Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  “So many odd things here,” her dad had said. An artist, he brought the board to the attached garage, and he painted it a deep, forest green. When it dried, he took out a delicate brush, and with quick strokes, added a white tree to its middle. A weeping willow in white bloom.

  At one point, the board had been beautiful, but being beside the washer’s water hookups, the wood had gotten wet, and over the years the painted tree had swelled and begun to crack. Elise knew it likely wouldn’t be long before Mr. and Mrs. Mason made it their next project, to touch up the tree, or to paint over it, and in the process they would discover the chute behind it.

  Until then—Elise could hide here.

  Outside the chute, the dryer’s exhaust tube was still unattached. And her book of Norse myths left there, tossed behind the machine when she’d heard the doorknob rattling. That was more concerning. And with the Masons now home, leaving the laundry chute wasn’t easy, or quick to do; the plywood board would have to be wedged out, a corner at a time. She’d have to find a way to catch the board before it fell to the floor. The process took time—she could do it, but not during the family’s waking hours, risking someone passing through, finding her half-exposed. Elise would have to wait until night to fix the exhaust tube. Her book would also have to lie there, waiting. This was her punishment.

  No more mistakes.

  A faint impression of light encircled the board with her dad’s tree, and what bled through shone on the pale hairs on her forearm. The inside of her arm burned. Small beads of blood had formed along the scratches gouged by the metal-rimmed exhaust hole.

  Elise didn’t cry from scratches and bruises anymore. The last time she could remember was for a skinned knee, one or two years back, from when she’d fallen from a tree. The flash of memory like a photograph to her: Elise seated on the rim of her parents’ tub, crying, watching her own reflection in the mirror. Her mom cleaning and bandaging the cut. Elise’s hair, then combed, pulled to one side with a pink clip. Below, her mom’s back hunched over her leg.

  In the chute, the girl brushed lint from the cuts. She pressed each wet droplet with her thumb to stop their flow. Later this evening, she would scale the long chute up, patient and quiet, to that same bathroom, now Mr. and Mrs. Mason’s. While they watched television downstairs, Elise would pop free the false wall at the back of the cabinet, push through the rolls of toilet paper, and crawl into the bathroom, where the rubbing alcohol was kept. She’d ignore the mirror and, with it, her dusted cheeks, the unkempt hair that’d grown too long. She would douse the cuts over the sink and grit her teeth as her stinging arm seared.

  These are the consequences of living alone, Elise had come to realize. Of being all alone. You take care of yourself. You learn to take care of yourself.

  If Elise ever hurt herself, punctured a palm with a nail, twisted an ankle in a descent, she would still be alone. If she caught a cold, she would recover on her own. She could suppress a sneeze (those loud, bellowing sneezes were for dramatic people, she’d learned, for cartoon characters ridiculously failing to hide), but no hand would ever press against the heat of her forehead. No ice water, cold compresses, or aspirin brought to her bedside. Elise worried most about coughing. About nausea. She worried about what it would mean if she grew too weak to pull herself back out into the light.

  Even so, she’d be here. Until?

  She would be here.

  Elise told herself this for months. Every day, she was resolute, even if it had grown harder to hear.

  Begin Again

  IT WAS LATE BY THE TIME THE POLICEMEN DROPPED ELISE OFF. HER extended family—a grandfather, an aunt she’d never met—lived in states far to the north, in a time zone earlier than her own. They hadn’t answered their phones when the policewoman called. So, for tonight, Ms. Brim. The woman met them on her porch in a bathrobe, pulled tight for warmth. Her hand suppressed a yawn. The face of the house behind her was narrow across, like all the others around it. Stubby, and stunted-seeming, to see it from the street, but Elise had seen this kind before, a common house in the city. She knew it was deep inside. Long, like a massive snake; the big door was its mouth pinched shut. Her dad and mom always called them shotgun houses. Elise hadn’t ever asked them why.

  On the porch, Ms. Brim knelt down on the mat and looked Elise in the eyes. She spoke swiftly, without inflection, the way teachers did at school with instructions for the standardized tests even they didn’t want their students to take.

