What was . . . ?
He looked again. Butter yellow. Sparkling glass. Green grass.
Was he losing his mind? A frigid gust of wind that held the promise of winter propelled him forward. He shoved his hands in his pockets, elbows locked against his sides, took a deep breath, and stepped into the alleyway.
The blare of a car horn pierced the air. Cooper leaped back as his neighbor, Mr. Evans, skidded his Suburban to a halt.
“Cooper!” he said, rolling down his window. “I’m sorry! I saw you there, but I didn’t think you were going to step in front of me like that.”
Mr. Evans’s words sounded muffled in Cooper’s ears, blocked by the blood flooding his eardrums. “Sorry,” Cooper said. “I didn’t see you.”
Mr. Evans tipped his head, as if to ask how Cooper could possibly miss the headlights of his huge vehicle in an alley that was hardly wider than the car itself. But what he said was, “My fault, kiddo. I should have been going slower.”
Cooper took another step back as Mr. Evans crawled past with a wave and turned into his own garage, twenty feet away. Something small and black shot past Cooper’s feet, startling him yet again, but it was only Mr. Evans’s cat, Panther, darting home at the sound of his meal provider’s arrival. Cooper watched the garage door close and tried to slow his breathing, before—with a side-to-side look this time—he stepped forward again.
The gate latch of Elena’s picket fence was painfully cold. Maybe this was a stupid idea. Had he really studied that T-shirt from the Korean newspaper closely enough? Maybe the crest was slightly different. Or even if it was the same, it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe someone who’d gone to Elena’s school back in the nineties had visited Korea and was unfortunately killed in the accident. He turned toward his own home, about to walk back across the alley.
But there was Jess, peering out the kitchen window at him. She smiled and gave him a double thumbs-up.
Cooper gave her a weak one in return. He turned, pushed the gate open, and walked into Elena’s yard.
He slid slightly on a blanket of wet leaves atop the path of stepping-stones. His hands shot out to steady himself, as if he was a child taking his first step onto an ice rink in skates. The damp soil on both sides of the path gave off an odor of mushrooms and decay. The latch clicked shut behind him.
Cooper slowly stood up straighter and wondered if maybe he should walk around to the front door and knock. Was it too presumptuous to come through their backyard?
Well, he thought, we’re friends now, right? We know each other’s names. We had a conversation. Most of one, anyway.
He walked between the two rows of landscaping lights bracketing the path, through the yard, and up to the whitewashed porch. The first wooden step groaned slightly at Cooper’s weight. He chewed on the inside of his bottom lip and crept up onto the deck. With the sense that he was pulling a Band-Aid off much too slowly, Cooper picked up his pace.
With each step toward the door, the stale autumn scents in the yard were pleasantly replaced by an aroma of pumpkin, cinnamon, and cloves. Cooper stood with his fist raised for a few seconds before finally rapping on the wooden edge of the screen door. But instead of a solid, crisp knock, the wood released only a quiet, damp thud.
When no one answered, Cooper scanned for a doorbell but found none, so he figured his only choice was to knock on the inner door. He reached for the handle of the screen and found it, too, was so icy he thought his skin might stick to it. The hinges creaked, and the closing spring stretched with a piercing screech. Cooper knocked on the heavy navy-blue wood.
On the very first strike, the door swung open, away from him. All of the house’s lights suddenly went dark again, exactly like they had a few nights before. A slow glance back showed the lights of his home were still aglow.
“Hello?” Cooper whispered, his hands now feeling clammy. When no one answered, he spoke again, with more force. “Hello! Is anyone home?”
He reached forward, and the door drifted farther, more than it should have from the force of his light touch. He peered through the open doorway.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Cooper found it hard to breathe.
Nothing that met his eye was right. This living room, which he’d glimpsed many times through the large bay window, was supposed to hold two off-white couches atop a teal-and-tan rug, a circular glass coffee table with a decorative lamp, and a framed black-and-white cityscape hanging over the mantel.
Except none of it was there.
The inside of the house was exactly as it had been for years; the way it had been until three months ago.
Dark, debris filled, and abandoned.
13
Cooper blinked, then blinked again. He wondered if he was somehow at the wrong house, as if that were possible. He stepped through the doorway, baffled. The enticing smells of pumpkin and fresh paint vanished completely, replaced by a wave of musty dampness, as if the house was filled with nothing but wet leaves. Cooper’s tongue felt gritty with the taste of mold and dust, and with each step he found it harder to think clearly.
The house was supposed to hold a gleaming dining and living room painted the color of heavily creamed coffee. Instead, the walls were adorned with faded flowery wallpaper, many sections of which drooped halfway to the floor where the glue had failed. Instead of a modern dining set, a grimy square table stood crookedly in the room, topped with three stained china plates with matching cups, as if a pleasant afternoon tea had been abruptly interrupted decades ago. An ancient, filthy couch with ornately patterned cushions and carved wooden arms sat in the living room, its stuffing escaping through a large hole that looked like it had been gnawed open by some critter. It was all dimly illuminated by moonlight streaming through the shattered remains of the windows on the opposite wall.
