It Will Just Be Us, page 5
Since I do not know the names of the women, I will refer to them by their most defining characteristics: one is blonde and the other is wearing red lipstick. The blonde leans over and whispers to her companion while the other titters, and then they both smile private little smiles, stealing glances at me from the white corners of their eyes. They lean back, rustling the pages of their reading.
I want to ask them what they are giggling about. What could be so funny here? But I have a terrible feeling they are whispering and snickering at me, and there isn’t a thing I can do to find out what it is they’ve found so amusing. I’d like to ask them. Just open my mouth and ask them what exactly they find so funny about my presence. After all, I am the only other person in this lobby.
I wonder if they planned their pregnancies together. How puerile! They have probably done everything together their whole lives. Most likely they spent high school lounging in one another’s bedrooms with their hair hanging down over the side of the bed; daydreaming about the same boys; sharing their deepest secrets, which they never realized are entirely shallow; holding each other’s hair back when one of them got so drunk she had to crouch gargoyle-like over the toilet to vomit; painting each other’s toenails with silly colors; one of them intimately wiping away the other’s tears with her bare fingers after her dog was eaten by a coyote. They will probably grow into old ladies together, their husbands only vaguely aware that they have always come second.
A little girl who cannot be more than four rushes over to the woman with red lips and tugs impatiently on her skirt.
“What is it, darling?”
“I’m bored,” says the little girl in her little-girl voice.
Why bring her here, I wonder. This sterile prison of needles is no place for a child. And all the doors! There are so many doors behind which she might get lost forever. Too many doors for a child, surely.
“You’ll just have to entertain yourself, sweet pea. We’re obliged to wait until the doctor is finished with the other patients.” Her eyeballs roll up in their sockets to glance briefly at me as if to say, Who are you? Are you the one who is holding us up? I quickly look away.
“Here, play with this,” and she hands her an electronic device that looks like a small plastic tablet, which the girl carries away to play on. The women resume paging through their magazines, glancing up every so often, murmuring to one another from the sides of their mouths, looking at me, I know, without really looking, until I can’t stand their little whispered conversation any longer.
I uncross my legs and slap my hands down on my thighs. “Do I know you?”
Their beady eyes latch on to me as their voices die, offended by my abrupt rudeness.
“I’m sure you don’t,” says the blonde.
Somehow the brunt of their direct attention strikes me as worse than the unconfirmed suspicion that they are gossiping about me. If only I could puff myself up and proudly take up an imposing amount of space, but instead I find myself shrinking away into my own body, in danger of shrinking away into nothing.
“I don’t recall seeing you much in town,” adds the woman with red lips. “I suppose that makes you one of those Wakefields?”
She says it without surprise. They must have realized already; they must have been speculating about those Wakefields, the witches, the swamp people, this whole time, knowing who I am by virtue of not recognizing me, for it is true, I do not spend much time in town, I am like a ghost here.
“And what does that make you?” I snap back. “How would you like it if I sat here snickering and whispering about you? As if I had nothing better to do.”
Both women now fix me with looks of such vapid affront that I almost laugh in their faces, but we are interrupted by Elizabeth, enormous and full of easy courage. “Making friends?”
The woman pinches her red lips as if sucking on a lemon. “Another Wakefield, I suppose.”
Scornfully, Elizabeth replies, “I’m not a Wakefield anymore.” Then, as soon as the words have tumbled from her mouth, her face goes ice-cold and still; I can see the realization blooming in real time. If a divorce is imminent, then will she be a Wakefield again? Will she revert to her maiden name? Who will she be, she wonders? Elizabeth Hill or Elizabeth Wakefield?
We are Wakefields, all of us, even in this patriarchal world. Even when my mother was married to my father, she kept her name, and they debated long and hard over which name their daughters would take, eventually settling on my mother’s family name, allowing us to inherit a lineage that would otherwise be lost to time and X chromosomes. Perhaps it does not matter, anyway. Perhaps the Wakefield name will die with us after all. It is so hard to keep a thing like that alive.
Maybe the house will keep it alive for us.
* * *
When I first came to stay with my mother, my intentions were for a short-term lease. A few weeks, perhaps, to regain my equilibrium. A month at best.
I should have known: once this house has you, it doesn’t let you go.
I slept on Liz and Don’s couch for about a month after I was mugged. Each night sleep tugged gently at me like television static, and just as I let my eyes slip closed, a windblown shutter would beat against the window, or a neighbor’s dog would bark to be let out, and I would snap awake and lie wide-eyed in the dark with my ears attuned to every minute noise that crept or cracked or whispered: the hiss of a passing car, the rustling of a bothered tree outside, or perhaps the patter of footsteps, some stranger stealing onto the porch, rattling a lock pick until the handle of the front door jiggled metallically, and the creak of the door swinging open, and that pungent odor of musk and sweat and my cheek pressed into the cement and the gun pressed into my neck—
Unable to take it, I would rise from the couch, check all the locks, make sure the windows were closed, and then, wired with nervous energy, I would spend the next several hours straightening up the house: pairing shoes and lining them side by side against the wall, alphabetically organizing DVDs, putting empty glasses in the dishwasher—and once I was so bored and fidgety that I moved all the furniture in the living room four inches to the left, just to see if they would notice in the morning.
