The little perfect house with its white picket fence was becoming less perfect, much smaller. Arguments replaced the quiet lazy sounds of Sunday mornings reading the paper. They cancelled their subscription to it in the new year, to save wherever we can, as Carrie put it. That, of course, also led to a fight.
The winter seemed endless. By March, it was still “freezing fucking cold,” as Will liked to say under his breath on his morning walks to the coffeeshop. (You know, those lattes cost us 30 bucks a week, Will.)
By April, Carrie and Will were barely talking. They were ghosts in the night, passing each other on their way to haunt the living. Carrie, to work. Will, to look for it.
By May, Will had managed to wrangle a couple of clients. He’d started to pull in some money—not much, but enough to make some of the due dates a little less stressful. Enough to make shopping trips a little less awful.
By June, their relationship was back nearly to normal, but Will was back on unemployment and Carrie’s job security was becoming less so. Though the days were getting longer, darkness was creeping in at all angles. It was, they knew, about to get worse than ever.
For months they were able to rely on savings to bail them out, some money they’d tucked away from their wedding and from all those nice big bonuses Carrie used to get. Even after the down payment, they had managed to save enough for a rainy day. But now it was pouring, and there was no end in sight.
In those darkest days, they clung to each other, Carrie and Will. At night, in bed, Will held on to Carrie like the whole damn world was being blown away by a tornado and she was his storm shelter. She did the same, inching closer to him late in the night as they both slept, texting him more during the day.
August was the worst. Financially, for sure, but also just in terms of stress. Carrie’s workload kept her at the office later and later every night, and Will’s lack of work was slowly eating away at his own sense of worth.
He stayed in the coffeeshop from open to close. He milked the same cup of coffee for hours and didn’t buy himself lunch. He ate whatever was in the fridge for dinner. He lost weight. He gained puffy little paunches under both eyes. He let his hair grow too long. His beard became wild, unkempt. Gray.
By September, Will had given up on looking for a new gig. He went to the coffee shop, set up in his back corner table, and wasted the day away online.
By October, Carrie was put—officially and with capital letters—On Notice. She was given 30 days to “turn things around.” Her long days bled into the night. After the coffee shop closed its doors for the evening, Will was left to himself. In the house. Alone.
The whole thing had begun like a haunting because, of course, that’s what it was. New house, young couple. It had all the elements. It fit the narrative.
On Halloween—yes, of course it was on Halloween—Will sat down in the lawn chair where Carrie had handed out treats the year before. Now he did the same, though he did so merely out of a desire to avoid a fight when Carrie finally did get home. And he did so with a little help from the bottle hidden underneath the lawn chair.
He’d been at it for about an hour—candy, smile, Happy Halloween!, wave, drink, repeat—when he saw the child: long and tall and dressed in black, flowing black, wearing the mask, the white mask with the rubber nose. Walking down the street and towards the house. Graceful in those long strides. Terrifying in his, or her, certainty.
Slowly, Will got up from his lawn chair. He placed the plastic orange bowl on the not-so-green grass. He walked, slowly, down the driveway. To the sidewalk. To the street.
The figure—black, tall, rubber—moved toward him. Once he was closer to it, Will could see that it was a she. The child. But too tall. And the mask. So real. And her movement, like water. Like dancing. Just like…and then she was standing in front of him, right there in the middle of their windswept Halloween street. The sound of leaves, scraping the pavement like bare branches on midnight window panes. Clouds in the sky. Storm smell in the air. Fear knots tightening in his stomach.
Will’s breath puffed out in front of him as he exhaled, waiting, staring forever at that mask, chalk white and rubber. Real but not real. He looked hard at it, lost himself in it. There were no little slits for the eyes, for the ears, for the mouth, or for the nose. Just as that dawned on him, Will became surrounded by noise. Children, running past, yelling and laughing. Little Spider-Men and Batmen and Deadpools and Draculas. A patchwork cartoon coming to life on his perfect suburban street.
