Help for the Haunted by John Searles Page A

prove how smart you are?”
    My paper. She was right that I needed to turn it in soon. But it wasn’t going to happen, I told her, since I already missed the bus and had no way of getting to school.
    â€œJust walk.”
    â€œWalk?”
    â€œIt’s not that far. Not if you take that path behind the foundation across the street. Just follow it past Watt’s Farm, and it’ll lead you to the high school and middle school just beyond. I’ve taken it plenty of times when I bailed from school. Thirty minutes tops.” With that, she grabbed the paper towel with those flat waffles on top and walked by me in a whiff of maple syrup. The smell made me hungry, and I thought of that Mexican girl I’d imagined—or maybe dreamed of—my father speaking about, the way her appetite had vanished, the way she had turned violent before the village priest devised a plan for her treatment. As Rose headed up the stairs, I called to her, “Wait.”
    Rose stopped, looked back.
    â€œIf I walk to school, do you promise to let her out soon?”
    With her hands still holding that paper towel, she made what was meant to be an X but looked more like a lopsided U over her chest. “Cross my heart. Now go.”
    After she disappeared upstairs, I went to the rickety curio hutch and pulled a map of Dundalk from the drawer. Rose’s path was not marked, of course, but I traced my finger through the woods and saw that what she said looked possible. I gathered my books and walked across the street, past the foundation, where a house had been started but never built. Behind it, I found the opening in the trees, a kind of wide-open mouth that swallowed me into those woods. Rose’s shortcut turned out to be not much of a shortcut at all, since so much of those woods was thicker than I thought, but eventually, I emerged by the athletic fields, the middle and high school waiting for me.
    For weeks, so much of what fueled me was the thought of placing my essay into Ms. Mahevka’s hands, but she was out sick so a substitute collected my paper. After that, I had to sit through an entire day of classes, unable to think about anything but Dot upstairs in my parents’ bathroom. Had she eaten those pathetic waffles? Had she promised not to call the police? Would she keep her word once she was free? By the time I stepped off the bus, those questions consumed my mind.
    In the driveway, Dot’s Yugo was parked where she left it. On the second floor, I saw that my parents’ bathroom window, which led out onto a slanted section of the roof, was wide open, the shade unraveled and flapping in the breeze. Nearby, shingles were missing, and I spotted them among the rhododendrons below.
    â€œ . . . There is the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Even a simple magnet demonstrates positive and negative energy. . . .”
    Even before stepping inside, I heard the faint sound of my father speaking again. This time, I realized how it was that he had come to me during the night. I walked through the door, listening to his words. When I flipped a light switch, no lights came on. I went to the kitchen, but no Rose. By the time I returned to the living room and reached the staircase, pausing to stare up at the darkened hallway above, my father had begun talking once more about that girl, Lydia Flores.
    â€œThe priest put the child in isolation. She was allowed no visitors except her mother. Her food and water were rationed. The priest spent hours each day, placing feathers between her toes in belief that it would enable the evil spirits to take flight. . . .”
    At the top of the stairs, I turned and walked down the hall to my parents’ door.
    â€œ . . . After a month of feathers and shouted prayers and the girl’s cries for help, Lydia began to speak of her desire to die in order to atone for her sins. That’s when doubt stirred in her mother, and she wondered if