by Cara Martin
“Stay out here with them,” Cal instructs as he climbs the porch stairs to hand me the lantern.
He doesn’t need to say it, but I nod, shoes squelching on the porch’s ancient wooden planks. “Leave the front door open,” I tell him. “I’ll keep one foot inside.” Half in, half out. That’s as much protection as I can offer.
“The first aid kit’s by the fireplace,” I shout after him as Cal edges reluctantly past me, into the bowels of Shantallow. Tanvi lowers herself and Lauren onto the middle step, refusing to take more than partial shelter under Shantallow’s roof. She stares over her shoulder at the last spot where Cal was visible in the main corridor, eyebrows knitting into an anxious furrow.
“Keep talking, Cal!” she yells, rain coating her lower legs.
“There’s still one lantern in here,” he shouts back, the distance and dense black air between us muffling his words. “Wait, the —”
“What?” I prompt.
“Nothing. I have what I need. I’m coming back.”
Can it be that simple? Tanvi and I glance at each other in wonder. Then the lantern light dims in my hand. Flickers. Dies.
In the absence of light, the sloping porch roof instantly becomes claustrophobic. A closing casket lid. My fingers feel for the battery compartment, fiddling with the cluster of batteries, trying to force more life out of them than they’re willing to offer. There’s no resuscitating them. They’ve given up for good.
Cal bolts out of the house, pillow under one arm, first aid kit tucked under the other, his hands clutching a loaf of bread and a stack of paper cups. Stumbling into my shoulder in the darkness, he exclaims, “Shit!”
“I’ll go back for the other lantern,” he offers, his inflection more thread-like than whole — straw trembling in the wind.
“No!” Tanvi objects. “Forget it. We don’t need it.”
I grab the doorknob, closing the front door firmly behind him. “Did you see anything?”
Cal’s lower lip slips. “Not exactly.” He bends to deposit the collection of supplies on the porch, lining them up against the wall of the house. Sinking down next to them, he clicks open the first aid kit. “The …” He retrieves the roll of elastic cloth bandage and begins wrapping his foot. “The cross from the mantelpiece was missing.”
My weight shifts, the porch squealing in response.
Tanvi’s silent from the steps.
“You okay, T.V.?” Cal asks.
“Yeah,” she replies, her voice low. “You guys can sleep, if you want. I’ll keep watch. I’m not tired.” Her foot drums the bottom step.
“No one’s sleeping,” Cal declares. A sound like Tic Tacs rattling in their package agitates across the length of the porch. He must have the tramadol bottle in his hand. “You want a couple, Misha?”
Sliding down on the floorboards, I position myself between Tanvi and Cal. When you take your eyes off people, they disappear. From my spot near the door I’ll be able to keep an eye on them both. “I’m okay,” I tell him. With no clue when I swallowed the last pill, I’m better off sucking up the pain and keeping my clear head.
“You’re definitely not okay,” Tanvi says, the razor-sharp point in her voice making me flinch.
I was never okay to begin with. We both have all the proof we need.
“You looked like you were ready to collapse when we found you,” she continues. “If your ribs are broken, you’re not supposed to lift more than ten pounds. I’m glad you did, but they say you’re not even supposed to vacuum with a chest injury. Does it hurt to breathe?”
“The ribs might just be bruised,” I say, her question disappearing between porch floorboards as the innocent meaning behind her original comment sinks into my cells. She wasn’t slamming me. If anything, that was concern.
A few feet away, Tanvi struggles to her feet, hefting Lauren onto the porch with her. Cal reaches for the pillow he brought out from the house, repositioning it so that Tanvi can settle her cousin comfortably on the worn planks, her head nesting on synthetic fibers.
“How’s your ankle doing?” Tanvi asks, sitting down by Cal’s feet and Lauren’s head so that she’s at the epicenter of our group.
Suddenly a woman screams from nearby in the forest. Blood-curdling and cut short.
