Housewarming

by Jennifer Bowen

  “Tomorrow morning. I’m not working a full day tomorrow, though.” His tone shifted and she heard the smile in it. “What do you want to do with our time off?”

  She didn’t take the bait, but made an effort to soften her tone. “Okay, well, it’s six-thirty, so I’d better let you get back to work.”

  After they hung up, she looked at his crumpled tee-shirt. John hadn’t really done anything wrong; she was so tightly wound, she could feel the stress in her shoulders. She flattened the shirt, smoothing it with both hands. She was just overly tired and she never had liked being home alone at night.

  Sunlight brightened the bedroom, but the house was quiet. The kids were quiet; the birds were silent. The room felt empty and she realized that already, the house felt lonely without John. The fact that he would positively not be home until the next day meant the night would drag by. She was starting to see what it was like having the morning hours alone to herself and that hadn’t been so bad. But nighttime was different. Even with children in the house, she’d feel alone. Apparently, watching scary movies as an adolescent had screwed up her imagination for the rest of her life.

  Tracy and John were an hour away; they might as well be ten hours away. And besides, she wasn’t sure if she felt like speaking with Tracy at that moment, not after wondering if she had something to do with her mother’s cryptic texts about David. But really, Kara felt like she and the kids were practically isolated; it would take too long for them to reach them if there was an emergency. The only people she knew in the neighborhood were the Foremans and then there was Shannon on the other side of town…

  There was nothing she could do about her misgivings, but she found herself springing to her feet and knocking on Jack’s open bedroom door. He sat on the floor playing with toy trucks. She watched him, looking for some resemblance to David. Jack shared Kara’s dark hair and his facial features were similar to hers. Physically, there was absolutely no reminder of her ex and she was grateful for that.

  If David sought visitation rights, would Jack want that? Jack knew John was his step-father and they had encouraged him to ask questions about David if he ever had them (very unlike Kara and Margaret’s own relationship, as Margaret kept the past forever closed), but Jack didn’t seem curious. Maybe that would change if he learned David had returned. If Jack did want to see David, would Kara’s relationship with him change? How would their family dynamic be altered?

  Kara cleared her throat and leaned against the door frame, pushing away her thoughts. “Hey, want to have a sleepover?”

  “With who? Can I invite Alan?”

  “No. With me and Lilah. It’s a school night.” It was a ruse to keep her loneliness at bay. She imagined the sun sinking quickly and thought of how truly alone they were in the countryside.

  “You and Lilah wouldn’t be a sleepover,” Jack grumbled.

  “Come on, Jack, it’ll be fun. We’ll watch TV, eat popcorn, and then we can all sleep in my great big bed. We can even tell stories.”

  She saw the scowl on his down-turned face. “Ghost stories?”

  Absolutely not. “Not ghosts. I was thinking more like adventure stories.”

  “When’s dad coming home?”

  “Not ’til tomorrow morning.”

  He looked up at her, studying her. Finally, he said, sounding resigned, “Okay, we can have a sleepover.”

  After dinner, Jack sat down at the kitchen table with his math workbook and Lilah lay on the floor in front of the TV. As Kara turned to the dishwasher, her cellphone chimed, making her jerk. Her nerves bunching up, she slid in a chair across from Jack and looked down at the phone screen.

  He didn’t look good.

  There was a hitch in her breathing. The text was from Margaret and even though she knew who she meant, Kara texted back, David?

  Yes. He looked wild.

  Wild? Kara pictured the clean-cut David she had known: always in nice clothes, well-groomed, smelled good…What did she mean by wild?

  Kara texted, What did he want?

  There was no immediate response and as she waited for a reply, she glanced at Jack, whose head was bent over his homework, unaware she was texting about his biological father. She returned to her phone, staring at the words, waiting for Margaret to give her the reason for his contact. But the minutes ticked by and after several more had passed, Kara prompted, What did he want?

