Chapter 50
Sammie’s plan consists of mostly tanning on the beach with iced coffee and donuts, and she won’t tell us what her idea actually is until the evening. At which point, we all learn that she’s starting to lose her mind.
“I don’t know why it isn’t working.” Sammie releases Austin’s and my hands and then we all let go too.
I open my eyes. We are sitting around the coffee table in the living room, all lights turned off, only candles lighting the room.
We’re all in black, for reasons Sammie did not explain, and she is wearing the Halloween witch hat from the garage where she said it was easy to find, she only had to climb into the rafters and move ten or twelve boxes.
The table in front of us is laid out with a few of Babe’s things. Sammie and I went into her bedroom together after I told her I’d explored there last night. We got a bottle of her perfume, one of her soft cashmere sweaters, the kitchen journal, and a few other odds and ends.
“I wish I could google what to do,” she groans.
“You wish you could google how to do a séance?” I ask.
“Well, yeah! Why not? There would be an answer.” She lays back on the ground, pouting. Birdie comes over to lick her face.
“Do you think that anywhere, they would say to wear a moth-bitten old witch hat?”
She fake-glares at me.
“Anyone want the last piece?” asks Austin, holding up a piece of cheese pizza, ordered from Woody Woodfire.
“All you,” Matt answers.
Sammie and I wave it off.
Sammie shoots up. “Wait, do you think there’s a Ouija board here?”
“Hell! No!” I exclaim vehemently. “We are not doing a Ouija board in this house, absolutely not.”
Matt winces. “I knew a girl who did that in high school, she asked if the ghost was in the room. It said yes, and she asked where, and it said in the corner, and then after that day the plant in the corner started to die from the top down.”
I shiver. “No, see, hate. Hate, hate, hate.”
Sammie gives me a look. “Oh, so little miss doesn’t believe in witches is too afraid of a game mass-produced by Hasbro?”
“Parker Brothers,” Austin corrects.
“Not exactly,” Matt says. When we all look at him, he clarifies: “Hasbro has owned Parker Brothers since ninety-one. Ouija boards usually have the Hasbro logo on them these days. So you’re both right. And wrong.”
Austin gives him a look of impressed approval. “You are damn good, I’ll give you that.”
“Trivia night at the corner bar is basically all I live for these days,” Matt confesses.
Sammie clears her throat and gestures with her eyes in the direction of the bedrooms.
“And my daughter!” Matt hastens to add.
“Listen, there is darkness in that game,” I insist.
“You have to admit you believe in a thing or two in order to be afraid of a little old game.”
“I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t mess with Ouija, that’s all I’m saying!”
“I’m going to go look anyway.” Sammie goes to the game cabinet. We had once been the same size as the cabinet when we crouched down looking for Hi Ho! Cherry-O and Candy Land.
“Can’t we just play a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit?” pleads Matt.
Sammie doesn’t answer, but keeps looking.
“Why not?” he asks anyway.
“Because you’ve memorized all the cards,” Austin answers for all of us.
“I have not!”
“From which sport did the rallying cry ‘tallyho!’ originate?” recites Austin, looking at his palm like it holds a card.
Matt sighs. “That’s obvious, it’s foxhunting. But—”
“Who was the first New York Met inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame?” Austin goes on to ask.
Matt hesitates. “Tom Seaver.”
“I rest my case.” Then Austin adds, “You haven’t seen a game of baseball in your life.”
“Yes, I have, I—” Matt furrows his brow. “Maybe that was hockey.”
Sammie pauses in her search. “You’re not sure if it was baseball or hockey?”
“It was right after I passed the bar! I just remember we were going to a game of some kind.”
All of us laugh.
“See, look how much fun we’re all having because of trivia,” Matt asserts.
“Nothing in there.” Sammie closes the cabinet back up, and then stands with her hands on her hips. She looks around the room and then her eyes land on the pizza box. “I have an idea.”
She runs off toward the kitchen, and Matt, Austin, and I share a worried look.
She returns with a Sharpie, and then rips off the lid of the pizza box.
I gape at her. “You are not going to make a Ouija board out of that.”
“It’ll be fun! It’s not going to be some plant-rotting ghost, we’re trying to talk to Mom!”
“That’s so much worse,” I whine.
Sammie points her marker at me. “And this time, we’re doing it in there.”
I follow her point to the den.
“No!” I shoot back.
“Yes!” she fires back, matching my pitch and tone. She starts in on writing the alphabet on the cardboard.
“We don’t even have the thingy.” I move my hand to indicate what the thingy is.
“The planchette,” supplies Austin. When Matt looks at him, Austin shrugs.
Matt shakes his head. “I’m telling you. We could be champions.”
“We could be heroes,” I quote, remembering the millions of times Matt and I used to duet in front of the mirror to “Elephant Love Medley” from Moulin Rouge!
“Forever and ever,” he half sings back.
Austin exhales loudly. “Thank god we’re not doing screens. I don’t think I can possibly watch that movie again.”
I smile at him. “But you would.”
He smiles back and taps my foot with his. “Yeah, yeah, I would. It’s a good movie.”
“Okay, done,” Sammie announces. “As for a planchette, I have already thought of this.” She gets up, goes to the bookshelf, and brings back a big, heavy, clear paperweight. “Am I right? Pretty good!”
I stare at it and try one more time. “I really don’t want to do this.”
“Hey, I sat out on the porch with Harrison today, just like you wanted me to, and just like I did yesterday.”
“I didn’t make you do it today, that was all you.”
Even in the candlelight, I see her blush. “Well … he’s actually pretty funny. Did you know he reads like a hundred books a year?”
“No wonder he wants a girlfriend,” Austin jibes. “No offense to reading.”
We all know this is a joke, since he might be the most well-read of all of us.
Sammie enlists us to help move the candles into the den, and soon enough, we’re piled into the room, crowded around a different coffee table. This time with a casket next to us, the reflection of the candles dancing in the gleaming pink surface and off the brass handles.
“This is horrible,” I hiss.
“It’s nice,” Sammie hisses back.
The way the palm trees whip against the window now reminds me of a time when we all piled in here—Babe …
alive at the time—and watched Jurassic Park.
I’d never seen it before. We ate popcorn and mint chocolate chip ice cream, and everyone laughed at Sammie, who screamed every time a dinosaur came on screen.
The movie experience became mostly us silently hoping another one was about to appear, and then it would, and then she’d scream, and all of us would laugh so hard it hurt.
“Okay, hands on,” directs Sammie. “Didion. Hands.”
“Mmmbleh.” I reluctantly put my fingertips on the paperweight.
Sammie tilts her head upward, taking this completely seriously. “Mom? Are you there?”
The weight moves, slowly, toward yes.
I let out a disbelieving puff of air and Sammie glares at me.
“Mom, are you in the room with us?”
It moves toward no.
I get chills. I blame it on the freezing cold air-conditioning pumping through the vents, but I know it’s more than that.
Sammie furrows her brow. “Mom, why did you want us to be here?”
It doesn’t move at first, and then slowly, it does. All our fingers so lightly touching it that they keep coming off.
B
I
R
D
S
And then it stops.
“Because birds!” I exclaim, unhelpfully.
“She obviously means Birdsong,” explains Sammie. “Okay, but why? Like … what do you want us to do?”
It’s still for a long beat, and then it moves again.
F
A
M
I
L
Y
“And also, gather, and live, laugh, love,” I joke.
But then … it keeps going.
M
E
A
L
“Family … meal.” Sammie breathes. “Didion?”
She’s seen the look on my face.