by A. J. Gnuse
“Come on,” Marshall said. He reached in and tucked his hands beneath Eddie’s armpits, and helped him out.
Together, they circled the roof to the place where the hackberry tree grew up close. Eddie stepped down on the branch. The tree swayed beneath him, scraped against the siding—Mr. Traust would hear that, would hear that they’d gone out; maybe she would, too—and he lowered himself, feet into the forks of the trunk, gripping the branches, climbing lower, his brother behind him, his back foot catching on the gutter on his way down, the loud snap as aluminum bent loose from the roof. But being quiet didn’t matter, leaving mattered more. And the boys climbed lower, until they could safely drop down into the lawn, the ground pushing firmly against the muscles in their legs.
The world spanned in every direction. The house was something they could turn from, and though its windows still glared down on them, far into the backyard, their feet could beat the gravel and grass, with each footfall a decision to put the place wholly behind.
We’re only kids, Eddie told himself.
They ran, Marshall leading, holding tight to his brother’s arm.
Coming In
LIGHTS APPEARED ABOVE HER, LIKE MINIATURE SUNS. PARTICLES of wall came loose, falling as heavy flakes of snow. Elise was buried by them. They fell on her face. She coughed. She tugged the bandana down to her neck and pushed free what was inside her. She inhaled—a brief, rasping window of relief. But the need returned to purge that sharp air.
He had a hammer now, was blasting holes in her home. Each blow vibrated through her teeth. Each strike like the gong of a clock at the hour. She bit her tongue—blood and dust-taste. With her free arm, she covered her face. She pulled herself tight. Small. Trying for something smaller than she could become.
Outside, Looking Back
THE BOYS CROUCHED IN THE BACK FIELD. THE TALL, MOIST GRASS clung to their arms and legs. Gnats flitted around their faces. Sweat dappled their foreheads and temples. Ms. Wanda’s car wasn’t parked in her yard. The nearest house was nowhere near.
“I need to think,” Marshall said, as they caught their breath.
And while they crouched, Eddie still felt the pressure of eyes on him. From the house, from the woods behind. Golden orb-weavers, massive spiders, black and yellow and large as an outstretched hand, hung drowsy between the high branches of the backyard’s oaks, their wide webs appearing as they caught the setting sun. The thistles bobbed in the breeze around them. Eddie could almost fully see the man up there, through their house’s office window. The rise of his arm, its arch as he brought it down against the wall. Rhythmic. Like a miner in a shaft. The boys could hear the walls breaking apart like a hand patting the side of a leg. The upstairs lights had begun to flicker with each blow.
From here, Eddie could see so much of the house through its windows.
From here, they heard the siren, rising now, growing near.
Birds
FROM SOMEWHERE, THE CALL OF BIRDS GREW LOUDER.
Traust stopped to listen. He could hear them too.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “How so soon?”
If he had been patient before, he was no longer. Hurried now, frantic, cursing and slamming at the walls. Elise let herself cough, tongue lolling, coughing though she was out of breath, and each one felt like ripping a new strip of flesh free. Seemed like he had a half-dozen hammers, in as many hands. Elise was caked in the wall’s debris. Her sight swirling. Necessary to move, escape, but her limbs were lifeless. He no longer used just the hammer, he struck with the steel toes of his boots. Because birds were coming. Rising in pitch and volume. A great migration—geese, starlings, mallards. Coming all at once, crying out in wild symphony, straining voices rising and falling as one, descending from the clouds.
They came for her. They came for him, too, and they both knew it. The man, just beside her, cursed at her. Cursed again and again. Bellowed, enraged, and his voice cracked into a scream. He didn’t stop. Screamed like he’d caught fire. Like something he loved had caught fire.
The siren had turned into the driveway.
He ran from her, ran through the rooms of the house. “But you’re here!” he shouted while Elise coughed and coughed.
