Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  “How about I show you?”

  Revealing a Home

  ELISE BROUGHT HIM TO THE ATTIC, TO HER NOOK BENEATH THE PLYWOOD floor, and the scattering of items laid in the place between the crossbeams where she slept. She watched his face, to see how he responded.

  “No way!” Brody shouted. “No way you sleep here. This is where you live? Does anybody else know?” Then later, after he stepped in, incredulous, bending and sorting through the space: “This is your stuff? This is junk!”

  “It’s not junk.”

  He picked up a roll of toilet paper she planned to use as tissues. He dropped it and picked up a Ziploc bag of crumbs. “It’s junk!”

  Brody’s opinion changed, though, when she showed him the crevice, the narrow mouth that led into the dark between the walls of the house. The cool air from below lapped at their faces, and the boy had to stand two steps away, his curiosity in battle with self-preservation as he leaned apprehensively over.

  “It’s so close to where you sleep,” he said. “You don’t worry about falling in?”

  “Watch this.”

  Elise got down to her knees and lowered herself into the dark mouth, her feet led by experience to fit into crevices in the wall that the boy could only imagine. Her limbs worked, and she sank from sight. She sensed a shadow swelling over her face as she pulled away from the attic’s overhead bulb, growing until Brody’s own face was something pale as a moon, grimacing high above her. Brody shrank in size, until finally, she made a turn, and he disappeared.

  “You okay?” he called down to her. His voice bounced through the house’s ribs, sounding blunted. “Can you hear me?”

  Around her, quiet. A warm water pipe in her grip, and the whisper of the air through the AC vent not far away. She felt her heartbeat in her wrists.

  That voice of hers, pleading: What have you done? Giving everything away. Your home. Your mom and dad’s home. For a stranger. Ruining it—why?

  The more she told the boy, the harder for her to keep what she held tight to. The more she gave away, the less safe the Girl in the Walls became, the less secure. She became less. With Brody here, her impulse to hide and duck away had never left her. Every time he turned a corner to another room, the temptation to pull back. At any time, she could have tucked herself away and left him there, to grope through the large house, calling for her. All she had to do was leave him, abandon him there with the large, dim, empty house around him. To him, it would be as if he had been talking to a ghost.

  She was deep inside the walls now. She could still forget him. Close her eyes and, next morning, the world might reset. But the girl had tried that the first night, after she made her way back into her home, when she had slept on a pile of strangers’ summer clothes in her old, cold attic. And it hadn’t worked.

  Brody had seen her home, seen the spaces between, where she hid. Seen her things, the belongings of her and her parents, hidden in the nook below the plywood. There was no more hiding, at least from him.

  Backed yourself into a corner.

  She had.

  So, she yelled up to him, through the dark, as loud as her voice could manage. “Hey, Brody! My name’s Elise!”

  Who She Was

  SHE WAS HALF-DEAD AND NOT-DEAD—SHE WAS LOSING AND REFUSING TO lose. She was not with the world as it moved on; she was its wake.

  This Girl in the Walls was a girl in the rooms of a house—this house—and now a spider in a broken web, who feared footsteps, the wind, falling limbs.

  The Girl in the Walls was a girl who didn’t understand when she would be old enough to say: I have lost my mom and my dad, and I will never see them again. She didn’t understand how she could ever grow to be that woman.

  In the walls, nothing ever changes. There was dust that was her parents’ moldered skin, warm before, but cool now, infinite. This girl lived in her walls because there was no other place that would still hold them.

  The Girl in the Walls wanted to live, but she had to be careful, as each day was a step across a deadfall, the branches bending beneath her feet, threatening to snap. She had to be careful, or she’d lose them.

  Before Brody left that afternoon, Elise told him all this, in so many words. She brought him around the house and showed him each of the places she hid.

  She revealed her hiding places, and she gave herself up. So, she told him who she was, who she’d become. She said it all as much to herself as to him.

