The Poor and the Haunted Page 9

  Love is expressed in all sorts of ways, words being the least important among them. He couldn’t say the words, so instead Carlisle observed from a distance, sometimes seen, sometimes unseen, trying to do everything he could.

  Trying to keep Jimmy and Kelly from falling into the darkness that existed right inside their own home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  2019

  The day began with Jimmy’s usual routine: a cold Red Bull, one of Jill’s homemade granola bars, and a seven-mile run around his neighborhood. Once his run was over, he would come home, shower, and—weekend or weekday—put on a pair of pleated khakis and a collared shirt.

  By late afternoon that day, Jimmy’s life would be disrupted by a crazed dash to Walmart for an Ouija board. However, the first disruption occurred when Jonathan met him at their front door in basketball shorts and a flat-brimmed Suns hat with the sticker still on the bill. He and Jonathan were essentially the same height, give or take an inch, so Jimmy didn’t have to look up or down to see the fear in his son’s eyes.

  “Dad, did you put the mud in your room?”

  Jimmy didn’t know what his son was talking about. Jonathan stepped back to let his dad pass through the entryway.

  “No? Mud—what do you…”

  “There’s mud all over your bedroom. Piles of it”

  “Mud? I—Where’s mom?”

  “She took Jessica to volleyball practice.”

  Volleyball. The latest in their attempt to interest their daughter in sports. He could already tell volleyball was going to be just like gymnastics, which was just like T-ball: a way for him and Jill to waste time and money driving all over North Phoenix as Jessica scowled through practice, waiting for the drive home to tell her parents how team sports were another way for the patriarchy to reinforce its dominance over women.

  “What mud are you talking about?”

  “Come with me,” Jonathan said, leading Jimmy up the stairs to the second floor and the master bedroom.

  “Jessica clogged the downstairs toilet again. I was going to use your bathroom, and I saw this,” Jonathan said as they entered the master bedroom, pointing to several piles of mud. The piles led from just outside the closet door to the bathroom in his and Jill’s room.

  “I didn’t do that,” Jimmy said. “Come on, Jonathan. You know I wouldn’t just leave mud on the floor.”

  Left unspoken between father and son was that Jill would be angry at whoever left the mess. When Jimmy and Jill met in college, one of her most appealing qualities was her cleanliness.

  “Well, if you didn’t leave the mess, who did?” Jonathan asked.

  Jimmy walked farther into the room, squatting down to get a closer look at the floor. They weren’t piles. They were more like rough rings with hollow middles.

  “Dad, Zach’s waiting for me,” Jonathan said. “We’re going to play basketball.”

  Jimmy looked back at the drying mud on his floor, noting how it spontaneously appeared just outside of the closet, went into the bathroom, and then abruptly stopped.

  “Dad? Hello?”

  “Um, yeah. Go ahead. Tell Zach I said hi,” Jimmy said.

  Jonathan began to leave the room when Jimmy looked up and said, “Hey, buddy? You don’t need to worry. No one is in our home. No home invaders, I mean. This isn’t The Strangers.”

  “It’s okay, dad,” he said. This is what happens when you get old, he thought, looking at his dad sniff the floor. You just go straight crazy. “I’m grown up. That stuff doesn’t scare me anymore.”

  Jimmy remained in his room as he heard his son’s footsteps echo through their quiet home. The dirt was the only sign of disruption in his and Jill’s bedroom. The bed was immaculately made, the drawers and bedside tables topped with framed pictures of their family: Jessica on Jimmy’s shoulders on the beach the year they went to Disneyland. Jimmy in full makeup, his six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter giving him the makeover they knew—despite his protests—he wanted.

  Jimmy looked at the mess again.

  His perfectly photographed life disrupted by mud that seemed to appear from nowhere.

  He placed his right foot, still clad in his bright white Nike running shoes, next to the pile closest to the closet door. He then stepped forward, his left foot landing near the pile second closest to the door. He took another step. Then another. And another.

  These weren’t piles at all.

  They were footprints.

  Jimmy looked at the bottom of his shoes. They were clean. He looked at the mirror above the dresser on Jill’s side of the bed. There was no smudge, though looking at his own reflection caused a cold chill to run up the length of his back. He bent down again, getting an even closer look, his nose practically touching mud.

  The air conditioner kicked back on.

  Jimmy jumped to his feet, looking in the mirror. Still, nothing, though he was weeping. Again.

  His eyes traced a line back to their bedroom door. He did not see a single speck of dried mud outside the piles. He started moving, tracing his steps back out of the room, going all the way downstairs to the front and back doors. Everything was clean, not a single speck anywhere else in the house.

  Jimmy weighed his options. He could get the vacuum out and clean, telling Jonathan later he forgot and wore dirty shoes in the house.

  “Crazy dad,” he would say. “Must be getting older. Can’t even remember what shoes I wore.”

  Or, he could show Jill how tenuous his grip on sanity really was by pointing out footprints that appeared to have no explanation.

  He sat down on the couch in the living area and closed his eyes. He weighed the choice of carrying a secret alone or looking and sounding like a madman.

