We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going home.”

  “We gotta tell my dad what happened!”

  “You tell him. It was your idea about the house anyway, Brian.”

  “You wanted to ditch him,” I protested.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m going home.” He cast his eyes down then slumped off the porch. He lived only two blocks over, not far, but when he hit Luther Avenue, he started to run.

  I exchanged a look with Cyn. “You wanna go home, too?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was small.

  “Go, if you want to.”

  I turned and went inside, calling immediately for my father. He came down the hall and into the foyer, wearing a sweater with black cats on it. He was smiling until he saw the panic in my face. “What is it, Bri?”

  “We lost Oliver,” I blurted.

  “What do you mean you lost him?”

  “He went into that old house on Cottage Lane, but he never came out. We waited around and I called to him but he never came out.”

  My father’s eyes flitted past me and toward the front door. I spun around, hoping to find Oliver standing there in his sheet, but it was only Cyn. She looked too frightened to move from the stoop. My father waved her inside then told us to sit down on the couch. My mother appeared over the half-wall, plastic spiders pinned into her hair. She asked what was going on.

  “Call the Toomeys and tell them to come over,” said my father. Then he came over to the couch and said, “Maybe he went home.”

  “Yeah,” I said, hoping it was the truth, but not believing it. We would have seen him leave the house. Jeremy had been watching the back door. Nonetheless, I held out hope.

  Yet this hope was dashed the moment Eric and June Toomey filed into the house without Oliver. June looked frantic and Eric had a stoic, medicated look about him. He came over and sat down between Cyn and me on the couch, but he didn’t say a word.

  “What happened?” June said, first to my father and then to my mother. “Where’s Oliver?”

  My father relayed what I had told him. When he’d finished, June looked at me. She was visibly shaking. “He doesn’t know the neighborhood,” she said. “He’s probably lost, wandering the streets.”

  “I’ll call the cops,” said my mom, who departed for the kitchen.

  “Why in the world would he go into that house?” Eric Toomey said.

  My father looked at me. I held my gaze on him for perhaps two heartbeats before I had to turn away. My face felt suddenly very hot.

  Less than ten minutes later, two police officers showed up. They asked questions of my father and then of the Toomeys. When they asked what Oliver had been wearing, June Toomey said flatly, “A bed sheet. A goddamn white bed sheet. He was a ghost.”

  In a softer voice, Eric Toomey said, “The boy has problems. He’s got special needs.” His dead eyes looked over at the police officers. “You should know that, I think.”

  “We’re gonna head out to the house,” said one of the officers to my dad. “I’d like to take one of the kids with me, talk to them, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure,” my father said, his eyebrows arching. “Should I come, too?”

  “No problem,” said the other cop.

  My father waved me up off the couch. “Come on.”

  “What about me?” Cyn said.

  “You stay here with me, sweetheart,” said my mom. “We’ll call your parents.”

  Sedately, Cyn nodded.

  My father and I followed one of the cops out to the patrol car, while the other cop stayed inside and asked more questions. The cop opened the passenger door for me. “Why don’t you hop up front so we can chat? Brian, right?”

  I nodded and climbed inside. My dad got in the back.

  Once we had pulled out onto Luther Avenue and were headed toward Watchtower Street, the cop asked me to tell him again what had happened. I started to tell the same story Cyn and I had told back at the house when the officer cut me off in midsentence. “So you’re saying your friend Oliver just decided to go into the house by himself? You guys weren’t daring him or anything like that?”

  “Well…” I said.

  “I need to know the truth if we’re going to find your friend,” said the cop.

  I looked out the passenger window, and at the glowing jack-o’-lanterns on all the porches as we drove by. The older kids were out now, safety pins in their shirts, black makeup over their eyes, tattoos. Some sat on cars parked up on lawns, drinking soda and smoking. They pointed to the police car as we drove by.

  “Okay,” I said, and told the truth.

  When we reached the house on Cottage Lane, the officer took a flashlight out of the glove compartment and got out of the car. He went up to the house, completed a full circuit around the property, then went in the front door. I saw the flashlight’s beam come slanting through the boards that had been nailed up over the windows.

  I glanced up and saw my father’s reflection in the rearview mirror. His jaw was set and his mouth was nothing more than a lipless gash just below his nose. When his eyes met mine, he looked quickly away, ashamed of me. He said nothing for the entire time we sat in the car together.

  The cop returned a full ten minutes later. Sighing, he tossed the flashlight back into the glove compartment then geared the car into Drive. “There’s no one in that house,” he said. His demeanor had changed.

  By the time we arrived back home, Mrs. Cristo’s convertible Sebring was parked outside. As I got out of the police car, Cyn came out of the house, followed by her mother, and marched over to the Sebring without casting even the quickest glance in my direction. My mom stood in the doorway, her arms folded, looking cold and very thin. Apparently, the Toomeys had gone to the police station to fill out some paperwork. It promised to be a long night for them.

  I went into the house and straight up to my room, where I dropped down on the bed and buried my face in my pillow. My father’s voice ghosted up through the heating vents as he spoke with the police officer in the foyer. Once the cop left, it was my mother’s voice that dominated much of the conversation.

