The Wabbits Are Coming
I was with my first
ex-wife Terri on the night that her mother died. We had been seeing
each other for about two or three months at the time. I was 18
and Terri was 16. The relationship had already become quite intense,
both sexually and emotionally, and the events of that night would
further bond us in a way that only something like riding through
the tunnel of death together can.
The day began at Terri's
parents' house. We were on our way out the door, headed for an
afternoon of teenage hedonism which would most likely include
sex, drugs and rock and roll, when Terri's mother called us back
into the kitchen. We found her rattling around in the cupboard
over the sink. Her eyes were glassy and distant, and her speech
was slightly slurred.
"Where are you
kids going?" she said.
I thought that maybe
she'd had a few late morning nips from the hooch bottle and gave
it no further thought, since I was eager to get started on the
fun.
"We're going to
the park. Mom, are you okay?"
"Oh sure... sure
sure sure... I'm fine... just fiiiine..."
She's toasted, I thought
to myself.
"Mom, are you taking
your pills?" said Terri.
"Well, I'm trying
to find them," said her mother, as she continued to rummage
through the huge variety of pill bottles crowding the cupboard
shelf. Terri's mother suffered from severe clinical depression
and required frequent hospitalization. In fact, Terri's entire
family was riddled with emotional and psychological dysfunction.
Nowadays, I would give such a potential powder keg a very wide
berth, but back then I was young and dumb and in love and I had
no idea what I was getting myself into.
"Mom, we're leaving
now. Are you going to be okay?" said Terri.
"I don't know what
your father did with those napkin holders, and I have to address
the cards... look at that squirrel... that little girl always
feeds the squirrel... it's going to bite her and give her rabies..."
She was rambling now,
her voice becoming cottony and disjointed, like a junkie on the
nod.
"David, I'm worried
about my mother," said Terri as we left the house.
"I'm sure she'll
be fine," I said. A pretty insensitive response on my part,
but I was, after all, only 18.
We spent the day in
a typical fashion for late 70s teenagers, wandering around, smoking
pot, making out, and along the way, we collected a few of our
friends and partners in debauchery. As evening fell, we found
ourselves at Terri's older sister's apartment, which was three
or four blocks from her parents' house. The apartment had recently
become one of our hangouts due to the fact that Terri's sister
was married to a very immature man who bought us beer and liquor
and partied with us like he was a teenager himself, rather than
a grown man of almost 30. Terri's anxiety over her mother had
diminished in the bright saturday sunshine, but now had returned
and was escalating with each passing moment.
"David, there's
something wrong with my mother! I just know it!"
I didn't know what to
say to this; none of us did.
"My mother is dying!"
Terri yelped, "I have to go!"
And she jumped up and
bolted from the apartment. The rest of us remained seated, dumbfounded
and speechless, and before anyone could even think about speaking,
the telephone rang. It was Terri's uncle, calling from her parents'
house to say that Terri's mother had taken an overdose of pills
and would Terri please come home immediately. He was informed
that Terri was already on her way. Everyone was confused and staring
blankly in disbelief. Didn't phones only ring to move a stalled
plot forward as a cheesy device in old B movies? Before that question
could be answered, the phone rang again. It was Terri.
"David, my mother
is dead!" she wailed.
"Ummm... what should
I do?" I said in a feeble, unsteady voice.
"Get over here!
I need you!"
When I arrived at Terri's
house, various family members were already on the scene and frenetically
rushing about. The atmosphere, as one might expect, was tense
and emotionally charged. No one seemed to care that I, a non-family
member whom they barely knew, was present. Terri sat sobbing,
with her face in her hands, on the living room couch in the midst
of all the frantic activity. I sat next to her and put my arms
around her and she melted into me. We stayed like that for a long
time; holding each other without speaking, Terri sniffling and
crying quietly, me handing her tissues or dabbing at her face
with them, the way a mother dries the eyes of her crying child.