With the noise and the movement of the children, the figure vanished. There, in front of him one moment, and then gone altogether in the next, as if the noise had taken her. As if the sounds of the street, of the early evening, of Halloween and real life, had taken her back to wherever she was. Before. Before that night. Before the knocks on the basement doors. Before Connecticut and Brooklyn and Carrie.
Carrie.
Will saw her face, in his slightly inebriated mind, and he snapped back into focus. Standing there, alone now in the middle of his street, Will wanted to cry. It was, actually, the only thought that entered his mind, other than the image of his wife.
“You okay, man?”
Will turned, wiped the wet from his face. It was Harold, his neighbor. Decent guy. Red Sox fan, but what can you do.
“I—” Will started, stopped, then smiled. He steeled himself to speak through the boozy haze. “I am, yeah. I just…weirdest thing. I could have sworn one of those kids was Carrie’s nephew. Oh, well.”
Will walked past Harold, hoped that his fake smile would suffice.
But then, mid-stride: “Hey, Will.”
Still walking, still fake smiling. “Yeah, man?”
Head down, hands in pocket. “Everything okay? With you. I mean, you know, with you and Carrie?”
Sigh. Turn. Fake smile. “All good, Harold. Been a rough month, but we’re getting there.”
“Okay, good. Just, you know. Just checking. Just making sure.”
“I appreciate it.” Fake smile, turn, walk. Then, over his shoulder, with a fake little wave, “Happy Halloween!”
Will packed up his lawn chair and the plastic container and he threw back the rest of his hidden bottle. Near midnight, Carrie still wasn’t home and Will was quickly fading. He thudded up the stairs and passed out lying on top of the covers.
At some point in the early hours, Will woke up, felt his wife breathing in the bed next to him, got up. His head and his gut did that lurching, post-drinking thing and he staggered in the dark to the bathroom. The vomiting took him by surprise.
Had he really drank that much? Will cleaned the toilet, as thoroughly as he could, using rolled-up toilet paper, then rinsed out his mouth, brushed his teeth, and rinsed again. He opened the small bathroom window, let the night in to clear the air.
He stood outside the bathroom for a moment, one hand bracing against the doorframe, and made sure his feet were underneath him and his head was back on right. Sweaty and damp from the alcohol, he laid on top of the sheets and slept.
Morning came. Saturday. Will woke, instinctively turned over. Carrie wasn’t there. He went downstairs. Carrie wasn’t there. After he’d put the coffee on, Will peeked outside through the blinds, at the driveway, to where the car—finally working again—should have been.
Carrie wasn’t anywhere.
Anger rose from somewhere deep and buried, and Will leaned against the counter. Morning coffee began to overtake the kitchen. He jogged upstairs and retrieved his phone from its charging place.
There were four messages, all from Carrie.
Working late...again.
Still working. You okay?
Fuck. Not getting out of here. Will?
Hello? Fine. I’ll be here overnight. Home in the morning. Maybe.
A flush of fear. A pinch in his stomach. Will turned back to the bed. Saw, for the first time. Carrie’s side was untouched. He’d slept on top of the sheets, messed his side up a bit, made a little dent. But Carrie’s side was s
till tucked in. No indent on her pillow.
Will dropped his phone, was startled by the sound it made against the hardwood floor. And then, from downstairs, “Will!”
He froze. The front door slammed closed. He listened to the footsteps climbing the stairs. Carrie appeared in the bedroom, standing with hands on hips in the doorway. “What the fuck, Will? Why didn’t you answer any of my texts last night?”
“I—”
“What, you don’t even give a shit that I was out all fucking night?”
“No, I was—”
“Jesus, Will. You smell. Please tell me you weren’t drinking while handing out the candy?”
“I was. I—”
“Whatever. I’m gonna shower. I’m going to visit my parents. Let them know I’m still alive.”
Carrie turned towards the bathroom, jabbed Will one more time before she shut the door behind her. “Not that you give a shit.”
The rest of the morning devolved nicely from there. Will’s half-drunken attempt to clean the toilet had been just that, and a brand-new fight began in earnest as Will, on his hands and knees, head spinning, scrubbed the porcelain and the surrounding tiles.
