It Will Just Be Us, page 6
Frantically I decide I must run down the hall and shake her awake, drag her back here to see, with her own eyes. Who is he? Would she recognize him? But he is moving too quickly now, and I fear if I lose sight of him he will vanish altogether.
I follow a few paces so as not to lose him as he slithers up the stairs. Up here, in the quiet of the third floor, the only light is from a window calling forth the moon. He creeps and creeps down the narrowing length of the hall. Maybe when he reaches the end he will turn around and come back. The mere thought sends a wave of nausea into my throat. Please do not come back.
Instead he slithers one hand up to the brass knob of that heavy locked door.
He will not be able to open it. No one ever has.
But impossibly, the knob turns, and the door swings inward to reveal a gaping black pit.
I have to blink. It is like seeing double, although it is so dark I can hardly see at all. He is going through a door from a different time; the door of now is still closed, is still locked, and I can see the door closed at the same time I see it open, like a photograph overlaid with the ghostly imprint of something else. The darkness of his open door reaches out as he climbs inside, into a darkness the feeble moonlight behind me cannot reach out and touch.
Then he is gone, but the doorway remains.
At first I am repelled by that terrible emptiness, as if that complete absence is sucking all light from the world, but I have to know—I have to see.
I hurry down the hall, the seething maw of darkness opening before me like an abyss, but as soon as I reach it, the open doorway vanishes. My hands and eyes meet solid wood, and nothing more.
If only I could arrest my heart. On trembling legs, I descend the staircase all the way down, thinking of cold water, a nip of whiskey, something to calm my nerves.
Instead I discover, again, that I am not alone.
The television is on in the sitting room, and Elizabeth sits bathed in its blue glow in the otherwise dark room, holding a glass of wine.
For a moment I am invisible in the dark. I could go back upstairs, but I do not. “Elizabeth?”
She startles, looks momentarily betrayed, perhaps wondering how long I have been standing here watching her.
“Have you seen him?” I step into the room, but I can’t sit; the vision of the crawling boy is fresh in my nerve endings. I wonder if that’s why she’s down here at two o’clock in the morning, distracting herself with infomercials. “Please tell me you’ve seen him.”
“Seen who?”
In the artificial light, she’s aged by the moonlike glow, as old as she has ever been and older still by the minute. But she is calm, unafraid. I tell myself to be calm, to be unafraid. She lifts her wineglass to take a sip, then hesitates with it inches from her mouth. “The doctor said I can have one,” she murmurs defensively.
“One glass or one bottle?”
“That’s funny.”
The dark figure crawls through the back of my mind. “Look, there’s something I have to tell you.”
She waits for me to continue, then lowers her glass. “Well, spit it out. Or are you going to keep dancing around it?”
Maybe I should just keep dancing. Just dance away, down the halls, and never speak of this again. I don’t know who he is, after all. The boy could be anyone.
And yet, I feel it in my gut. I know who he is.
“I’ve seen Julian.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, I know. You were at the ultrasound.”
“No, I’ve seen Julian. Here, in the house.”
A short round laugh escapes her, and her face invents an expression of bottled annoyance, amusement, contempt—clenched teeth behind closed lips.
“Julian? Here in the house?” she says with determined levity. “How could you possibly have seen someone who hasn’t been born yet?”
“Lizzie.” She scowls at my infantilizing her name. “You know this house. What if …?”
“I don’t believe you.” She takes an angry little sip. “Mother, I can understand. She’s always had a few marbles loose. But please don’t tell me you’ve bought into her New Age mumbo jumbo.”
“It isn’t mumbo jumbo.”
“Please. In any case, how is it you’ve come to recognize my unborn son, when you’ve only just seen a fuzzy little gray picture of him?”
“He called me Auntie.”
“Oh, of course, that explains it.”
We’re at a stalemate. If we continue on in this way, sooner or later one of us is going to crack. I hope it isn’t me.