Surprisingly, they didn’t care for my midnight labors.
One morning, when Don was getting himself set up at his rig to work, he started digging through the drawers of his desk with increasingly sharp movements, until he yelled out, “Where the hell are my headphones?”
I had to retrieve them from wherever it was I had placed them the night before during one of my shambling, zombie-eyed organizing sprees, and he snatched them from my hands. “You shouldn’t put things where they don’t belong,” he snapped, before closing the headphones over his ears.
Often I would catch a few hours of sleep close to dawn, when I had exhausted myself silly with all the nighttime working. But until then, I got to know that house intimately, saw into all its secret shadowed places that Don and Liz never saw, as they tended to sleep through the night. Until that last night, of course.
It was sometime after midnight and I was lying awake, running through possible tasks in my mind to see if I could fall asleep just by imagining I was doing something, when inevitably there was a petulant creak, which at first I chalked up to the house settling. But when I tried to go back to my mental exercise, there was the creak again, this time unmistakably the sound of a footstep, weight shifting on the floorboards.
Someone was in the house.
My breath caught in my throat as I listened to the slow, heavy footsteps creeping down the hallway, footsteps that didn’t belong there. I tried to remember if I had checked all the windows and doors that night, but I couldn’t recall doing so, and let’s face it, Don and Liz were fairly careless with that sort of thing, so who knows, there could have been a wide-open invitation somewhere for an intruder looking to steal inside. My gut twisted, sick with dread.
I reached out and felt around the coffee table to the left of the couch until my hand met the cold glass encasing of a candle. It smelled cloyingly of apples and spice, some heady autumn scent, and I pulled the heavy candle close to me as I sat up. On fleet, silent feet, I prowled over to the hallway and lay in wait for the figure’s passing. When the shape of him stepped out of the hall and into the living room, I shouted and swung the candle.
The man cried out and doubled over, one hand on his left eye, and with a sinking feeling somewhere beneath my furious heart, I recognized the sound of his voice.
“What the hell?”
The hall light blinked on as Elizabeth came stumbling out in her pajamas, hair mussed with sleep. “What is going on?”
Don straightened, still holding a palm over his injured eye. The candle lay somewhere on the floor.
“What were you doing?” I demanded, my voice rising defensively.
“I was going for a smoke,” he confessed, and sure enough, he had a pack of cigarettes in his hand.
“Damn it, Don,” said Elizabeth. “Are you smoking again?”
When he finally pulled his hand away from his eye, we saw the purple blooming over the swelling lid. It was lucky he didn’t lose the eye. His brow ridge absorbed the worst of the blow, leaving him with a ghastly black bruise and a burst blood vessel that turned the white of his eye red.
I was lucky, too. They didn’t press charges, didn’t even want me to cover the medical bills. They just wanted me to leave.
Perhaps it was time to go home, but when I thought of home, I didn’t think of that lonely apartment I had been living in for the last several years; I thought of the mansion on the edge of the swamp with its proliferation of rooms and towering bookshelves. And even though I intended to go back to my apartment, truly I did, when I started my car and crawled away from their suburban bungalow, I imagined myself settling into bed that evening alone, surrounded by the darkness within and the darkness without, figures creeping around outside my windows, shadows with nothing visible but the whites of their eyes, breaking through the front door, stealing into my apartment, pushing me to the floor, pressing death to the back of my neck. Before I knew it, I was driving in the other direction.
I drove up the winding roads, through hilly forests and leafy vales, and when I arrived at the house, it welcomed me as if I had never left.
My mother, answering the door, looked at me like a stranger. She opened it only a crack, giving me a slivered view of her wary eyeball.
“Yes?” she said.
The porch light wasn’t on. All was dark, and I a shadow.
“Mom,” I said.
She flipped the switch, and the low yellow light buzzed to life.
When I stepped in, she padded away in her slippers to fix some tea. I brought in my things, and from the foyer I heard the distant murmur of her talking to someone in the kitchen. By this time, my mother had been living alone for nearly ten years, ever since her youngest child flew the coop for college and other worlds—her only company the house itself and whatever it deigned to offer her.
When the teakettle started screaming, I found the kitchen abandoned and the kettle rattling with a volcanic expulsion of steam, which only calmed when I shut off the burner and went searching through the labyrinth to find where she had gone.
As I turned through the lonely halls, a terrible sensation came over me—the strange uncertainty of this house, the inescapable feeling that I had never actually left, but that I had been wandering these halls and finding in them doorways to other places, unreal places, dorm rooms and cafeterias and movie theaters and coffee shops, as if my life outside these walls had never actually existed but only been a twisted sort of pretend, the house making up the whole of my reality.
When I found my mother, she seemed to have forgotten I was there, inciting my fear of dementia—that she would lose her memories, too, like her parents before her, the house sucking them away to keep for itself as if feeding on her mind. But she was only confused. The memories confused her, she confessed after the fact, so that she had thought me a memory as well, wasn’t sure if I was real or not, as the memories had become more real to her than anything else in this world.
