Page 27 of Spooked
After being prodded, poked, blood taken from my arm, and a sample of urine gathered from a container underneath the bed, I’m relieved when finally I’m left alone.
It’s then thoughts intrude, a dreamworld weaving around me—sights and sounds entwining, threading, and tangling in waysthat can’t be sorted out. Recollections as firm as memories of things that can’t be possible and must have been dreams and nightmares filling my head while I was unconscious in the morphine-induced nightmare world.The Sullivan House, both as it had been in its heyday, and ruined by neglect, and then me seeing … ghosts? There was a man, too, such a handsome being only my imagination could have conjured up. Like a common issue with dreams, I can’t recall his exact features, but I know there was something about him that attracted me more than it should have. My skin heats as I remember some X-rated scenes that I question how they could have come out of my head. And then, the recall of that odd feature, he was injured himself, hampered by crutches and a broken leg.
It's true I’ve never been in a coma before, so I wouldn’t know what to expect, but such vivid images are not what I’d have ever thought to bring back to the conscious world with me.
Suddenly, I’m startled by a sound coming from the corridor outside, a peculiar clack repeated in a slow rhythmic manner. For a second, my dreams and reality collide.It’s him. The man who touched me so inappropriately, but so wonderfully, in my family home. Shit. Fuck. Does this mean he was real?My heart races, causing me to give a concerned glance to the monitors faithfully recording every vital sign. As my sane mind reminds me that I conjured him up in my head, I will my pulse rate to slow. My aim is to get out of here, not to give the nurses a cause for more worry.
But thatclack, clackis getting louder, the definite sound of something hitting the vinyl floor. Not only that, it reaches a crescendo and then stops right outside my door. There’s a perfunctory knock, then it opens into the room.
I suck in air through my teeth, feeling disappointment that it’s not my dream man made flesh. Instead, it’s my aunt who’s approaching, leaning heavily on a cane. It’s been fifteen yearssince I last saw her. Now, pushing seventy-plus, it appears that physically her body is failing. As her eyes, sharp as ever, focus on mine, her face fixed into the familiar scowl, I assume her mind is still active, and her personality not softened from when I first met her as a child.
For a moment, I let the memories take hold of me.
Arriving at this huge house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forest, I’d stayed close to my mom’s side as she rang the doorbell, totally in awe of a place so grand I expected a butler or at least a maid to answer. Instead, it’s a woman who, while stylish and well dressed, is, to me, a fourteen-year-old, older than time.
After the elderly woman stares at my mom for a few awkward moments, my mom introduces herself. “I’m…”
“I may be old, but I’ve got all my senses. I know who you are,” the elderly woman declares. “How could I not recognise the devious features of my own daughter?”
I respond by instinctively moving closer to my mother, unsettled by the hostility directed toward her. Nonetheless, she calmly places a reassuring hand on my arm and, disregarding the severity of her illness, composes herself. “Devious? Is that how you see me?” she replies, her voice measured despite her declining strength. “It is clear you have accepted my sister’s account.” She shakes her head regretfully. “I thought sufficient water might have flown under the bridge by now.”
“You disgraced our family. Fell in with the wrong crowd.” Before Mom can protest, she adds, “So what’s brought you crawling back after all these years? You after money?” Her tone is brusque, suspicious.
My mom takes my hand. “Maeve, I’m sorry, sweetheart, there’s nothing for us here. It was a waste of time to come. Let’s go.” She stumbles slightly as she turns, and I give her a supporting hand.
“Wait!” the old woman says sharply. “I demand to know what you want and why you have come?”
Glancing at my mother, I can see she’s battling with herself, my young teenage self recognising her pride wants her to just turn her back and leave. But there’s more than just her feelings to worry about. There’s mine, and what my near future holds.
Taking the time she needs to turn back around, Mom raises her eyes. “Mother, going into care, being fostered, is a life I don’t want to impose on my daughter. Maeve will need family around her with what’s coming, and you’re the only living relative I know. Apart from Siobhan,” she adds quickly. “And she’ll never lift a finger to keep her niece out of the system.”
I hadn’t known we were visiting family. As far as I knew, all we had was my dad’s, not that I knew him. He died before I was born. Gramps and Granny had given a home to us both, but they’d passed away, leaving us all alone. Mom calls this elderly lady her mother, so I suppose that means she must be my grandmother. It makes me eye the woman in front of me more carefully, but with no love. I’ve always known that she and my mom were estranged.
