Halloweenland Read Free

to be able to keep doing this.”
    “You’ve already done too much.”
    “Tell me about it.” She locked eyes with Marianne, and her expression grew serious. “You still look a little out of it. You gonna try to kill yourself again? Can I stop worrying about that, at least?”
    “Yes. It was stupid. And the weirdest thing is, I think someone was in the room with me.”
    “Come again?” Janet asked.
    “A . . . spirit, trying to keep me from taking those pills. There was a hand . . .”
    Janet stared at her as if she had just landed from Pluto. “You think
that
was Jack, too?”
    Marianne looked away. “I don’t know . . .”
    There was a sudden chill in the room—as if clouds had pushed the sun away, and autumn had flipped over into winter. The pumpkin and fallen leaf odor had disappeared, leaving a chill. Marianne shivered, and looked at the window, which darkened for a brief moment, ushering in silence and cold, before snapping back to normal.
    Her arms, she saw, were covered with goose bumps.
    Her sister was speaking, fussing with Baby Charlie, making sure the straps on his stroller were secure.
    “I’ve gotta go,” Janet announced. “Now that you’re awake, they’ll probably want your bed and release you. I’lltalk to the nurse and come back later to bring you home. Your house is clean, most of Jack’s things are packed up and in the garage. You can decide what you want to do with them later. You’re having dinner at my house tomorrow night. No argument. And you’re going to call me before you go to bed tonight, and again when you get up tomorrow morning. And if I hear anything I don’t like in your voice, a slur from pills or alcohol, or even cough syrup, I’m going to come over to your house and strangle you. Got it?”
    Janet turned away from Baby Charlie to her sister, who was staring out the window blankly. “Earth to Marianne!”
    Marianne turned and gave her a weak smile. “I’ve got it, Janet. Again, thanks for everything.”
    “You bet.” She turned back to Baby Charlie and made a sudden sour face as an odor wafted upward from him. “Whew, little man, we need to make a stop at the changing station on the way out.”

C HAPTER S IX
     
    She felt like a visitor in her own house.
    She remembered a similar feeling when she came home to her parents’ house from college the first time. Janet was already married by then, right out of high school the year before, and the bedroom they had shared, which was still essentially unchanged, looked almost strange, as if someone else lived there. Everything was where it had always been—her bed piled high with stuffed animals, the shelf over the headboard lined with books, the rolltop desk open, a row of knickknacks, figures from
The Wizard of Oz
across the top, the bed tables with the funny-shaded lamps, little gold pom-poms hanging from the shade rims, two of them missing on her lamp, victims of their cat Marvel’s hunting ardor. She knew every inch of this space, the messy closet, the red-and-white curtains, the floral wallpaper. She had lived in this room since she was a little girl—and yet, today, it all looked new to her, as if she was visiting herself.
    That was how Marianne felt in her house today.
    But there was a difference, because she was not coming home to the same house.
    Jack’s half was . . . gone.
    It hit her immediately, when she looked at the hat rack in the front hallway and saw his baseball caps gone. There was only her own gardening cap, on its single peg. Normally it would have been hidden behind one of Jack’s hats, which had always annoyed her. There were certain places—the living room closet, stuffed with his golf clubs, baseball glove, bowling ball—where he tended to crowd her out. The garage had been his, the basement his, even though he had been promising her for years to set up her sewing machine down there.
    All of
him
was gone, now. The living room closet was nearly empty, three of her coats hanging