It was easy to fall into the comfortable habits of home, and easier still to tell myself I had to stay for my mother—a sharp, clever woman, but anyone will grow dull and muddled if they are left on their own for too long with their own mind. So I broke my lease, moved the rest of my things in, took over the grocery shopping and other necessary trips into town, and found there the very same people of Shadydale I had left behind, their flat profiles, the infinite corners of their eyes.
These people would never invade Wakefield Manor, however, and so I felt safe from them. They never ventured that far out toward the swamp. They left us well enough alone.
And then I remembered who I was in Shadydale: not just a small, meek, anonymous creature, the way I was out in the world, but one of those Wakefields. Most of the time I kept to myself, tried to make myself invisible, but sometimes I stood outside the post office after mailing the gas bill and stared at the woman walking her dog until she shuddered from my gaze and hurried away, yanking the leash after her. Or I stopped at the diner for a milkshake and sat in the shadowy corner booth, slurping until long after the drink was gone, until that empty bone-rattling gurgle of the straw made the young couple at the next table call out for the bill, throw down some cash, and scurry away whispering.
Sometimes it is a pleasure to be one of those Wakefields. If everyone leaves me alone, then I have nothing to fear.
* * *
When we returned from the doctor’s office, Elizabeth had that cracked smile on her face, and she wandered about the house like that, restless, trying to rein in some terrible identity crisis burbling just under the surface, which those smirking women had managed to stir loose. She handed the ultrasound photo to our mother, whose delight seemed not enough for her, as she kept urging my mother on with questions about every little visible part of the child’s body—Don’t you see his foot there? And his head? And what about …?—until even my mother gave her a look of alarmed confusion, said he looked like a healthy baby, and handed back the picture to put a period on the conversation. She then went about cleansing the air of whatever negative energy Elizabeth had brought back with her by lighting up a variety of incense. She hummed all the while.
I suspect the person Elizabeth really wanted to show the photo to was the child’s father. At dinner, I found myself wanting to see the faceless boy again, and I kept checking the doorway in hopes that he might walk through and reveal himself. I needed to know who he was. If only I had the right talisman, the right ritual to summon him. But I waited in vain.
* * *
I wonder if the house dreams.
Its regurgitations of memory seem accurate, as far as I can tell; and if they are accurate memories, then they are unlikely to be dreams.
But what if the house dreamed? Would the memories distort the same way our dreams sometimes twist reality? Would it begin showing surreal images of things that never were and never would be? And what monsters might be lurking in the shadows of these dreams?
Is the faceless boy a dream?
I wonder, because my dreams are always so strange.
In this one, I am as pregnant as my sister; my belly protrudes unnaturally from my angular frame, and from within that aching globe of flesh press tiny hands, pushing up, pushing free. I am lying down and watching mesmerized as two little hands appear, distending the flesh. At first I am intrigued by the sight, but then two more hands appear, and two more, until myriad tiny hands are pressing up from the inside of my belly and fear grips me as I wonder what is inside of me, and I begin to shout please get it out, please get it out, but there is only a dark figure lurking in the corner of the room—and I call out to this figure but he does not move, merely watches as the tiny hands burst through flesh and reach their bloodied fists into the open air and one by one climb out and away, trailing umbilical cords, and the figure steps closer holding a knife and the figure is Julian—
No, of course it isn’t. I wake, feeling foolish, pressing both hands against my stomach.
After the nightmare, I cannot get back to sleep. My brain feels wired, keyed up with electricity. Lying in bed makes my stomach churn, so I get up and tread quietly into the dark hallway, the floor sighing disconsolately beneath my footfalls. I make it only a few steps into the hall when I feel suddenly that I am not alone.
A creature creeps low against the floor toward me.
It crawls with long narrow limbs like a spider, its elbows protruding into the air. Instead of crawling strictly on its knees, it keeps picking them up to use its feet, pushing itself forward by extending its legs out behind and repeating. All I can see are pale limbs and black hair hiding a face that is turned down to the floor, a face I know I would not be able to see even if it were lifted in my direction, and I beg inwardly, Please don’t look up, please don’t lift your head, please don’t fix me with your black eyes trapped in an indistinguishable face. I wanted him to appear again, but not here, not in the middle of the night. What seems fine in the daylight becomes infinitely more grotesque when encountered at midnight upon opening one’s bedroom door.
I step back into the open doorway as he crawls past, so close he might reach out and brush my bare feet; I curl my toes in revulsion. The floorboards groan beneath him. I turn on the bedroom light so that it floods the hall, but he is already past me, and the light only illuminates his path from behind.
Though he looks young, he is clearly too old to be crawling. This child should be able to stand but instead continues his hypnotic spider-scuttle.
“Elizabeth,” I whisper, knowing she will not hear me, wherever she is, likely asleep in her own room—but I am too afraid to shout, fearing, again, irrationally, that he will hear me across the span of time.
