April 14, 1965

April 14, 1965, is the day Zelda Goldman died of spinal meningitis in the back bedroom of the family home in Lake Forest, Illinois. Rachel Creed, then eight years old, was the only person present. The event is the foundational trauma of Rachel's life, shaping her lifelong phobia of death, her inability to attend funerals, and her fierce, irrational protectiveness toward her own children. It is the secret wound that drives her bitter argument with Louis over Ellie's encounter with the Pet Sematary and that resurfaces in nightmares after Gage's death.

The Circumstances of Zelda's Death

Zelda Goldman was two years older than Rachel. She contracted spinal meningitis, a disease that caused her constant pain and progressively twisted her body. Her shoulders hunched, her face pulled down into a mask, and her hands became like birds' feet. The illness was long, painful, and ugly. Rachel's parents, Irwin and Dory Goldman, nursed Zelda at home, but the strain was immense. The room always smelled of urine and a drug that reminded Rachel of Smith Brothers' Wild Cherry cough drops. Zelda became demanding and hateful, sometimes deliberately wetting the bed and then claiming it was an accident, with a smile in her eyes. Rachel had to feed her sometimes and hated it. Near the end, the drugs stopped working, and Zelda screamed. Rachel began to believe Zelda hated her because Rachel's back was straight, because she had no pain, because she could walk, because she was going to live. She imagined Zelda wanted to kill her or take over her body.

Rachel Alone with Her Dying Sister

On April 14, 1965, during the Passover season, Irwin and Dory Goldman went out to visit friends for a few minutes. They left eight-year-old Rachel alone with Zelda. Rachel was reading a magazine in the kitchen, waiting for it to be time to give Zelda more medicine because she was screaming. Then Zelda stopped screaming. Rachel went in to check on her. She thought Zelda had swallowed her own tongue and was choking to death. Rachel did not know what to do. Zelda began making a sound, a "gaaaaaa" sound, with spit coming down her chin. Rachel turned her over on her belly and thumped her back. Zelda's feet beat up and down, and her twisted legs moved. The seams under both arms of Rachel's blouse ripped out. Zelda began to convulse. Rachel saw that her face was turned into the pillows and thought, "Oh, she's choking, Zelda's choking, and they'll come home and say I murdered her by choking." Her first thought was, "Oh good, finally, Zelda's choking and this is going to be over." She turned Zelda over again. Zelda's face had gone black, her eyes were bulging, her neck was swelled up. Then she died. Rachel backed across the room, hit the wall, and a picture fell down — a framed illustration from an Oz book that Zelda had loved, showing "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible." The glass shattered. Rachel started to scream, believing it was Zelda's ghost coming back to get her. She ran out of the house screaming "Zelda's dead!" A neighbor retrieved her from behind a tree where she was crouching and screaming. Rachel's nose was bleeding. The neighbor called the ambulance and then Rachel's parents.

The Aftermath and Lasting Trauma

By that evening, Zelda's room had been cleaned and fumigated, all the furniture removed. It became a bare box, later Dory Goldman's sewing room. That night, the first of the nightmares came. Rachel woke up at two in the morning, screaming for her mother, and discovered she could barely get out of bed. Her back was in agony. She had strained it lifting Zelda. Rachel was sure this was Zelda's revenge from beyond the grave — that Zelda knew Rachel was glad she was dead, that Zelda had given Rachel spinal meningitis, and that soon Rachel's back would start to twist and she too would become a monster, then choke to death on her own tongue. No one could talk her out of this belief. Dr. Murray, the family doctor, told her brusquely to stop behaving so badly. Only the slowly abating pain convinced her she was not the victim of supernatural vengeance. For months — actually years — afterward she would awaken 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 often thought the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws. She did not attend Zelda's funeral or any funeral since. The memory of that day — the smell of Wild Cherry cough drops, the sound of Zelda's "gaaaaaa," the sight of her blackened face — became the core of Rachel's death phobia, a secret she kept from Louis for over a decade of marriage, until the night after Norma Crandall's funeral, when she finally told him the whole story.