  She waited a beat, then called her. She was sent straight to voicemail. “Mom, what did David want? Call me back.” She hung up, laying the phone face-up on the table.

  Jack piped up, “Mom, can you help me with this?”

  * * *

  The next two hours dragged by. Margaret didn’t call or text again, making Kara more exasperated than concerned. Was she playing games? Was this because she was irritated they hadn’t talked recently?

  After Kara had put the kids to bed, she went into the great room to watch TV. Twenty minutes into the program, she started to feel sleepy, but then the show broke for commercial and her thoughts drifted back to her mother’s text messages, so vague and incomplete she didn’t know what to make of them. Cool, calm David…She wondered how he really was now.

  He looked wild.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. Who cared how he looked? She didn’t want anything to do with him. He was the past. She had cursed his name throughout the pregnancy and had hated him as she started to mirror what her mother’s life must have been like as a single parent. But then she had met John and the cycle had been broken. Thank God for John, a father who cared.

  Without warning, Kara’s thoughts flipped and Sophie appeared. She didn’t have to close her eyes to see her. Kara’s gaze was to the right of the TV, her eyes fixed on the wall. Projected there was Sophie, lying still as always, in the bassinette that had waited at the apartment for her. Of course, in reality, Sophie had never lain in that bassinette. She had never felt comfort in their home. Kara’s pupils grew larger, taking in the infant’s eyes. They opened for the first time, glowing electric blue, an unnatural hue. They didn’t blink, the relaxed mouth didn’t twitch, and there was no flush to those sunken cheeks.

  Kara blinked and the trance was broken; she’d never seen Sophie’s eyes. She felt a numbness come over her and realized the great room had turned chilly. She covered herself with a throw blanket, pushing away the image of her daughter and turned her eyes to the TV. A sitcom was on, but she couldn’t follow the storyline. She found herself looking into the shadowed kitchen. The outside lantern and foyer chandelier added light to the otherwise dark house. Besides the TV, it was quiet.

  Her eyes drifted again, over the playroom door. It was closed. She returned her gaze to the screen again, but she had lost all meaning to the episode. She turned off the TV and picked up her cellphone. She scrolled over the few texts between her and Margaret. She couldn’t read between the lines; there wasn’t enough content. Giving up, she skimmed articles online instead. After a while, she went back to her contacts list, scrolling through names, looking briefly at John’s before clicking off the phone.

  She headed to bed, but stopped to peek out the dining room curtain. She didn’t know what she expected to see, and as it turned out, there wasn’t much to see, since the deck light didn’t reach that far. She hardly saw the outline of the pool. She released the curtain and stepped into her bedroom, pulling the door closed and locking it. She used the toilet, then flipped off the light and peeked out the bathroom window. The lamppost at the edge of the driveway poured a ring of light all around it, but only reached so far. There was blackness beyond.

  She closed the curtain and looking up at the star-shaped skylight, she saw a smattering of stars thousands of miles away. Her eyes drifted and she noticed a shadow draped over three of the window points. It didn’t waver as it darkened half the outline of the window. Perhaps, it was the effect of moonlight bending over the trees. She rubbed her eyes and looked up again. The shadow was gone; perhaps, the moon’s angle had shifted. Perhaps, Kara had
caught the change by chance.

  She climbed into bed, lying down between Jack and Lilah, who both slept. Kara closed her eyes. Minutes quickly turned into an hour as she worked at ignoring the sounds of the house settling. But her ears were trained, listening for any sounds that didn’t belong.

  The floorboards creaked and her eyes opened, darting to the closed door. Were those footsteps?

  Her fingers tightened around her cellphone and she listened intently, pushing the blanket down, as if the cotton impeded her hearing. Jack on her right started snoring. She was glancing at him when something thumped against the floor, nearby.

