O My Darling

by Amity Gaige

  On the floor of the room, she could perceive the places where other people had put their furniture. Scrapes and scars in the floorboards, and splattered paint in a corner. She saw the four ghosted feet of a desk that someone had drawn right up to the window. A glinting thing in the running board caught her eye. She went over to it and squatted. Another golden hairpin.

  Standing by the window, suddenly heavy-hearted, she held the hairpin in her open hand. How many times had someone else stood here, some other woman, looking out this window into the orchard, waiting, wishing for things, watching the approach of things? She could almost feel her, feel that she was in the room with this other woman. She took a deep breath and brought her hand to her neck.

  A car labored up the lane. She looked out hopefully. But only a child in the backseat stared up at the house as the car passed. The leaves of the trees outside the window began to jerk backward, and Charlotte saw that it had begun to rain again—a light, mournful, late summer rain. And, as if he had sensed the growing agitation in her mind, or had simply been flushed out by the weather, Clark leapt up from a ditch across the street in his gray sweatpants and mud boots, eating an apple.

  “Oh thank God,” she said.

  She gasped with relief, waving, but he did not see her in the upper window.

  HALF ASLEEP

  And just like that it was autumn. The wind, reaching Clementine, fell slack and no longer bore the smell of fruit or brine. At night, the stars were precise. They sat fixed in lucid blackness. The maples in the yard turned yellow. The hawthorn in the backyard dropped its purple berries in one day, its naked bark the color of old hide. In the grips of the morning chill, the house made a myriad of sounds, the cricking and cracking of the windowpanes and the joists.

  Clark sighed and said, “I guess we should get it.”

  Charlotte turned her head on the pillow. “What?” she said.

  “The door,” said Clark. “Didn’t you hear? Someone’s at the door.”

  Charlotte raised her head from the pillow and listened. A branch snapped outside, and she heard what sounded like floor-boards downstairs creaking under the weight of a large man.

  “Wasn’t it just the house?” she asked. “This house makes a ton of noises. Have you noticed that?”

  “No,” said Clark, licking his lips. “There.” He raised a finger. “There it is. Didn’t you hear it that time?”

  “No,” she said.

  He went rigid in her arms and a draft came through the curtain.

  “Let me go,” he said. “I should go see who it is.”

  “No,” she said. She put her head between his shoulder and neck. “Let’s not get it. Let’s pretend we’re not home.”

  Clark’s lips stiffened. “I don’t want to pretend anything,” he said. “It’s the morning and it’s my day off and I don’t want to hang out in bed anymore.”

  The previous week, Clark had finally gone back to work. And as he had entered the junior high, late to the beginning of the school year, all the secretaries and Stanberry and the teachers and even the kids had smiled and looked up at his tallness with new impressionability. He found them all the more touching since he would be leaving them soon. For he still carried in him the Plan: quit, sell the house, buy a typewriter, take a chance. And it was all right, all of it, until one afternoon he found himself trying to explain to Mrs. Ormerod his heightened sense of life. How capable he felt of anything, of building a whole new life from scratch, how strong he felt. He told her about the hawthorn blossoms, beautiful white clusters in his own backyard, right there the whole time. And as he gazed fondly out the window at the school parking lot, Mrs. Ormerod had mentioned that of course such a reaction was common among those who’d experienced a brush with death. It was a rush—a death rush. A manic phase, she said, putting her plastic torso up on its shelf, a temporary euphoric high sometimes characterized by the making of grand, fantastical plans and decisions. It was, in fact, a well-documented medical phenomenon. Mrs. Ormerod slapped the eraser chalk off her hands, not realizing, perhaps, what she had done.

  For just like that, the world had regained its hard edges. Down the school hallway, a phone rang shrilly, and the kids passed in their store-creased clothing. Time itself clustered back around the clock. In Clark’s mind, the Plan fell apart like a house of matchsticks, a delusion itself.

  Clark sat up in bed.

  “Oh please,” said Charlotte. “Don’t get the door, Clarkie. We don’t have to. Come on, let’s pretend we’re hiding.”

