I pulled out the card with Dr. Parker’s number and reached for my cell phone. I was finally scared to the point of desperate. My mother had seen things knotted in the weeks before she died. Now I was.
Dr. Parker’s pink glasses looked like magic spectacles in the lava-lamp interior of Wayne’s Bar. When he’d asked me to meet him there at eleven P.M., I’d wondered what I was getting myself into, but Wayne’s turned out to be a health bar serving various flavors of springwater, herbal teas, and vegetable dishes, some of which looked suspiciously like cooked bay grass.
I was sipping my raspberry water and staring at Dr.
Parker’s glasses, as if an answer might suddenly rise to the surface of them the way it does on a Magic 8 Ball. He had listened without interrupting while I recounted some of the events of seven years ago and the strange things that had been happening recently. Now he was either thinking or asleep.
“An interesting image,” he murmured, then opened his eyes. “Tell me, Lauren, tell me all about knots. What do they mean?”
I stared at him blankly. “I don’t want to be rude, but I thought you were going to explain them.”
“If you were writing a poem,” he said, “and used a knot as a symbol, an image, what might it stand for?”
I gazed down at my hands, twisting my fingers around one another.
“Think of all the different kinds of knots you have seen,” he prompted, “not just the recent ones — others. What do they do? How do they work?”
“Well, there are nautical knots,” I began. “You could use one to tie a boat to a dock or make fast a sail.”
“So a knot can link things and hold them steady,” he said.
“Yes, like a knot that ties a plant to a trellis and gives it the support it needs.”
“Good. Keep going.”
I traced a shape on the table with my finger. “I’ve seen jewelry, silver and gold wires, that has been twisted into shapes called love knots. I guess they symbolize the linking of two people.”
I drew the shape again, as if it were dangling from a chain, then thought of the heart necklace pulling against my neck. “There are knots that can be tied and tightened until they hurt you, even kill you. Like a hangman’s noose.”
“Keep going.”
“You can be bound and gagged, kept prisoner by knots.”
“Yes. Keep going.”
“Knots can be hard to untangle, so they could be a symbol of confusion. Sometimes a person will say her stomach is in knots — like before an exam.”
“And what does that mean?”
“That she’s anxious, scared, worried.”
“Keep going.”
“That’s all I can think of.”
Dr. Parker sat silently, chewing his sprout sandwich, sipping his tea.
“So,” he said at last, “knots can be positive and negative symbols. They can represent a whole spectrum of feelings, and even those that seem opposite aren’t really. For example, sometimes our ties with people support us and allow us to grow. But those same ties can restrict us, strangle us.”
It was like that with my mother, I thought, but I would never tell him that. “So you’re saying that Nora can be feeling any of these things and this is how she expresses it?”
“If she’s the one tying the knots,” he replied.
“But the strange thing is — I probably didn’t make this clear-she’s not always — that is, I haven’t seen her — I mean sometimes things seem to move when—” I broke off.
“She’s not touching them?” The psychologist picked up a honey scoop and slowly twirled the golden liquid off the stick and into his tea. “Lauren, do you know what RSPK isrecurrent spontaneous psychokinesis?”
I tried to string together the meanings of the words. “No.”
“Do you know anything about poltergeists?”
“Poltergeists? I’ve seen the movie.”
He poked the honey stick back in the jar. “Spielberg’s, I assume. Well, that gives you a sense of what some poltergeist activity is like, objects moving around without being touched — sliding across the floor, flying through the air. It can also be noises, knocking, or voices calling outsome activity for which there doesn’t appear to be a physical cause.”
Things that move with no hands touching them, I thought. It was what my mother had described, what I had seen.
“In the movie,” Dr. Parker went on, “a group of dead people were causing the commotion. In cases investigated by parapsychologists, this kind of activity has been attributed to recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, RSPK.
That is, we think it is caused by the recurring and spontaneous mental activity of a person who is alive.
“Many of the documented cases are traceable to an individual who is profoundly disturbed or under great stress.
Some are children, a majority of them are adolescents. It’s rare to find such ability in adults. The subject may have a history of mental problems, but not always. In any case, during a crisis of some sort, the phenomenon suddenly appears — it can be quite spooky. It disappears after the stress subsides, when the mental conflict is resolved.”
“Can Nora control this thing?” I asked.
“I’m going to rephrase your question. Can the individual who is responsible control it? Some who have been studied in the laboratory can, but to a limited extent. Many are totally unaware of what they are doing. It is often an unconscious response to trauma in their lives. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, that in a sense, Nora is telling the truth when she says someone else broke the lamp and tied the knot. She really doesn’t know she’s done it.”
“Not exactly. What I’m saying is that if Nora is doing it, she may not know; if Holly or you are doing it, you may not know.”
“But I—” He held up a finger, interrupting me. “I haven’t written down the poltergeist events you have related, but you should do that, noting who was in the area during the time each one took place. I’m suggesting you three girls because seven years ago and now, you have spanned early to late adolescence and, as far as I can tell, you have all been in the area of the activity.”
“Is there a limit to the distance in which it can work? The night I saw the plants move in the greenhouse, Holly was at the prom.”
“That would be stretching it,” he said, “but it’s possible.”
“But it’s got be Nora,” I insisted, picking up my bottle of water, swirling it.
“She is an obvious candidate,” he conceded. “But sometimes the individuals who appear the calmest on the surface don’t know how to deal with their emotions and therefore express them unconsciously this way.”
“So it could be Holly,” I said.
“And it could be you. From what little you have told me, I gather you felt loved by your mother, but also bound by her, your freedom choked when she accompanied you to Wisteria. Those conflicting feelings could have, in a sense, tied you in knots. And returning to the scene of her death for the first time, especially after putting it off for seven years, has got to be stressful for you.”
I rested my elbows on the table, my head in my hands, my fingers shielding my eyes from him. I didn’t want it to be me.
I didn’t want Nick to be right when he said “get over it.”
“I still believe it’s Nora.”
Dr. Parker finished the food on his plate and drained his teacup. “It could well be,” he said, wiping the side of his mouth, missing the crumbs. “I have just one piece of advice.
