But first, a little history.
My mom and dad met fourteen years ago, on the set of a TV show called Crime Beaters. It was about a bunch of homicide cops who solved a different murder each week. My dad was the first assistant director, which means he shouted at the crew to hurry up and shoot scenes before they lost their light, or their time, or their money. My mom was the on-set hair person, which means she combed and sprayed and bobby-pinned the actors’ and actresses’ hair in between takes. One day, by accident, she blasted some hair spray right into my dad’s eyes. He started to curse. Mom poured water into his eyes and leaned in really close to him, her big green eyes full of concern. According to my dad, “That’s when I knew I was going to marry this woman.”
They tied the knot a year later. Three months after that, I was born. You can do the math.
When I was five years old, they bought the house just east of Main Street. It was a “heritage” home, which Dad said was just a fancy word for “falling apart.” But he was good with his hands, Mom had a great eye for cheap but cool-looking furniture, and together they turned the house into a home. Mom still worked on occasional shoots when she could find good child care for me, and Dad started getting directing gigs, first on Crime Beaters, then on other TV series. When I was almost seven, Rosie was born, and Mom and Dad decided that Mom would put work on hold for a few years.
Two years later, when I was nine going on ten, Dad got a job directing a bunch of episodes for a TV series called Paranormal Pam. It was about a woman who investigated ghost sightings. The twist was that she was a ghost herself.
I remember sitting at dinner with Dad on the weekends (the only time we ate meals with him while he was directing because he worked really long hours), and he would say things like “I think this show is going to be a hit. The star – Jennica Valentine – is a real find….
“Jennica is unbelievably talented. I had my doubts at first – I just figured she was another blonde bimbo – but, no, she’s got substance. And she’s only twenty-four….
“Jennica said the funniest thing today….”
I guess you could say the clues were there.
One day, Mom decided to surprise Dad by taking us all to the set, so we could have lunch with him. At first, it was sort of like a homecoming for her. Even though Mom had never worked on Paranormal Pam, she knew a lot of the crew. Including Karen.
“Ingrid! It’s about frigging time you came to visit!” Karen said, when we entered the hair and makeup trailer. She put me into her chair and started braiding my hair, and, even though I could smell her stale cigarette breath, it was kind of nice.
“I hope Ian’s treating you well,” my mom said.
I was gazing into the mirror, and I saw a look pass between Karen and one of the makeup artists.
“It’s not the same without you here,” Karen replied.
After Karen finished braiding my hair, Mom took us to find Dad. They’d just broken for lunch, but Dad wasn’t in the lunch tent, and no one answered when we knocked on his trailer door.
We were still standing there when another trailer door opened nearby and a woman with long blonde hair, big boobs, and tons of makeup stepped out.
Followed by my dad, who was buckling his belt.
You know that expression “the color drained from his face”? That’s what happened to my dad when he spotted us.
So I might have been only nine, but I knew something big was going down. I didn’t know what, exactly, but I did know that a man shouldn’t be buckling his belt in front of a woman who wasn’t his wife.
“Ingrid, hi!” Dad said, forcing a smile. “What a nice surprise.”
“We thought we’d join you for lunch,” Mom said, her voice a weird monotone. “But I can see you’re busy.”
“No, no, Jennica and I were just going over some line changes, that’s all. Jennica, this is Ingrid, my, um, wife.”
Jennica’s face turned fire engine red. “Hi, there! I’ve heard so much about you.”
“And these are my girls, Violet and Rose,” Dad continued, trying to act like everything was perfectly normal.
“What lovely names! I love violets,” she said to me.
I hid behind my mom.
Jennica’s smile was frozen on her face. “Well, nice to meet you,” she said, then ducked back into her trailer and slammed the door.
Dad turned to us and smiled. “Well, troops, shall we eat?”
“Screw you, Ian,” my mom said quietly. “You will tell me everything when you get home.” Clutching Rosie to her chest, she grabbed my hand, pulling me so hard I thought my arm would come out of its socket. Dad didn’t try to stop her.
That night, Mom got what she asked for.
He told her everything.
“Your mother and I are going to live apart for a while,” Dad announced a week later. He’d taken me on a bike ride to La Casa Gelato. We were sitting outside, and I was working my way through a massive cone of Rocky Road. (Phoebe told me later that my choice of flavors was psychologically significant. Her parents’ profession couldn’t help but rub off on her somewhat.)
“Why?” I asked.
“It has nothing to do with you, sweetie. It’s just that sometimes adults … they fall out of love.”
“You’ve fallen out of love with Mommy?”
“Not exactly. I still love her. I always will, in a way.”
“But you love the blonde lady with the boobs better.”
There was a pause. “Jennica. Her name is Jennica.”
Two weeks later, Dad moved out of our house and into a furnished apartment in Yaletown. Rosie and I slept over on Wednesdays and every other weekend. This change in our routine didn’t seem to bother Rosie at first; she was only two, and she acted like the whole thing was just a temporary adventure.
As for me, I was having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t help thinking about what had gone on before Dad buckled his belt, when he and Jennica were alone in the trailer.
As Phoebe said, it was a lot for a kid to process.
