She reached into a drawer and retrieved a small vial. She dipped her finger, applied it to each nostril and inhaled, rubbed the finger around her gums, and then replaced the vial and went back into the bathroom, where Darryl waited nude in the shower stall singing an old Pink Floyd number about money, and she finished powdering his hair with flour.
She wiped the flour off his shoulder with a towel, kissed him on the lips, tweaked his nipples, and fondled his penis. She stepped back, her eyes hard and sparkling, and considered her handiwork. From the shower stall, Darryl, smiling, red-faced, and drunk, blew kisses at her.
“Hmmmnnn,” she said.
“Hmmmnnn what, baby?” he said.
She said, “I just wanted to see how you’d look as an old white-haired cracker with a hard-on.”
The children rushed through the doorway and halted just inside the bedroom and almost fell over with fright. In front of them, holding hands side by side on the bed, sat two laughing ghosts with pale, shiny faces, chalky white heads, and bloodshot eyes. They wore flowing white sheets. The ghosts raised their hands in the air, flopped them around and wailed, “Whooooooooo!” and Kyle turned and ran into the doorframe.
A ghost jumped up and took Kyle’s face in its white-dusted hands and said, “Honey, you all right?”
Kyle looked up with one of his eyes shut and said, “Mom?”
The ghost nodded.
Kyle said, “You scared me.”
The ghost bent back Kyle’s head to examine the bump over his eye and asked, “You sure you’re all right?”
Kyle nodded.
“You want to play the game?”
Kyle nodded again. “I guess so.”
“It’s only for an hour,” the other ghost said, and Courtney said, “Kyle’s so spastic.”
“So, if we’re all okay...” Darryl said. He reminded them that no lights or flashlights were allowed during the game.
“And Kyle better find his own hiding place,” Courtney said.
Darryl told them that the ghosts would wait in this bedroom, then come out and search for the children, ha ha ha.
Courtney pressed her hand to her forehead and said, “Dad, you’re weird.”
Darryl, noticing a look on Kyle’s face, said, “And you can’t just give up. If you’re caught you’ll have to wait in the TV room — with the TV off. Under no circumstances can you go outside the house. Okay?”
Kyle nodded and touched the bump on his forehead and said, “But what’s the prize?”
“A Peanut Buster Parfait at Dairy Queen,” Darryl said.
“Tonight?” Kyle said, in a rising voice.
Darryl nodded.
“Wow!” Kyle said, and even Courtney forgot herself enough to show enthusiasm.
“So, we’re ready?” Darryl asked.
From where the children waited in the TV room, they caught glimpses of the ghosts floating around the house, turning off lights. They heard, in the gathering darkness, one ghost remind the other about the alarm system. Then the ghosts returned to the doorway of their bedroom, their sheets billowing behind them.
Darryl called out, “Children, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
“Yes!” the children shouted.
They had ten minutes to hide themselves, he announced. “From now.” He slammed shut the bedroom door, and he and the other ghost groped toward the bed and lay down side by side in the darkness.
He said, “Lordy, think of them creeping around out there like mice.” Caroline said she didn’t know if she had the energy to spend an hour chasing the kids around a dark house, and Darryl reached over and touched her nipple and said, “Who says you have to do that? I’ve got a great idea. Want to hear?”
“Hmmmmnnn — probably not,” she said. “But tell me anyhow.”
As he began to speak she sat up, moved off the bed, and found her way over to her dresser. She quietly opened the drawer, found her little vial, and applied some of its contents to her nostrils and gums, and when her husband paused to ask what on earth she was doing at her dressing table, she sniffed and told him that she was looking for her eye drops, because flour from her hair was irritating her eyes.
“I’ll take some,” Darryl said.
“Some what?” she said.
“Eye drops,” he said, and she said, “Coming right up!”
A moment later she started swearing because, she said, she’d just dropped the container on the shag carpet and now she couldn’t find it.
Kyle couldn’t find a place to hide. Every spot he chose turned out to be too obvious, or it bothered Courtney, who seemed to be playing a game of her own, popping up behind him in every room he went into and hissing at him to go away. He finally returned to the living room and squeezed himself under the sofa. Kosmo the cat came over to keep him company and interpreted all of Kyle’s efforts to shoo him off as invitations to play, and just when Kyle realized that he’d picked another stupid place to hide, he heard his parents’ bedroom door open. His father’s voice called out, “Ten minutes is up. This is now officially a ghost house. Only ghosts live here. Watch out, heeeeeerrrre we come!”
From under the sofa, Kyle looked over and saw the two ghosts standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom. He whimpered when they laughed like those jungle animals from Africa he had seen on TV. As they began searching through the house, flapping their sheets and making terrible noises, Kosmo finally ran away, and Kyle squeezed himself into the tiniest ball he could imagine and tried not to think about the throbbing bump on his forehead, or about all places on his body that itched, or the fact that he badly needed to clear his throat, at least once. An hour seemed like forever.
The game glided over Caroline’s imagination with the sinister smoothness of a dream bird. She felt more energetic now, and she put her best effort into it. Action kept her paranoia — the panic feeling that she was wavering like an old quarter around the edge of a bottomless pit — far enough away to be bearable.
They swept through the house making ghostly noises, and the first place they looked for Kyle was under the living room sofa, because they both remembered that when Kyle was a little younger he loved to crawl under this sofa and declare himself invisible. Caroline spotted one of his feet and pointed it out to Darryl, who nodded. They circled the sofa, moaning and flapping their sheets, and went on in search of Courtney.
Caroline’s senses twitched when they passed the broom closet just off the kitchen, and they stopped and flapped their sheets outside that. While she was dancing around and tapping on the freezer next to it, Caroline felt a stronger twitch of intuition, and she led Darryl to the linen closet by the laundry room. She had remembered that Courtney loved the floral smell of the sachets slipped between the laundered sheets and towels to keep out the smell of mildew. The ghosts wept out her name, and Caroline rattled the linen closet doorknob and felt a sudden pull from the other side. She pulled harder, but the door wouldn’t budge. She pictured Courtney obstinately hanging on to the doorknob, and a wave of irritation rose up in her, and she felt a wild urge to yank open the door and strike terror into her daughter’s heart, and then she felt ashamed. She loved Courtney. Why should she want to terrorize her? Caroline was appalled at herself. This game had gone too far. She turned away and signaled urgently to Darryl. They made one last sweep through the house, then silently departed through the sliding glass door to the patio and fled across the lawn.