  “You’ll be with us tonight. Maybe for a few days while they figure out who’s getting you. And when. But this is your home, for now. And we can be family. Home’s where you’re loved, and you’ll get that here.”

  She handed Elise a small, stuffed elephant. Then a toothbrush still in its packaging.

  The wind blew—cold outside—but the snake’s insides were little better. Cool, dark, the air smelling sharp with the remnants of bleach. Ms. Brim kept the overhead lights off and led Elise through, their footsteps like knuckles knocking beneath the floorboards. No doors between any of the rooms. They passed through a room where she saw impressions of bodies turn in their beds. In the next, one shape sat up and stared. Each room a half-room, a hallway.

  “It’s late,” Ms. Brim whispered near the end of the long house. “Early, actually. Tomorrow, we’ll see what’ll happen.” Ms. Brim reached through a doorway and flipped on a bathroom light. She pointed elsewhere. By the glow: a small mattress, a blanket balled up at its foot. Elise’s new bed.

  “In the meantime,” the woman continued. “Undress. Brush your teeth, and sleep. Try to. You got a whole new start in the morning.”

  In the other bed across the room, another girl rolled over and covered her head with a pillow. Ms. Brim’s hand touched Elise’s shoulder. She tensed. When the woman left, Elise went into the bathroom and did as she was told. Brushed her teeth. Laid her toothbrush beside the other four on the counter. Turned out the light and groped her way to bed.

  Through the window, the streetlights shimmered orange. As she lay on the stiff sheets, a sudden gurgle from the bathroom—probably water in the pipes—but like nothing she’d ever heard before.

  Elise closed her eyes, and she tried to imagine that opening them in the morning meant returning to a corrected world. One that realized what it had done, and taken its choices back. But there would be no sleeping that night.

  Eventually, with the night wearing on, seeming never to end, and with the breath of that other girl growing steady in the bed near her, and the wind against the loose windowpanes, and the morning seeming impossible, increasingly like some pockmarked creature, needy and biting, with fingers grown far too long to actually exist—the girl had to catch herself.

  Ms. Brim’s words in her head: Home is where you’re loved.

  Elise needed that place.

  She needed to go home.

  The Masons at Work

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE APRIL, AND MR. AND MRS. MASON HAD the boys pull loose the guest room’s carpet. It was a wilted brown mess, old and almost sticky, long past its due date.

  “How did we put this off for so long?” Mr. Nick said, his voice muffled through one of the white ventilator masks he and his family wore over their mouths. “We’ve been keeping an armoire in here. An antique armoire—nineteenth-century—on carpet?”

  Mrs. Laura cut a long segment with a thwuck. She beat across the floor on her knees, rolling the old carpet into a bundle, which came detached with a sound like paper being crumpled into a ball. “There’s a hundred thousand things in this house that need to get done. There’s a lot of ridiculous things happening here,” she said. “Hey—Marshall, use something smaller. A flathead screwdriver is more than enough for the corner tacking. You don’t need the crowbar.”

  “The trim’s already scratched up,” Marshall said.

  “Marshall,” Mrs. Laura said.

  Across the room the crowbar clattered to the floor.

  Mr. Nick’s voice: “Watch your attitude, kid.” />
  While the family worked, Elise was beside them, reading with a booklight inside the wall. She was close enough to listen in, to hear their conversations, and the strange, comforting sound of carpet being torn from its tacking. It reminded her of the Little Mermaid shoes she owned as a little girl, and the sound their Velcro straps made when separated.

  “I don’t see why we have to do this,” Marshall said.

  As Mrs. Laura rolled another stretch of carpet, she answered him. “Because, you dingbat, this carpet is nasty. Not that you understand the word. You can’t seem to notice whatever dead thing in your room is making it smell that way.”

  Mr. Nick laughed. Inside the wall, Elise had to do her best to stifle her own snort.

  “What the hell are you smiling for, Eddie?” Marshall said.

