4

More Voices

During the next month, Carmen became friends with Tanya, a neighbor on the block. Tanya was a heavy-set brunette and she was very pregnant. She and her husband, Benjamin, had moved in only a few months earlier, hoping to be completely settled before the baby decided to make his or her appearance, which would be any time now.

"Look, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you," Tanya said over iced tea in Carmen's sun-room one afternoon. "Stephen's illness has really upset things for everybody and you're in a new house, a new town...makes sense that the kids aren't themselves. I can understand Stephen hearing things, Stephanie seeing things." She sipped. "Don't make a big deal of it and it'll pass."

"Well, I don't know. I could sort of understand Stephen thinking he'd heard things...y'know, voices, whatever. But when Stephanie said—"

"But you said yourself that Stephen probably said something to her about the voices he heard, maybe even about the house's ugly past. Besides, they miss their dad. You know how that is, you miss him. Don't you feel a little off-center because of that?"

"Yeah. You're right," Carmen said, smiling. "But it drives me nuts, you know?"

"If they stop doing things that drive you nuts, then you should worry."

Carmen laughed. "You talk like you've been a mother as long as I have and you haven't even had your baby yet."

Tanya shrugged and grinned. "So, I'm practicing."

That evening, as the sunlight faded outside where Stephanie was keeping an eye on Peter, Carmen was sitting on the sofa talking to her mother on the telephone. The television was on with the volume low and Stephen was somewhere in the house. She was telling her mother how Stephen was coming along, talking about Stephanie and Peter, when Stephen hurried into the room buckling his belt, with eyes wide.

"Is...is Dad home?" he asked, looking around.

"No, course not, you know that. He's in New York until the weekend."

"I heard him call me."

"What?"

"I heard him call me just now. It...sounded like he was in the hall, like he'd just come in," he said as he looked back over his shoulder toward the front door.

"Mom, can I call you back in a little while?" Carmen said. After she said good-bye and hung up, she asked, "Now, what'd you say?"

"I thought...maybe Dad came home early, or something. I heard him call me just now."

"Well, you couldn't have heard him, hon. He's not here. But, you know what? Sometimes I miss him so much, I wouldn't be surprised if I thought I heard him, too. But it won't be long before he'll be here with us all the time and he'll come home from work every evening and when we think we hear him, it'll be because we do."

Stephen stared at her as if she'd just told him water was wet.

"I heard him," he said, calmly, flatly. Then he turned and headed for the front door.

Frustration and anger suddenly burned like bile in Carmen's throat. If he was going to go on insisting that he was hearing voices, then there obviously wasn't a damned thing she could do about it.

"Okay," Carmen snapped as she shot up from the sofa and followed him, her jaw set, "okay, fine, if you want to believe that, go right ahead. I mean, it's pretty obvious he's not here, right? Oh, but don't let that stop you. Just, for crying out loud, don't tell your sister."

He turned to her, his eyes weary, and said quietly, "I'm gonna go outside for a while."

After he'd gone out and closed the front door, Carmen stood in the living-room doorway for a few moments, just staring at nothing in particular.

It was going to have to stop. Stephen simply could not go on talking about voices he'd heard, voices that did not exist. He'd already upset Stephanie—what next? She would have to talk to Al. They would have to do something about it. Maybe they should speak with the doctor, see what he had to say. Maybe it was something they should be worried about.

Carmen was also starting to get annoyed. She didn't know what got on her nerves more: Stephen's insistence that he heard voices that she never heard, and Stephanie's insistence that she'd seen a woman in her bedroom who wasn't there, or the vague, gnawing curiosity deep inside Carmen that made her wonder if maybe...just maybe...

"Uh-uh," she said to herself, going back in the living room. "No way. Ridiculous."

That Saturday night, after Peter and Stephanie had gone to bed and Stephen was asleep on the sofa, Al and Carmen spoke in hushed tones at the dining-room table.

"So, what do you think we should do?" Al asked. "You think maybe they need some kind of therapy?"

"Oh, Lord, I hope it's nothing that drastic yet. I'm just worried that...well, that it might turn into something like that if it's not stopped now. What do you think?"

"I dunno. You're with them all week, you're the one who hears about all these...voices, or whatever. I think their life has just been a little too interrupted recently and they want some attention, wanna feel normal again. And Stephen...well, those cobalt treatments are no picnic. At least, that's what I think. Do you think they need therapy? Hell, do you think we could afford therapy?"

She thought it over a moment. "No. No, you're right. It's just...well, it's getting on my nerves."

"Let them know that. If they're just after attention, give it to them, but let them know you're fed up with the ghost stories. I think they'll stop."

"Yes," she said, nodding, staring at her tea, "that oughta do it. Yes." She kept nodding, but that gnawing feeling of uncertainty, of mild confusion—the thing that had really been getting on her nerves lately—rose up inside her and would not go away.

