The Possessed Read online

  Lilah reached for the bottle of vodka, cranked the lid off, and tilted the bottle toward her nose. She took in a whiff, closing her eyes in delight, and smiled as she exhaled. “Beautiful.” Her eyes snapped open. She added more alcohol to her glass, screwed the lid onto the bottle, and handed it to Noelle, who placed it in the fridge. “Coke, please,” my mother said to Noelle.

  “None left,” I chimed in. “I snorted it all last night.”

  Lilah gave me a wry look.

  “What? The vial didn’t have the same ‘Hands Off!’ note you tape to your vodka bottles.”

  Noelle snatched a liter of soda, snapped off the lid, and plopped it on the table in front of Lilah. “All set.” She rummaged through her purse and removed a joint from a Ziploc bag. “So Jocelyn’s going to join us this time?” She went over to the other side of the kitchen, opened the window, and lit the joint using a large candle lighter. Then she took a long pull on the joint, held it in, and exhaled it through the window screen.

  “When did you invite me?” I asked, appreciating that Noelle directed the marijuana near the window screen so most of the smoke didn’t infiltrate the kitchen. I wished they’d told me about their attempts to contact my father. If they both abused substances while using the Ouija board, they might not be coherent enough to be careful with whomever they contacted.

  “We didn’t think you’d be interested.” Lilah tilted the Coke bottle until a few dashes of soda discolored the clear liquid in her glass. Then she grabbed the liter of Coke, snapped off the lid, and poured some into her glass. She put the glass to her lips and guzzled it down, as though she hadn’t tasted a similar concoction every day during the past two years.

  My heart broke at the sight of what my once strong and intelligent mother had become. I set my eyes on Noelle, who took another pull on her weed, and my spirit felt hollow, void of attachment. It pained me so much that I didn’t know how to help them.

  At first, I’d left brochures about alcohol abuse around the house for Lilah, but whenever I took out the trash, I always found them inside the bag without a crinkle in the spine, which told she hadn’t even cracked open the booklet. I’d also given her contact information for recovery support groups, but she didn’t think she had a problem. Until she acknowledged the truth, I couldn’t help her. As for my sister, who indulged in partying every minute that she wasn’t working, I’d given up hope that she’d also return to the loving twin who lashed out at her popular friends when they had insulted me in middle school for dressing up as Hermione Granger while at a Halloween party.

  “You want some? asked Lilah.

  “Yeah,” I said, hoping they hadn’t heard the jitter in my voice.

  “Seriously?” Lilah wore an astonished expression. “You want a drink?”

  “Hit me up,” I said with a confident smile, only because I’d discovered that Lilah and Noelle might have been dealing with dark forces. I’d need some liquid courage to overlook my experience with a Ouija board. After all, I’d failed to prevent them from using the board, so I’d need to chaperone them.

  “Well, all right,” said Lilah. A selfish grin formed, revealing that I no longer had any right to criticize her dependence on alcohol. She got up and made a drink for me, but mostly filled it with Coke. I couldn’t tell whether she’d done so because she thought I was a lightweight or if she’d done so to save more vodka for herself.

  I took a gulp from my drink, so I wasn’t uptight while Lilah and Noelle tried to contact my father. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have taken a sip because I was a control freak, but when it came to the Ouija board, instinct told me I’d need something to dull my anxiety.

  Noelle returned to the table as a wisp of noxious pot smoke swept about her head. When Lilah put her fingers on the planchette, my sister did likewise.

  “Are you there, Rick Ryland?” asked Lilah. “We love you, so please answer us.”

  Nothing happened.

  “We’re here, Dad,” Noelle said. “Even Jocelyn.”

  Seconds ticked by, but the planchette didn’t move.

  “Do you think,” Noelle said, “that Dad wants us to show how much we want to hear from him? Maybe that’s why he hasn’t gotten in touch with us.” Noelle and Lilah looked at me.

  “No way,” I said, waving off the idea. “Keep me out of it.”

  “You already had a drink,” Lilah said. “Did you like it?”

  “It tastes horrible.”

  “But do you like the way it makes you feel?”

  I couldn’t argue that point.

  “Jocelyn,” my mother said in a soft tone. “Be honest with yourself: you wouldn’t have had that alcohol if you didn’t plan on joining us.”

  Once again, I couldn’t lie.

  “Fine,” I said, moving forward and placing my fingers on the planchette beside theirs. “Is this better? Does this make you happy?”

  “Rick Ryland,” my mother called out. “Are you there?”

  Underneath my fingers, the planchette moved across the board and landed on the word “Yes.”

  2

  I backed away from the table, shot up from the chair, and stared at the board. “That wasn’t… it wasn’t…”

  “Who?” asked Lilah. “Your father?”

  “It wasn’t either of you doing that,” I finished. “Right?”

  Lilah took in a deep breath, and a triumphant smile lit her face.

  Noelle swished her hands together. “Let the festivities begin!” She got up and removed a red see-through glass containing a fruit/veggie smoothie she’d left in the fridge since this morning, something as ritualistic as this encounter with the paranormal. She tilted it to her mouth, gulped some down, and then placed it on the table before taking her seat and returning her fingers to the planchette.

