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. OK?”
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. He looked at his digital watch and called out, “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 that 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?”
“Hmmmnnn — 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 Kyle 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 the 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.
Courtney sat on a pile of towels in the linen closet and hung on to the doorknob with both hands. She wept as silently as she knew how. She had felt, through the door, the force of her mother’s anger, and it had shocked her. What had she done to deserve it? She knew she was overweight and unlovely, but she couldn’t help it. Her father was acting so weird too. She cried harder now, because she wanted to love him but he wouldn’t let her, and she felt so alone.
Kyle strained until he thought his ears were going to pop, but he only heard the thumping of his own blood. Me waited and waited and waited for the ghosts to make a noise, and finally he just had to move his legs, and then he had to scratch all his itches, and after that he couldn’t stop himself and he cleared his throat. Time dragged by. He couldn’t remember the house being this quiet, ever.
Caroline and Darryl threw cushions down on the dew-dampened afterdeck of the Lay-Z-Girl and tore off each other’s sheets, T-shirts, shorts, and underwear and made love in the silvery light of an almost full moon, as if they were young again and back in a field outside Chunchula, Alabama. Ah, it was sweet and powerful, the best ever, they told each other afterward. Sweaty and relaxed, they dozed for a while, until the crisp growl of twin outboard engines, approaching in the canal from the direction of Biscayne Bay, awakened them. The outboard engines shut off close by, and they looked at each other and shook their heads. “Jorge?” “Jorge.” Both of them had thought the same thing: young Jorge Dominguez was returning home. Darryl got up into a crouch, looked over the railing, and glimpsed two figures moving across the Dominguezes’ lawn. He lay back down again next to Caroline. They decided that Jorge had taken his girlfriend out in his boat, to smoke a joint or fuck in the moonlight.