Moonlight also came from the middle of the living-room ceiling, where the wooden floor beams of the second story protruded downward, like something large had crashed through them, allowing light from an upstairs window to filter through.
Cooper pulled his phone from his back pocket and turned on the flashlight. The beam was clouded by the heavy air, thick with foglike dust motes. He put the curve of his elbow over his mouth and coughed. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes to see if clearing his vision would change the images before him.
Then something shot past his ear.
Cooper screamed and swatted the air around his head. He fell, landing hard on his backside, and his phone skittered across the floor, the beam from its flash bouncing and ricocheting around the walls before it landed light side down. His heart drummed impossibly fast in his chest, and he held his hands at the ready in the darkened room. A rustling and flapping mass cut through the air away from him, coming to rest on the back of the gilded couch.
The inky-black creature turned around and peered back at Cooper in the moonlight.
“Stupid bird!” Cooper shouted, the terror of the previous moment still flooding his veins. The feathered beast tilted its head, first to one side, then the other, as if contemplating the impertinence of this intruder. After a soft, dismissive caw, it moved in a way Cooper would have sworn was a shrug and took flight again. It circled the room a few times, dropped a small “gift,” as Cooper’s mom might say, next to his hand, then disappeared from the house through one of the many open window frames.
Cooper folded in half and plowed his fingers through his hair. The surge of adrenaline, now gone, left him exhausted. He rubbed his face firmly, grit from his now-filthy hands scratching his skin. Mindful of the bird poo, he stood and dusted himself off. A new, particularly tender spot announced itself on his rear, caused by a brick he had landed on.
He stepped further into the room to retrieve his phone near the fireplace. The hearth was flanked by two piles of kindling, though it wasn’t the normal sticks and logs found in most homes. It was a collection of broken bits of furniture. Cooper remembered his parents’ discussions about this house over the years, and their a
rguments about what should be done about the neighborhood’s homeless seeking dry shelter within it for the night. Every once in a while, there would be a telltale flickering glow through the windows, of men and women using whatever they could find to start a warming fire. But that was before. Before Elena had moved in with her new furniture and welcoming hearth fires.
Now the fireplace was dark.
Cooper had seen and smelled the woodsmoke that had been coming from this fireplace moments ago. He had watched it drift upward into the evening sky. But when he put his hand to the mantel, he found it as cold as the door handle. He touched the front of the stonework, the inner bricks, the metal wood cradle.
All icy.
He had entered the house with the intention of getting some answers. Now he didn’t even know what the questions were.
Cooper scooped up his phone and turned to face the room from a new angle. A staircase on the opposite wall led to the second floor, presumably to the bedrooms he’d previously thought held downy, rose-stitched comforters and pillow piles. Was it all some sort of illusion? Gazing at the hole in the ceiling, the answer seemed obvious.
A sound of something moving came through a doorway in the far corner.
“Elena?” Cooper tried to say, but it came out as barely more than a croak. His brain told his legs to move, to investigate, but he had to force his feet forward, leaving a trail in the dust on the floor like two snakes’ tracks.
He put his hands on the doorframe and leaned into what used to be a kitchen. No one was there except a family of mice. They all shot into a hole beneath the cabinetry, the doors of which hung open at a variety of uneven angles. A drawer lay upside down on the floor and a pillow hung inexplicably from the cracked porcelain sink. He panned his flashlight around the room and saw a small table and chair in the corner. A swath of navy fabric was slung over the back of the chair.
Everything in this house was caked in dust. But this corner was pristine, and a glimmer of gold twinkled back at him from the fabric.
Elena’s jacket.
“Elena?” Cooper said again. The only reply came from the rodents, stirring with frantic commotion.
He walked slowly to the table and stared at the stitching for the first time up close. Though he wanted to run a finger over the rise and fall of the thick gold thread, fear kept his hands by his sides. A small trash can stood on the far side of the table, and multiple crumpled wads of paper lay within it. They too appeared relatively fresh. Glancing around to again make sure he was alone, Cooper pulled the papers out one by one, noting a thick layer of dust in the bottom of the can. Whoever had put these pages here had done so recently.
Cooper flattened them on the table. Each of the five sheets had a ragged left edge, torn from a notebook. They were written in delicate and careful handwriting, and though he couldn’t immediately tell the order of the pages, Cooper found the opening of what he could see was a letter.
Dearest Mother,
It’s odd writing to you, knowing you’ll likely never read this, but I find comfort in at least pretending. I can no longer let these thoughts exist in my own mind, alone, without relief.
You taught me a love for the written word, how important it is to capture history, to commit events to the page, yes? You once wondered aloud, “If something is forgotten by all, did it ever really happen? Or was it no more than a dream?” It’s a good question. . . .
Cooper quickly folded the pages and jammed them into his back pocket, wanting to read more within the safety of his own home.
It was time to get out of here.
He backed away from the table and spun around, exiting the kitchen. As he passed a shattered window in the living room, however, he stopped. There, through shards of glass, was his home, appearing exactly as it should. Everything on this side of the alley, however, was altered. There was no picket fence. The yard was a dirt patch peppered with litter. The new white porch was gray and weathered, sloping at a dangerous angle with multiple missing boards.