  “As your sister stated,” Lilah said, “it must be because we’re all in attendance.” With her free hand, she reached for Noelle’s palm and took it in her own, ignoring my own as a secondary option. It made sense since Noelle had always been her favorite. They had the same charismatic personality, at least when my mother wasn’t trashed. They spoke each other’s language, cynicism with a hint of self-doubt, even if they spoke in a completely different manner. As a child, each time they shared a tender moment, it felt like someone had jabbed a knife into my heart and twisted it. But time passed. The dagger now felt like a pinprick.

  “Dad, is that you?” asked Noelle.

  The planchette led Lilah’s hand across the board until it stopped at the word, “No.”

  Breathless, I was still shocked to see it move, apparently without Lilah or Noelle manipulating it. I could tell because their fingers moved in a mechanical way, the kind that showed they didn’t anticipate movement as they stared at the board with perplexed expressions.

  “This is bad,” I said. “We should stop.”

  “You did your part,” said Lilah, eyes wide enough to give the impression that she was sober. She had the hungry yet greedy stare of a card shark who couldn’t wait for an opponent to reveal his hand. “For that, I thank you, but you’re free to leave.” She turned to Noelle. “What now?”

  “Don’t you know?” asked my sister. “You’ve been working this thing for a while now. Ask it another question.” She snickered, but her mouth opened wider as every second passed, making it clear that she was eager for something to happen.

  Angry and irritated that they looked like drug fiends waiting for their next fix, I reached across the board and knocked Noelle’s fingers aside, replacing them with mine. “Who are you?”

  The planchette slid under my fingers, but I barely managed to retain control of the device because my hand shook so violently. When the planchette came to a stop, it had spelled out “A…F R I E N D.”

  I removed my hands and placed them under my hamstrings, pressed tightly against the chair’s padding because the trembling would continue, and I didn’t want my sister and mother to criticize my blatant fear. “A friend of mine? Or a family friend?”

>   Lilah and Noelle took the planchette, and soon enough it spelled out, ‘A…C L O S E…O N E.’ “Obviously,” Lilah said. “But which friend?”

  A framed family photo with the three of us and my father rattled against the wall behind me. A second later, it fell to the ground.

  I jumped in my seat, and the idea that an unseen entity lurked around our home made me scan my surroundings. The air felt heavy, as if someone had pumped the house with humidity, and it carried an ominous sensation that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

  “Ha!” said Noelle with a triumphant smile. “See? I told you. We made contact!”

  Seeing her excitement at having invited an invisible spirit into our home that wasn’t our father, I rushed over to the table, picked up the Ouija board, and slammed it against my right knee, breaking the board in half.

  “What the fuck, Jocelyn!” Veins stood out in Noelle’s neck. “That person could have known Dad!”

  “A person has a pulse,” I said. “Flesh and blood. That’s a person, Noelle. A ghost is not a person. And it even admitted that it’s not Dad.”

  “It was a spirit,” said Lilah, glaring at me with tight lips, as though trying to clamp her mouth shut to keep from ripping into me. She hurried over to the picture frame, inspected it, and sighed with relief upon seeing that the glass hadn’t broken. She mounted it to the wall and took longer than necessary to straighten it. “We all have a spirit. Just because it isn’t corporeal doesn’t mean—”

  “It wasn’t Dad,” I repeated. “I pitched in to play along in the far off chance that Dad would reach out to us. He didn’t. Something else did. I don’t want an entity in the house, peering over my bed and staring at me while I’m sleeping.”

  “But it knows Dad,” said Noelle. “Why else would the spirit knock over that picture? It’s his way of saying, ‘I’m not your father, but I know him!’ That spirit might tell us about—”

  “Dad doesn’t want to communicate with us. Let him rest in peace. Why are we even having this conversation?”

  “I expected…” Noelle splayed her hands across her arms and looked around. “It feels cold in here now.” She turned to me. “Right?”

  I’d been so upset by whatever had infiltrated our home and how Lilah and Noelle responded to the paranormal that I hadn’t even noticed the chill in the air. My gaze instantly settled on the open window. I let out a long sigh as I got up, crossed the floor, and closed it.

  “Oops,” said Noelle with a guilty grin.

  “The air doesn’t feel as charged as it had been earlier,” I said.

  Noelle glared at me. “You’re reading more into this because you were so weirded out by the whole thing. You didn’t have to go all caveman and break the board game.”

  “It’s not a game! How high are you right now?”

  “It’s perfectly rational that a gust of air from the window may have caused it,” Lilah said.

  That she’d considered the same explanation as my friends from sixth grade obliterated my anger, sending me back to a much younger age when I turned inward. This time, however, I didn’t have to worry about my friends ostracizing me. My mother and sister had already done it years ago.

  They’d never say it outright, but by keeping me out of conversations, going out shopping or chatting over a meal at a restaurant, they had cut me out of their friendship. In doing so, they made me feel like a forgotten relative instead of a member of their immediate family.

  “It wasn’t the wind,” I said. “It was something otherworldly.”

  “And how would you know?” my mother asked. “You’ve made it clear you haven’t studied the paranormal.”