The pounding of his boots, he came back—“And you’re right here! You’re right fucking here!”—and she watched as his hand reached in through the holes, groping for her in the dark. His fingers, clenching and unclenching, slapping down the sides of the wall, just above her. If he could grab hold, he’d lift her up like a rag doll. He’d wrench her against the sides of the holes he’d made until her body gave way and came out.
But the hand pulled back. He pounded against the walls. Down the hall, lumbering down the stairs, two at a time. The wail of the siren in the yard now cut out. Its heavy presence still there, but silent. The sound of men’s voices.
And Elise lay there until she caught her breath. The thick air through her nostrils.
Aching. Bile at the back of her throat.
But, for a moment, the house was quiet around her. An empty house.
She found a way to pull herself up. Elise wiped the dust from her face. A fingernail brushing each wet eyelash. She lay her forehead against the cool plaster. Looked out through the holes at a still room before her.
Exiled
THEY WATCHED THE HOUSE EXPEL HIM: THE SMACK OF THE SCREEN door as he threw himself against it and out into the yard. He stumbled in the orange afternoon light, one arm curled around his toolkit, the other tearing the white ventilator mask from his face and casting it into the lawn.
Alongside the house, the truck pulling closer, slow through the wet, uneven driveway, its red lights flashing, seeming more than huge beside their mother’s frail flowers and the small wooden fence lining the driveway. The top of the truck snapped the low-hanging oak branches in its way.
They watched as Mr. Traust climbed into his own truck and turned its ignition. The jerk of his entire body as he pulled the vehicle into gear. His black truck tore a semicircle through the lawn, out onto the driveway, and met the fire engine halfway. The man’s engine revved draconic, V-8 with its muffler removed, and gravel and mud kicked into the air. He cut the front wheels right, driving into the front yard, chassis pitching, breaking through and over the small fence, with a long stretch bending down around the breach. Clumps of grass coming loose beneath the tires, the man passed the fire engine, cut back onto the driveway, and swung hard out onto the road.
His truck disappeared behind the pampas grass and trees, out of their sight. Gone, for one second. Two. But gone didn’t mean they didn’t feel any less seen. By him, from a rearview mirror, from the tree line behind them, from the house and the yard ahead. And even when the roar of his truck’s engine was swallowed by the quiet around them, he might as well have still hung on there, just out of sight.
For a few minutes, they watched the firemen, who circled around the house, looking beneath the brims of their black helmets into the dim windows. They shifted on their haunches in the tall grass. “Who called?” Marshall said.
The smell of the thistle flowers. The rustling of the woods behind them. An owl warbling from the trees. Finally, Marshall placed his hand on Eddie’s shoulder, a firm hand, as if to hold steady something that had begun to vibrate. They left the tall grass for their home.
Questions
“WAS IT ONE OF YOU TWO WHO REPORTED THE FIRE?”
A waking dream to be here like this. Marshall’s hand never left Eddie’s shoulder. The whole world alive around them—mosquitoes, fluttering moths, crickets around their feet—and each part of it was oblivious. The air still hot. The leaves of their mother’s garden hung heavy from the heat. Sun dipping below the reach of the cypress trees on the other side of the levee, with silhouettes of branches and tired, hanging moss. Lean shadows cast upon the house’s siding. Reflections on windowpanes.
“Do you boys live here?”
The older brother said, “We do.”
“Our dispatch said a boy calle
d in a fire at this address. Said it might have been a prank.”
“We didn’t call. We couldn’t.”
“Is there a fire?”
“No fire. No.”
“Little guy’s got some blood on his nose. You boys okay?”
“Yeah. He’s okay.”
“Who was that guy who drove out?”
“Is he gone?”
“Looks like. What was going on with him? Was he doing something with you kids? What’s—”
“Sir, do y’all have a cell phone? We need to talk to our mom and dad.”
A Survey of Damages
HIS BOOTS’ DARK PRINTS THROUGH EACH AND EVERY ROOM OF THE house. Scuffing and chips in the wall from the stick he used on them. Scratches from the metal stethoscope he dragged along them.
