CHAPTER NINE

NIGHT TERRORS AND THE FLOODED CONFESSIONAL

We told Mom about Danny. We had to. I explained the incident the best I could, though I cried through the gory parts and used the word “dickface” at least once while describing A.J.'s betrayal.

“You sweet, darling girl,” Mom said, sobbing for Mara and holding her close.

“I'm okay, Mrs. Parker,” she replied as if declining a second helping of potatoes. “Dorothy was a special cat, but I'll be fine!”

Dad talked Mom out of filing a police report, claiming Danny was a disturbed little boy who only needed a push in the right direction... not jail time. He even offered to call Danny's uncle to recommend a psychologist. “To help control the violent impulses,” he said.

“It’s not just Danny,” Livy added. “Sometimes, I hear voices in the woods...”

With Mom’s supervision, Dad armed himself with a crowbar and overalls and marched to the mysterious hideout as if he actually had a clue. I stood on my bed between Mara and Livy. Together, we watched my Dad putter around the trees as if he lost a contact. Mom pointed to a fresh candy wrapper and a trio of discarded pop cans. They peered down The Great Divide, then inspected the view of Mara’s window from various positions among the trees. Dad used the crowbar to pry the wooden rungs from the trunks.

Until the grownups deemed the property safe, Mara wasn't allowed out of the house without supervision, and I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike to Whit's.

“The weather man’s predicting storms all week,” Mom told us that evening. “We’ll order pizza and camp in the tower! I know how much you love watching the lightning over the lake!” It was a nice offer, but nothing could compensate for the dead pet and castle lockdown.

An hour later, I overheard a phone call between Mom and Mr. Anderson. Whenever we went on vacation, the social worker was Mom’s go-to friend for emergency respite care. She asked him if he and his wife could take Fantasia for the week, a testament to her underlying fear.

(There were three nights between our adventures; three nights of sleeping with the remains of Mara’s wonderful smell. The first night, her imprint was still visible in the sheets like the taut white texture of a perfect snow angel.)

Mara awoke the next morning and dressed herself as if Dorothy had never died, tapping hangers on closet rods to the beat of the FM stereo, gargling, rinsing, spitting... just like any other day. She wore her smile so easily that I found myself drawn to her usual giddiness, not mortified by the memory of Dorothy’s inside-out asshole or the clouds looming on the horizon.

The Fairytale premiere was twelve days away. Arrangements were being made whether the movie was done or not. Mom used her meager artistic abilities to fashion invitations out of card stock and decorative strips of old 8mm negatives.

“Meet James Parker, 

writer, director and editor of ‘Fairytale!’

Screening at the Grand Harbor Community Center 

hourly during the Lakeshore Celebration Art Show!

Premieres Thursday, August 25!”

“That’s an awful lot of exclamation points,” I said.

“There’s a lot to be excited about!” Mom replied.

The movie was the only way to beat Ryan Brosh. If it was a blockbuster, Mara would pick me. Every scene--every shot and sound effect and line of dialogue--would culminate into the vision that had lived in my head since the beginning, and she would marvel at my writing ability and my directing ability and the killer production value.

The movie was the only way to beat Ryan... and I had let Danny distract me.

(On the second night, the smell of Mara’s moisturized skin still clung to the fibers of my pillow, but my restless sleep had loosened her shape from the sheets. Outside, it began to rain.)

As if to reiterate the Fairytale deadline, Mom scheduled a back-to-school shopping trip to distract us from the buried cat. Mrs. Greenfield came too and helped Mara pick out a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper with a hot-pink kitten on the front. “To remind you of the good times,” she said.

As Mara hopscotched across the laminated tiles from the pens to the markers to the triple-hole punches, Livy seemed unusually fixated on her. When Mara discovered the perfect pencil box, Livy scoured the shelves for one just like it.

My sister wasn’t the only person with her eye on Mara. One man, twenty-something, accidentally plowed his shoulder into a rack of backpacks because he was more interested in a twelve-year-old girl than his path through the aisle... reminding me again that “Mara” and “public” don’t jive well.

Mom and Mara broke into their own clique and meandered toward the jewelry cases. “Isn’t back-to-school shopping fun with the kids?” Mom asked.

Livy and Mrs. Greenfield joined them at the earring display. Livy worked a pair of sterling-silver hoops through her lobes and dangled them in front of Mara. “Cute?”

“Totally cute!” Mara replied and twirled the display. “I wish I had piercings. The social workers won’t allow it.”

Livy looked to Mom. “Hey, Ma,” she said. “Are these cute?”

She nodded. “Very!” 

“Think I should get ‘em?”

“That’s what allowances are for!”

Livy rolled her eyes, but decided they were worth the eight bucks.

The outing concluded with a power surge. A peal of thunder shook our check-out lane, and for ten seconds, the lights went out. Livy screamed. The rest of us laughed.

That evening, Mrs. Conrad braved the rain and dropped Whit off at the castle for some much-needed editing time. In my room, he tossed a cellophane bag of white powder on my lap. “Released it early,” he said. “It’s sellin’ like crazy.”

“Who’s buyin’?” I asked.

“Nerds from computer camp.”

I read the price tag. “Two bucks a pop?”

“First taste is free,” he said. “Best-friend discount.”

I laughed, then dropped the sweet temptation in my dresser drawer and slammed it shut. “I haven’t touched candy in a month,” I said.

Whit finagled a mess of cords from the hammock beneath his chair. “My VCR broke,” he said and plopped the wires beside the TV.

“What? How?”

“You left an open bottle of cola next to it.”

“And you spilled it?”

“Looks like we’re stuck with your equipment.”

I held up the wires and spread them between my hands like a mangled spider web. Composite cables, S-Video cables, a giant phone cord... “What am I supposed to do with all these?” I asked.

“Extras. We gotta finish this thing in less than two weeks, so I brought the works.”

I showed my friend a rough cut of the first five minutes of our film (though I turned away during the opening monologue with Dorothy). As The Girl approached the entrance to the Red Room, I paused the video and awaited Whit’s response.

He picked up his left thigh and manually crossed it over his right. The motion gave him an aura of awkward sophistication. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s really, really good.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Now we gotta finish it.”

(The rain was unrelenting on the third night. As the lightning threw tree-branch shadows across my walls, I pressed my nostrils against the mattress and breathed her fading scent. At one AM, the real Mara woke up screaming in the opposite room.)

Four days after Dorothy’s death, as the sun was still hiding beneath the horizon and the rain was still spilling in broken reams from the gutters, Mara made her escape.