At least she was finally past the first few months. She loved being pregnant, but she didn’t miss the morning sickness, the constant nausea. Plus, now she looked pregnant, as opposed to merely strangely chubby.
The world swam again, and she gripped the counter hard enough to suspect she might leave marks on the granite surface. What was going on?
She looked out the window, and saw the moving truck right where it should be, parked in front of the house at the top of the long driveway that led through the woods. That meant Cap would be nearby. She gulped air, trying to decide if she should call him. She didn’t want to. Heaven knew he was already doing enough. It wouldn’t be fair to make his job even harder by interrupting it.
But she felt an urge to call to him. Suddenly wanted to interrupt him every bit as much as she didn’t. She could chalk it up to the irrationality of pregnancy, a side-effect of the hormones that were using her as their own personal amusement park. But she couldn’t deny it. And she realized that she not only wanted to interrupt his hauling of boxes and bric-a-brac, she wanted to tell him to drop everything, get in the truck, and pull right back down the driveway, leave the house behind forever, nothing but a dark memory atop a hill.
What’s wrong with me?
She shook her head. Deep breaths. Slowly the dizziness passed. The baby stopped moving, settling down for a uterine nap, perhaps.
After another moment, she decided she wasn’t going to faint and straightened up again. She didn’t want to pass out. The house was secluded, which was a boon in so many ways. But it also meant that if something happened, it would be a while before they even got to the town in the valley below, let alone to a hospital.
She felt a thrill of fear at that realization. What was she thinking, moving into a house in the middle of nowhere? She was pregnant, for goodness’ sake. What if something happened to her? To Cap? To the baby?
She shook her head again, this time not to dispel dizziness, but rather to cast off the dark thoughts that had gripped her on what should be nothing but a bright and luminously happy day. They were starting. They had the house. Everything was going to be fine.
She knew where the thoughts had come from. The past was past, but somehow remnants of it kept shoving into her present, trying to bend her future. Thoughts infiltrated her mind, saboteurs of happiness. Thoughts of what had happened. Of The Before. –
No. That’s old me thinking.
She did what she always did when thoughts like this threatened her: she thought of Cap. His eyes, so brown they were almost black. His frame, tall and lithe and tightly muscled. His smile. He was completely unlike anyone she had ever met before. He was an even greater blessing than the baby was. He was her rock. Wherever they went, no matter how many times they might have to start over, as long as he was there, she would be all right. More than all right. She would be the thing she hadn’t dared to be since that hateful day so long ago.
She would be happy. So busy with her life – her good life – that she wouldn’t have time to be anything else.
She picked up the box cutter that sat on the counter nearby and turned to the kitchen table. It was a beautiful piece of furniture, dark wood with elegant lines. It had been in the house when they got here, and Sarah had been glad of that. Seeing it made the place seem more like a home. Anyplace with a kitchen table had possibility. Meals could be eaten here, family could chat here. She could almost see the people around it.
Of course, it was piled high with boxes right now, and she would have to get a move on if she wanted to clear it off before dinner time. Dinner itself was likely to be nothing more than sandwiches, but she knew that if she could eat with Cap, both of them sitting at the table, it would be like laying claim to the house. Making it hers. And then later, in the night, in their bed, she and Cap would lay claim to the house in a different kind of way.
She smiled. She flicked the small knob on the side of the box cutter, and the blade emerged. It caught the light that glinted in through the large bay window beside the table and the sharp edge seemed for a moment to glow like some kind of mythic weapon. She plunged the razor down, slicing through the packing tape on top of the nearest box. She wanted to unpack the dishes first. It was part of the feel of the kitchen, to have the plates and saucers and glasses put away neatly in one of the cupboards. Unfortunately, Cap apparently hadn’t marked all of the boxes. That was unlike him. He must have gotten too busy toward the end of packing up for the move, which had happened so fast it was barely more than a fuzzy haze of activity.
She put the box cutter down, and opened the box. It was at least kitchen ware, though it wasn’t the dishes. A breadmaker, a waffle iron. Some odds and ends. She moved the box aside and picked up the box cutter again. Opened another box. This, too, disappointed her. She repeated the process several times.
Pick up the box cutter.
Slash through the tape.
Put the blade down.
Open the box.
Glance inside.
Pick up the cutter.
Cut the tape.
Razor down beside the box.
Box open.
Look inside.
Pick up the…
She felt around blindly, still looking inside the box that sat in front of her. A spice rack? She didn’t even remember owning a spice rack, let alone packing one. She sighed. Somehow moving made everything seem new. Or no, not merely new. Alien. As though someone else’s belongings had somehow infiltrated her life.
Stop it. That kind of thinking doesn’t belong here.
