My first hint as to their existence came in the form of a bracelet. I found it wrapped in a paper on the step of the backdoor. In fact, I almost stepped on it when I was leaving. My parents were ill, then, and I had to fetch groceries from the market.
There was no name on the paper, but it was sealed with a ribbon, wrapped like a gift. I took it inside and opened it, shocked to find such a beautiful bracelet. We were not poor, but we did not have money, either. The only jewelry my parents owned was their wedding bands.
I wondered if I should find the owner, but I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t want someone laying a false claim. I then considered selling it. We needed the money, especially for medicine. In the end, I tucked it into my pocket and decided to wait until my mother was well. I would show her and see what she said. For all I knew, it could have been meant for her.
My mother and father were wise. They would deal with it properly, and in the meantime, an inner rationale told me to keep the bracelet close. I thought it was because I was keeping it safe, but rather, it turned out that it was my destiny.
I studied the ring on my finger. The swarm of colors reminded me of exploding fireworks. I yanked the ring off with a gasp and threw it at the couch. The gemstone flashed as it struck the cushions.
Silly, silly me. It’s just a ring.
In the bedroom, Oma screamed, and I flew off the mattress. My feet could have had wings as I rushed to her.
My grandmother blinked her bloodshot green eyes.
“Oma, are you okay?” My heart felt as if it wanted to thrust from my chest.
I stared at my grandmother’s face and felt like crying. The skin that had once been smooth and supple was wrinkled and flecked with dark freckles and warts.
“They’re coming,” Her lips looked thin and dry, but she didn’t lick them. “The Goat Children come for me. They want me to go back to them.”
“It was just a dream…”
“No.” Oma grabbed my arm, but her grip wasn’t strong enough to hurt. “They want me to go back. What if I do?”
I rubbed my grandmother’s arm. Oma settled back against the pillow, but her gaze burned.
“What if I give in?” Oma whispered. “What if I go back?”
“Then you’ll be happy?”
“If I go back, I won’t be able to leave again. I can only leave once.” Oma closed her eyes. “I will be young again. I will be the same age I was when I first joined. That’s how it works.” Tears pooled in Oma’s eyes.
“What will be, will be,” I said.
Oma nodded.
I pictured the ring.
****
I am eleven years old. In the summer, I will move, but for now, I have a week left of school.
“We will be writing stories about what we hope will happen over the summer,” my teacher says. “Make it a fictional story, like something you would read in a book.”
I write about my family moving to New York City. We hate it, so we move back. Oma hugs me and says, “I knew you wouldn’t leave me alone here.”
On the last day of school, I bring the story home. When I show Oma, she reads it and then sets it down. “You write well.”
I wish she would praise it more. Maybe it isn’t any good.
Later, during dinner, Mama puts down her fork and taps the table with her fingers. “I spoke to Oma today.”
“How was she?” Dad asks.
“She is concerned. Keziah showed her a story she wrote about how she doesn’t want to move.”
I stop feeding Phebe. “I had to write it for school.” My parents are glaring, so I’m afraid the story really is awful. “You guys didn’t get to read it yet.”
“You know we have to move, right?” Dad speaks into his glass of tomato juice.
“I know. It was just a story.” I don’t understand what’s so horrible about it.
“Don’t talk to Oma about moving anymore,” Mama says.
I run upstairs to my bedroom and tear up the story. I want to be a good writer, but that project has made everyone upset. Next time I want to tell a story, I will talk into Oma’s tape recorder again and make her write it.
Chapter 24
“There’re people outside,” Oma said.
“What?” I looked up from my homework, a six-page essay on how poverty affected Richard Wright in his autobiography, Black Boy.
“They’re watching me.” Oma wrung her hands. The oversized sweater she wore hung off her body. “They want to come in.”
“Wait, what are you talking about?”
“There are people outside my window,” Oma said.
I pictured Michael clipping the bushes around his stoop. “What are they doing?”
