1965

The year 1965 is the year of Zelda Goldman's death from spinal meningitis, an event that becomes the buried trauma governing Rachel Creed's relationship with mortality. Rachel was eight years old when her older sister died in the back bedroom of the family home in Lake Forest, Illinois, and the circumstances of that death—the prolonged suffering, the isolation, the guilt—leave a scar that never fully heals.

Zelda's Illness and Death

Zelda Goldman contracted spinal meningitis and died on April 14, 1965, after a long and terrible illness. Rachel, then eight, was left alone with her dying sister when their parents went out for a brief visit during Passover season. Zelda's body had become twisted and deformed by the disease; her shoulders hunched, her face pulled down into a mask, her hands hooked into claws like birds' feet. The room always smelled of urine and of the medication that reminded Rachel of Smith Brothers' Wild Cherry cough drops—a smell that would haunt her for decades. Near the end, the drugs stopped working, and Zelda screamed constantly. Rachel had to feed her sometimes, and she hated it, but she did it without complaint. She also witnessed Zelda's deliberate cruelty: her sister would refuse the bedpan and then wet the bed deliberately, smiling in her eyes while claiming it was an accident. Rachel came to believe that Zelda hated her because Rachel's back was straight, because she had no constant pain, because she could walk, because she was going to live.

The Moment of Death

When Zelda stopped screaming, Rachel went to check on her and found her choking. Rachel turned her over and thumped her back—it was all she knew to do. Zelda's feet beat up and down, her twisted legs thrashed, and the seams under both arms of Rachel's blouse ripped out from the strain. Zelda's face turned black, her eyes bulged, her neck swelled up, and then she died. Rachel's first thought was, "Oh good, finally, Zelda's choking and this is going to be over." She backed across the room, hit the wall, and a framed picture of Oz the Great and Terrible—which Zelda, unable to pronounce the sound, had always called "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible"—fell and shattered. Rachel ran out of the house screaming "Zelda's dead!" and the neighbors saw her running down the street with her blouse ripped out under the arms. She believed, and would confess to Louis decades later, that she might have been laughing, not crying.

The Aftermath and the Scar

That night, Rachel woke up screaming, unable to get out of bed because her back was in agony. She had strained it lifting Zelda, but in her eight-year-old mind, she was certain this was Zelda's revenge from beyond the grave—that Zelda had given her spinal meningitis, that her back would start to twist and she too would become a monster, and that finally she would choke to death on her own tongue. No one could talk her out of this belief. The doctor diagnosed a mild back sprain and told her to stop behaving badly, that her parents were prostrate with grief and this was not the time for her to make a childish play for attention. For months—actually for years—she awakened from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark her hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. She never attended Zelda's funeral or any funeral afterward. The trauma became the hidden engine of her fierce, irrational refusal to confront death, the source of the bitter argument with Louis over Ellie's tears about the Pet Sematary, and the reason she could not bear to attend Norma Crandall's funeral. When she finally told Louis the full story, on the night after Gage's funeral viewing, she said she felt as if she had "sicked up something that's poisoned part of me for years." But the poison never fully left; in the days after Gage's death, she dreamed of Zelda again, and Zelda said she was coming for her, that both she and Gage would get her for letting them die.