Next to me, Tanvi’s breath catches. My hands freeze at the end of my arms, dangling into darkness. Our silence stretches like an elastic band tugged to breaking point. In the strained quiet the rain begins to ease, its rhythmic tapping on the porch roof slowing and softening.
“That sounded like an actual person,” Cal blurts. “Maybe there’s somebody else out here with us.”
My leg twitches, floorboards grumbling. The woman from the forest’s exposed cheekbone gleams in my memory. “I saw something — someone — earlier in the woods,” I say, beginning to explain about the dead woman.
A second shriek slices the air, rapidly subsiding into a whimper. More animal than human. Something with its paw snared in a trap, bloody and broken.
Tanvi rocks back and forth, her head bobbing and the reverberations from the motion veining out along the floorboards. For a long while none of us speak. We listen for the rain and the screams from the woods that break nature’s silence, time after time, in an irregular cycle. The repetition should desensitize us. But that’s not how it works. Anticipating the noises is as harrowing as their arrival.
Finally my mouth dries up and my joints stiffen. “I need water,” I whisper to Cal. “Hand me a cup.”
Cal doesn’t stir. Tanvi cranes her neck toward him, immediately scooching closer on the floorboards. “Hey,” she says loudly, grabbing his leg. “Cal!”
He jumps in his sleep, some newly woken limb bumping into the first aid kit. “What?” he cries. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing.” Relief sugars Tanvi’s tone. “It’s okay. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.” Not like John or Lauren. Cal’s only been lulled into dreamland by the tramadol. “Pass me a couple cups.”
He does as she asks, Tanvi holding one out to me. I advance warily down the porch steps, extending my arm into the rain where the cup can catch it. The storm has become more drizzle than downpour. It takes forever to gather a single gulp.
From somewhere behind the tree line the woman sobs and squeals. I recoil, my right foot jumping backwards, heel smacking the porch’s bottom step. Forcing my shaking hand back into the air, I hold my ground. When I drink, the water tastes warm but clean. Everything else might be rotting, but the air remains breathable, the water drinkable, and the trees healthy and infinite. Maybe because the unnatural things that live here don’t touch them.
“Do you want water?” I ask Tanvi.
She drifts down the steps to hand me her cup, thanking me when I return it to her lined with a couple of teaspoon’s worth of rainwater minutes later. Cal’s wordless in the shadows, likely fallen back to sleep. Before retreating under the porch roof again I search the sky for hints of morning — the comfort of impenetrable obsidian sky yielding to somber blue.
“What do you see?” Tanvi asks from behind me.
“Nothing.” A hundred coats of black paint overlaid against the night sky, smothering the moon and stars.
Settling myself in my previous space on the floorboards, I think of my mom and Natalya. The police would have found my car outside the Mahajan house. Cal’s too. Keion would’ve jumped into his cab to search for me.
Tanvi’s voice steals out from the darkness. “Why were you outside my house tonight?”
It’s not how it looks. That’s what I would’ve said before. But from here, I can’t lie to her. We’ve come too far for that.
“Sometimes I drive by,” I admit. “Not a lot. And not to stalk you.” I could add I’d never hurt her, but who would believe that?
Leaning forward, I pull my chin in toward my chest. Breathe in and out.
Feel the weight of last spring settle into my back and limbs, burning my skin with regret and self-accusations.
“This is the place from the nightmare, isn’t it?” she says. “Only we’re not alone here like in the dream.”
I nod, momentarily forgetting that Tanvi probably can’t make it out in the dark. “I dreamt about it more times than I can count,” I confess. “I was having the nightmares before I met you. The very first time I saw you, I recognized you from the dreams.” Although I’ve never told her that before, it’s easier than talking about the ugly things I did.
In my imagination she purses her lips, refusing to look at me. “You should never have kept it from me all that time,” she says.
A metallic ping from the driveway steers my eyes in the direction of the van. The sound of a stone — or something similar — hitting the hood.