“I’m afraid there’s something wrong with him.” I look around, wishing for him to appear again. I need him to show himself, to show Elizabeth what I cannot possibly explain with mere words. Maybe she would be able to see his face. “You’ll see.” I look around, half expecting him to come crawling toward us out of the shadows. “I just saw him upstairs, not ten minutes ago.”
“This is just like your ghosts. When you were a kid,” she says, with more wonder and disbelief than spite. “Remember those? You were so scared that we looked through our family’s whole genealogical record, but the people you saw never lived in this house. It was all made up.”
“I’m not making this up.”
“Sure you aren’t. And there really was a man who lived here once who didn’t look like anything, and an old woman with Xs for eyes.” She laughs, but it is a mean sound. “Come on, Sam. You scared yourself because you let your imagination wander away from you, and, well, nobody could blame you, could they? Not in this place. But you have to get a handle on what’s real and what isn’t. When you mix those up, you hurt people.” The words etch a scowl on her face.
“If you open your eyes, you’ll see him too,” I tell her, ignoring her comments on my childhood ghosts. “Just wait.”
I want so desperately for her to believe me that I wait as interminable seconds tick by, waiting foolishly, hopelessly, for the boy to show himself, and every second that he doesn’t I feel my credibility shatter a bit more. But I wait, anxious and eager, because I cannot stand any more of Elizabeth’s condescension. She must, she must believe me. The air crackles expectantly. A minute drags into eternity. The television drones in the background, bothersome and insistent, until Elizabeth snaps up the remote and douses us in an abrupt dark and quiet.
“Are you finished?” she says coldly.
“Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“Why would I listen to bullshit?” Her voice is harsh and low; I hear the slosh of wine in her glass. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I fumble my way to the light, trailing broken sentences behind me as I go. “I do. Jesus, Liz. I’m trying to help you. So you can … I don’t know … do something.”
“Like what?” she snarls. “Get an abortion?”
I pause beside the lamp. “Well, it’s a bit late for that.”
“You’re still angry with me,” she says. “For kicking you out of my house. That’s what this is about.”
“I’m not angry about that,” I tell her, which is the truth.
I turn the switch and a harsh light pierces the air, glaring on every surface and illuminating Elizabeth’s furious face in a cold white. Her pupils hastily retract into glossy irises. Red wine drips over the lip of her glass and onto her hand.
“You attacked my husband. What else was I supposed to do?”
“I told you, I’m not angry about that,” I insist.
“Then what?”
“I’m not angry about anything.”
“Oh, don’t lie.”
I shred a piece of lint in my pocket until it disintegrates in my fingers. “How could I be angry with you? You only left me there.” The words stumble free, cottony in my mouth. “You only left me out there alone, to get mugged—to be pushed to the sidewalk with a gun to my head, thinking I was going to die.”
“How on earth was I supposed to know that was going to happen?” she replies, her voice rising indignantly. “You can’t blame me for not predicting the future.”
She finishes her wine in one long pull, slams the glass down on the table so hard I’m surprised when it doesn’t shatter, and pushes herself to her feet in what is supposed to be a sharp rise but turns into a laborious toddle. “Anyway, you’re an adult now. It isn’t my job to take care of you. Frankly, it never was. But I did it anyway, because Mom wouldn’t. You can’t expect me to look out for you forever.” Her eyes are iron. “Making up stories for attention won’t make me feel sorry for you. Poor, neglected Sam. Always has to have some invented problem. Well, some of us have real problems.”
She stalks away before I can think of anything to say.
4
Elizabeth has locked me out of her life now, refusing to talk to me.
I have made myself an enemy, and now she will defy me in her spite, retracing her childhood footsteps of rebellion, which always came so easily to her and so hard to me. Rebelling against Mother, against the house, against the quiet.
She used to do this to me when we were kids, sometimes even quite literally locking me out of the house.
