A few weeks before my entire world collapsed around me, my wife and I rented a found-footage movie about a couple of spoiled rich kids deciding their house is haunted. They’re terrified because a dish gets broken or they hear a strange noise in their silent, spotless home.
I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for them. Stuff got broken around our place all the time, and the apartment had never exactly been quiet to begin with.
It’s called having a family.
I turned to Lynn at her end of the couch and I said, “If this happened to us, how would we know? Seriously, how? With your Amber chatting and singing constantly, I wouldn’t be able to hear a ghost unless it screamed right into my ear.”
“You’re the one talking now. Amber’s asleep.”
Lynn pretended annoyance that I spoke over the television, but I knew she was miffed at the “your Amber” remark—which, let’s be clear, I never say in front of our daughter. But when my wife and I are alone, I kind of can’t resist pointing out Lynn’s tendency to give Amber extra attention and encouragement, sometimes at Mattie’s expense.
Amber’s the squeaky wheel.
As a for-instance: Say, after dinner, we’re in the TV room and Mattie’s drawing in one of his notebooks while Amber plinks away at the xylophone I could kill my brother for giving her last Christmas. She hits a ton of notes until it’s like Morse code, dot-dot-dash-dot-whatever, and I swear it’s like she sends her mother a coded message. You want a cookie? Lynn says, and Amber bright-smiles with a Yes, please, so you know it’s just what she’s been thinking, and all the while she never pauses with those sticks against the colorful metal bars, maybe practicing a sequence for her next request—you know, Bring me a glass of milk while you’re at it, okay Mom?
And all the time Mattie’s right there in the same room. “What about Mattie?” I say, and Lynn says she didn’t think he wanted to be bothered while he was drawing. If he’s hungry, he should speak up, she says. Then she asks him anyway, just to humor me, and Mattie looks at her like he ponders the offer, then moves his head kind of in a circle so you can’t tell if he’s nodding yes or no. To me, it’s a sweet and sad gesture: It’s like the boy thinks he doesn’t deserve a cookie. So I’m like, “Bring him one, too. He doesn’t eat it, I will.”
Later, in the movie, the young wife started screaming because she heard footsteps above the bedroom ceiling.
How terrifying.
As Lynn and I watched, our new upstairs neighbor took heavy steps across the floor of his living room.
“Mr. Stompy’s at it again,” Lynn said. The apartment regulations said you were supposed to carpet eighty-five percent of the floors, with padding beneath, to muffle footsteps. Before I’d met the new upstairs guy in person, I thought he must weigh four hundred pounds. Actually, he was this frail little thing and I didn’t know how he managed to make so much noise.
“He sounds angry,” I said as he crossed the room again. My eyes tracked his movement across our ceiling. “Let’s hope he doesn’t start his vacuum at two a.m. again, like last week.”
Next, the movie husband heard a low whisper through the baby monitor. I couldn’t hear what it said because somebody used the trash chute in the hallway outside our apartment. The bag clanged against the hollow metal chute on the way down, and some glass shattered when it hit bottom.
“Some ghost has probably been trying to scare us for months now,” I said. “Too bad we can’t hear it.”
“Shhhh,” Lynn said. “Movie.”
I was just joking around, of course. If my jokes had anything to do with what happened to our family that Halloween, I’m really sorry. I wish I could take it all back.