The insides of the walls fumigated.
Carpets torn. Furniture wrenched out and spilled, clothes and towels and sheets flooding the floor, trampled. Holes blown into the walls of Eddie’s bedroom. Holes in the office’s walls. A broken gutter outside, dangling loose beside the hackberry tree. A cut phone line.
An attic, its plywood floor pulled open, skin removed and tossed aside; a narrow fissure exposed between the crossbeams leading down into the darkness between the house’s rooms like the open mouth of a cave. Like tunnels. More than anyone, besides her, had known existed.
Her.
She, whose things were there, beside the fissure, in spaces that the plywood floor had once covered. The impression of a body on their winter coats. Books that once had been Eddie’s. Trash. Tissues, snack bars, and wrappers. Odd and incongruous things: a bow tie, a single sock. Beneath the blankets, there was a curled and cracked picture. Sun-bleached, like it had been placed in the crack between the storm window and a frame, and lost there, the colors bleeding dry from the daily sun. The faces of those photographed were mostly illegible, but their outlines, and the park behind them, clear enough. A mother, a father, and their little girl.
The hole in the floor of the attic was almost eye-shaped. This was a horror.
But, to the boys, looking down, after everything, how could it be—quiet? A policeman’s footsteps reverberated through the rooms beneath them. But the hole itself lay like something deeper than sleep. This should be worse, they knew. They shouldn’t feel as relieved as they did. Seeing it.
Outside
THE WOODS MAINTAINED THEIR WATCH.
Someone small, in a tree, who had returned. Hoping to see some sign from her. For a moment, he had. Maybe. When the sun was still up. Some flicker through the upstairs hall while the two older boys were still crouched in the back field—or maybe just the movement of his eyelids as they blinked. Since he’d come back after the call, his bare arms and feet had been bitten raw by mosquitoes. Would have to go soon. His aunt would be home, and she’d be waiting for him.
Nearby, the shape of a hawk perched on a branch. He hadn’t noticed it there, behind him. He thought of the firemen’s truck earlier, how, after the call, it had beat him to the house. How it had seemed so big, even at a distance. The house so large next to it. The police car that, later, had pulled alongside it, its siren off but lights flashing. The firetruck had left but the cruiser had stayed ever since. No one had come, bringing her out, yet. He hoped that was a good sign.
The levee stretched its arms out far in both directions. One day, Brody would like to grow just as large, as tall as the largest tree in the woods. The shifting faces in the patterns of their leaves would be his own. His arms as strong and hard as the thickest branches. From far away, he could reach over and pry free the roof of a home. He’d rise over, wide as a cloud, as a constellation, and watch the people living inside, like pill bugs teeming over an overturned, half-rotten log. They’d see him, too, but it wouldn’t matter to anyone. He’d see Elise, in the dark lines between the rooms, and tell her how sorry he still was. That he missed her. Ask if there were any things he could bring her.
But it had grown late. Brody dropped down into the underbrush. He would come back tomorrow, when he could. To keep watch until he saw her again. Until he knew that the girl in the walls was okay.
Across the levee, a tugboat’s searchlights played over the cypress trees, and the great black river flowed past. The lights of the house—the living room, the bedrooms, even the attic—remained on for hours.
Family, Recomposed
MRS. MASON AND MR. MASON RETURNED THAT EVENING WHEN THE tree frogs’ calls permeated the black night. An officer, parked in his cruiser with its lights on in the driveway, spoke to them for a few seconds through his window before getting out. He led them into their house, into their living room, where their two boys watched television.
“I’ve done a run-through of the whole place,” the policeman said, hands on his hips. Part impatient, part resigned. “Whatever, or whoever, these boys had him looking for, isn’t here. This house is empty.” He spoke to the Mason parents, listing to them some of the damage he’d seen throughout the house. He shook his head and shrugged.
