Page 94 of Haunted

“Go on.” She leans forward.

“I had to say his name three times before he stopped. If I hadn’t, he’d be in jail right now on murder charges. And then he decides, in the aftermath of all that, that he wants to marry me.”

“Wow!”

“I know!” I say. “Like, oh, since you have the blood of my enemies on your skin, yes, that sounds like a very good idea right now. Plus, he knew Nash could try something and didn’t tell me. He was ‘protecting’ me.” I make the quotes with my fingers. “And then, when everything was falling apart, he said things about Mom.”

“What things?”

“That she was abusive. That I was her free childcare. That Elliott would never have lived independently and I was going to spend my whole life as their warden.” I look at my hands. “He compared what she did to me to what Nash did to him. It was horrible. She’s dead, Aunt Shelley. She died in a fire. And he was picking her apart like she’s a case study.”

Aunt Shelley is quiet for a long time. Then she says: “Jonny, I need to show you something. And I’m sorry I didn’t show you sooner.”

She goes into her room and comes back with a small flash drive and her laptop. She sits down and looks at it in her hand for a long moment before she plugs it in.

“What is this?”

“About five years before the fire, your grandmother called me to come and see her. Angela and I were already arguing, and when Mom called out of the blue, I came right over. She said she wanted to make sure her last wishes were preserved.” She pauses. “I think she knew she was starting to lose her faculties, and she waited for a good day to make this recording.”

She presses play. The first image is my grandmother’s face, close to the camera. She looks younger and sharper than I ever knew her—this woman with her penetrating eyes was a stranger to me. I lean forward.

“You were about twelve or thirteen when it was made, I think,” Aunt Shelley says. “You and Elliott were at school.”

On the screen, my grandmother speaks. Her voice is younger. Lighter. Softer.

And then she talks, and it goes through me like something cold poured straight down my spine.

Because I had forgotten it. Completely. I have spent ten years not being able to get at the sound of my grandmother’s voice, and here it is coming out of a laptop speaker in Aunt Shelley’s front room, and it turns out it was never gone at all. It was only ever behind a door I couldn’t find on my own.

I put my hand over my mouth and I don’t take it away for a while.

“I don’t like this,” she says. “I came here to take care of Elliott. Well, let’s call a spade a spade, honey. He’s what they used to call simple. But she don’t do nothing to keep him reined in. He needs boundaries. He’s nine, but he’s throwing temper tantrums like he’s a toddler. Soon he’ll hurt someone.”

She pauses and wets her lips. “It’s my fault about Uncle Clement. I coulda said something, but back then—”

Aunt Shelley pauses the video. “That’s your Great-Uncle Clement. Believe me, this next bit was hard for me to understand at the time, too. She does get to the point.” She restarts the tape.

Grandma purses her lips. “He was—Clement was my brother. My baby brother. A momma’s boy, they called him. That was the polite word for it.” Her gaze slides off the camera, somewhere I can’t follow, then comes back. “Momma always said he was too delicate for the world. So we kept him home.”

“And he was gentle, Clement. A gentler soul you never met. And he never once—he never married.” Her mouth works. “No. Of course he didn’t. We saw to that, didn’t we? Kept him close and used his good hands and called it kindness.

“He babysat two generations of youngins, and he wasn’t never nothing but sweet to them. That Thanksgiving we had at our house—you were two and your sister was ten that year.” She pauses. “He had gone off to fetch a pie and your sister called him Clementina, and Daddy and your uncle Harold laughed so hard they looked like they’d about fall over. I turned around and I saw him standing there, looking hurt. The next morning, when he didn’t come down to breakfast, I sent Angela to go and fetch him down.”

She shakes her head. “I made Angela hide the pill bottle. We put it out that his heart failed overnight. I told her that we were protecting the family from the scandal. I should have told her that we had done wrong to him. But what could I do? We took that boy, we used him, and then we erased him when he wasn’t there.”

For a long moment she says nothing, and I think maybe she’s drifted off the way she used to at the end. Then the fog goes out of her eyes all at once, the way a cloud slides off the sun, and she looks dead into the lens. “Parker. You understand me. This is about Parker.”

“Parker? Are you saying Parker’s gay? He’s twelve.” Aunt Shelley’s voice on the tape.

“I’m too old not to know what this looks like.”

“Are you saying that Angela is treating Parker like your mom treated Uncle Clement?”

Silence. Then: “You look at those two bedrooms and tell me who the second-class son is. It’s wrong. He’s already talking about colleges he wants to go to, and places he wants to see, and it breaks my heart. Angela just says we can’t afford it, but what she’s really doing is trying to make sure he don’t dream too big.” Her eyes glisten. “Soon, I’m gonna need to be put into a home. And if I were in my right mind, I would ask you to see to it. That’s why you’re here. I want this on video. I don’t want to be a burden for Parker to take care of. Because that’s who it’s gonna fall on. Angela will work and Parker will stay home for the rest of his life taking care of me and Elliott, until he’s old and gray, and he won’t know no better.”

Grandma straightens herself and puts her chin out defiantly. “But I don’t want this for him. And I don’t want it for me. When my mind goes, I want you to play this for Angela and make her understand that I want to go someplace where I won’t burden nobody. And Elliott needs to be in a place where he can get the structure and supervision he needs.”

Aunt Shelley shuts off the video.