  I thought about the books I’d seen on top of the fridge. “No. But you have. Does it say that gusts of wind from open windows travel thirty feet through the house and knock framed pictures off hooks in the wall? Because if it does, then who am I to argue?”

  “Now you’re just complaining.”

  “I’m using common sense. Something that came naturally to you before you tossed your career into the toilet by getting wasted every day since Dad died.”

  “Your negativity chased that spirit away,” said Lilah. “Don’t you think it would have been wise to discover its identity before you broke the board?”

  “Two years ago,” I said, “you were one of the most distinguished professors in the country. It doesn’t bother you that you’ve given up on that life to drink full-time, yet you’re mad at me because a ghost, that wasn’t Dad and might have wanted to haunt us, vanished and we don’t know its name?” My comments might have sounded callous, but up until Dad died, I’d looked up to my mother as someone to emulate. But it disappointed me that she now spent her days consulting a Ouija board instead of writing another well-regarded book in her field.

  “What are you so pissed about?” asked Noelle. “We’re the ones who can’t communicate with Dad now.” She turned to Lilah. “Guess we gotta buy another Ouija board.”

  “You’ve been trying to contact Dad for a couple weeks. Have you gotten this far before?”

  Noelle lowered her head and Lilah wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “So maybe whoever answered your call did so because I was here.”

  Lilah shot up from her chair and headed to the fridge without even looking my way. She pulled open the door, removed the bottle of vodka, and put it to her lips. She took a few healthy gulps before removing the bottle from her mouth. She capped the lid and set it back into the fridge. She let out a long sigh as though she’d taken in a fresh gust of air. With her eyes closed, she allowed a big grin to appear. “That was so necessary.” Then she opened her eyes and turned a harsh gaze onto me. “For this sort of thing to work, you have to believe.”

  “Don’t you think I want to hear from Dad?” I asked, unable to keep tears from entering my eyes. “But you still have each other. I don’t—” I steeled myself against a crying jag because my mother had stopped showing me affection on that horrible day when I was four years old.

  Lilah stood between us, her face fragile and crestfallen. She placed an arm around my left shoulder and mirrored that movement with my sister. “Girls,” she said, but her voice broke. Her head slung low and she shook it. A pair of tears fell from Lilah’s eyes. They hit the floor and glistened in the overhead light. Her arms slipped off our shoulders. “Next time, if you join us to contact your father, please don’t bring your reticence with you.” She lifted the bottle to her lips, took a swig, and headed for the family room.

  When Lilah was out of earshot, Noelle leaned over and punched me in the shoulder. “Nice going, Jockstrap,” she said, using her childhood nickname for me. “As if Lilah doesn’t have it hard enough already, you’re making her feel worse.”

  “She hasn’t even tried to stop drinking, and she’s just as disinterested in finding a job.”

  “Did you ever think,” said Noelle, “that using the Ouija board to chat with Dad was a good thing? That maybe it might help her move past it?”

  “You have to mourn someone to move on. She hasn’t done that.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s all she’s been doing. For two years!”

  “She drinks to keep her from thinking about having lost him.”

  “That may be, but did you ever ask her why she drinks?” Noelle asked.

  That gave me pause. My mother once told me that, before meeting my father, she’d suffered from very low self-esteem, and that he’d persuaded her to work toward achieving her dreams, rather than considering them beyond her reach. Given that information, I now wondered whether having lost him, Lilah had retreated inside herself because she no longer had anyone to encourage her. I’d done so, but only from the perspective of a child asking her alcoholic mother to face reality, quit drinking, and accept the responsibilities she faced.

  I now felt as if I’d been overly judgmental, but I hadn’t gained enough experience with romantic long-term commitment to comprehend what Lilah lost when my father had died. After all,
my first and only boyfriend and I had only been together for three months. There were things I hadn’t learned about him, and I questioned whether he’d ever voluntarily offer up those parts of himself without prodding.

  Sort of like my mother. She rarely gave up pieces of her past, let alone her feelings in the present. I gestured toward the books above the fridge. “Did she really read all those books?”

  “I’m sure of it. Does she recall what she read? Who knows? But don’t you think talking with Dad might give her some closure?”

  “No. I think she would miss him even more, and it would make it worse for her. Dad obviously feels the same way. Otherwise, he would have tried to make contact at some point during the last two weeks. He hasn’t for a reason.”

  Noelle searched my gaze. “You’re only saying that because you’re scared of the Ouija board. You made that clear when you cracked it in half.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But what if something bad happens?” Something worse than a door slamming shut or a picture frame falling from the wall? What if something seriously dangerous threatens our lives?”

  “That can happen when you get behind the wheel. Dad taught us that.” Mention of our father’s poor fortune tugged her lips into a frown. “Good night, sis.” She got up from the table and started toward the family room but turned back. “One more thing: I know we aren’t close like we used to be, but…with you graduating soon and getting your business off the ground?” She nodded with conviction. “I’m really proud of you.”

  Tears entered my eyes. Noelle rarely allowed herself to be vulnerable with others, so to hear her share those feelings lifted my spirits higher than she could have imagined.