  After a while, I heard my dad creaking down the hallway toward my room. He opened the door and poked his head inside, where he remained for some time. I still had my face buried in the pillow, but I could sense him there like a spirit at my back. Eventually, he came over and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Roll over,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I rolled over and looked at him. My vision threatened to double.

  “That story you told in the police car,” said my dad. “Never in a million years would I have guessed that my son…” Disgusted, he let his voice trail off. It wasn’t necessary for him to complete the thought. I felt horrible enough as it was. “Have you told the police everything?”

  I merely nodded, not trusting my words.

  “If there’s something else, you better tell me now.”

  I shook my head.

  “Speak,” said my father.

  “There’s nothing else.”

  “All right.” The bedsprings squealed as he stood up. “We’ll talk more about this in the morning. You better pray they find that boy,” he said, and left.

  But they didn’t.

  They didn’t find that boy.

  I was questioned several times by the police, each time more thoroughly than the previous times. Cyn and Jeremy were questioned, too. Intimidated by the cops’ authority, they did not bother lying. In the end, we all told the same story. We all told the truth.

  The house on Cottage Lane was searched more thoroughly, too. The cops used dogs, and my parents, along with the Toomeys, joined in the search. But it was futile. There was no evidence found that even suggested Oliver had ever gone into the house. He certainly wasn’t still there, hiding.

  One Sunday, as we drove home from church, my mother said out of nowhere, “You should have never forced him to play with all those kids.”


  My father, who was driving, glanced quickly at her, a look of surprise on his face. Then he turned back to face the road.

  “They’re all problem kids,” said my mom. “What did you expect?”

  “They were just kids,” said my dad.

  “He could have just run away. Did anyone ever consider that?”

  “It’s possible,” my father said.

  “It’s the Toomeys’ fault, too,” my mom went on. “This is a nice residential neighborhood. Who do they think they are, bringing children like that onto our street?”

  “Geri,” said my dad, his tone placating.

  “Don’t give me that,” she spat. “There’s enough blame to go around. No one’s hands are clean in this, Roger.”

  My dad’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. A confusing mix of compassion and disappointment greeted me.

  “Maybe he’ll show up eventually,” said my dad as we pulled into the driveway.

  But like I said, he never did.

  Unless…

  There’s that old chestnut—a verbal crutch of sorts—that goes, I told you all that to tell you this, and I suppose that’s the point we’ve reached in this story. I’ve told you all that to tell you this:

  A year has passed since Oliver disappeared in the house on Cottage Lane. In that year, I have changed quite a bit. For one thing, I no longer hang out with Jeremy Beachy. We haven’t spoken since that night, when he left Cyn and me standing on my front porch to face the music on our own. I’m sure he was scared and acting out of impulse, and in truth I don’t really blame him for it; but the sight of him sickens me, because I see myself reflected in him. I see the way I may have provoked that girl into biting me on the arm, and how I teased the kid with all the hats in the A&P bag until he would cry. I remember one afternoon, troubled by that blank ghost-face peering down at me from the dormer window of the Toomey house, when I gave that little girl the finger. Most of all, I see the way I teased Oliver and tricked him and tried to scare him. Funny, how he wound up scaring us instead.

  I still see Cyn at school, but she doesn’t come over to the house anymore. Perhaps she sees herself reflected in me the same way I see myself reflected in Jeremy.

  The Toomeys still live next door. Since Oliver, they haven’t brought in any new kids. I hope they do eventually, because I could use the opportunity to absolve myself by changing my behavior. Maybe some of it is what happened with Oliver; maybe some of it is just a part of growing up. I’m thirteen now. I’m responsible for the stones I throw and the windows I break.

  And then there’s my dad. I won’t be dramatic and say that, since that incident, he has looked at me differently, because that’s not the case. True, I had disappointed him. True, it took some time to earn his trust again. But I did earn it back, and we share a good, strong, close relationship. My father is a good man, and it’s funny how it took all these years to understand what that means.

  So here we are, one year later, Halloween night. I didn’t go out this year. I’m too old for that. Instead, I stayed home to hand out candy while my parents, dressed as Popeye and Olive Oyl, went to a party a few blocks over. Around ten-thirty, well after all the ghosts and witches and goblins had made their final rounds and ventured back home, I heard a knock at the front door. There was some candy left in the bowl, so I answered it.

  A ghost stood on the other side of the door. It was a person just slightly shorter and thinner than me draped in a single white sheet with two eyeholes cut into it. The sight arrested me, and I stood there without moving, the bowl of candy gradually growing heavier in my hand.

  A hand emerged from beneath the sheet, holding open an empty plastic Ziploc bag. The fingers of the hand were small and white, but there were crescents of black grit under the nails. There were specks of dirt on the plastic bag, too.