  The air conditioner cooled his sweaty skin as he silently cried.

  He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he felt the muscles and organs of his middle section trying to simultaneously retain and expel everything in his torso. His throat dried, and he felt pressure on the back of his eyeballs. Though he didn’t notice it, he peed a little, a quarter-size drop of moisture visible on his grey shorts.

  “Hello?” Jimmy asked. Tears leaked through his closed lids.

  “Hello?”

  Every light on the second floor sputtered until it flickered on, the glow in each slowly intensifying. Jessica’s hamster—a fat, ugly, white-and-brown male his daughter named Lady Gaga—began throwing itself against its cage until the whole unit tipped on the floor and the door popped open. Lady Gaga ran for it, looking for the closest couch cushion he could find. A free-range hamster was the most chaos this house had ever seen, though things were about to get a lot worse.

  “What do you want from me?”

  The couch settled into the carpet as the light directly above Jimmy blew out.

  “Please. Please,” he moaned. “Tell me what you want.”

  He could feel slight pressure against his right shoulder.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  Jimmy’s eyes darted back and forth beneath his closed lids.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  Jimmy closed his eyes tighter. Orange bursts of light fired behind his eyelids. He felt himself grow lighter. He kicked off his shoes and dug his toenails into the carpet, his
feet searching for the grip his mind was losing. He knew, immediately, that he wasn’t headed toward the outer reaches of cold space.

  He was headed somewhere far worse.

  Garrity, Oklahoma.

  Soon he would float over the badlands of eastern New Mexico and north Texas toward the outskirts of his old hometown. There he and his companion would stand in the same spot his father stood when he took his own life. After that they would float to a different part of town, the part of town where a woman Jimmy shared DNA with once used the passenger seat of a decaying Firebird to earn the drugs she needed and the money she wasted.

  His body remained rooted to the couch, but Jimmy’s soul did not. It burst through his ceiling into the flat-blue Phoenix sky. Beige, brown, and blacktop as far as Jimmy could see rolled out beneath him. It was beautiful, all of it: the many, many Subways serving sandwiches in their master-planned neighborhood, new cars indistinct and parked only in driveways and garages, the Applebee’s and the Barnes & Noble, all of it possibly signs of a culture in decline, all of it—even the Old Navy—a sun-scorched blanket of beautiful Jimmy chose, all of it new, all of it inherently incapable of holding a memory more than five years old.

  “I’M NOT GOING BACK! I’M NOT GOING BACK! THERE’S NOTHING THERE! THERE’S NOTHING THERE! THERE’S NOTHING THERE! THERE’S NOTHING THERE! THERE’S NOTHING THERE! THERE’S NOTHING THERE!”

  His forward motion stopped. Jimmy hung suspended, able to see how all the homes in his neighborhood have pools and perfect backyards mowed and manicured by hired landscapers. Expensive, clean, tidied, and cared for: It was the world he and Jill built and populated with people they both loved.

  It was a world he would not leave. He would end it here, if he had to. He would reach back and clip his own wings if it meant not having to return to Oklahoma.

  “PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO! PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO! PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO! PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO! PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO! PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO!”

  Jimmy was no longer floating above his home. He was screaming the same words over and over, alone on his couch. He was soaking wet. From his scalp to his toes, streams of sweat rolled south. The skin of his palms was broken and red from his clinched fists.

  In his terror, he failed to realize his companion was gone.

  Perhaps it had done enough damage. Or perhaps it heard the downstairs door opening, Jill’s Saturday morning sneakers echoing across the hardwood as she ran upstairs toward the sound of her husband’s screams.

  Jill reached the top of the stairs and saw Jimmy sitting on the couch with his eyes closed, his fists clenched. She saw the whites of her husband’s knuckles, his bloodied palms, the way he appeared to have just climbed out of a swimming pool.

  “Jimmy? JIMMY?!”

  He opened his eyes and saw his wife standing there, her eyes wide, her upper lip trembling.

  She dropped the Whole Foods bags and crossed the room, sitting next to her husband and taking him in her arms. He dug his head hard into her breast, needing a mother as much as he needed a wife. There was nothing there, she told him. No one was going to take him anywhere, least of all away from his wife, his children, and their home. She spoke the words she knew he sometimes needed to hear.

  “You’re safe,” she said, pulling his head toward her shoulder.

  “You’re safe,” she said once more, kissing him on the forehead.

  She didn’t know who Jimmy was screaming at. She was sure they were the only two in the room, and that prior to her arrival Jimmy had been alone. Just weeks ago, Jimmy was so controlled in his polite gentleness that sometimes Jill wished he could just relax and feel safe.

  Now, looking at him, she wasn’t sure how safe he was. She worried the human heart and mind could take just so much until it broke.

  “You’re safe, babe. You’re safe, Jimmy,” she said, again kissing him on the forehead.

  Jill said the Lord’s prayer from memory. Neither one of them would call themselves devout, but the words seemed to settle Jimmy down a bit, though it frightened Jill the way Jimmy squeezed her when she spoke the words, “Deliver us from evil.”