Once, when I was fifteen, I stayed out late with my study group, and when I returned the house was dark, dormant, the front door locked. They were supposed to leave it open for me, but Elizabeth and I had been fighting that day, and I knew she must have crept downstairs and locked the door at some point to get back at me. I circumnavigated the house, tried the back door, tapped on forbidding windows. I looked up to the second floor, begging for a light to shine through the draperies—Mother awake reading, Elizabeth sulking in her princess bed. Their rooms were dark.
Moonlight made a mystical landscape of the swamp, which seemed to whisper its mysteries to me, saying, Don’t worry if you can’t get in there, the swamp is always open, we’ll let you in. Why I thought the swamp might want me to wander, lost, through its narrow creeks and sorrowful trees must have been the fanciful workings of an overactive teenage mind, one fraught with the anxiety of being trapped out in the darkness, barred from home, from the grace of light.
I went around picking up small pebbles—small enough, I hoped, that they wouldn’t damage the old windows, which even then had seen better days. Feeling like a cliché—I am a boy who is in love with a girl but we are only sixteen so I will throw pebbles at her window—I tossed my little prizes here, and here, but my aim was terrible. One of the pebbles flew off course and hit the window overlooking the back corner of the house. The only one that is truly inaccessible from the inside: the window of the locked room.
A heavy curtain hangs there, never touched, never opened, leaving the window perpetually black even in broadest daylight. But then, one can hardly tell the difference from any other room. All the house feels encased, enclosed, with its heavy draperies pulled over each orifice as if to keep the outside world out.
What a fool was I, wasting a pebble on entirely the wrong window.
But then, of all things—the curtain moved.
At first I thought it must be a trick of the moonlight, the swamplight, that strange eerie glow that inhabits the darklands of the country, a glow that’s likely just the eye trying frantically to see in such nonlight where there is nothing to refract against the pupil, where everything looks grainy and strange no matter how desperately you squint, as things fuzz and fray and disappear, pursued relentlessly by the failing eye. But it was no mistake. The curtain’s dark sensual curves fluttered and began to draw back to one side.
The heart-stopping sight flooded me with terrible anticipation—there was someone in the locked room.
It could not be my mother or Elizabeth, I reasoned, since neither of them had the key, the lost key, the long-gone key.
There was someone else in the locked room.
Thrilled with this new fear, I suddenly lost the old one; being locked out was not so awful after all, even out here in the darkness, for at least I was out here, at least there lay a solid windowpane between me and whoever, whatever, was drawing back that black curtain with its bony fingers, whereas my sleeping mother and sister were inside, locked in there with it.
I wish I could describe to you the face that loomed out of the empty dark within, but I could not make it out from below, and the moonlight was too afraid to touch whatever lingered in that lonely room, leaving me with only the vague impression of a face with pits for eyes, like a demon.
In a moment, the curtain swished back into place and went still.
And then I was at the front door. I was pounding desperately, madly, to be let in. I was hesitating with my fist an inch from the wood, abruptly terrified to be let in, wanting in that sick moment to remain out in the familiar confusing dark, perhaps to go live in the swamp now, away from the house, when the door opened, and my mother ushered me inside with a mixture of irritability and fondness, assumed my panic was at being locked out. She made me an indifferent cup of tea and went back to bed.
I don’t know how long I sat in that kitchen, clutching the mug of cold dregs, trying to convince myself to move, to ascend the stairs, to get to my room where I could cower beneath the covers like a child.
Eventually I did.
I never liked to see the memories at night—something in their ghostly appearance has always unsettled me during the moonlit hours—but then I saw, inexplicably, my father, just standing there cleaning his glasses. Seeing him gave me a warm rush of relief, enough so that when he vanished, I had the courage to run upstairs.
By the next morning, in the light of day, it all felt like a dream, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I had imagined the figure. But perhaps it did not matter whether I had imagined it, for the room was locked and no matter how many times I pressed my ear against the door, I never heard a thing.