  Kara sat at attention, her heart in her throat and her eyes back on the closed door. She couldn’t hear beyond her racing heart and Jack’s steady snore. Her thumb poised to dial 911 on her cellphone, she slid to the end of the bed, not breathing as the sound of the blankets and sheets rubbed against her. She waited a few seconds, then got up, rounding the bed slowly to Lilah’s side from where the noise had come. She moved closer to Lilah, whose face was turned to the ceiling. Hovering close to the cool wall, Kara clicked on her cellphone’s flashlight and aimed it at the floor.

  Finding Lilah’s statue there, Kara’s head came slightly back, stunned to see it, before she swiftly got to her knees and aimed the light under the bed. Nobody there. She trained her ears, but heard nothing besides Jack’s steady snore. She scowled at the statue. The clay girl’s head was hidden beneath the bed, looking eerily lopped off, but the frog was in the open, grinning at Kara, as if laughing at her. She picked it up and shoved it under the blanket beside Lilah.

  Wide awake now, Kara rechecked doors in the house, ensuring they were still locked, then walked around, identifying the refrigerator made the hum in the kitchen, John’s computer whirred in the office, and the buzzing came from the baby monitor on Lilah’s dresser. She picked up the monitor. The green light burned steadily and the buzzing chirped intermittently. How in the world did Lilah sleep through that? Kara turned it off. The house was even quieter than before.

  She aimed the cellphone’s flashlight at the bonus room, the familiar boxes unmoved. She went downstairs, passed under the harsh foyer light, peeked in the powder room, and went into the great room. Greeted again by the refrigerator’s hum, she rechecked the backdoor and peeked outside. Nothing stirred within eyeshot. She turned back to the great room. It was dark, but she saw the outline of the playroom door.

  It wasn’t closed.

  Hairs standing on her arms, Kara held out the cellphone, its flashlight extending a few feet ahead of her. Her steps were quick; one would’ve mistaken it for bravery, but it was more an adrenaline rush, like ripping off a Band-Aid: get to that door quickly and get it over with.

  The beam of light fell on the open door, ajar a few inches. She stretched her arm out as far as possible through the doorway, illuminating boxes of nails, drywall, and wood planks. No monsters lay in wait.

  Entering the room, her light reflecting off the naked windows, she felt exposed to the outside world, the world from which she was trying to hide. She ignored her reflection, sensing a pale-faced woman stared wide-eyed. She backed up, glancing out the backdoor as she headed back to bed. She was passing through the dining room when there was an abrupt Boom!

  She jumped, practically dropping the cellphone.

  Crrrrrrrrackkkkk! Booooom!

  A flash of light illuminated the closed curtains.

  It took her a moment to realize it had started storming. The window flashed again as lightning struck nearby. The sound of a million nails spilling erupted as it started to rain. She sighed, the storm instantly relieving some of her stress. Who would break in during a thunderstorm?

  She returned to her bedroom, locked the door behind her, and climbed into bed, closing her eyes. She ignored the banging, so loud it sounded like somebody was trying to break inside. She ignored the wind howling like an anguished banshee, and pushed away the ugly statue that had edged to her place in the bed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Seven the next morning Kara awoke, still sandwiched between Jack and Lilah. She placed a hand on both, rousing them. “Time to wake up, guys.” She checked the office and garage for John, tamping down her annoyance that he hadn’t returned from work. Following routine, she watched Jack ride away on the bus until it disappeared behind the trees, and dropped Lilah off at school.

  She left Lilah, crossed the Grace School parking lot, and sat in her car for a moment. The sun was still rising, casting light on the bottom third of the Collumber house, its remainder in shadow. The windows were dark, the covered porch swept clean, and the For Sale sign in the yard near the locked iron gate. To her, the sign might as well had read, Keep Out.

  She drove away, but slowed as she advanced on the weathered barn on Seter Lane. It too was shadowed, but she remembered the hayloft and a smile played on her lips as she imagined it in light with dust motes sparkling in its wake.

  Come and see.

  The leaves crinkled, whispering in the wind. Her smile fell and her foot pressed hard on the brake, the abrupt stop rocking her harshly forward and backward. Her lips parted as she reached for her seatbelt, her fingers fumbling for the push button.