  If she were being honest, she would admit Jimmy scared the shit out of her lately, and that wasn’t the sort of language she typically used. It was so bad that if Jimmy told her he believed a demon arrived from his childhood, and that demon was real, it would be somewhat of a relief.

  Better a real-life demon than your husband rapidly losing his mind.

  But years of marriage taught her honesty wasn’t what she or Jimmy needed right now. She needed to believe that in the long run her husband would be okay, that this was some sort of temporary breakdown. She needed to believe that.

  What did Jimmy need?

  He needed to be around people who loved him.

  He needed family.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  2000

  The letters began arriving in the spring of 2000. The University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Rogers State, and the University of Tulsa all accepted Jimmy. Even a confirmation letter for enrolling in community college would make Jimmy the most academically successful Lansford in the history of Lansfords.

  Letters from OU and OSU were on another level.

  Most days Kelly got home before Jimmy, who usually had cross-country practice or student council after school. She would run to the mailbox, grabbing any letter with a college logo and hiding it from their mother until Jimmy came home.

  Feeling the weight of his college acceptance packets made Kelly so happy for her brother. She was happy for herself, too. For the first time someone actually wanted them. After a lifetime of rejection that began the moment Diane realized she had missed a period, Jimmy and Kelly weren’t just wanted—they were being recruited, and though her brother’s name was the only name on the mailing label, she knew that when you got one Lansford kid, you got both. They were a “they,” and they were leaving Diane’s shadow for the light of a warmer world.

  Kelly’s excitement meant Jimmy couldn’t tell her the truth about the letters. Though any school would be happy to have a cross-country state champion with a 28 on his ACT and a 3.8 GPA, cross-country was not football, a 28 was not a 36, and a 3.8 was not a 4.0. Every school offered a scholarship, but in each case the amount was short of what Jimmy needed to make his college dream a reality.

  As the letters and disappointment piled up, Jimmy turned to the only person he knew—other than his teachers and coaches—with a college degree.

  On an April day, Carlisle and Jimmy sat in front of Derry’s. Carlisle looked closely at each letter and the financial aid packages offered. He could give Jimmy a motivational speech, tell the boy all he needed to do was believe in himself. He wouldn’t do that, though. Carlisle treated Jimmy like a man—and a man knows wishing the numbers added up right doesn’t make them add up right.

  “I have an idea,” Carlisle said.

  “Yeah? Rob a bank?” Jimmy asked.

  “An inside job? A cop? I like it. But it would never work.”

  Carlisle solemnly shook his head, as though he had briefly given bank robbery serious consideration.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t trust you as a getaway driver, Jimmy, and the Camry is too slow. That, and the bank people know me.”

  “Everyone knows you.”

  “Exactly. Bank robbery, out,” he said, making a slashing gesture across his throat.

  “Okay, then what was your idea?” Jimmy asked. Though his new and struggling goatee couldn’t match Carlisle’s, it was most visible in the bright daylight with a bit of ice cream in his chin fuzz.

  “I played ball at OU with a g
uy who coaches at Arizona State. It’s down in Phoenix. I could put in a call for you, see if my buddy can pull some strings.”

  Phoenix: a completely attainable city for most people, but the rich side of Paris for Jimmy. Even if he could somehow get out and make it somewhere like Phoenix, he would miss the man sitting across from him.

  Carlisle seemed to sense what Jimmy was thinking.

  “Look, my man, we’ll be friends wherever you are. I’ll come see you. But you need to get an education.”

  “How will Kelly—”

  Carlisle waved a hand, his class ring from OU glinting in the flat Oklahoma daylight. He hadn’t worn it in years but had slipped it on as he left his apartment, just for this conversation. It was gaudy, thick, dated—and earned. He assumed it was the first unpawnable jewelry Jimmy ever laid eyes on. He was right.

  “It’s no different at ASU than it would be here. If the scholarship requires you to live on campus, just ghost them.”

  “What?”

  “Ghost them. Make yourself invisible. Take the scholarship and the dorm,” Carlisle said, eating the last bite of his cone, “and get an apartment off campus. You and Kelly will have to work, but you guys have to work now.”

  “How will I get there?”

  If Jimmy attended school in Oklahoma, Carlisle could drop him and Kelly off at their apartment door. Phoenix was different. He couldn’t ask Carlisle to make a thousand-mile drive, and he didn’t know how to get around Phoenix once he got there.

  Carlisle fished around his pocket, pulling out the key to his 1987 Toyota Camry. Carlisle passed the key across the table and said, “When the time comes, take this.”

  “What? I can’t take your car.”

  “Jimmy, you can take my car, and you will take my car. I spend most of my time in the cruiser, and the Camry is about done. It won’t help you with the ladies, that’s for sure,” he said, laughing. “Claudia told me I needed to stop acting like I’m still a poor kid from Nowhere, Oklahoma, and get a grown-up car. But she’ll still run. The Camry, I mean. She’ll get you to Arizona. And once you’re some rich investment banker, you can pay me back. It’s not a gift. It’s a deferred loan.”