  Hidden Things

  WHEN SHE FINISHED, BRODY CLOSED HIS EYES. NODDED, TWO CURT bobs of the chin. For the rest of that morning, he helped search the house with her. Careful, cautiously moving objects, lifting couch cushions, peering beneath dressers and along the backs of closets—he helped her look through her home for things that had been lost. Eventually, it was Brody that found one first. A fresh set of eyes is a good help.

  In one of the floor vents in the library, with the metal grate pulled up and placed to the side, the air duct was a compartment like a small chest. A bookmark, blue and leather and frayed at the edges, dusty at the bottom of the vent, but—as Elise remembered—one of her father’s. Brody handed it to her, and Elise squeezed it like a living hand.

  “I don’t remember my parents,” Brody said to her. “But I know I like when something I got was theirs.”

  Elise pressed it into the pocket of her jeans. Kept her hand in there with it.

  Things Brought

  SUPPLIES, OR AT LEAST THAT’S HOW HE REFERRED TO THEM, NEW things each time he came, tucked away in a muddy blue tote bag he carried over his shoulder.

  He brought Mardi Gras beads and a small, stuffed bear; a plastic grocery bag filled with rocks he had collected from the riverside of the levee. He brought games—Jewels in the Attic and chess, wet and dried leaves and a magnolia cone bursting with smooth red seeds. He brought an old miniature water gun made of plastic gone brittle from heat, and a half-empty container of Silly String she refused to let him spray, even out in the yard.

  He brought her useful things: Listerine, napkins, and girl’s deodorant. He brought things she had absolutely no use for, like sunglasses, a badminton birdie, a set of rusted keys, and a bell for a bicycle. Useless things she told him to take back at each morning’s end. Some things Brody forgot to take at the end of the day. And sometimes, after keeping them beside her in her nook overnight, she changed her mind, and wanted them after all. Things like an antique stopwatch, a vial of bright-blue nail polish, and a miniature cactus she placed in a patch of light from the attic dormer, camouflaged within a large Christmas wreath.

  He brought food—cans of beans and peaches, a sleeve of Ritz crackers, a pair of satsumas fresh from a tree with the skin still speckled with black mold. He brought cereal, but never any of the good ones, no matter how much she complained (“Why on earth would I want more Raisin Bran?”). He brought useless foods, too:

  “What am I supposed to do with a cake mix, Brody?”

  “Make a cake?”

  “I can’t bake a cake, Brody.”

  “Well, I didn’t want cake anyway.”

  Some things he brought were nice things. Expensive things. Like a Gameboy with a cartridge of Mortal Kombat II.

  “In case you get bored,” he said.

  “Is this yours?” Elise asked. “It’s really old.” She switched the game on, and the small power light on the edge of the screen glowed a bright green. Lighting flashed across the head of a silver dragon. “Wow.”

  “I beat it already,” Brody said. “Watch out for the ninja who comes near the end. He spits poison.”

  “Thanks,” Elise said, and had said each time, each day he had arrived at her house. That strange tingle crawling along the back of her neck and scalp, the feeling she got when something was being done only for her. Hadn’t felt it in a long time.

  But when the mornings ended, after they cleaned the house together, ensuring each thing was as the Masons had left it, there’d still be signs of him there. Miniature signs, mostly gone by the time the
Masons returned, or for days, or more, unnoticed. Footprints across the yard. A small puddle alongside the house by the hose. Fingerprints on the doorknob. Elise and Brody could do nothing all day, could sit in front of the television from starlings to cardinal, and there’d still be signs.

  It didn’t help that he was curious. When Elise left him alone, he rifled through storage bins and desk drawers. This house was so much larger than his own. So many nooks, rooms, alcoves, crannies, closets to explore. It held so many different objects, ones he’d never owned, and secret ones stashed in the back of a desk drawer.

  For the Girl in the Walls to survive, these kinds of things can’t last. These friendships.

  Those who live in the walls must adjust, must twist themselves around in their home, stretching until they’re as thin as air. Not everyone can do what they can.

  Others might try, but soon enough, they can’t help themselves. Signs of their presence remain in a house.