“It’s nothing,” Tanvi murmurs unconvincingly after a ten-second delay. “What do you think it all means? Why are we here?”
“I have no idea. Sorry.” Once the word has slipped out others bloat in my mouth, forcing their way onto the sagging porch. “I’m sorry for everything. I never should’ve —”
“Don’t,” Tanvi snaps. “I don’t want to hear it. We need to concentrate on getting through this, and none of that is going to help.”
“But you have to know that I’m never going to let anything like that happen again. I know I can’t be with anyone. Not like when I was with you. I can’t handle it.” There are some advantages to starless night; I’m not sure I could say these things aloud if she could look me in the eye. “It’s too much to lose. It fucks me up in a way that’s not normal.”
“That’s your idea of how to handle your massive anger and insecurity problems?” Tanvi’s bitterness ruptures the darkness and gleams hot. “To be alone from now on?”
From now on. The phrase cartwheels in my head, merging with the final memory of her in my bedroom, down on the floor surrounded by broken glass. If she’d swept her arms and legs out along the hardwood, making the same vigorously graceful swinging movements used to create a snow angel, there would have been blood.
I never want to feel that way again. Sick with myself for a handful of seconds of noxious gratification that would never have plagued a normal person in the first place.
“That won’t fix anything, Misha,” Tanvi continues. “You think you can just go on pretending that you’re this amazing guy — obsessing over looking and acting the right way twenty-four-seven — when in reality you don’t have a life.”
“I have a life.” A future. Despite my meltdown last spring, I never let my grades slip. Senior year they’ll be better than ever. I’ve dropped cross-country, swapping it for one of the less time-intensive school clubs to make sure of that. There’s every reason to believe that come next September I’ll be enrolled at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. I’ll study hard. Graduate. Land a job that gives me more money than I need.
“But it’s fake,” she counters. “Like an airbrushed photo. If it was real you wouldn’t have to try so hard constantly.”
“People try in life, Tanvi,” I argue, resentment crusting my tone before I can stop it. “Maybe just not the people you know. Maybe things come easily for them.”
“Because they have money? Is that what you’re implying? They don’t all have money, Misha. Anyway, money doesn’t necessarily make everything easy. And if I don’t understand what it’s been like for you growing up, maybe it’s because you never told me. Not really. You always skimmed the surface. I never really knew you until the end.”
“Don’t say that. You knew the best version of me. The person I want to be.”
“But that you’ve given up on now to hide away? How does that make any sense? Shit.” She stops herself short. “I don’t care, okay. Pretend to be whoever you want. It doesn’t matter. Just don’t sit here telling me you’re sorry and expect me to forgive you — that’s never going to happen.”
“I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
One of her shoes scuffs against the floor. The rest of her betrays no sound.
Tanvi leaps restlessly to her feet. “None of that matters anymore.” She glides past with a swiftness that generates a current. The gust brushes my face as Tanvi hurries down the steps to hold her cup aloft into the rain. “The only thing that does is getting home.”
“We will.”
“We all keep saying that, and here we are.” Tanvi stares up into a sky that remains stubbornly night. “It should be getting light by now.”
I’ve thought the same. We’ve been here for an eternity.
Tanvi pivots, jumping in her skin with a force the darkness can’t hide. Pointing at the porch stairs, she gasps, “Did you see her?”
The dilapidated steps protrude from the spot directly ahead of me. My eyes laser into unoccupied space, fingertips tingling in fear. “I don’t — I don’t see anything,” I stammer. Not this time. It was the woman from the forest who tugged at my shirt before. Her hot breath on my neck. Her that I can’t see in front of me now. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t here.
“Alice,” Tanvi whispers, her voice like a feather caught in a squall. “She was right there on the steps. So close. You could’ve taken a couple of steps and touched her.”
“Alice,” I repeat. Alice who called Tanvi directly after she had the nightmare, despite having left the land of the living months earlier.