  She looped her arms around his waist and Clark marveled at her strength. He lay back down on the bed and tried to think of pleasant things—gravy and pecan sandies and Rod Carew and trips to the beach. But again he heard the knocking, stronger this time.

  “What the hell is that?” Clark said, sitting up again.

  “Maybe it’s in your head,” Charlotte murmured.

  “Gee,” said Clark. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  And then, as if to bring home the very casualness with which she could say such a thing, Charlotte began snoring lightly, one finger hooked inside the band of his underwear. Out the bedroom window, he saw that the oak in the divorcee’s yard was touched orange, and the blue sky turned around and around on its invisible maypole. It didn’t even seem pretty to him.

  Charlotte startled and raised her head and blinked against the sunlight.

  “Maybe it was an early trick-or-treater,” she said.

  “Good Lord,” said Clark, shuddering. He hated Halloween, which was fast approaching.

  “I’ll protect you,” Charlotte said, lazily smoothing the hair on his arm.

  “You’ll protect me,” Clark snorted. “Thanks.”

  But as he sat there a little longer, the wind fell still and the house itself settled, and he lay back down and sighed. Maybe it wasn’t just a death rush. Maybe it would stick. Maybe tomorrow he would awake and think the sky was pretty again, and that he was indeed capable of anything, including escaping himself.

  THE THING THAT HAUNTS YOU

  Fear, he knew, was a relic. We inherited fear from our primitive ancestors. It had been reasonable for the ancestors to feel fear, Clark thought, for they hadn’t fire or knives or glow sticks or even history. Nor did they have words. Only impulses. Run. Jump. Scream. They did not have answers, only questions: What the hell is that? Will it hurt? Halloween traded upon this, these leftover feelings of unspeakable ill-boding. Premonitions. Superstitions.

  Clark knew he was a sucker for being afraid of Halloween. He knew Halloween was, at base, a marketing opportunity. But he had several unfortunate associations with Halloween that resulted from spending the holiday with his mother, who for several years forbade him from trick-or-treating apropos of her secret knowledge about cannibals and insane asylum breakouts. And before he could investigate this further, she stopped warning him off Halloween and dropped the whole issue. And suddenly he was allowed to go out with Mary like a normal child. But it was hard to shake the image of slobbering cannibals in the hedges, as well as the idea that he himself might be a sort of Halloween candy. And even though of course not a whit of it was true, Clark still did not like the sound of voices surrounding the house at night, and he did not like the breathless rapacity of all those trick-ortreaters. Halloween was a night of childish treachery. Kids played tricks. They threw stink bombs, toilet paper, they lit things on fire, and Clark knew that if he awoke in the morning with dog shit smeared on his stoop, his feelings would be hurt. You had to admit it, the guidance counselor was a pretty sizable target.

  Daylight closing overhead, Clark drew the rake across the stiffened grass. Thick with memories, the chore was taking on a new level of protractedness. Briefly, he wondered if the yard might never be free of leaves, that he might be fated, as a character in mythology, to rake beneath an eternally shedding tree. He thought he heard, but could not be sure, a kind of ghostly music in the distance, which rose up when the wind changed directions. Honestly, who had not been somewhat fri
ghtened by Halloween as a child? And wasn’t it truly kind of a scary holiday? He wondered if kids even liked it. Who hadn’t burst into tears once or twice while peering through his mother’s legs at a mummy that darkened the front door? Who hadn’t been terrified by the shiny little witch that came out of his sister’s bedroom, or woken up to find his favorite climbing tree draped with ghostly toilet paper? But then, he thought, you grow up, you see the gears and wires behind the scenery. Don’t you? You saw that, of course, there weren’t any deranged people loping around and bending steel fences to get at the children, there weren’t any nets and there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Was there?

  Clark startled at a tapping sound. It was Charlotte at the kitchen window, gesturing at him, saying something. He leaned against his rake.

  “Jellybeans?” Charlotte said again to the window, holding up the package. “You bought jellybeans?”