Stephen waited for the silence that told him it was safe to get up. He hadn't meant to eavesdrop, but he'd been unable to sleep—in fact, he'd been unable to sleep a lot lately—and their voices had been clearly audible in the night's silence, so he'd heard everything Mom and Dad had said in the dining room. He'd felt his heart sink into his stomach as he listened and he'd thought over and over, They'll never believe me. Never. There's no way they'll ever believe me.

He threw back his covers, got off the sofa and flicked on the lamp at one end of the sofa before going into the kitchen for a drink of water. Because of the radiation treatments, his saliva ducts had dried up completely, and his mouth was constantly dry, so he drank more than he ever had before. When he was finished, he went quietly down the hall to Stephanie's room and tapped on the door with one fingertip before opening it and stepping inside cautiously.

"Stephanie? You awake?" He closed the door silently and stared into the dark. "Steph? It's me." Squinting in anticipation, Stephen reached out and turned on the overhead light.

She was lying on her back in bed, tense and trembling, the edge of the blankets pulled up just beneath her widened, terrified eyes. When she saw him, her body relaxed and she closed her eyes as she sighed and pushed her head back into the pillow.

"What's the matter?" Stephen whispered.

"I thought you were a ghost."

Stephen stared thoughtfully at her a moment.

"Is that what you think they are?" he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Ghosts?"

"I don't know." She shrugged. "What else?"

"Do you...feel them?"

She squinted, cocked her head to one side and thought about it a moment. "Mmm...sometimes. I think."

"Me, too," he whispered. "Sometimes I feel like...I don't know, like there's just something there. Even though I can't see it."

"I wish Michael'd come home," she breathed.

Stephen felt the same way, but asked, "How come?"

"Well...I think he'd believe us. Don't you?"

Stephen watched her for a long time. Most of the time, his little sister was an annoyance, a pain in the neck. Since he'd gotten sick, he'd been looking at everything a little differently— as he was looking at his little sister now. She had become an ally, a friend. He took her small hand in his and whispered, "Listen, Steph. If anything else happens, you can tell me. Come to me right away and let me know, okay? I'll believe you."

"Will you tell me if anything else happens to you?"

He nodded and squeezed her hand.

Carmen began to spend as much time with the kids as she could. With Peter, it was easy; he didn't wander far. But Stephanie was active, playing with other girls up and down the street, and Stephen spent a lot of time with Jason. They didn't seem to be in need of attention, but Carmen decided to keep trying.

As usual, she missed Al; having the house and the kids to herself all the time made her feel like she had more on her shoulders than she could handle. It helped to keep busy around the house and she visited with Tanya a lot. She took Stephen to the hospital for his treatments and watched as he slowly grew more pale and brittle-looking. Sometimes she wanted to take him in her arms and hold him, to keep him away from that hospital, fearing that the treatments were only making him worse. But the doctors assured her that those treatments were Stephen's best chance.

Her weeks were speckled by stories from the kids, mostly from Stephen, stories of voices heard around the house.

One morning, Carmen got up to find every light in the living room on and Stephen sprawled on the sofa, as if he'd had an unusually restless night. She went around the room and turned off all the lights, then woke Stephen. He said he'd heard a voice in the dark, so he'd turned on the lamp beside the sofa. But the voice—a man's voice—continued, coming from the darkest corner of the room, so he got up and turned on another light, then another, until they were all on and he was able to sleep. He'd told her knowing full well that she would not believe him, and that didn't seem to bother him. But the fact that he didn't care whether she believed him or not bothered her. His attitude poked a hole in the attention-getting theory.

It happened again and again: Stephanie would hear a voice in the bathroom or Stephen would hear one in the hall and no matter how Carmen talked to them, they nodded and apologized for bothering her, but somehow managed to give the impression that they knew something she didn't....

The incidents bothered Carmen enough for her to write about them a number of times in her journal. It had become a habit for her to write down her thoughts and experiences, if not every day then at least a few times a week, even when nothing particularly eventful had happened. It was comforting to put her feelings on paper with the knowledge that no one would read what she wrote, that it wouldn't be criticized or graded.

Early one Friday afternoon, she sat at the desk in the sun-room, writing in her journal as music played softly on the stereo in the living room. Stephanie and Stephen were outside and Peter was taking a nap. More than anything, Carmen was trying to pass time until Al arrived that evening.

She was writing in her journal about the latest voice—a man's voice that had called to Stephen from downstairs—when a man called, "Carm? You in here?"

She dropped her pen and stood, thinking, Al’s home early, as she spun around and smiled and said, "Al? I'm in here."

Silence.

"Al?" She went into the living room and stopped, staring at the empty doorway that opened onto the hall and the front entrance.

Her smile quivered, then fell away. She frowned as she stepped through the doorway.

"Al?" she asked again, but now her voice was quiet and just a bit unsteady.

She was alone.

Al had not come into the house.

She looked out the window to find that he had not even arrived yet.

Carmen released a long, breathy sigh, forced a smile, and muttered, "Well," thinking, I must miss him, that's all, it's just that I miss him and was thinking about him and...yeah, that's all.

She turned and went back into the sun-room to continue writing, but not before turning up the music on the stereo.