Maybe the faculty emeritus had been lurking in the open doorway of my attic bathroom, and Rose had seen his reflection in the skylight? Although I couldn’t see Granddaddy’s ghost, I didn’t hesitate to speak sharply to him. I never imagined that poor Rose would think I was speaking to her.

“Get out of my bedroom!” I said (I thought) to Granddaddy’s ghost, who (of course) wasn’t there. Nana and Dottie didn’t hear what I said—not over Rose’s heart-stopping scream, not as far away as the kitchen—but, from Rose’s heartrending expression, I had no doubt that Rose had heard me.

“No, not you—I meant the ghost!” I said to Rose, which my grandmother and Dottie also didn’t hear; Rose clearly did. The ghost word, and her perception that I was rejecting her, gave a new urgency to Rose’s backpedaling across my bedroom floor. She’d called her wonky right foot her accelerator foot—the stated reason Rose was not allowed to drive a car—but the way she propelled herself with both her heels, on her back, down the attic stairs, suggested to me another reason not to let Rose drive. In the middle of a muscle spasm, Rose’s capacity to accelerate in reverse would have been more hazardous (and frightening to behold) in a car.

From the attic, I could only watch in horror Rose’s headfirst and rigidly supine descent of the stairs. Dottie was there—she was able to soften Rose’s fall at the foot of the stairs. Rose’s panties had been pulled down to her knees—step by step, an inch or two at a time, in the course of her harrowing descent. Commanded to get out of my bedroom in the agony of her muscle spasm, and being abruptly told there was a ghost, poor Rose had seen me at the top of the stairs. She not only knew I’d watched her fall; she saw the exact moment of my seeing her so crudely exposed.

You can’t control how you look when you see someone revealed that way. I can’t imagine the expression on my face, or how poor Rose would ever forget it. At that moment, my pity for her was apparent. As with Sally, it wasn’t a look I could take back.

In my boxers, I started down the stairs; Dottie stopped me before I got to the step that creaked. “Get dressed, Adam—then bring me this young lady’s clothes,” Dottie said. Rose had managed to pull her panties up, but she clung to Dottie, with her face turned away from me.