  Clark only stood there with his rake, squinting back. She waved him away.

  “Oh forget it,” she said.

  She poured the jellybeans into a bowl. They weren’t even orange and black. Clark walked up to the back door, blowing on his hands.

  “Getting dark,” he said through the screen. “I wonder if anyone will come. You know, since we’re new.”

  Charlotte bit her lip. She wanted trick-or-treaters to come very much. She had always loved Halloween, the only night in America where one could get chocolate just because. As a child, October had seemed to her the longest month, with Halloween at the breathless end, a spasm of candy and action. It had been many years since she had celebrated Halloween. After all, she was a grown up, and she was childless. She was constitutionally incapable of being cute and engaging in cuteness, and she suspected she never was cute, even as an infant, and thusly she was a bit skeptical of the impulse that made her want to celebrate Halloween now, with decorations and all, because for whom were all these things intended? Herself? Up and down the street, she heard pots banging, a child being called for, a pogo stick—sounds of normality and domestic concord. She looked back at the jellybeans.

  She said, “We can’t pass these out.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “They’re not individually wrapped.”

  “They have to be individually wrapped?”

  “Yes,” said Charlotte. “Yes they do. I mean, everybody knows that.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Clark.

  “Exactly,” said Charlotte.

  She poured the jellybeans back into the package. She went out to the front porch and took down the glowing paper skeleton she had hung there only hours before.

  “Oh come on,” Clark said, pursuing. “It’s just candy.”

  “It’s not just candy,” said Charlotte. “It’s Halloween.”

  “What does it matter?”

  Charlotte turned to him, pointing. “You got the wrong stuff on purpose.”

  Clark opened his mouth and laughed. “What? Are you kidding?” He followed her into the kitchen, and watched her untie her apron, which she hung with finality on its hook. “I didn’t get the wrong stuff on purpose. Listen, the truth is I never really celebrated Halloween as a kid. I’m not used to it. I don’t like it.” He plucked the front of his shirt. “It scares me, all right?”

  “It scares you?”

  Clark looked outside. The backyard was already completely dark. Through the picture window in the living room, he could see the small figures gathering, wearing masks and pointed hats.

  “My mother used to tell me that all the people in the insane asylum developed superhuman strength on Halloween. Then they’d break out of their cells and wander around, hungry for flesh.”

  “Hungry for flesh,” said Charlotte.

  “Yeah,” said Clark. “They had to be fetched up one by one with special nets. I always wondered why she let Mary go out with Dad, if that was the case. I’d sit with her, in a panic, until they came home.” He leaned against the counter, looking once again outside. “I guess it sort of… stuck with me.”

  “Clark,” said Charlotte, standing across the counter from him. “You know that’s not true, right? It’s a crazy, made-up story.”

  “Right,” he said.

  But just then a young man dressed entirely in white broke through the hedges of the backyard, and Clark’s first thought was, cannibal! He backed away from the window, while the young man, a ghost lost on his way to a party, waved in apology.

  “Clark,” said Charlotte. “Come on now. We’re perfectly absolutely safe in this house. Your mother was just…” she made a frustrated gesture with her hands, “… confused. Come on. You really should try to forget all that.”

  But just then, there was a rapping on the door. They both turned and looked.

  “That’s funny,” Charlotte said. “I just turned off the porch light.”

  She turned back to Clark. He was biting the side of his hand. The sight of this alarmed her. She went to the door, where the knocking persisted. Smiling demonstratively, she flung it open. But then she gasped, for the two figures standing in the darkness rather frightened her—a wild-haired teenage girl with plastic fangs and a child in a scuba suit and mask. It seemed momentarily like some sort of absurd holdup. The girl had whiskers painted on her face and two ears stuck out of her black hair, and the child could be heard breathing doggedly through a hose. The girl spat her fangs into her hand.

  “We were about to leeeeave,” squealed the girl.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have any candy,” Charlotte said politely. “No lights, no candy.”

  But then she heard Clark come up behind her.

  “Judy?” he said. “Judy and James Nye?”