“Why do you want to foster your…” she obviously tempers what she was going to say after a glance in my direction. “Child onto me?” It seems it’s the first time she’s really taken in her countenance. Her eyes narrow as she adds, “You into drugs or something again? Or come back to steal from me?”
Mom breathes in deeply. Her body shudders, and even at my age, I know she doesn’t want to admit the truth that she’s already carefully and tearfully explained to me. Fighting down my nerves, I address my grandmother directly for the first time. While I might want to spit the awful truth out, I temper my voice, making it quiet and respectful. “Mom’s got cancer.” Voicing it aloud, I can’t help the tears that fill my eyes.
A squeeze of my hand, a proud look down, and Mom takes over from me. “I’ve got months, Mother. But no more.”
For a moment, Mom’s words hang heavy in the air. I hold air in my lungs. I doubt there’s any happiness to be found inside these doors, and while I’d give everything to have my mom live forever, even at fourteen, I’ve accepted the truth that, against her will, she’ll soon be leaving me all alone. Where would I go?
Even the birds in the trees seem to wait with bated breath as the silence drags on. Then the old woman steps back out of the doorway, raises her hands, and beckons, “Well, you better come in.”
Emerald Sullivan. Matriarch of the family, my grandmother, as I came to know, didn’t know fuck about the family dynamics. She hadn’t known how her elder daughter had poisoned her about her second child, had fed her lies for years, when the truth was that my mother’s only crime had been to fall in love with someone Emerald hadn’t approved of and had borne a child out of wedlock. The money she was supposed to have stolen? Siobhan had taken it herself, played on her mother’s gullibility. The motive? Jealousy.
Growing up, Mom had biased me against my maternal grandmother, bearing resentment herself for Emerald so easily believing Siobhan’s lies. I might realise this is my only option to not be alone when Mom can’t be with me anymore, but I guard myself against getting too close to the woman who had wronged my mother so much.
While she indeed put a roof over our heads, I was standoffish over the first few months. Mom was suffering, dying, and Emerald stoically did her duty to her and to me. To this day, I believe it was the crumpled marriage licence she’d found among Mom’s effects that made her start to doubt Siobhan was the angel she’d always made herself out to be. The first cracks appeared as the lies became exposed. She began to soften towardMom and me, and in turn, I began to feel affection for her. After my mom’s time came and she was taken from us, hopefully to go to a better place, one with no pain, I’d come to love that old woman, and knew she loved me.
Grandmother, or Gramma, as I came to call her, was my strength, my rock. When she realised the extent of Siobhan’s treachery, she said she was going to change her will and leave everything to me. Trouble was, she’d lived a charmed life. Her seventieth birthday came and went, and yet she still felt no urgency to put her affairs to rights. Maybe her brain wasn’t as sharp as it was once, or she wasn’t as immortal as I think she believed herself to be. But it wasn’t her health that failed her. A fall down the stairs that snapped her neck separated me from the only remaining family I had.
Well, not the only person with whom I shared blood, but I’d discounted my aunt as an unpleasant and conniving woman from the first time we met. I wasn’t surprised, nor was I particularly upset when Siobhan had stepped in to handle the funeral arrangements, happy to leave it to my aunt. At eighteen, I barely knew enough about living, and nothing at all about the formalities that have to happen when someone dies.
I remember the church was quiet, the mourners numbering only a few. Emerald, a star in her day, had lost touch with or outlived her contemporaries, and since her husband’s death, had become a recluse. Siobhan had sat beside me, dry-eyed, as I failed to stop the tears rolling out of mine. I excused her lack of emotion, thinking that age had probably hardened her senses and that she must have been grieving inside.
There was no wake. No point, the few other mourners had disappeared as soon as her coffin was laid to rest in the ground. Instead, there was a visit to the lawyer’s office.
After offering condolences that seemed routine rather than genuine, I waited to hear what provision my grandmother hadmade for me. I’d lost my mom, and now I’d lost the next most important person to me. I was alone in the world. My aunt and I had never been close, and I doubted she’d want anything to do with me. Even though Gramma had said she’d leave everything to me, I hadn’t really thought she’d meant it. But I expected at least some provision, a legacy that perhaps would kick-start and soften this abrupt thrust into adult life.
