right before he died, when he was in the hospital, Dad told me not to move back in with her. ‘Don't let her drag you back in,' was what he said." She rubbed her face. "I wish I'd listened."

I swallowed. My grandfather had died of a heart attack long before I was born. I'd never thought there was anything suspicious about it. Probably there wasn't. Heart attacks are perfectly normal.

Nice and normal, even.

"Where do you think she got the rest of the teeth?" I asked.

"The rest of them?"

"There were more than just baby teeth in that jar," I said. "And more than one set of adult teeth." I'd looked at the jar long enough. If I was a good archaeologist, I'd have poured it out and tried to match it to multiple individuals, but I think even good archaeologists get to have the screaming heebie-jeebies for a bit first.

Mom stared at me. I kept my eyes on the road, but I could feel her eyes boring into the side of my head.

"Jesus fuck," she said finally, and despite everything, I wanted to cheer. That was the Mom I remembered. She'd learned to swear in the eighties too.

The road stretched out. We passed the alpaca farm, still offering trendy weddings and fiber arts classes. Finally Mom said, "She was a hospice nurse."

My breath came out in a long sigh. "Yeah," I said. I'd been thinking that too. "Yeah, she was."

"Sometimes old people lose teeth."

"They do."

Mom and I looked at each other, and then I stared at the road and she stared at the alpaca farm. The other alternative did not bear thinking about.

You see so much evil in a small town,Gail had said.

I don't believe in ghosts. I don't.

"I don't know what to do," I said finally. "Do we try to get you a different therapist, or a doctor, or an old priest and a young priest?"

"The Catholics don't do that anymore. I checked. And if I tried to get one of those people out who think they're fighting demons, I'm afraid I'd just make her angrier."

I don't believe in ghosts. But if anyone was going to be too mean to stay dead…

I made a noncommittal noise. Mom reached out and touched my shoulder. "Believe me, hon, I hope I'm crazy. I think being crazy would be a lot easier than being right about this."

I had no idea what to say to that. We went and got ice cream and ate it in silence then drove back together, because what else could we do?

When we got home, the jar of teeth was gone.

I stayed up too late that night. It wasn't exactly insomnia, it was more that I knew that I'd lie awake and think too much if I tried to sleep, so I didn't. I played Civilization on my laptop, which was just engrossing enough, combined with the TV, that I didn't have to think. I stared at the screen and let myself think absolutely nothing except how to develop my cities and which one of the other nations was going to declare war on me first.

No great surprise that I fell asleep on the couch. I retained enough presence of mind to put the laptop on the coffee table and then slumped over the arm, not quite watching the TV.

I don't know how much later it was when I started to dream. I was still lying on the couch, but I could see into the backyard, and someone was walking back and forth outside. They went along the line of roses, then back, over and over again. I couldn't move. I just sat and watched them walk, like a soldier patrolling their post. Something white squirmed outside the line of roses, trying to edge through a gap between them. The white things drew back when the person passed, then surged forward again.

Little piggy, hissed the voice. Look at the mess you've made, little piggy. Who's going to clean this up?

I tried to turn away, but the owner of the voice had hold of me, pressing my face against cold glass. The white thing was on the other side, dark shadows moving under its skin. I thrashed helplessly, opening my mouth to yell, but dirt fell in and I woke, choking.

Daylight was streaming through the window. My arm was asleep and I had a painful crick in my neck. I'd spent the night on the couch, with my face angled toward the garden.