Annie's Ghosts

Annie had been, her mother admitted, a difficult child - fragile but stubborn, shy but curious, withdrawn but adventurous. She had cried long into the winter nights and would not be comforted by a bottle or a lullaby or the old standby rocking chair in which Mary Evelyn had soothed many a child before her. When she was able to walk, she found more hiding places that anyone thought the old house possessed and disappeared for hours at a time without a trace, refusing to answer her mother's frantic calls and submitting to her punishment - locked in the attic for the same amount of time she had been missing - without the first tear. She talked to ghosts, she began telling people, spirits who knew her name followed her about, and at this Mary Evelyn gave in and signed the papers sending her away. Bewitched, she complained bitterly, The child is bewitched.

Annie grew up alone in a small, empty room - much like the attic - and was released at the age of eighteen, a strange and pale child with haunted eyes. She found work as a maid and slipped into an anonymous, quietly regimented life, living in a small room and keeping to herself as she had been taught. She took her medication faithfully though it dulled her senses and made her hazy and she never missed a day of work. She had no visitors and made no friends and when Mary Evelyn came to see her, she locked her door and refused to answer, leaving her mother angry and confused at her ingratitude. After all I've done to help her, Mary Evelyn complained to my grandmother over afternoon sherry, It's a fair sin to treat me like this. My grandmother sighed, You sent her to an asylum for 12 years, she told Mary Evelyn pointedly, It changes people.

I was thirteen the year Mary Evelyn keeled over in the corn crop and fell dead in the stalks. She was alone by then, her children spread all over the provinces and their daddy having been gone for years. The funeral was held in the small church on a chilly October morning and only Annie came, standing in the back, a thin figure in a simple black dress and veil. She accepted condolences passively and at the graveside she stood apart from the mourners and spoke to no one save the banker. A few weeks later, a "For Sale" sign appeared on the old house. Land o' mercy,
Aunt Vi told Aunt Pearl, She stayed long enough to see Mary Evelyn put in the ground and then just up and disappeared! The shame of it! Aunt Pearl, no less scandalized but by nature prone to disagree with her sister, shrugged, Family's a blessing and a sorrow, Vi. Come, let's have a cup of tea and you'll feel better. Nana hushed them both firmly and sent me to gather kindling for the stove.

Annie never came home again. A retired couple from New York bought the old house, gutted it and rebuilt it without an attic, opting for an open floor plan with beamed ceilings, panoramic windows and sky lights. Driving by, Nana would shake her head and smile, A house without an attic, she told me, Can't be any ghosts in there and I reckon Annie would like that.