Luckily Jennica was never over at his apartment when we were there. But sometimes Dad would plop us in front of the TV and go into his bedroom and close the door and have long talks with her on the phone.
Once, when he was talking to her, I picked up one of his Paranormal Pam scripts, which he’d left lying on the glass-topped coffee table. I randomly flipped it open to a page and read.
INT. JOE’S HOUSE – LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
PAM is talking to JOE, a 40-year-old client.
They are both gazing at the ghost of a
BEAUTIFUL WOMAN dressed in 1920s-style
clothes, standing by his mantelpiece.
Pam considers this.
PAM
You know, Joe, a woman did die in this house, in 1927.
JOE
How?
PAM
She died of a broken heart. She loved her husband madly, but he was having an affair. One morning, she just didn’t wake up.
She looks at Joe, hard.
PAM
Are you cheating on your wife, Joe?
Joe doesn’t answer, but looks away guiltily.
PAM
I suspect only you can see the ghost because of your guilty conscience. She’s trying to tell you that an affair can cause unbelievable heartache. Do you want to destroy your marriage? Do you?
I could hear Dad in the other room, still talking quietly to Jennica. Rosie was staring at the TV, transfixed. I picked my nose, smeared the booger on the page I’d just read, and closed the script.
Phoebe would later tell me that this was classic passive-aggressive behavior.
Whatever. I just knew that, in the moment, it felt pretty good.
At our place, my mom was trying hard not to fall apart. Most nights, Karen or Amanda would come over with a pizza or a frozen lasagna for dinner, and once Rosie and I had gone to bed, they’d talk long into the night. I was glad my mom had her girlfriends because the mood around the house during those first few months pretty much sucked. At least when Karen and Amanda were over, I could escape to Phoebe’s house without feeling guilty.
“We can’t just sit here and let this happen,” Phoebe said to me one weekend, while we were holed up in my room. She’d stayed for dinner and witnessed my mom crying over the kitchen sink as she washed the dishes.
“But what can we do?” I asked.
Phoebe thought for a moment. “I saw this movie with my parents once. Some crazy woman was in love with this guy, but he was in love with someone else. So she made a voodoo doll of his fiancée and started to make the fiancée sick with black magic. It gave me nightmares for months.” Cathy and Günter took Phoebe to all sorts of movies that were what my mom called “age-inappropriate.”
“Are you suggesting we make a voodoo doll of Jennica?”
“Precisely. Then we can put a curse on her. Not to kill her, of course. Just to get her away from your dad.”
Phoebe was an excellent ideas person.
So we printed some instructions from the web and got to work. Using scraps of fabric and stuffing, we made a basic doll, about six inches high. When the body of the doll was complete, Phoebe stitched a mouth onto it, and I sewed on two buttons for eyes.
“We need hair,” Phoebe said. “Jennica’s hair. And we need a personal object that belongs to her.”
The next time I was over at Dad’s, I snuck into his bedroom while he was cooking dinner. It didn’t take me long to find a lipstick that had rolled under the bed. In the bathroom I found a pink hairbrush, filled with long blonde hairs. I pulled the hairs out of the brush and slipped them into a Baggie, along with the lipstick.
After school the next day, Phoebe and I went to her house. We stuck the hair on the doll’s head with some glue, then smeared Jennica’s lipstick on its mouth. We held the doll up to the light, feeling quite proud of our work.
Then we cast the spell. We stuck a bunch of straight pins into the Jennica doll and chanted, “May ill fortune befall you! May you be forced to leave this city! May you leave Ian’s life forever!” We repeated this process every day for a month.
On the final day, Karen dropped by to see Mom. Phoebe and I were in the kitchen doing homework.
“Ingrid, I have some interesting news,” Karen announced, as she pulled out a bottle of wine. “Violet, Phoebe. Am-scray.”
We clomped down the stairs to the basement and turned on the TV. Then we tiptoed back up the stairs and listened at the basement door.
“The show wrapped last week,” Karen said. “Jennica took the first plane back to Los Angeles. Said she couldn’t wait to get out of this rain-drenched town.”
“Really,” Mom said, and I could hear a hint of hopefulness creep into her voice.
“And they screened an episode at the wrap party. What a steaming turd. I’d be shocked if it gets renewed.”
Phoebe and I tiptoed back down the stairs and did a little dance, convinced our curse had worked.
Sure enough, just like Karen had predicted, the network aired only three episodes before canceling the show. Phoebe and I figured it was only a matter of time before my dad came crawling back home with his tail between his legs. I think my mom figured the same thing because she started taking showers again.
So we were all blindsided when Dad announced that he was moving to L.A. to live with Jennica.
And that he was filing for divorce.
And that Jennica was pregnant with the twins.
That night, my sister wet her bed for the first time. After she fell back to sleep, I took all of my books off the shelf and carefully rearranged them in alphabetical order by author, from Louisa May Alcott to Paul Zindel.
When I was done, I took them all down again and rearranged them in alphabetical order by title, from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to Wind in the Willows.
It was the first time I’d ever done a weirdly obsessive thing like that. But it wouldn’t be the last.