  A car came up behind her then, honking, and her fingers let go and her head snapped to attention. Birds scattered from the trees. Avoiding the rearview mirror, Kara pressed down too firmly on the accelerator, and returned home.

  John was not there. As the coffee percolated, she pressed his name on her cellphone. “No service” flashed back. She roamed the front of the house, waiting for bars to appear, but they didn’t. She gave up, sinking into the office chair. She played with the phone in her hands, mindlessly scrolling through her contacts list. Her eyes eventually lowered to the desk to the note she had left there.

  She flipped it right-side up, looking at the hand-written uppercase word.

  LEAVE!!!

  It didn’t seem so foreboding as it had when she first found it taped to the door. There was no way to tell, but it very well could’ve been the writing of a teenaged prankster.

  Of course it had to be a kid, she told herself. Who else would’ve thought that was funny?

  A joke. Just like Ding-Dong Ditch.

  She looked at her phone again. Still no bars. She clicked back to her text messages from her mother. Kara’s thoughts flipping to David, she texted her now, even though there was little chance of the message going through due to poor cell reception.

  Hello?

  She watched the status bar crawl across the screen, and after a moment, the message sent. She waited, but there was no immediate response.

  What did David want? Why was her mother not responding?

  Sighing, Kara went down the hallway, glancing at the playroom door. She was glad it was closed. She turned off the coffeemaker, didn’t bother to pour a cup, and went into the master bedroom. With sore eyes, she looked at her bed, crumpled sheets and blankets hanging off the edge. It looked inviting and she desperately wanted to catch up on quality sleep, but she went instead to the window, collapsing onto the cushioned bench. She gazed outside for a while, glossing over the surrounding trees that outlined the backyard. She narrowed her eyes, spotting something metallic in the far reaches of the yard. She tried to make out what it was, but was distracted when a buck darted past to the lawn. He paused, looking at the house, perhaps seeing her, before scampering beyond the north end, disappearing again into the woods.

  Kara turned back to her room, her eyes locating the white box sitting on her dresser.

  Sophie.

  Her fingers itching to open the box, she started toward it. But, nearing it, something screeched, high-pitched, from behind her, making her whirl around. She went to the windows, peering out, but couldn’t find what it was. Then there was another screech, this one not as jarring, which she recognized as a bird.

  Turkey vulture.

  She wrinkled her nose, hating the creatures she hadn’t even known had existed months ago, and back
ed away from the windows. Her eyes trailed down the window bench, inviting in the light, spotting two brass hinges beneath the cushion. Remembering what she had stored inside days after they had moved in, she removed the pad and pulled open the seat.

  She pulled out the cardboard box and opened it, finding leftover invitations from their wedding, photographs from her last day at work, two baggies holding Jack’s and Lilah’s first hair clippings, and three photo albums.

  She selected an album and closed the bench to sit on it. The first photograph inside the cover was of John and her sitting awkwardly on a park bench. It was from their first date. Their cheesy grins made her smile. She remembered he had asked a passerby to take their photo.

  “For prosperity,” he had told Kara, jokingly.

  Later, he had confessed to her that he had just wanted to capture how beautiful she had looked in the sunlight. She had told him he was full out it, but his words had pleased her and had made her feel loved.

  She took her time, flipping through the laminated pages, pausing on various photographs that had captured their lives: John and her as boyfriend/girlfriend, married life, snap-shots of Jack and Lilah as babies, and some professional stills of the kids taken at the mall.

  She stared at one of the family portraits, wondering how different it would look if Sophie was there too. Big brother and his two sisters.

  Kara closed the album and looked up.

  A figure stood in the doorway.

  Kara jumped to her feet, dropping the album on the floor. It took her a moment to recognize John.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Welcome home,” she mumbled, bending to pick up the album, the chore an excuse to regain her composure. She straightened and glanced at the clock. It was almost eleven.