By the time the coffee was ready downstairs, Carrie had skipped the shower and instead had packed a bag.
Once again, Will found himself alone in the house. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a half cup of coffee lingering next to him. His head hurt with each heartbeat, but the swimming upstream feeling of the morning after was—mercifully, if slowly—fading.
He’d been staring into the liquid blackness of his cup, hadn’t heard her come in, but when he looked up, Carrie was sitting across from him at the table. She had been crying, her eyes raw, her makeup streaked and vaudevillian.
“We need to talk.”
“I know,” Will managed, knowing what was coming.
“I love you, Will. And I care about you. But.”
Will braced.
“But this…” Carrie looked at him then, lingering on his eyes. “This is not right, Will. This isn’t you. This isn’t...me.”
“I know, Carr. I know. It’s just…” He’d thought about this exact moment so many times in the past year as he was sitting at the coffee shop, not finding jobs. He’d practiced it in his head over and over. He took a breath, a deep one, and he looked at his wife and began again.
“It’s all ghost stories, Carr.” Will leaned back in his chair, exhaled as he looked up at the ceiling. The sound of soft footsteps padded upstairs. “I mean, we’re haunted by everything, you know? Our past, it’s just—I don’t know. We carry it with us, always. Like ghosts.”
Will reached across the table, took Carrie’s hands in his. They were cold. She was cold, and tired, and she just wanted him. She just wanted their one-bedroom in Brooklyn, and in truth, she just wanted the last two years back. She just wanted to make things better. To make things like they were. Before. Will could feel that, all of that, through her hands, like a lightning bolt of certainty. He felt better, more confident in his rehearsed speech.
“Think about it, Carrie. The good guys usually survive. In ghost stories, right? But...so do the ghosts. You know what I mean?”
Carrie smiled, small and thin-lipped, creating little dimples under her eyes. And then those eyes drifted up towards the ceiling. Up towards soft footsteps. Taking her hands from Will’s, Carrie wiped at her eyes. Will took a sip of his coffee, felt the weight of everything drift away from him at last. On the table, his phone buzzed.
I’m gonna stay with my parents a few days. Clear my head. Suggest you do the same.
Then. Coffee and cup falling, crashing and shattering against tile. Above him, footsteps. Below him, knocking. Across from him, at the table, chalk-white, rubber.
The New Daddy
Scotty Milder
Michael sat in the short hallway between the living room and the kitchen, atop the ancient brown heater grate, and played with his puzzle.
It was an old puzzle, big painted wood blocks that slotted into a warped laminate frame. Mommy bought it at one of the garage sales she dragged him to on Saturday mornings, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was too easy for him. He could put it together and take it apart in seconds. The finished image—a crude painting of Big Bird and Grover, surrounded by multi-colored balloons and smiling cheerily vacant smiles—gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.
Mommy loved garage sales. She told him that going to a garage sale was like looking through a window, and through that window you could see inside other people’s lives. You could see all the things they had loved and come to hate. All the things that hung around their neck like anchors. People tried to get rid of the stuff, she said, but the anchor was always there. It never went away. It just got heavier and heavier until it suffocated you, like the wet smoking cough Grammy had before she died. The one that made her sound like she was drowning.
Michael didn’t know why you would want to see that stuff. It sounded horrible. Sometimes he thought maybe Mommy wasn’t such a nice person. He looked down at the puzzle and wondered if it was an anchor like she said. Maybe it had belonged to some little kid like him who died, got hit by a bus or was consumed by a terrible sickness. Like Tim O’Brien up the block. Tim had something called cystic fibrosis. Michael didn’t know what that was, except it made Tim cough up big ropy balls of snot, and then it made him die. Maybe the puzzle belonged to a kid like that, and maybe the kid’s mom couldn’t bear to look at it anymore so she sold it to his mommy, who then gave it to him. And maybe that kid’s mom dreamed about it at night—the big globs of paint splattered across rough wood and the maniac, murderers’ grins from Big Bird and Grover—and maybe she cried. Michael’s own mommy didn’t care about that. She snickered and gave the puzzle to him because maybe she wasn’t a nice person. Like when he fell down on the porch stair that one time and scraped all the skin off his knee and she laughed. She said sorry afterward and kissed him and put a Band-Aid on it. But she had still laughed. He would never forget that.