“Watching me.”
Groaning, I stood and stretched. “I’m sure they aren’t, but I’ll go look, okay? Where exactly are they?”
“Out in front.”
I parted the ragged bedroom curtain. The streetlight glowed in the dusk, brighter than the lights in the windows across the street. Nothing moved outside, neither animal nor human.
“There’s no one there.”
“Yes, they’re watching.” Oma’s voice rose.
“Shut the curtains.”
A tear slid down Oma’s wrinkled cheek. “They’ll be back, and you don’t care. You hired them to scare me so you can take my money and my house.”
Oma, don’t go off on one of these tangents. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. You’re not my little Keziah anymore.”
“Ah!” Each time my grandmother said that, it stabbed deeper. The words nagged and haunted me, yet Oma always forget she’d said them and moved on.
That night, a sound roused me from sleep. I shifted on my mattress, tugging the blanket closer to my chin. The noise came again: a footstep in the hallway. I opened my eyes, adjusting to the darkness. In the glow of the bathroom light down the hallway, Oma walked toward the kitchen.
I nestled into my pillows. At least tonight, Oma knew how to get herself a glass of water. Sometimes, she would wake me up to ask, “Where’d you put the fridge?”
The doorknob to the cellar rattled, then the door creaked open.
“Oma, what are you doing?” I called. The door creaked louder. “Oma?”
After a few quick footsteps, Oma appeared in the doorway to the living room. She held her finger to her lips. “They’ll hear you,”
“Who?” I crossed the living room to my grandmother.
“They’re in the cellar!”
“Oma, no one’s in the cellar. The house is all locked up.”
“They came in through the special door,” Oma said.
“What special door?”
“The one in the cellar,” Oma exclaimed. “They’re all down there, and they’re dancing.”
“They’re dancing,” I repeated.
“I’ll show you.” Oma waved for me to follow her into the kitchen. Once there, she pointed down the gaping cellar door. “See?”
“I can’t see anything. It’s dark.” I reached for the light switch.
“Stop. If you turn on the light, they’ll know we’re onto them. They’re hiding right now.”
“That is ridiculous.” I flipped on the light switches. Both the cellar and kitchen burst into life.
“Don’t,” Oma yelped.
“There’s no one there. Come on, I’ll show you.” I stepped onto the first cellar stair. My grandmother hung back, tears shining in her eyes.
“What if they attack us?”
“If they were just dancing, they seem friendly enough,” I muttered. Louder, I said, “Then I’ll get a baseball bat. I’ll protect us.”
Worn out orange carpeting covered the narrow cellar stairs. I gripped her hand lest she trip. Oma clung to the railing with her other hand, each step small and shuffling.
At the bottom, I waved my hand around the cement room. Rust kept the windows shut. Shelves contained glass bottles of nails and piles of old coo
kbooks. Other than a broken birdbath, table saw, and dryer, the cellar was empty.
“See, Oma, no people.”
“They ran out the door.”
“Then wouldn’t we have seen them on our way down?”
Oma pointed at the cement wall. “They went out that door.”
I picked my way across birdbath pieces to tap the wall. “There isn’t a door here. There isn’t any door in the cellar.”
Oma’s lips quivered, muscles twitching in her chin. “Why do you lie to me? There’s the door. Lock it.”
“There’s never been a door down here, ever.”
“Why can’t you see it? You’re doing this to me. You want my house.” Tears drenching her face, she shuffled toward the stairs. “When the people don’t come back, I’ll know you were behind it.”
“There are no people.” My voice bounced off the cold cement.
****
Come morning, Oma insisted the people had left the cellar and sat in the living room.
“I’m in the living room.” I braided my hair for school. “I was all alone last night.” Realizing how defensive that sounded, as if I’d slept with a boy or had lured strange people in to dance, I clamped my lips shut.
“I saw them,” Oma whispered. “The man had a comb. He said he’d be coming. They were Goat Children.”