Cooper stepped to the door—a door that, from the inside, looked nothing like the navy-blue one he had knocked on—and peered across the threshold into the backyard.
Picket fence.
Green grass.
Sturdy porch.
He took multiple slow sidesteps back to the broken window.
Dirt patch. Garbage.
He repeated his glance through the doorframe. Fence, sod, landscape lights.
Cooper stepped out onto the white porch and looked at the lovely butter-yellow exterior walls. The smell of mildew and decay vanished the instant he crossed the plane of the door. Pumpkin and spice again.
He stepped back. Moldy.
He went back and forth multiple times, marveling at how the scents flipped back and forth, as if they were on a switch, before he ultimately stayed out on the porch. He walked to that same lower window—the broken one he had peered through seconds ago—and looked through it again, this time from the porch side. Before he got there, he could see that the glass was flawless and new; even the stickum from the manufacturer’s label was still visible in the corner.
Through the window, he saw heavily-creamed-coffee-colored walls, decorative pillows nestled on an off-white couch, and a coffee table holding a stack of magazines. A ceiling fan turned languidly overhead, where the gaping hole had been moments ago.
And a raging fire glowed in the fireplace.
He put his hand out to touch the glass, to prove with more than his eyes that it was solid. He ran it side to side, then recoiled at a sharp bite. Blood spilled from a clean, straight cut on the tip of his middle finger.
Cooper ran.
He moved as fast as his legs would carry him, down the creaking steps, over the slippery leaves, through the picket-fence gate, and back home.
He slammed the back door of his house before leaning on it, gasping for air, his mind spinning so fast he wondered if it would break free of the confines of his skull.
“Cooper, I swear, if you slam—” His mom rounded the corner, her face set in stony anger, until she saw him. “Oh my—Cooper, are you okay? What happened?” She hurried to him and grabbed his hand. “Jess! Grab me a towel!”
He was dripping blood all over.
“You’re as white as a ghost! How long have you been bleeding?”
“I don’t . . .”
She led him to the kitchen sink, almost colliding with Jess as she came running with a dish towel. Jess’s eyes went wide at the sight of her brother. “Oh my g— Did she hurt you?”
His mom held Cooper’s hand under the tap as he hissed at the sting of it, before she wrapped the wound with the towel and guided him to a chair. “Cooper, what happened?”
“I . . . I just . . . I cut it over at Elena’s house. It was an accident.”
“Elena? Who’s Elena?” his mom said, putting pressure on the cut.
“The girl across the alley,” Cooper mumbled through a wince.
“What girl?”
“The one who moved in this summer.”
“There’s a girl over there?” His mom took her attention off his hand and looked through the kitchen window at the house.
Cooper nodded and cried, “Ouch!” as his mom pinched the cut even harder.
His mom sighed in exasperation. “How many times will I have to email the city about that place? It’s not safe.”
Now it was Jess’s turn to freeze. Slowly she asked, “Mom, what do you mean, not safe?”
“It makes me sad. No child should have to live like that,” their mother said with a gentle shake of the head.
Time slowed. Cooper and Jess locked eyes.
“Live like what?” Jess stammered.
But Cooper already knew. He knew the cozy couches, decorative rugs, and glowing lights that Jess saw weren’t really there. None of it was.
“It’s bad enough that adults sleep there,” his mother said, “but kids? They need a shelter where there’s food, warmth, and the hope for some real help. That place n
eeds to be torn down before more people get hurt.” She held Cooper’s hand up in hers, offering proof of the danger.
A memory flared in Cooper’s mind—that moment when they had arrived home from their trip this summer. He had commented on how amazing that house was. His mother had given him that look. “Okay, Cooper,” she had said. He had been sure he’d hurt her feelings by being envious. But now, listening to her, he understood her expression for what it was: she had thought Cooper was being a sarcastic smart aleck.
“Oh no,” he whispered.
“I’ll call the city tomorrow,” his mother went on, still squeezing his hand. “Nothing can be neglected for that long without its falling apart. They could at least board up more of the broken windows and help that girl find a better place to stay.”
Jess had turned ashen, and Cooper had a distinct and terrifying feeling of coming unmoored from the ground beneath him.
“Bud, you know better than to go poking around over there, even if you are trying to help someone.” She unwrapped the towel to assess the damage. “Who knew being a mom involved so much blood? It’s too bad you aren’t the one whose blood sugar I have to test!”
Jess and Cooper both stared at their mom.
“Jeez, tough audience,” she said with a shake of the head. “That was a joke, you two.”
Jess managed a feeble attempt at a laugh. Cooper feared he might scream if he made any sound at all.
“Okay, a Band-Aid should do the trick here. Jess, can you grab me one from the drawer?”
Jess did as she was told. She moved like she was made of some unbendable material as she crossed to the other side of the kitchen. She stared at Cooper with pleading eyes as she came back to his side. But Cooper had nothing to offer her. The only solace he could find for himself was the knowledge that Jess was as lost as he was.
The In-Between Page 8