Eventually, the family members departed, and Terri and I and her
father were the only ones left.
"I guess you'll
be needing some time alone," I said.
"Are you kidding?" Terri said, "I need you more
than ever now! You have to stay with me tonight. Please?"
"Alright,"
I said, and we settled in on the couch. The room was dim, lit
only by the thick, hazy light from the lamp on the end table.
As we sat in silence, there was a perceptible shift in the psychic
environment. It was hard to put one's finger on how or why, but
the room felt different. There was a lowering, an aura of heaviness
that descended over us like a shroud, along with a sense of foreboding
and formless anxiety. If it had been a movie, that moment of turning
mood would have been accompanied by ominous music indicating looming
and unseen supernatural menace.
I looked at Terri and
saw on her face an expression of utter despair. I tried to reassure
her that everything would be alright. Not knowing what else to
do, I looked around and noticed a bowl full of rabbit-shaped lollipops
on the lamp table. I took one of the bunny pops and bounced it
up and down on Terri's body in a line from her feet to her face
in an imitation of hopping, the way one would with a small child,
and as the rabbit hopped, I sang "The wabbits are coming,
hooway, hooway..." in the voice of Elmer Fudd.
To this day, one of
the things I am most proud of is that I made my ex-wife laugh
on the night her mother died. And one of the things that still
embarrasses me the most is that my ex-wife gave me a blow-job
on the night her mother died. But to be fair, we were in love,
and Terri was feeling very close to me emotionally, and my libido
was apparently undaunted by the tragedy and gloom, and so it didn't
seem unusual or inappropriate at the time.
The physical intimacy
was a quick affair and when it was over, we fell into a stressful
slumber that never went deeper than skimming the surface between
wakefulness and sleep. Only an hour or two had passed when I was
jarred awake by an indefinable sense of something being very wrong.
The room was pitch black,
although I couldn't remember turning out the light. From an upstairs
bedroom came the gut-wrenchingly mournful sound of Terri's father
weeping and moaning and saying "Oh god... this hurts... this
hurts..." The family's german shepherd was somewhere in the
room with us, whining and panting loudly and making strange noises
that sounded like souls crying out in purgatory. The atmosphere
of grief and black despair had become intense, oppressive, almost
palpable. And in addition to of all of this, my body was stiff
and uncomfortable from Terri lying on top of me. The whole scenario
was very surreal and extremely disturbing. It was all I could
do to contain myself. I had the strong urge to jump up and throw
on all the lights, but I remained lying still, immobilized under
Terri's sleep-heavy body, with my skin crawling from the creepiness
of it all.
I don't remember how
I got back to sleep or what happened the next day, but from that
point onward, Terri and I were joined at the hip, or should I
say joined at the groin. Terri slept over my house with increasing
frequency, spending night after night in bed with me. Her father,
in his grief and distraction, didn't seem to care what his teenage
daughter was up to, and my parents, being liberals, had no problem
with Terri sharing my bed. It was as if Terri and I were trying
to defy the reality of death by having as much sex as possible,
our warm bodies pressed together crying out for life.
Terri's mother had committed
suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, and just like
the troubled spirit who takes their own life in a classic ghost
story, her soul, as we were soon to find out, was not at rest.
It began with the nightmares.
In the weeks following the suicide, Terri dreamt of her mother
constantly, and the dreams were always horrific in nature. Terri
would find herself in a crypt, her dead mother laid out on a stone
slab. Her mother's corpse would get up off the slab and walk towards
Terri with outstretched arms and Terri would run from her in terror.
This basic plot, Terri's dead mother re-animated and chasing Terri,
wanting to touch or hug her, was played out over and over again
with variations in props, setting and supporting characters.
Then there was the dog.
