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CHAPTER SIX
WEIRD RADIO
1
It hadn’t happened in at least three years, but some things you don’t forget. Like when your child
begins screaming in the middle of the night. Lucy was on her own because David was attending a twoday
conference in Boston, but she knew if he’d been there, he would have raced her down the hall to
Abra’s room. He hadn’t forgotten, either.
Their daughter was sitting up in bed, her face pale, her hair standing out in a sleep-scruff all
around her head, her eyes wide and staring blankly into space. The sheet—all she needed to sleep
under during warm weather—had been pulled free and was balled up around her like a crazy cocoon.
Lucy sat beside her and put an arm around Abra’s shoulders. It was like hugging stone. This was
the worst part, before she came all the way out of it. Being ripped from sleep by your daughter’s
screams was terrifying, but the nonresponsiveness was worse. Between the ages of five and seven, these
night terrors had been fairly common, and Lucy was always afraid that sooner or later the child’s mind
would break under the strain. She would continue to breathe, but her eyes would never unlock from
whatever world it was that she saw and they couldn’t.
It won’t happen, David had assured her, and John Dalton had doubled down on that. Kids are
resilient. If she’s not showing any lingering after-effects—withdrawal, isolation, obsessional behavior,
bedwetting—you’re probably okay.
But it wasn’t okay for children to wake themselves, shrieking, from nightmares. It wasn’t okay that
sometimes wild piano chords sounded from downstairs in the aftermath, or that the faucets in the
bathroom at the end of the hall might turn themselves on, or that the light over Abra’s bed sometimes
blew out when she or David flipped the switch.
Then her invisible friend had come, and intervals between nightmares had grown longer.
Eventually they stopped. Until tonight. Not that it was night anymore, exactly; Lucy could see the
first faint glow on the eastern horizon, and thank God for that.
“Abs? It’s Mommy. Talk to me.”
There was still nothing for five or ten seconds. Then, at last, the statue Lucy had her arm around
relaxed and became a little girl again. Abra took a long, shuddering breath.
“I had one of my bad dreams. Like in the old days.”
“I kind of figured that, honey.”
Abra could hardly ever remember more than a little, it seemed. Sometimes it was people yelling at
each other or hitting with their fists. He knocked the table over chasing after her, she might say. Another
time the dream had been of a one-eyed Raggedy Ann doll lying on a highway. Once, when Abra was
only four, she told them she had seen ghostie people riding The Helen Rivington, which was a popular
tourist attraction in Frazier. It ran a loop from Teenytown out to Cloud Gap, and then back again. I
could see them because of the moonlight, Abra told her parents that time. Lucy and David were sitting on
either side of her, their arms around her. Lucy still remembered the dank feel of Abra’s pajama top,