I Will not Forget

This is all true and to the best of my memory.  Even now, when I am alone, I am afraid.   I can almost, only almost, hear her voice if I am still enough.

When I was three years old and my father was working in our basement downstairs.  He was building a dollhouse for me for Christmas and did not want me to see what he was so doing, so when he saw a small child rush into the room and hide in the corner he yelled.

  “Get out!  Out now.”

 The child didn’t respond so he walked over the where she was crouching in the corner. 

“Amy?”  He asked and walked slowly over to the little girl curled in the corner.  He crouched down to look into the face of the child and the child jerked her head up.  My dad staggered back in horror because the child, just my age, my height, was nothing more than a fuzzy, intangible light.  Her eyes lay deep in her skull and she had saggy fuzzy skin of no definite color.  My dad tried to reach out to her after recovering from his shock, but she ran. 

My father caught the ghost again a few days later.  He caught sight of her walking down the hallway.  He followed her into the front room where she was sitting beside me on the couch watching me play paper dolls.  She fingered the dolls I played with and touched my hair while I played indifferent to her touches.  My father approached us timidly so he wouldn’t scare her away but when he got too close, she panicked  and disappeared.    

She played tricks on me all the time.  My brother’s room was upstairs and because he hated me to play in his room, it was my favorite place.  So when he was out with his friends, I would sneak into his room and play with my dolls.  One night, my parents wanted to go out to dinner, so I laid my doll in the lacy bed I had constructed on the edge of my brother’s bed.  She was a special doll to me, one that I kept for almost 30 years of my life.  I threw her out when I realized that she was terrifying my husband.  She is the size of a two year old and her dark eyes shined as though she were real.  He would often walk into a room and I would have her sitting in a window sill, or decorating our bed.  He would scream at first, and then laugh, as most terrified people do, and then yell at me to get rid of that demon doll.  It was this doll the little girl loved to play with the most.  On one summer night I went out to dinner with my family but when I came back, I found my doll at the bottom of the stairs.  Her red hair was flayed and matted and her clothes were ripped off.  I screamed and yelled and stamped my feet.  I hit my brother and ran to my room.  I cried myself to sleep.  No one believed that I had put the doll to bed and that while the house was quiet and empty; she was played with and thrown down the stairs.    

The night that changed everything I found myself unable to sleep.  My bed was shaking, tilting back and forth off the ground.  I can’t sleep because I am irritated at all the movement.  I turn over and over and the shaking gets worse. I feel it come off the ground and then tilt.  It bangs the floor and hits the walls.  I jump off the bed to tell my parents.  I walk, rubbing my eyes, into my parents’ room. 

“Dad, I can’t sleep.  My bed keeps moving.” My mother moans but my dad jumps out of the bed and follows me to my room.  I run to keep up with him but he beats me there.  He stops dead in the doorway to my room.  I come up beside him and watch passively as my bed jumps around spasmodically.  It does not seem so unusual to me. 

I slept in my parents’ room after that.  Every night I listened as little feet walked up and down the hall.  I found consoling comfort in those footsteps.  She paced and paced and sometimes little sobs would escape through the walls.  She missed me in my room.  When father left my mother for another woman and we had to move, I missed those footfalls and in their place had feverish nightmares.

He left when I was six.  He was perched on the edge of the couch with a broken arm.  While he talked about why he had to leave us, I studied the woman sitting in the car outside.  She had deep auburn hair.  She looked forward at all times, never once trying to glimpse at us through the window. He was crying.  I couldn’t hear his words but knew he was leaving so I ran to my room.  I heard him calling me but as quickly as I could I packed a suitcase with all of my favorite toys and ran back into the front room. 

“I’m coming with you, daddy.”  I said.  My mother who was standing by the couch cold and untouched unfolded her arms and walked out of the room. 

“Harriett!  Harriett, come back here.  You can’t come, Amelia.  You can’t.” 

“I am ready.”  I said.  He got up and even though I ran after him, grabbed his ankles and legs, he shook me off.  He left.  He got into the car with the red headed woman and drove off.  I didn’t see him for many years after that.  A week later, a violent thunderstorm shook our house.  Our dog went mad in the front yard, running back and forth, yelping and crying.  My brother sat on the floor with my sister playing cards and I sat at mom’s roll top desk pretending to be a secretary.  A bolt of white hot lightening shot straight through our front window, just in between the space that separated my brother and sister from me.  I remember clearly, the white hot electricity that singed our skin and hair.  All three of us ran into the kitchen where my mom was and overwhelmed her with our fear.   

The red headed woman became my step-mother.  She died when she was only 43 in a car accident.  On the way to the funeral, I sat next to Tonya, her college friend.  Tonya was driving and had some trouble finding a parking spot at the gravesite.  She ended up parking a quarter of a mile away from where my step-mother was buried.  We sat silent for a moment, feeling the weight of the death.  Out of nowhere, the radio turned on and the car was flooded with static.  My hand flew up to my mouth but Tonya reached over and quickly turned it off.  She hastily got out of the car but I stayed a moment trying to figure what had just happened.  I saw Tonya quickly descending the hill to where my step-mother’s grave lay and was afraid I would be lost so I got of the car and followed her.  All the while my head swam. 

I was 30 years old and hadn’t thought about that house for years.  But for sure she reached out to me.  I heard my name whispered in the white noise of the radio.  It was a little girl’s voice, my childhood friend that I had forgotten.  Panic ceased me and then left me numb. 

“I’ll go see the house.”  I said aloud.  I caught up with Tonya who was standing by my father.  The preacher said a solemn prayer.  I will never forget the dead, I thought.  For some reason, they need us to remember them.