She moved the box aside and looked for the box cutter. Where had it gone? She rolled her eyes. That was a little tidbit that no one ever mentioned about pregnancy: the absent-mindedness. Sarah knew that she wasn’t a genius, not by a long shot. But neither did she think of herself as particularly stupid. At least not until she got pregnant. Then it seemed like the most basic mental exercises were beyond her. Words had a tendency of deserting her. She couldn’t remember what she had had for breakfast half the time, and couldn’t remember if she had had it at all the rest of the time. She understood it was a fairly common occurrence among pregnant women, but the fact of its prevalence didn’t make her feel any less stupid when she couldn’t remember a name or a date. When something she knew she had seen before seemed brand-new. When she felt like she didn’t belong in her own skin.
Or couldn’t remember where she had put the stupid box cutter.
She moved the boxes around on the table like one of those puzzles that made a picture if you slide the tiles around in the proper order. She wasn’t looking for a picture, though. She wanted the box cutter. Cap used his keys to open the boxes, but she hated doing that. What was the point of having a box cutter if you used your keys to open boxes?
She moved aside several stray sheets of bubble wrap, pushed aside some papers that had somehow made their way onto the table, but still couldn’t spot the box cutter. She looked under the table, wondering if it had somehow clattered to the tile floor without her noticing it. The floor was bare.
“What the heck?” she muttered to herself. She had a rare moment in which she was glad that Cap wasn’t in the room. She loved him, loved to be with him, but he did have a tendency to tease her mercilessly at times. Her inability to find a utility knife she had been using all of sixty seconds before would be prime fodder for some good-natured – but still irritating – goading and jeering.
She was loath to give up her search, and did not relish the idea of being reduced to Cap’s key method of box opening even less. But after pushing the boxes around on the table a half dozen times, after looking on the floor twice, after peering under everything on the table that could possibly hide the razor, she had to admit defeat. The baby flipped in her womb again, and this time she got the distinct impression it was laughing at her. She didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl – she and Cap were looking forward to the surprise – but she got the feeling that no matter what the sex, the child was going to take after its
father’s sense of humor.
She turned her back on the table, crossing her arms and feeling for all the world like a pouty child. But then, what was pregnancy good for if not allowing a gal to act irrationally sometimes? She took a step back, half-sitting on the table.
And there was the box cutter. It was sitting on the counter, a good ten feet away from where she had been working.
“What the heck?” she said again, this time neither irritated nor on an obsessed quest for dinnerware. Was she really getting so absent-minded that she couldn’t remember moving the cutter away for some reason? Why would she even want to do that in the first place?
But there was no other reasonable explanation. She had to have done it. Cap might have done it, she supposed, for no reason other than to play a joke on her. But she was alone in the room. She was sure of it. So she must have done it herself.
She went to the counter and picked up the cutter. The blade was retracted. She thumbed the blade forward again, and went back to the boxes. As though to repay her for the irritation she had just suffered, the Moving Gods rewarded her on her next cut. She put the blade down – in her pocket this time, she didn’t want it wandering away again – and flipped back the heavy cardboard of the box. The plates were inside. They were white, with silver edging. A wedding present. They looked like fine china to her, though she knew they were probably just some kind of cheap ceramic. No matter. They were a remnant of her first days with Cap, the beginning of her real life, so she cherished them. If someone had offered to trade her dishes for those of British royalty, she would have said no thank you and continued eating off her silver-edged plates.
The world seemed to shiver around her, and for a moment the plates were alien things, strange and somehow foreboding.
She shook her head. That was ridiculous. The feeling passed.
She moved the plates out of the box, stacking them carefully one at a time. She had all dozen of them out of the box quickly, standing in an orderly tower on the table. It was utterly silent in the kitchen as she worked, and she wondered how she could have felt strange here only a few minutes before. The feeling of being watched was gone. She felt alone. Not lonely, not isolated, but just pleasantly flying solo for a few moments. She couldn’t even hear any sounds from the nearby woods. It was the end of summer, pushing inevitably into fall, but there should have been a goodly amount of wildlife nearby. Instead, there was only stillness. Perfect calm. The world was at peace.
Sarah put her hands on either side of the stack of plates, ready to lift them off the table and shuttle them carefully to their resting place in the nearby –
SLAM!
She jerked at the sound, and the plates rattled against the table top. She whipped around, her shoulders hunching up around her ears as though she expected to see something dangerous.
It was only Cap. He grinned at her, and the smile lit up his face. He was slim and tan, and the only wrinkles on his face were the smile lines around his mouth, and some tiny crow’s feet that were just starting to walk around the edges of his eyes. He was beautiful. And he would have been beautiful even if he was ugly. He had rescued her.
“Hey, Captain America,” she said. His grin grew even wider.
“You usually don’t call me by my full name unless I’m in trouble,” he said.
“And you will be, unless you kiss me this instant.”
He moved across the kitchen with his trademark grace, seeming almost to glide across the floor. His arms curled around her, and she let herself melt into his embrace. He felt warm from his exertions, a bit sweaty. She loved the smell of him. He had been “Cap” since falling in love with the Captain America comics as a child, but even without the nickname, he would still have been her hero. He had saved her.