  “All right, boys,” Mrs. Laura said. “We don’t have time for it. Actually, yeah. Can we please pick up the pace? I’d like to get this part finished by dark.”

  Thwuck.

  Like with most of their projects, Elise could see that Mrs. Laura seemed to enjoy the work more than the rest of her family combined. Mr. Nick, who was just as likely as her to be found on an early weekday morning on top of a ladder, touching up border trim, had a reasonable approach to housework. Elise, more than once, had peeked around a corner to see him pausing in the middle of a project to look over whatever left he had to do. He’d slump his shoulders and, with a long sigh, let out a hushed, moaning, “Fuck.”

  That, she understood.

  But Mrs. Laura never showed weakness. Over the past few months, Elise had looked down through the attic dormer and seen the Mason mother’s hair wild, glowing in the sunlight, while she sledgehammered fence posts in the garden. Had heard her chuckling as she pressure-washed the house’s siding. Had smelled the scent of fresh wood stain coming from the attached garage late on a Saturday night. Mrs. Laura reminded Elise of her own parents, in their own projects here, before they gave up on trying to have another child (the pregnancy with Elise had hurt her mom somehow) and decided to move on to a home more in line with their needs. This was all to say Mrs. Laura went about each project with an enthusiasm Elise thought pathological.

  But to be honest, she didn’t mind Mrs. Laura as much as someone like Marshall, even if the mother seemed to be the driving force for most of the changes (awful changes) to Elise’s home. She had grown to realize she enjoyed watching and listening to Mrs. Laura, like Weather Channel footage of a tornado. Enjoyed, as long as Elise wasn’t subject to the torrents of wind herself, like when the woman, on a whim, replaced the set of thick curtains with a pair of sheer ones (impossible to hide behind). Or how she would get on her hands and knees to vacuum under tables and behind the sofa. Or, worst of all, how she had taken to probing with a flashlight the oddly sized holes in the backs of closets and the access panel in the pantry ceiling.

  “I don’t know why we always have to do it ourselves.” Marshall grunted as he tugged on a patch of carpet liner that was stuck in a corner. “We could hire someone. Sunday’s the only day I don’t have to go to work or do homework, and it’s kind of bullshit you have me doing this.”

  “Watch your language,” said Mr. Nick, across the room.

  “Neither me or Eddie,” Marshall said, “want to have anything to do with your stupid projects.”

  “Eddie’s not saying anything,” Mr. Nick said. “Do you have a problem helping out with the house, Eddie? No? Marshall, I’m pretty sure the only one complaining is you.”

  “Stop it,” Mrs. Laura said. “Nick, I mean you, too.”

  In a few minutes, Mrs. Laura had her husband and Marshall lifting each side of the armoire while she pulled free the carpet beneath it. Eddie was somewhere in a corner. He’d hardly spoken the entire afternoon. Nearly silent. So hard to keep track of him sometimes, hard to imagine what it was he was doing. Sometimes it felt like she wasn’t the only ghost in this house.

  Earlier that day, Mrs. Laura had said this would be a quick project, one they could finish in an afternoon. But, with the day dying, and the wren calling out from downstairs, Elise listened as the family looked over the bare, wooden floor. They paced over it. They stopped in various places to rub at patches with the bottom of their shoe soles. Elise could tell: something had turned out different than they had planned.

  Big surprise.

  “Nope,” Mrs. Laura said. “Nope. This won’t work. We’ll need to scrub it down, polish it. We’ll need to polyurethane it, too. Nick, add all of it to the list.”

  The father, quiet for a second. A sigh. “Okay. Consider it added.”

  “I’m guessing,” Marshall said, “this means you’ll have us in here again next weekend? So, it’ll be every Sunday this month.”

  Eddie groaned from the corner, the only sound Elise had heard from him in over an hour.

  Their father took a harsher tone. “I don’t want to hear it. You two should know, we’ve been more than reasonable. With as much as needs to get done in this house, with as much as we do without you? We need a lot more than an afternoon a week of help, and we’re not asking for it.”