* * *
In the morning I frantically, belatedly iron out my lessons for the week, trying to catch Elizabeth’s eye as she lumbers past. I’ve planted myself in the drawing room, a book spread out on the table before me, the drapes pulled open to let in a bit of light. She ignores me.
My mother is upstairs, picking through dusty boxes of old toys and blankets from when Elizabeth and I were children. I had to come downstairs after trying to work in my room, because every so often she would appear in the doorway holding up two stuffed animals worn wretched with age and ask me what I thought. “For Julian,” she said when I only stared, dumbfounded, and it was all I could do not to tell her we shouldn’t give him any animals, even fake ones, not if he’s going to destroy them, like the bird. I bit my tongue, shrugged, thinking my silence would protect her. Eventually I could no longer take her constant interruptions.
Julian, I think, why will you turn out so cruel? What is it that could produce such a disturbing child?
I shiver, feeling trapped by the question, and wonder how long it will take him to pick up a knife for the first time, crawl his way to my room in the middle of the night, and beg for his auntie to let him in to play.
Elizabeth comes into the room again without looking at me and picks up a set of headphones, plugging them first into her phone and then into her ears, the better to ignore me with.
I always had the sense that Elizabeth was afraid of the cold depths of silence, and afraid of being alone—the silence of loneliness. She has always tried to fill the world with bright sounds, sought out distractions, noise, delightful chaos. Her most memorable rebellion against the eternal tomblike quiet of Wakefield Manor came when she was thirteen, loud, talkative, restless; she brought home a yard-sale mint-green Fender Strat, a junky guitar with warped strings she did not know to replace and pick scratches from unrestrained clumsy strumming. As soon as she plugged it into the cheap amplifier she’d picked up, she started playing feral nonsense—dissonant nonchords of the purest teenage rage. After a day or two they morphed into actual chords as she started to learn by reading tabs, and soon she was playing punk rock that echoed throughout the house as yet another seeming anachronism that lived there.
No surprise, then, that the screaming guitar and its unholy choir of demonic chords sent my mother into a towering drunken temper.
I remember hearing her footsteps overhead and the pounding on Elizabeth’s door and her shouts. “Do you want to hear this noise the rest of your life?” Then more shouting, on either end, until there was a door slam and the cold, ringing, uncertain silence that hovers in the wake of a fight.
The next day when we got home from school, me with a dandelion tucked into my hair for good luck and she sulking her way from the bus stop with her backpack slung over one slouched shoulder, a posture that later put her at risk of scoliosis, we came into the house to find a little girl peering anxiously out the windows, which I knew from photo albums was a younger version of our mother. The real one, the current one, was nowhere to be found.
“Who cares?” said Elizabeth scathingly, still annoyed with her yet simultaneously displaying something other than mere annoyance, something I did not recognize then—whatever veiled emotions recoil within a teenager whose mother frequently yells admonishments at her over a glass of something opaque.
(I recognized this reaction much later, when this memory returned to wander through the house and I had the opportunity to study it from the outside—to study the childish carelessness and the complex succession of rancor, hurt, and regret that passed fleetingly across my sister’s face with all the whispery impermanence of a hummingbird’s wings—and to understand the truth behind our behavior.)
Eventually we found our mother in Elizabeth’s bedroom. Well, I should say Elizabeth found her; she had run upstairs to her room while I deliberately counted my steps, as I was fixated on counting at the time, and there were certain magical numbers I had to reach in my counting if I wanted good fortune—in particular, seven, eleven, and twenty-one. I had just reached nine, counting my steps on the way up the stairs and having pocketed seven for later magic, when I heard the thump of Elizabeth’s backpack hitting the floor and a wordless shriek that sent me racing up the rest of the way in a flurry of curiosity. I found Mother sitting on Elizabeth’s princess bed, the sorry guitar flat on her lap. Each of the strings had been removed, tied into terrifying metal knots, and cast onto the floor.