  “You got it!” sang the girl. Then she threw down her pillowcase full of candy and spread her arms. “Ain’t I a lulu?”

  “Oh,” said Charlotte. “Oh.”

  “You guys scared the pants off of me,” said Clark. “I thought—” he looked to Charlotte. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  Judy relaxed her arms and said, looking fiercely at Clark. “It’s been too long, Mr. Adair. May I give you a hug?” The girl pressed her head into Clark’s shirt and shut her eyes. Then she gazed at Charlotte.

  “Is this your wife?” she said.

  “This is Charlotte.”

  “Hi,” said Charlotte.

  “May I hug you?” asked the girl.

  “Oh,” said Charlotte, flinching, “I—” But suddenly the girl-panther was upon her, making a purring sound. She burrowed her face in Charlotte’s armpit.

  “You smell good,” Judy murmured.

  When the two adults and two children were again facing one another in the doorway, Clark put his arm around Charlotte and gave her a squeeze. To the children he said, “You know, I’ve been looking for you in school, James. Where you been? Have you been a good kid, coming to school every day?”

  “He’s so little you can hardly see him,” said Judy.

  Clark knelt and put his face close to the boy’s mask. Inside the mask swam the boy’s blue eyes. One rubber fin squeaked against the doorstop. The boy lifted his mask, revealing a dark, rumpled head. When he looked at Clark, a grin spread unbidden across his face. Charlotte looked away. She looked back. So this was the child.

  “Gimme five,” said Clark.

  The boy gave him five.

  “Give me ten.” The boy gave him ten.

  “All right,” said Judy. “Are you ready for your surprise?”

  “Surprise?” said Clark.

  “Jimmy,” said the girl. “It’s time.”

  The little boy disappeared into the darkness. He came back tugging on one end of a frayed rope. The other end of the rope led back into darkness. There was the sound of toenails coming up the flagstone. An animal sigh. Then, out of the night, wolf white eyes flashed. A pink snout nuzzled a leaf.

  “Tecumseh,” whispered Clark.

  “Are you kidding me?!” Charlotte cried, clapping her hands. “Is this for real?”

  The
dog lifted his head, then perfunctorily wagged his tail. As Charlotte and Clark fell to their knees, Tecumseh skipped right past them into the house, dragging his rope.

  “Here boy!” said Clark. “Good boy!”

  “Good boy! Good dog!” said Charlotte. “I can’t believe it!” She turned to the children. “Where was he?”

  “Some old guy’s yard,” said Judy. “Tied up to the porch. He answered to his name. So we just took a little… poetic license, and emancipated him.”

  “Well come in,” laughed Charlotte, holding out one arm, wanting now very much to hug the girl. “Happy Halloween.”

  In the kitchen, Charlotte plied the girl with jellybeans.

  “All right,” Judy said, dumping them entirely into her pillowcase. “If you insist.”

  Charlotte knelt and kissed Tecumseh several times on his nose. The dog licked his nose off afterward and collapsed to the kitchen floor with a sigh. In the backyard, Clark and James were assiduously raking the leaves into a big pile. Their laughter could be heard through the kitchen window.

  “Let me help you with those dishes,” said Judy, tying on an apron.

  “No need,” said Charlotte. “Really. You sit.”

  Ignoring her, the girl shook a huge gob of dish liquid onto a sponge and lathered it up. They stood next to each other, looking out into the backyard.

  “Leaf-pile jumping,” said Judy, shaking her head. “Never heard of such a thing.”

  “Oh it’s something Clark used to do with his dad when he was little.”

  “Jump into piles of leaves? Didn’t he have toys or anything?”

  Charlotte laughed. She had to admit that Judy Nye seemed like a normal kid, if not a little awkward with her thick conjoined eyebrows and chipped nail polish, but finally not much different from any other young girl who hoped life would turn out to be fun and pretty. Judy’s hair was huge in the kitchen light, and Charlotte thought of herself in high school, loping down the gymnasium floor with a basketball while the burly gym teacher shouted, full of male grief, “Bounce it, you’ve got to bounce it!”