  The boys didn’t respond. Something thumped against the wall by Elise, startling her. It must have been Marshall, letting the back of his skull knock against the plaster.

  In the moments of quiet that followed, Elise imagined the boys and their parents looking down over the length of the floor they’d uncovered. She pictured it stained, blackened in places from age, or water damage from a summer hurricane. She remembered how it had looked in the kitchen when her own parents had ripped up that mustard yellow linoleum, and how long it had taken for them to turn that wooden floor to the glossy, syrup-colored brown it was today. She remembered lying on it on her belly with her mother when it was finished, rolling Cheerios across the floor.

  “Besides,” Mr. Nick continued. “If you’re going to start a project, you’ve got to power through. Finish it. Leaving something half-done is worse than not even starting in the first place.”

  “Really,” said Marshall. “If leaving things half-done is so bad, then how come we’ve lived here for over a year and we still have mice?”

  “We don’t have mice, Marshall,” Mrs. Laura said. “We’ve talked about this. If we did, the traps we laid would have triggered.”

  Elise remembered those. Actually one had, in fact, been triggered. On her heel.

  “Well, then who’s eating all my food?” Marshall said. “I had two Pop-Tarts last week that went missing. Eddie swears it wasn’t him.”

  “Could it be bugs?” Eddie said.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Nick said. “Have you considered some colossal bugs might have carried your Pop-Tarts away?”

  “Nick,” Mrs. Laura said.

  “Something took them,” said Marshall.

  “Mice don’t run off with entire Pop-Tarts,” Mr. Nick said. “You probably ate them yourself.”

  “Did you eat them, Eddie?” Marshall asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you guys eat them?”

  “You really think we ate your Pop-Tarts, Marshall?” Mr. Nick said. “Together, maybe? Sneaking them in the middle of the night?”

  “You two act like I’m an idiot, but I’m not,” Marshall said. “I’m not dumb. I’m not a child. No, I didn’t eat them myself. Something took them.”

  Elise closed her book. The Pop-Tarts had been a bad idea.

  Sunday Evening

  EVENTUALLY, INSIDE THE WALLS, ELISE SENSED IT GROWING DARK OUTSIDE. She could feel it in her own body: a slowness to the muscles, a heaviness, even if she wasn’t tired. There were the sounds, too, that cued her in. Faintly, the calls of tree frogs and crickets. That throb of the afternoon cicadas had ended for the day, and now, she thought, they must be tucking themselves in, behind the leaves and under litterfall—wherever it was they went—for the night.

  After the Masons’ Sunday projects were done, or delayed (more often) and prolonged, each family member went a separate way. Mr. Nick to his upstairs office
to grade and Mrs. Laura to the back porch to read, the boys each to their own bedrooms. Marshall’s door closed, Eddie’s halfway. By night, the home would grow quiet, free from ladders being dragged along upstairs floors, or from the table saw roaring in the garage, or music playing from a paint-speckled radio in the hallway.

  Tonight, as evening wore on, the family seemed to grow accustomed to the noises they heard that the house made when everything else was quiet. Sometimes the outside voices of a couple on horseback taking a night ride along the top of the levee sounded loud enough to seem as if they were coming from inside the house, from the depths of some empty room or closet. Other times the floors and ceilings creaked, seemingly of their own accord. Noises heard while dozing off on the living room couch, like footsteps in another room, might simply be something else: branches of a tree tapping against the siding of the house, or the steady beating of one’s own heart.

  The girl heard them, too. Enough to make her wonder if someone else was here, unaccounted for, slipping through the rooms of the home, like her. Someone here, who’d come to look for her. Someone else, playing a game.

  Someone’s Always Missing

  PEOPLE GO MISSING EVERY DAY. AND WHILE FIRST RESPONDERS, friends, neighbors, and family all search for the missing—walking along roads and the sides of canals; returning to favorite places, the ice rinks, coffee shops, playgrounds, and snowball stands; circling in their cars at night around the edge of parks with their high beams on—there are so many cases where that person hasn’t been found.

  But people who go missing, they don’t always disappear.