  Eventually, every hidden thing is found.

  Returning Home

  SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT.

  This is not where it’s supposed to be.

  Sometimes the change is ignored, forgotten nearly as quick as the realization occurs. Finding a doily shifted on the small hallway table is not such a change that a mother or father wouldn’t slide it unconsciously back in place and move on. But other changes are evident. For him, the first thing was that the remote for the television had moved—not on the coffee table at the base of the sofa, where his father insisted it be kept.

  Marshall looked over the table for a moment. Puzzled. A victim of a small betrayal. He gave in and went to press the power button on the side of the set.

  Its black buttons were tucked around the frame of the television. Marshall curled his fingers and groped. He tested them, tapping them all to find the right one. But before he found it, with his hand along the side of the television set, he’d felt the machine’s warmth, warmth like a living thing, as if it had been running all day.

  Marshall turned the television on. Put its volume down low. Turned the television off.

  On the Roof

  THEY SAT ON THE ROOF IN THE LATE NIGHT AND WATCHED THE clouds. When Brody had come, it had always been during the safe weekday hours, and on Sunday, while the Masons were at church. Evenings had always been off-limits—the Masons were home. But tonight was different. Yesterday, Mr. Nick had cleaned the gutters and had forgotten to take in the ladder, leaving a perfect route for someone to climb up to the roof from the outside. Now, it was already after midnight, but no one would miss Brody at home: his aunt worked the graveyard shift at the pharmacy, and his uncle, whenever he got home, if he came home tonight, wouldn’t bother checking on him.

  Up there, they doused themselves with the can of bug repellant. When they caught the bitter spray in their mouths, they spat the taste off the side of the roof. A necessary suffering; summer nights belonged to insects. It had been two weeks since Mr. Nick last cut the lawn, and the grass below teemed with bugs. Moths, mosquitoes, crickets, and black Devil’s Locusts—with eyes fractured into dozens of smaller ones, thousands in total, accounting for them in the dark. Elise and Brody sprayed themselves until they reeked of chemicals, but at least they no longer worried over slapping after each itch. Elise only hoped the smell wouldn’t be so strong the Masons would catch a whiff of her later on.

  Brody snacked from a tin of peanuts and pointed up at the stars, showing her which constellations he knew. “You see that bright star, and the big box around it? And the tail going out the back, that goes right below the moon?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Yeah, I see it.”

  “That’s Godzilla.”

  The shingles below them continued to radiate warmth from the hot afternoon sun. Their texture was rough, a grainier sandpaper, but to sit still kept them from rubbing too harshly, and to feel no more coarse than the black rubber of a park playground. Elise was outside, but the house held firm beneath her; it reached up to her and grabbed hold. She was still here. An owl hooted from somewhere beside them, and when a passing car’s headlights flashed through the front yard, Elise made out a ruffle of feathers in the fork of an oak tree.

  She looked up at the sky and told Brody which ones she knew. “That big rectangle—the one that looks like its corners are stretched out? It’s Orion. He was a great hunter in the old times. You can see his bow, there. And his belt with its knife. He was quiet and patient. He could hide for days and days on his belly in a field, just like the one down there, or on a treetop, or on top of a roof. He hid so he could hunt monsters. He caught so many of them that the gods pulled him up into the night sky, so he could wait in the dark and hunt forever.”

  “I like him,” Brody said. “He sounds like me.”

  “I was thinking he sounded more like me.”

  “Really?” Brody shoved another fistful of peanuts into his mouth and shrugged. “Okay. He sounds like you, too.”

  Elise smiled, kicked her legs out, and leaned back on the slanted roof, resting on a forearm. “And there’s the Big Dipper. Can you see it?”

  “What’s a dipper?” Brody said.

  “It’s what I’m pointing at right now. Look.”

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  “It’s—”

  “Is it a monster?”

  “No. It’s a kind of—”

  “I bet it’s a monster.”

  “I mean, it’s not.”