“Oma, are the Goat Children good or bad? Why would a Goat Child be after you?”
“They want me back.” Oma grabbed my arm. “They’re here. They’re watching me.”
I disengaged myself. “There’s no one here. I have to go get ready for school.” Sleep nagged the corners of my mind, fogging my eyes. After Oma’s episode in the cellar, I’d been afraid to fall back to sleep in case my grandmother crept around the house more. In the dark, Oma might trip.
“You’re not leaving me here with them watching.”
“Hey, Oma. Let’s put out some peanut butter, and you can watch the squirrels eat it. You love doing that.”
I swung open the refrigerator door to retrieve the jar of organic peanut butter. After unscrewing the lid, I grabbed a knife from the dish rack and stirred the oil into the thick substance. From the loaf of bread, I took the heel and smeared peanut butter over it.
“Here, Oma.” I placed it in my grandmother’s hand. Since Oma didn’t move, I propelled her from the kitchen to the front door. Oma still didn’t move, so I unlocked the front door and opened it.
“Toss the bread out for the squirrels,” I said.
The bread flopped, peanut butter side down, on the front porch. The birds and squirrels would clean that up.
As I rubbed lotion over my dry forehead, Oma hovered behind me. In the bathroom mirror, I saw her narrowed eyes.
“Why are my hands sticky?” Oma held them up, palms facing me. “What did you give me? You’re trying to poison me.”
“It’s probably from the peanut butter.”
“What peanut butter?”
“The peanut butter we just put out for the squirrels.” I ground my teeth.
“You’re trying to hurt me,” Oma screeched. “Why are my hands sticky? Why are you doing this to me?”
Fear blossomed in my heart. Oma was always so angry, so distrustful. Rage flared to the surface.
“I’m going to school,” I snarled.
****
I am nine years old. It is the first time that I can remember my parents fighting in the living room. I sit on my bedroom floor with my knees tucked to my chest, and I rock with my headphones in my ears, but I can still hear them.
“Stop it,” Mama screams. “None of that is important.”
“I don’t care what my brother says, or what you say. I’m going to tell her,” Dad threatens. I wonder what Uncle Tom has done, but I am afraid to ask, in case they yell at me.
Hearing perky songs by Britney Spears makes me feel sick, so I yank the headphones out and toss the iPod onto my bed.
“What good will that do? We’re a family!” Mama’s voice crackles.
My uncle has done something horrible, and Mama doesn’t want me to find out. Why is my father pushing?
“It’s her life,” Dad says.
Mama runs up the stairs and opens my bedroom door. Her eyes are red, swollen, and her lips tremble. I start to cry with her. She grabs my arm and pulls me up. Her grip hurts, but she’s so upset that I don’t want to complain.
“There are things you don’t need to know about your father.” Mama rushes me out the front door.
“You can’t take her,” Dad calls.
I’m too scared to look back at him. He must have done something awful to make Mama act this way.
When we get to Oma’s house, Mama lays in the bedroom. I sit next to her, rubbing her shoulder and petting her hair, but she doesn’t look at me.
“Come watch television with me,” Oma says, but I don’t want to leave Mama.
“Why did I have to do that?” With her face still buried in Oma’s pillow, Mama strokes my hand. “You’re too old now. You wouldn’t understand why I did it.”
“I don’t care.” I mean it, too.
Mama could have robbed a bank, and I would still love her.
My father comes the next morning with donuts: a peace offering. I eat in the kitchen with Oma, while my parents converse on the front porch. Mama comes in and hugs me.
“When you finish, we’re going home.” She smiles.
It doesn’t matter what they don’t tell me, as long as Mama is happy.
Chapter 25
“Hey!”
I almost slipped on the driveway as the shovel caught under a hunk of ice. I brushed back my braid to glance next door. Michael waved. Despite the snow falling around us in flakes like cotton balls, he only wore an unzipped leather jacket over what appeared to be an undershirt. He tucked his bare hands into the back pockets of his jeans.
