“Are you sure you hear people talking, Addison? Or do you just want to liven things up around here?”
Or “Will you tell the ghosts to be quiet? It’s after ten o’clock, time for bed, naughty ghosties!” That’s always been the problem with our moms—they’re Catholic schoolgirls. Obedient. If a priest or a doctor says it’s true, then it’s true.
But Addison began to detach. Like, hiding her food in her napkin. Staring into space, pinching the insides of her arms, pretending to watch TV—when she was actually looking past it, waiting for voices from Miss Cal or Douglas or especially the girl who was our age, Ida. She told me all this creepy stuff. She said she could feel three time-layers of the same house crimped up together. She said every family was living here at once, only they couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them. Ida and Ida’s people were the loudest voices, she told me.
Then Addison started drawing pictures of the “original layer,” as she called it. Ida’s layer. She said the dining room used to be half the size, because there’d been a pantry. She’d drink coffee and draw these ugly pencil sketches of Ida. She’d tape the drawings up to the fridge or to the medicine cabinet in our bathroom. I hated those pictures. I tore them all up. Now I wish I hadn’t, for all kinds of reasons.
And you can imagine how well the “haunted house” idea was going down with our super-religious grandparents, right? They thought Addison was bringing something evil inside. Not intentionally, of course, but my grandparents are churchgoing people, and they couldn’t handle Addison’s “ghosts.” Luckily, Aunt Maureen was smart enough to pack Addison up and take her home before they asked them to leave.
MAUREEN STONE: When Charlie got that sports camp scholarship, it was a wonderful thing. We all celebrated it. Addison, too. Addison adored her little brother. She’d never resent his success. His abilities were so different from hers. But I kept second-guessing myself. Maybe I wasn’t seeing everything straight? Maybe she really needed extra attention? The doctor seemed pretty sure that this was the root of Addison’s trouble.
But Addison began to look sick. She stopped going outside, stopped bathing. She stopped brushing her teeth and hair, she lived in her pajamas. She never slept, either. She’d be up all night sketching this Ida, this specter, whatever you want to call it … I took a picture of her and showed it to her, and I asked, “Do you even recognize yourself, sweetheart? Do you see what you’re doing to yourself?” I felt so helpless. I couldn’t break through to her.
Addison Stone, summer, Dartmouth, Massachusetts, courtesy of Maureen Stone.
Ida was the ghost who controlled Addison’s imagination. She was this old-fashioned girl, always in this same dress, a “day dress,” I think they used to call them, with a soft tuck and pleat, lacework at the sleeve, and a pendulum necklace. Addison saw her so intensely.
“Please stop drawing that girl,” I’d plead. “You’ve made yourself sick, drawing her.”
“Ida wants me to draw her.” This was always Addison’s response. “She wants me to breathe the life back into her.”
Of course it wasn’t my parents who made me leave. It was when Addison got in her head that Ida hated her artwork.
“Ida doesn’t think my pictures have potential.”
“Ida says I’m not intelligent. She thinks I’m a copycat.”
“Ida says I’m not as talented as she is.”
“Ida says I’ll die all alone in a white dress in a white room with no windows or doors. Just like her.”
So, yes, I believed that Ida was becoming a real threat. I had to call Roy. He’d stayed in Peacedale for the summer, to give our marriage some “space”—and I knew he’d be angry that we were cutting his alone time short.
“We have to leave Dartmouth,” I told him. “Something is unfixing in Addison’s brain. It’s not right, and I don’t like being stuck here in the country, worrying about it.”
MADDY MEYERS: My grandparents have lived at 21 Lyn Road for over fifty years. Still, one afternoon, Mom and I sneaked off to the Dartmouth Public Library’s records department. Just see if there’d ever been an Ida. All we found was someone named Calliope Saunders. So maybe that was “Miss Cal” or maybe not. We didn’t have any proof. And, by the way, proof of what? Of a poltergeist?
Mom and I also found a house plan. Addison was right that the dining room once had been split into a smaller room plus a pantry—but Mom thought she remembered Gran once telling everyone that. Anyway, it seemed obvious to Mom and me that the problems were mostly in Addison’s head.
ROY STONE: Maureen left things too long. By the time I said, “Come back home to me,” Addison had starved herself. She looked like a prisoner of war, a skeleton in a T-shirt. You want to know something? It was one of the few times I’d been so angry with my wife that I had no words. And when I looked into my daughter’s eyes, I knew we’d all failed her. But that wasn’t anything compared with what happened the next week.
Maureen and I were both on watch, but that morning Maureen was gallivanting off somewhere. Luckily, I was close by. Only down the road. Needed to see a neighbor. At some point, I said, “Something feels wrong,” and I hightailed it back home. Don’t know how I knew, but I went straight into the bathroom. There she was, in a white sundress, blood in rivers on the bathroom tiles, seeping into the mat.
I picked her up—she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. I called 911. I got her the ambulance. I acted quick; you can bet that. She was loaded up within five minutes—she’d have died, if they’d been any later. She was bleeding out.
At the hospital when the doctors started talking about psychotic tendencies and hallucinations, I was all, “Come again?” Maureen hadn’t told me a word about what really went on at her parents’ place. She’d led me to think Addison’s imagination had been getting the better of her. Let me tell you, since then, I’ve researched the hell out of mental illness. Go ahead, you can ask me anything. I got all the answers.
MAUREEN STONE: That morning, I was interviewing for the job I’m at now, a clothing store called Rick-Rack. So yes, I was preoccupied. And Roy, well, he didn’t ever want to hear that our daughter was gravely ill in a way that he didn’t understand. He’d keep insisting she had a garden-variety eating disorder. Every time I tried explaining to him about the voices—he didn’t want to listen. He thought I didn’t have enough control over Addison, that I was “soft” on her, that I should have been getting her to eat regular meals. We were in a struggle every time we spoke of Addison. We’d been back from my parents’ house for about a week, and fortunately Addison wasn’t sketching Ida or any of those other imaginary people. I never let my guard down, but Addison did seem stable. Dr. Tuttnauer had said to watch out if she seemed in a bliss state, but I’d have never called her blissful. Just stable.