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Eunice eventually discovered that I was saving her missives and began addressing them to me. In one of my favorites, she writes, “Noah, there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”
Margaret, a “good girl” and still a virgin, imagined that real love ought to be a full-contact sport, intense and dangerous, the kind of thing that happened on railroad tracks or forest floors, two bodies struggling to express purity of spirit.
On the other hand, many of the tales had a compelling sense of dark revelation, the gradual realization by the narrator that the comforting “real world” humans inhabited was in fact nothing but weak gauze ready to be pulled aside to reveal an abyss of terrors underneath. It was sort of the opposite of Moses and the burning bush, or Paul on the road to Damascus. The same basic concept as religion—the world is not the world—but twisted.
She fell asleep almost at once. She dreamt about baying sounds, as if some wolf or hound was in great pain nearby.
“I think horror is the most important fiction in the world,” he said.
In that moment in 1968, as they lay missionary style outside Spooky House, my mother looked into Harry’s face and felt a comfortable life with Pierce disintegrating. In its place, she saw a different, harder span of years stretch out before her: a small, anxious wedding, too many children, life in a blue-collar neighborhood, aggressive penny-pinching, hand-me-down clothes, thrift-store shopping. She felt powerless and unwilling to stop it from becoming a reality. She didn’t tell my father any of this. Instead, she put her hands on his face and said, “My mother’s going to hate you.”
“I love you until the end of time, and whatever comes after that.” It was a bit of doggerel he’d coined on their wedding night, such a dramatic proclamation that Margaret had laughed in his face. It had since become shorthand between them, part of the internal language of marriage, a phrase both ironic and sincere, something uttered with a roll of the eyes and a thump of the heart. “And whatever comes after that,” she agreed, and laid her head on his chest.
Margaret thought the girls somehow instinctively understood the difference between his heart and her own. She always felt at a disadvantage with them, eager to demonstrate an appropriate level of love.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she murmured. I wish I could have responded, could have put my hand on the wall of her womb and reassured her. But I went on happily ignorant in my perfect little world, there but not there with her in her despair.
Mom wears jeans and a denim jacket, and looks embarrassed in the universal manner of all moms before a camera lens, but both she and Dad are smiling, and in their smiles I see none of the manic energy and false cheer described to me later. I see only my parents, happy. I see why they could have loved one another to begin with.
The streets would soon be awash in dark magic and the world beyond the world would show its face.
Human beings are small and insignificant in a big, scary universe, and in a horror story—be it a movie, a book, or a haunted house—we have to face that fact. But no matter how scary things get, no matter what the audience has to confront or endure, there’s always a happy ending. When the credits roll, or the reader closes the book, or when our guests walk out tonight, their lives will go on. Because they faced the dark, the sun will shine a little brighter tomorrow, and the real-life monsters won’t seem so bad. For a day, or an hour, or even a moment, life will be better.”
She didn’t want to hear it. Not tonight. Tomorrow they would deal with glioblastoma. They would discuss and debate round after round of punishing treatment, the possibility of her handsome, kind, loving husband reduced beneath the force of radiation, dulled by medications meant to stop seizures and prevent him from assaulting his children. Tomorrow they would discuss what to do about me, the parasite gathering mass in Margaret’s womb. Tomorrow they would face the thing on the doorstep, demanding to be let in. But not tonight.
She does anyway. Despite the dance, she loses the calm, becomes the small, sad Sydney, and is dragged back into the scene.
“Who do I love most?” she said. “Me,” I said, waking up a little. “And who do you love most?” “You,” I said. She kissed my forehead. “Sleep tight, little prince.”
Living with a family wounded by a loss you can’t remember is like sitting behind a tall person at a movie theater. The people around you are laughing, crying, reacting to something, but you have no idea what.
In the old days, your left side was considered your sinister or bad side. Left-handedness used to indicate a moral failing. Teachers would smack you with a ruler if they caught you writing with your left hand. So it seems appropriate to me that the heart, the symbol of love, the organ supposedly driving the major decisions of our lives, beats on the left side of the body.
“Good night,” I whispered, putting my hand to the window. The creature—my monster, My Friend—put its paw opposite mine and scratched the glass, whining just a little.
She imagines herself a playwright, hiding in the lobby of the theater, listening to her show through closed doors. She takes a bow in the dark, facing toward the center of the building. She wishes her father could be alive to see this. Look, she thinks. Look what we did for you.
Eunice just wanted a different favor. She wanted to hear Merrin say the forbidden words, to make okay the rotten thing at Eunice’s core that makes her ashamed and afraid of herself.
“Thanks ever so much,” I said. In response, it wiggled toward me until its back was pressed into my front. Its warmth through the cloak and my clothes didn’t help with my general sweatiness, but there was still a sweetness, a comfort to the touch, a sense of coming home. It pulled me swiftly down to sleep, even as I tried to make a mental note to check on Eunice in the morning.
I did my best to play the part of “interested, normal dude.”
Noah, there’s no such thing as a happy ending. The songs, books, and movies with “happy endings” all stop at the moment of triumph. They don’t tell the whole story. Only the old tragedies tell the truth. Beowulf triumphs over Grendel and his mother, only to fall fighting a dragon. Gilgamesh loses his best friend. Achilles, too. Everyone dies in Hamlet. This is the whole truth. There are, however, good stopping places. I made the mistake of traveling past mine, is all. I’m like spoiled milk stuck in the jug. I need to pour myself out and move on. I need to be free to move through eternity and
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She needs to see him as a lovable victim finding the strength to speak up for the first time, not the kid who grew up to fuck the monster.
She’s kind, but there’s something flinty at her core, the strength of someone who had to deal with too much pain too early in life.
She does that little headshake and ashamed smile that means she’s trying not to cry. He knows better than to try to stop the tears, or encourage them. She prefers to fight this battle alone every time. He sits and he waits.
The constant confusion, fear, and unreality of his former life fades into a dream of soft colors and inviting scents. The sense of being watched recedes, and his past seems less like something that’s happened to him and more like vivid scenes in a book he once read, a borrowed nightmare. Love and a simple life. This is the real magic.
Everything is fine here, the house seemed to say through gritted teeth. We are normal and happy, goddammit.
She is full of fury as she saves Noah from the Gray Beast, and she finds a new level of clarity and color as she rediscovers her human shape, finds her human voice, and makes love to Noah for the first time. Love has called her out of the dark, and at last given her a name: Leannon.
I squatted next to her. “I understand. It was easier to let us slip away and pretend that there was nothing missing, nothing wrong. It was easier than fighting and hoping and hanging on. But you held us together through sickness and poverty and disappearances and suicide attempts. You made The Wandering Dark, a place in our world that taught me to navigate this world. It’s because of you that I get to bring everyone home. That means you, too, Mom.”
“I know,” I said. “But the bad dream is almost over and the lights are about to come back on. I can’t give you Dad back, but I can give you almost everyone else. I just need you to come out to the living room with me.”
Sydney hugged her mother back. She had so many questions: How long had she been gone? What year was it? But for now, it was enough to be home, and alive, and crying with her mother.
“Do you think it will work?” I said. “Will what work?” “The marriage. My family. Will they still be happy after tonight?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But you’ve given them time, and a second chance. That’s more than most anyone else gets. It will have to be enough.”
Harry’s body is racked with pain, but his mind is clear, and he’s been given a second chance to meet his son. Free of the tumor’s distortion, he has so much he wants to tell the boy, but most important, maybe, is this: life makes monsters of everyone, but it’s always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness. But the words won’t come. Instead he leans forward and kisses Noah’s forehead and hopes this tiny pink blob of a person will grow up to understand.