“Hello.” I yanked the shovel free as he strolled up the sidewalk.
“Another two weeks and it’s yo-ho-ho Christmas.” Michael flashed a toothy grin.
“Pretty sure the ‘yo-ho-ho’ time is the pirate holiday.” I couldn’t help but grin back. “What’s up?”
Michael shrugged. “Visiting the folks for a week. Christmas and New Year’s, that whole shebang.”
I leaned against the shovel. “That doesn’t sound so joyous. Don’t you like them?”
“I’m the youngest in the family. They never let me forget that, if you know what I mean.” He winked.
“Right.” I had no idea what he meant. My back hurt from shoveling, so I rolled my shoulders.
“Here, let me do that.” He held out his hand for the shovel. “Pretty little ladies shouldn’t be breaking their backs over snow.”
I handed it over and stepped back. “Wow. Gee, thanks.”
“‘Gee, thanks’?” he mocked. “What, are we on the Brady Bunch now?”
Oops. “Um…”
He winked again, but I didn’t feel as if he’d meant it as a kind joke. “Are your folks coming up or are you going to see them?”
“My mom’s coming for New Year’s.”
“Not the rest of them?”
I bit my lip. “My grandma doesn’t like Dad or Phebe all that much.”
He stared at the shovel. “I’m sorry. How come?”
I shrugged, and then bent for a handful of snow. I sculpted it into a ball. Good packing snow. “I dunno. Oma can be really antisocial sometimes.”
“She never says hi to me.”
She never says hi to me, either. “She doesn’t go out much at all.”
“Right.”
He shoveled a wide path across the pavement, getting down to the blacktop. When I shoveled, a layer of slush remained.
“I like all the decorations you put up in the windows. Very festive.”
“Thanks.” I stared at the house. “There’s a bit more in the garage. My grandpa used to work with wood a lot, but now nobody will hang those pieces up.”
“Do you miss him?”
&
nbsp; “I didn’t really know him. I wish I had.”
“I’m sorry.” He paused to lean against the trunk of Oma’s car. “I’ll hang decorations up for you.”
I blinked at him. “For real?”
“Sure. I don’t mind ladders, hammers, or nails. I’ll do it right after this.”
“Cool!” I jumped across the snow and flung my arms around his waist in a hug. “Oma will be so grateful. She probably misses having them hung up.”
Realizing I still had my arms around him, I pulled back. My cheeks flamed, and for a second, my mind dwelled on the fact I’d felt his abs through the thin jacket and shirt. He laughed, making my cheeks burn hotter.
“You really don’t mind?” I asked.
“Not at all. What are neighbors for, if not to help?”
****
I borrowed a holiday book from the school library to read to Oma on Christmas Eve. When I started to read the stories, Oma couldn’t hear, so I gave up and read them to myself. Uncle Jan stopped by on his way to church to pick us up, but Oma stayed home. I sat on the pew beside my aunt and pretended Phebe was there. I would hold my sister close, helping her read the words from the Bible and Hymnal by using my finger to follow along.
I struck a match and lit the bayberry candles when I got back home. It was Oma’s tradition that bayberry candles burn to the socket every Christmas Eve for good luck.
In their brass holders, the sleek candles appeared majestic. The tiny flames danced across the wicks. When I went to bed, I moved them off the piano into the bathtub so they wouldn’t catch anything on fire.
In the morning, there weren’t any presents from Santa under the tree, nothing except the fuzzy white cloth. Mama would bring everything with her when she came for New Year’s.
I helped Oma get her breakfast ready, and I gave Oma her present. Uncle Jan had taken me to the mall the week before, and I’d bought a glass bluebird. Oma used to collect them, and she kept all ten on a shelf in the bedroom. When Oma opened the present, though, she stared and didn’t say thanks.
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