“I know.” Tanvi’s wrists hug her waist as she approaches the porch, her foot landing tentatively on the bottom step. “I know that’s not possible. It’s this place, playing with us again. But …”
“But?” I prompt.
“She didn’t look like somebody who would be here. She looked like her usual self, only worried, concerned.” Tanvi’s right leg rocks against the step, the other refusing to join it. “Not scary or threatening. I think she might even have been in pajamas. A pair my nonna gave her for Christmas years ago. They had raccoons on them.”
Raccoon pajamas. I nearly crack a smile at the innocuous picture.
BAM.
A vintage concert T-shirt snaps into place behind my eyes, forcibly dislodging the pajamas.
Raleigh, NC
Atlanta, GA
Virginia Beach, VA
The vision of city tour stops itemized on worn cotton races along my brain circuitry, Alice’s message to Tanvi sprinting in sync, setting my prefrontal cortex alight. When the time comes, don’t let the darkness inside you.
“I think I saw my father too,” I admit. Three times at least. Behind the carriage house where I laid Mark’s body on the grass, inside on the staircase, and back in the van before we arrived. “But he couldn’t be here either.”
Could he?
Closing the distance between us, Tanvi climbs the steps. Stands on the spot where her aunt stood. Lays her palm flush against the adjacent post, feeling for any trace of Alice’s warmth while my mind twists and flips — like a fish yanked out of water — before exploding into realization.
18
MY EYELASHES ARE STICKY and refuse to open. My teeth and tongue taste of ash and dry earth. The air hangs heavy and stale, like a windowless room with its door locked for days. Infinite quiet fills my ears. The sound a cactus makes growing in the desert, spines knifing out from its skin, keeping the plant safe from all but a select few predators.
Forcing my right arm to move is about as simple as breaststroking through quicksand. But I do it. It’s the only way I can pry open my eyes. Clamping my fingers to my eyelids and separating them.
Once that’s accomplished I can’t understand what the problem was. My eyelashes glide open and shut with ease, narrowing their angle to protect my retinas from the sun’s tenacious gleam.
A field of lush green grass cradles my back. I comb my fingers through the cool, narrow blades as I sit up and
stare at a familiar two-storey house. The sun’s rays bounce magnanimously off its fresh white paint. A smaller outbuilding abuts the main structure like an eager sidekick. Pale blue shutters flank the house’s upper windows, their inner aspects touching the porch roof. A triangular peak divides the roof in two, elevating the house’s appearance from unremarkable to medium-picturesque.
I know its face, but I can’t place it. Can’t think what I’m doing here, either. My mind’s clouded by a web of fog.
A dark-haired boy no older than nine jogs past me, fists up in front of him, thumbs together at the knuckles as he bends his head to his hands and blows. A whistle rings out — loud and clear — breaking the silence. Charging toward the house, the boy’s hands part, the blade of grass caught between them fluttering to the ground.
“Wait!” I call after him.
I run too, trying to follow. Questions agitate in my throat. Where am I? How did I get here? My legs jerk in slow motion, falling further behind with each second. The house’s front door thuds shut before I can reach it, the boy disappearing inside.
Gripping the doorknob, I find it unlocked. Muffled voices filter through the main corridor as I troop clumsily inside. A man and a woman arguing. The noise of their exchange guides me into the kitchen, where a middle-aged man stands in the middle of the room with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a woman in a shapeless light blue dress leans against a spotless counter, empty save for a large white mixing bowl.
Neither of them notices me. I’m the shadow of a speck of dust.
“You’ve heard the strange things she says,” the woman insists, her eyes hooded and fearful. “You’ve seen her tremors and twitches. They’re worse with every passing day. So are her headaches. She needs to see the doctor. She never sleeps anymore. She wanders the hallways jabbering to herself. She frightens me, Thomas.”
“You know she doesn’t want to see the doctor,” the man contradicts. “She’s said as much. She’s a very devout girl. We should be pleased and proud. Not many young people are as pious these days.”