The family german shepherd had to be given away to another family
because it got into the habit of standing in the doorways of empty
rooms, it's hair standing on end, insanely barking at some invisible
intruder. And then there was the overwhelming sense of an unseen
presence in the house; an unsettling feeling of being constantly
watched wherever you went. Strange things began to happen. A strong
scent of roses, the mother's favorite flower, was detected in
rooms where no roses were to be found. The family came home from
a weekend at the shore to find the front and back door, which
they had left locked, wide open and all the burners on the stove
turned on.
One evening, Terri and
I were sitting in her living room playing a board game. Her father
had gone to bed and there was no one else in the house. Needing
to use the bathroom, I flicked the upstairs hallway light switch
which was situated right next to the front door. Just then, there
was an enormous thump at the door, up near the top, as if a very
tall gorilla had banged it's fist against the door with all it's
might. I hesitated for no more than five seconds before throwing
the door open to reveal absolutely nothing there. The door opened
onto a large, creaky, wooden porch and if a living human being
had made the noise and then ran, I would have seen or heard them
as they fled, but all was still and silent.
Gradually, it dawned
on us that we were being haunted. And as if haunting us in the
place where she killed herself wasn't enough, Terri's mother then
followed us over to my house.
Terri and I were having
sex in my bedroom one afternoon when there came a knocking from
inside my closet. It was a rhythmic, insistent rapping, definitely
the sound of knuckles on wood; the kind of knocking one would
engage in in order to get someone's attention. Since we were in
the heat of the moment, so to speak, we stopped momentarily but
then decided to ignore it and go back to what we were doing. The
knocking came again, even louder and more urgent, and once again
we chose to ignore it. It was only later, when we were able to
really think about what had happened, that the creepiness and
supernatural dimensions of the situation were fully realized.
Someone was trying to get our attention from INSIDE MY CLOSET!
The haunting came to
a climax on an evening when Terri was sleeping in my bed. We were
just beginning to drift off when Terri said "Hey... leave
my hand alone."
"What?" I
mumbled, half asleep.
"I mean it... stop
touching my hand... I'm trying to sleep..."
It took a moment to
register the implications of what she was saying, but when the
realization set in, it snapped me instantly awake. The thing was,
my hands were up above my head, clutching my pillow, and Terri's
hands were down at her sides.
"Uh, Terri?"
I said slowly, "Now, don't freak out, but... my hands are
up here..."
Asking her not to freak
out in that moment was like asking Niagara Falls to stop falling.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
"What's the matter?!
What's the matter?!"
"A hand... the
hand... someone's hand was holding my hand! I thought it was you!
It was warm! Oh my god! Oh my god!"
My parents came rushing
into the room.
"What's going on?!"
"Terri says she
felt someone holding her hand and she thought it was me, but it
wasn't me..."
"What? Are you
serious? Who was it then?"
My parents sat huddled
in their bathrobes as all the stories about Terri's mother and
the ghostly activities since her death came pouring out of us.
We sat up half the night talking, and even after my parents had
gone back to bed, Terri and I were too scared to sleep, and were
only able to doze off when the sun's first rays began peeking
through the venetian blinds.
The next day, my mother
told us about a friend of a friend, a local ghost hunter who had
written some books about hauntings in the Delaware Valley, and
suggested we go to that person for help. We seriously considered
contacting the ghost hunter, but that night had been the pinnacle,
and afterwards, the ghostly happenings subsided. Perhaps Terri's
mother, hearing the threat of a ghost hunter, decided to start
moving towards the light.
In the years since then,
Terri has seen her mother's apparition on many occasions, and
strangely enough, it seems her mother was also keeping en eye
on me. For several years after our divorce, I frequently had the
sensation that Terri's mother was present and watching me. This
seemed to occur only when I was taking a shower. I have no idea
why she would choose to spy on me in the shower, but regardless
of why she was there, she seemed more at peace, as if she had
made amends and forgiven herself for deserting her children through
suicide. Maybe she just wanted to thank me for seeing her daughter
through that dark and traumatic time when she was unable to do
so herself.
David Aronson
October 2006