  Finding my momentum again, I reached into the candy bowl, snatched up a handful of goodies, and dumped them into the ghost’s bag. Apparently satisfied, the bag retreated back beneath the sheet. Yet my visitor did not move away from the porch. I stared at those two dark eyeholes, dark as roofing tar. Listening, I could hear the visitor’s respiration, thin and wheezy, behind the sheet. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  The ghost turned and padded down off the porch. I watched it cross the yard and head down the driveway. When the sheeted figure reached Luther Avenue, I expected it to blink out of existence, but it didn’t. It continued up the block, the reflective tape shimmering with moonlight on the sides of the costume, in the approximate direction of Cottage Lane.

  There was a train that ran from northern France to a small village tucked down in the gray safety of a whitewashed valley. We spent most of the winter there, thankful to be away from the front and away from the beaches and away from northern France altogether. The train was calm and peaceful but shook rather furiously over the land, and the village itself was small and proud and did not seem very French. You would think of the beaches and think of the shelling on the beaches, then wake up and realize you were on the train all along. Everyone was still on the train. The bumping of the train did nothing to settle your dreams and you were only thankful for living once you were awake and able to understand it all, and able to understand living, and when you were able to see the little village up ahead through the dirty windows of the train. All of us drank hot coffee in the cafés and slept in two-story bungalows outside the village that had once been brothels. With the commencement of the war, the brothels emptied and became places of refuge for tired soldiers. Someone laughed at this and said we were all tired soldiers. Many of the men laughed, too. It was a strain to hear the laughter and I don’t think it truly made anyone feel very good. Sometimes, we would move out of the cafés and into the streets and kick around a small leather ball with some of the village children. We all seemed to like it, sometimes more than the children. Some of the men spoke a little French, and the children would always laugh and point and call us américains bêtes, and it was all very much fun and all very European. But then at night you could hear the planes and think you could hear the gunfire and you forgot all about the children and kicking the leather ball around in the street. You forgot all about the hot coffee and the cafés and the bumping of the train. You would lay there and know that some man and woman had loved each other, albeit briefly and perhaps passionlessly, in the bed you were pressed into, and that did nothing to satisfy you. There was nothing any of us could do. And as the winter pressed on, the snow came, dirty and brutal, and buried the entire village. It was as if it never existed.

  Pembroke

  Pembroke’s Used and Rare Books was, on the outside, a rather nondescript little enterprise tucked between a drab drinking establishment and the satellite office of a mortgage company along a brick-topped boulevard in historic Ellicott City. Its proprietor, Arthur Pembroke, had been in business at this location for the better part of three decades, yet despite the bookstore’s prominence as a local fixture, few people ventured into the shop. In fact, few people even knew of its existence. This suited Pembroke just fine: a lifelong bachelor in his mid-sixties, Pembroke drew great pleasure from the quiet afternoons spent at the shop, untroubled by tourists or the occasional curioso who browsed the shelves but ultimately never made a purchase. His rent was cheap, his overhead low, and, with the exception of Tom DeLilly, who came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to straighten the place up, Pembroke bankrolled no staff.

  What kept Pembroke afloat were the few loyal customers with whom he’d cultivated a civil yet perfunctory relationship over the years—avid collectors of rare books who visited the bookstore on occasion to make specific requests (much in the conspiratorial tones and suspicious manner of someone inquiring about an illegal enterprise) of Pembroke. So-and-so has learned of a specific book on witchcraft—could he secure a copy? So-and-so is interested in a specific Romanian book of black magic—was it possible to place such an order? So-and-so fears that his wife has been unfaithful and has heard rumor of a book
that might inform him one way or the other (with no harm coming to the unfaithful wife, of course)—was this something Pembroke could locate?

  He was often fulfilling such exotic requests, so when he first saw the package on the front steps of the shop that Monday morning, he assumed it was one of the orders he’d recently placed. It was indeed book-shaped—large and blocky, like a dictionary, Pembroke thought—and it was wrapped in brown butcher’s paper and bound with frayed bits of twine. The packaging was a bit out of the norm, but it wasn’t wholly unusual—not enough to give Pembroke pause, anyway. What was unusual, he noticed as he gathered the heavy package up off the stoop and carried it into the shop, was that it bore no markings, labels, addresses, or postage. Pembroke puzzled over this for several moments after he set the book on the front counter and contorted out of his tweed coat. It then occurred to him that he could stand there puzzling over that nondescript brown paper for eternity, and so, with his wiry gray eyebrows arched above the lenses of his circular glasses, Pembroke untied the twine and removed the paper.

  The book was bound between two roughly textured covers, greenish-yellow in hue and networked with what appeared to be tiny threadlike fibers. There was something very plantlike about the covers, reminding Pembroke of hand-rolled cigars, of which he indulged on occasion. There was no title or author’s name embossed either on the front cover or on the very wide spine. This wasn’t unusual per se; what was unusual was the absence of author’s name and book title on the title page. Moreover, there was no copyright or publishing information. The book was sizable—perhaps 800 pages or so—but as Pembroke carefully turned page after page (the intensity and fervor of his page-turning increasing with each passing second), he saw that there were no printed page numbers, no headers or footers...no printed text anywhere in the book at all.