Michael watched Big Bird scream a silent scream as Michael tore his big yellow stomach loose and set it aside. Now he thought maybe Grover knew what was coming and braced himself for it. Michael worked another piece free. Grover’s head split apart right down the middle. One wide, white eye stared up at him, suspended above a severed nose and shattered half-mouth of gaping red and black. Michael was only five, but it occurred to him that this was a weird way to design a puzzle.
He put it back together. Took it apart. Put it back together. Took it apart. Over and over and over. As time went on, he found the puzzle had its own soothing quality, quite independent of the challenge (or lack) it presented. There was something about the bubbled surface, the rough edges, the cheap wafer-board backing, that stilled whatever had been roiling inside him all week. He put it back together, then just sat there with it, ran his fine little fingers over the paint. The varnish seemed a little too cold to the touch.
He took it apart again.
Hanging behind everything, there was this sound. A low, wet snuffling. He didn’t look up. It was a sound that tried to call attention to itself. It had been going on for a long time, all week, but Michael tried to put it out of his head and just focus on the puzzle. If he did that, he thought, maybe it would stop.
Finally:
“Michael.”
Michael snapped Big Bird’s head back onto his spindly neck.
“Michael. Look at me, baby.”
Michael did, reluctantly.
Mommy sat over on the living-room couch, still wrapped in her thick white bathrobe. She’d been wearing it for days. Her stringy blond hair hung limp and waxy on her shoulders.
She was crying.
Michael gets up to get a drink of water, only to find that the kitchen isn’t where he thought it was. The kitchen has become the basement, and there’s nothing there but an oily pit surrounded by a ring of shattered stones. Confused, he makes his way back upstairs and goes down the hallway to the b
athroom.
He flips on the light switch and catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He is grinning madly, though he can’t feel it at all, and it seems to him that the face in the mirror is not entirely his own.
There’s a glass by the sink, stained and milky with years of hard-water accumulation. He wraps his fingers around it and slides it under the faucet. The pipes rumble and disgorge a globular red substance that quickly turns black. Michael recognizes the smell. Almost like blood, but with more salt in it.
He puts the glass back onto the edge of the sink and turns out the light.
He hears something in his parents’ room.
A thick laugh.
A wheeze.
He pads down the hallway, dimly realizing he’s naked, and pushes open the door.
Dad lays on top of Mommy, doing something. The smell is thicker in here. Blood and salt. Michael turns on the light.
Mommy squeals.
He sees her neck covered in blood.
Daddy looks up, eyes tarred and hollow like the pit where the kitchen used to be, and Michael sees that behind the familiar face is that other, that IT…
Dad opens his mouth. A wide, dripping grimace. Rimming the red and black maw are rows and rows of pointed white teeth...
Mommy and Daddy had a fight. It was a week ago. Michael didn’t know what it was about. He had a sneaking suspicion it was about him. He didn’t know how he knew, but the knowledge was there, nipping at him, nibbling its way through the soft, pliable skin of him.
Mommy and Daddy had a fight, and it was about him.
He was lying in bed when it started. He listened to the muffled voices in the room next to his, muted by the wall. He could feel the sharpness of the words, pricking at him like little needles even though he couldn’t understand them. Daddy’s voice kept getting louder and louder. Mommy’s voice went shrill, warbled high like the rasp of a bird. He heard a door slam (the closet?), and then another. Heavy footsteps in the hall, and then Daddy was rustling past the thin sliver of door that Michael always left cracked, muttering something. Mommy followed. “It isn’t what you think, Jim!” she shouted. He heard the steady whisk-whisk of her slippers on the stairs as she went after him. Then more voices downstairs. Shouts. Something thudded. Breaking glass from the kitchen. A brittle cry of pain.
The Half That You See Page 12