“We’ve got enough for trespassing and vandalism charges for the guy. More, too, maybe. Assault and battery. Is your cell phone a good number to reach you?”
“Yes,” Mr. Nick said. “Yeah.”
“We’ll let you know if or when we find him,” the officer said. “If we do, we’ll reach out for the follow-up. Until then . . .” He jerked the crown of his forehead toward the boys. “You should probably sort it out with them.”
Their boys looked down at the floor.
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Laura said. “I don’t understand any of it.”
The officer thanked them. He smiled at the boys, lips turned down at the corners, as he turned and left the house.
Searching for an Answer
LAURA AND NICK PASSED THROUGH THEIR HOUSE WITH THE SAME strained, pale faces. Surveyed the damage. Surveyed the implications about their house, and their sons.
They were children, still. Boys who needed their protection. Arms wrapped around them, keeping them from harm, and harm they’d bring to themselves. How long until your baby is no longer a baby? Never, they realized, in case some part of them had forgotten. You might be dead, buried six feet below, but they are yours, and your body will pulse to protect them. Relentless, steady as growth through the deep, black soil. Their home was upended—but their boys would be protected.
Nick couldn’t look his wife in the eyes. He picked towels up from the hallway floor and held them there, dirty and bundled in his arms, not sure where to put them down. Laura was sobbing. She held her boys, their bodies rigid in each of her arms, while she shuffled between the rooms. She tried not to squeeze their shoulders too hard. She realized she might hurt them.
Eddie and Marshall showed them the hiding place in the attic, the collection beneath the floor—the nest, they called it. The items laid out there like an exhibit of a museum. But with everything that had happened in the house beneath, the objects seemed so small, insubstantial. Most all of the things had been their own, moved.
Who could believe in this? No telling how long these things had been there, or who had put them there. Maybe they’d been there, for weeks, months, while they moved below through their house, eating their meals, showering, brushing their teeth, reading and sleeping—living. But maybe these items had only been laid here a few hours ago. A fabricated proof. A justification. “I don’t want to hear this,” Nick said, but there was no anger in his voice.
Marshall said, “This is everything. We’re telling you everything.”
He showed them the rooms: where they’d been locked up, where they had heard her, and the man had gone after her. In his own room, he plugged his computer back into the wall and turned it on, and showed them websites, conversations.
If any of it were true, they would understand. They’d believe. The man who came—their boys say he’d been brought, but they’d read those emails now: he came—that man was now gone. That man was the source, the singular cause of what had happened here i
n their home. He somehow had convinced the boys of the irrational. A madman who had stoked two children’s fears.
“Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?” Nick said.
And again, they said he did not. But Nick wasn’t asking about the scratches along their forearms from descending the hackberry tree. Or the bruises along Marshall’s shoulders from being held by the man. The pink bridge of Eddie’s nose. Or how the bottom of his eye was beginning to darken.
“This is all of it?” Laura said. “You promise there’s nothing else?”
The boys swore it.
Hours drifted by without their noticing. The antique clock’s birds cried downstairs. Past midnight already, and soon long past it.
“I don’t know what else to say,” Nick said. “I don’t know what else to ask you two.”
“Do you want to sleep in our bedroom tonight?” Laura said. And after hesitation—only kids—they said they did not. No, they would not.
This would be talked about again, all over again, tomorrow. Punishments, unstated, would wait. Follow-ups, check-ins, talks—a long, unwinding future of them—would wait. They were all too tired. You have to give in eventually. They walked their boys to their rooms. They watched them crawl into their beds.
That night, Mr. and Mrs. Mason paced the rooms of their house. Of course, the doors were locked. The black of each windowpane was smooth as the eyes of statues. The two separated as they walked, passed each other at times, only sometimes catching each other’s gaze. Their slack cheeks, the softness at the bottom of their jawlines. They each might have been much older. They wouldn’t talk for some time.