  “Orion should keep an eye on that dipper.” Brody mimed aiming a bow and arrow at the sky. “Whoosh!” he said, releasing his arrow and skewering the constellation.

  Around them, the trees rustled. It was a quiet night, and an oil tanker drifted slow down the river. Inside, the Masons would be sleeping in their beds, deaf to them. If they did hear, they heard nothing more than a murmur, a sound that might come from anywhere—neighbors shouting a half mile away, the calls of ships’ crewmen. Elise might as well have had her own house that night, out on the roof, one she shared. While she told Brody about Hercules and his twelve labors, the monsters he slew to prove he had become a better man, Elise thought about how much this, this night, reminded her of home.

  Inside

  EDDIE LAY AWAKE AND LISTENED TO THE HOUSE.

  His ears had grown sensitive enough to hear the bird clock singing on the hour, and his father snoring faintly down the hall. Eddie’s room lay open around him. All he needed was to sit up and see into every crevice. Eddie wasn’t sure how long he’d keep it this way. Earlier that day, his father had opened the door to ask for help with something in the shed. His father had looked over the room, mouth tightening into a thin line, but had said nothing about what Eddie had done to it. Eddie wondered why his dad didn’t ask him. He wouldn’t have known what to say, but the question, maybe, might have helped.

  Not long after he had gone to bed that night, Eddie woke to his parents fighting in their bedroom. Their voices sounded tired. They weren’t yelling, but he knew an argument when he heard it. As summer neared, his parents built up momentum in the daylight hours, churning, no chance to stop moving. His mom’s work heels left in the hallway outside the guest room, where she mumbled as she, again, worked. His father shouting through the house, demanding to know who had moved his grade book. Hurricane season coming, and his mom talked of needing to sell properties. Summer school coming, which meant more of the same work for his father. The guest room floor was taking longer than they’d expected, and they still planned to paint the walls by the end of the month. Eddie waking to their strained, drowsy anger: it made too much sense. It’d become harder now to imagine them ever at rest, asleep.

  Then, Eddie had stayed awake, kept up by the patter of Marshall’s fingers at the computer keyboard and the groan of its processor. Another hour passed, and Eddie wanted to free himself of his bed, to stretch and pace, and sit by the window, but he didn’t want Marshall to hear him again, moving at night. When the older brother finally shut the machine down, and the dim crack of light d
isappeared beneath the bathroom door, Eddie dozed, falling in and out of sleep while the house adjusted itself around him.

  Sounds grew blurred by encroaching sleep. What might be footsteps, or a finger tapping against a glass of water. What might be a window opening, or nothing at all. Voices. The feeling that someone crouched outside his bedroom door, to see if his breathing had slowed.

  In the mythology and fantasy books Eddie used to read, simple explanations were never good for describing what really existed. A small hole in the base of a tree, the sliver of a cave opening—each might descend into an entirely different world. The solid ground could shake loose beneath a person’s feet, creatures could wriggle themselves from moss, ancient empires could thrive beneath mountains. When he was younger, Eddie used to imagine that science could only account for one part of the machinations around him, and that gods perched atop the cumulonimbus clouds, and beneath his feet, down within the Earth’s molten mantle, goblins stoked the flames.

  He’d given up those thoughts. A teenager now; at night, it was harder to remember.

  With school ending, Eddie knew he should be different, the way his classmates were different. Like at his old school on the Northshore, he sat in the back corner of class. He spent lunches at a separate table in the cafeteria, flush against the wall by the vending machines. But at the old school, he had still made conversation at recess. Mostly with shyer boys who sat beside the hackberry tree while they scooped caterpillars from its trunk with leaves. But here, he no longer shared that history with any boys his age. No more common history to bridge the gap between one person and another.

  At the school he’d go to the next day, it seemed each of his classmates might have been this age their entire lives. Eddie heard their conversations before class, the weekends they recounted, the plans they made. They spoke like they were half adult already. He was nothing like them. Somehow, over the past couple years, he’d dragged his feet with growing up and had left himself so much ground to cover.