He kissed her lightly, and then drew back, a trace of concern playing across his face. “You doing okay in here?” he asked.
“I’m managing,” she said. A grimace made its way through her smile. “Though pregnancy seems to be making me forgetful. I keep putting things down and then not finding them.”
Cap winked at her and then patted her swollen belly. “Well, be careful,” he said. “You’re forgetting things for two now.”
“Har, har,” she said, and punched him lightly on the shoulder.
“You sure you’re okay, though?” he said, and the joking was gone from his eyes just like that. She loved that about him. He was fun, he was cheerful, he laughed… but he would move heaven and earth to keep her safe, to protect her from anything.
“I’m fine,” she said. She forced her smile even wider, as though by doing so she could push back the strange thoughts that had forced their way into her first day in the house. “I love moving,” she added. “Everything seems like it’s new. Not just the house, but everything.”
“Even me?” he asked. “I haven’t worn out my welcome yet?”
“Not yet. Give it another fifty years or so.”
“Done.” He gave her another hug, then pulled away. “Well, I don’t want to interrupt you, just wanted to check and make sure you and the baby were doing all right.” He patted her stomach once more. “I’m gonna go outside and start unloading the rest of the boxes.”
He leaned in to peck her cheek. And that was when Sarah saw something. Or thought she did.
It was less than a glance. Barely a flash of something half-seen outside the kitchen window. Something near the truck. Something red. Sarah cocked her head to the side, as though by doing so she could follow whatever she had seen past the boundaries of the window.
“Okay, I know I’m repulsive,” said Cap.
“What?” she said, only half-listening. What had that been?
“I know I’m grotesque,” he reiterated, “but you usually don’t try to actively avoid me kissing you.”
“What?” she said again, the meaning of the words only gradually sinking in. She realized that in trying to look at… it… she had inadvertently leaned away from Cap’s kiss. “No, it wasn’t that. I thought I saw something.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding mock-sagely. “I can see how seeing something would make you avoid kissing me.”
“I’m being serious,” she said. His smile immediately disappeared.
“What did you see?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Uh… huh…,” he finally managed.
“Something red,” she said, and headed for the side door, the one that Cap had come through a moment ago. She opened it, and looked around. She could see the woods. The truck nearby, open with a goodly amount of boxes still inside it.
Nothing red.
Had she been seeing things? Was this some new side effect of pregnancy, another symptom of the absent-mindedness that had been plaguing her? She supposed it was possible, but didn’t believe it was what had just happened. She had seen something. She knew it.
Didn’t she?
“You see it?” asked Cap.
She was silent a moment longer, peering into the forest. It was foolish, she knew. The trees were a good hundred yards away, and nothing could have moved fast enough to get into the cover they provided and disappear in the shadows below in the time it took for her to come out and look around. But even though she knew it was impossible, she still peered into the woods, and a part of her expected to see something.
“No,” she finally said.
“Any idea what it was?”
“No. Just something red. A piece of paper blowing by? I don’t know.” The feeling that something was watching her had returned. She looked into the woods, and tried hard to convince herself that nothing was looking back at her. Her shoulder muscles tightened and drew together of their own accord. She felt like she had a bullseye painted on her. But it was an invisible one, one that she couldn’t see, couldn’t cover up.
“Well, I don’t see anything,” Cap said after a moment.
“No,” she murmured. She felt far away from herself, like she was observing a specter of reality, a shadow without subs
tance.
She turned away from the forest and headed back into the kitchen. She didn’t like doing so. Something about the red whatever-it-was had set her on edge. She would have been relieved if it had been just a piece of cloth or something the wind had dragged past the window, but somehow didn’t believe that was it. For one thing, the air outside was still. No breeze at all, not even a light zephyr.
She looked at Cap, escaping into the smooth lines of his face, the grace of his movements as he stepped into the kitchen and looked around at what she had been doing.
“Geez,” he said. “You’ve been busting through here.”
“Lots to do,” she said with a smile. But for some reason she didn’t feel like working anymore. At least, not here. She pointed at the truck outside. “You need any help with the bigger stuff?”
Cap winked at her. “Thanks, but I think I’ve got it covered.”
She loved him so much. She kissed his cheek affectionately, then batted her eyelids like an oversexed version of Betty Boop. “My big stwong man,” she said.
He kissed her back, and this time it was more than just a peck. There was interest there, and she could feel his body grow taut as she put her arms around him.
“Or I could just stay in here for a while,” he said when they separated. “The unloading’s going faster than expected. We have time for… other things.” She laughed, and pushed him away. He didn’t let go. “Come on. We’re all alone here, no one but us and the cute little woodland creatures.”
She pushed him harder. Reality had returned with his embrace. She had to get the kitchen unpacked. “Later, Don Juan,” she said as she wriggled out of his arms. She chuckled. “But I promise, we’ll make sure the house is nice and broken in tonight.”
The Haunted Page 2