by Adam Golaski
“I suppose I ought to get to work, right?” The man turned to the drafting table, adjusted the angle of the lamp but did not turn the lamp on—the room was dark. And dark. The man picked up a pencil and a little brass pencil sharpener—Molly heard the sound of the pencil as it turned against the sharpener’s blade. “I guess the best place to start is where you stand now,” he said.
Outside, Molly’s parents were hysterical. Mom shouted Molly’s name in the darkening parking lot. Dad used a phone in the diner as Mathilda stood by, a worried expression on her face.
Mathilda in the museum clicked at the door.
Molly said, as calmly as she could, “I want to go.”
The man said, “Oh, but look, you can’t.” He gestured for Molly to come join him at the drafting table, to see what it was he drew. Molly read the title: “Molly stands still.” And while she didn’t look anything like what the Animator had drawn on the page, she would not be able to move until he was finished. The laminated card with the Lord’s Prayer was in her pocket. She had never learned the prayer, not by heart, and her cousin’s recitation of it in his story was the first time she’d heard it since Christmas. She could not remember any of it; at least, she could not seem to bring any of it to mind. And so the prayer, her salvation, cruelly mocked her ignorance. If only she could read the words, if only Cousin Mike were here.
The Animator drew, and Molly hoped he would draw her hand to her pocket. Though she could not imagine why he would.
IN THE CELLAR
Ironing naked, Joseph’s wife Marguerite asked Joseph to tell her a story. He was dozing, and he was watching her breasts shift as she rearranged a blouse on the board, watching her mouth purse as she got the tip of the iron into a corner of fabric, but mostly, he was dozing. His legs and arms were spread across the bed, his penis relaxed, spent, his breathing drifting into snoring. Joseph acknowledged that he would tell Marguerite a story, and then he snored a little. It was late, he was tired, but she had decided after making love that she was going to iron her blouses, to be ready for the week, and while she was at it she would iron his shirts, so: “Joseph. Tell me a story.” He moved again, jerked awake, then closed his eyes again. “Come on, Joseph. Tell me a story while I iron.” “Okay,” he said with his eyes closed. “Okay,” he said to the white ceiling. “Okay,” he said, as he looked at his wife.
Because he was not fully awake, he told a story he didn’t expect to tell. He said, “I remember the stairs that go down and I remember the little girl who led me.” Marguerite stopped ironing for a moment, to take in what Joseph had said. She frowned. He woke up a little more and started again:
“When I was living alone, in the apartment, I woke one night from a nightmare. I tried to go back to sleep but every time I closed my eyes the images that had terrified me came back. I turned on my bedside lamp which cast my bedroom a dirty yellow. I wrote the nightmare out, hoping to exorcize the images into my notebook; no good, they were still firm. So, exhausted, I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen, flipping light switches the whole way. I poured myself a glass of milk and sat at the small card table where I used to eat my meals. As I sat there, a memory came back, in toto, all at once.”
Joseph appeared to be in contemplation, but his snore gave him away. “Joseph,” Marguerite said. Joseph said, “The off-season cottage. The yard. Lilacs. Abigail and the steps.” Marguerite set her iron down and started to come around the ironing board, because it looked to her as if Joseph had slipped into a nightmare. But he opened his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I’m not making any sense, am I? Let me make some tea.”
He returned to their bedroom with two cups of tea, set one on the night table and another on the end of the ironing board. Marguerite moved her cup from the ironing board to the night table and Joseph told this story:
When Joseph was eight, his family moved, for an off-season, to a small cottage in the seaside town Marion. The air smelled of lilac and ocean. The trees were still green but for patches of color: an oak in the back with an iris of red. The drive was a gravel roundabout, with a great pine in the center which cast a shadow over the house. To the left of the house was a small shed, slightly dilapidated, painted white with green trim to match the house. The shed’s window was thick with dust; through it, only vague shapes could be seen. The backyard was the cottage’s most impressive feature. An enormous field of carefully trimmed green grass, marked at its halfway point by a row of apple trees. At the far end of the yard was a flat granite boulder and a split rail fence, which right-angled and ran along the right, street-side of the yard. The left side of the yard was delineated by tall, thick, lilac bushes.
Joseph’s bedroom was bright during the day. One large window opened out over the backyard, and another faced the shed. For the first week he and his parents spent in the cottage, there were no curtains up over those windows: during the day Joseph didn’t care, but at night he felt vulnerable. He liked least his view of the shed, which, even on dark nights, was bright white.
Toward the end of the first week, he woke in the middle of the night, opened his eyes and saw a little girl at the shed window, screaming. He whimpered. Her hands were pressed to the glass, her mouth was wide open. Behind her, something moved. He screamed, “Mom!” And, “Dad!” His father flipped the light switch, flooding the room, and erasing the image of the screaming girl: his bedroom window went dark. Joseph’s mother pushed into the room, alert, awake. She touched his face, his arms, pulled back his covers to examine his body. “What’s wrong Joe, what’s wrong?” His father crouched in front of him. Joseph said, “There’s a little girl in the shed and she’s screaming. I saw her in the window.” His father walked around the bed to the window, put his hands to the glass and looked out. Joseph’s mother looked at his father, who turned and said, “I don’t see anything, Joe. But I’ll go out and check.” Joseph’s mother kept caressing him and reassured him that his father would make sure everything was all right. When his father got to the bedroom door, his mother asked, “Should I be calling the police?” His father replied, “Just keep an eye on me.”
Joseph’s mother turned on the small light by Joseph’s bed, then stood—“I’m not going anywhere,” she reassured—and turned off the overhead light. Now they could see out the window into the side yard. Soon they saw Joseph’s dad, leather jacket on over his pajamas, work shoes without socks and a heavy flashlight. He walked to the shed. He checked the door. Apparently it was locked. He walked to the shed window and shone the light inside. For a moment, Joseph and his mother could see the cluttered interior. Joseph’s dad pointed the light into the backyard and walked a little ways into it, out of sight. When he came back into view, he gave Joseph and Joseph’s mother a thumb’s up, then headed back toward the front of the cottage. In a moment, he was standing in the door frame of Joseph’s bedroom. “I didn’t see anything, Joseph. And you saw me look around. But it sounds like you had a bad nightmare, so feel free to join us tonight if you want.” Joseph’s mother smiled, and Joseph, getting sleepy amid the comfort of his parents, mumbled that he wanted to sleep with them. Joseph’s father picked him up, and the three of them left Joseph’s room. Once Joseph was tucked into his parents’ bed, Joseph’s father signaled for his mother to step out into the hall. He said, “I didn’t see anything, Mary, but I heard something in the backyard. Toward the left, by the bushes.” “Was it an animal?” she asked. “Probably. But I’m going to make sure all the windows and doors are locked before I join you two for bed.”
When not at school or in his room playing, Joseph took long, exploratory walks. These walks never took him far but there was a wealth of detail to be found close to home. Along the left perimeter of the backyard, among the short trunks of the lilac bushes, were gaps large enough for him to crawl into, which gave him glimpses of the yard beyond—his only glimpses: the house was otherwise surrounded by a high, unpainted picket fence. There wasn’t much to be revealed by his spying—another backyard, another flat plane of bright gre
en grass. The only mystery a cellar entrance, a slanted cement bunker with metal doors. Joseph could lie for hours watching those doors and fantasizing about the people who might exit from them.
On a bright, cool afternoon, as he squirmed under one of the bushes, turning up the pale, dry dirt—tendrils of dust rising to his nose—he unearthed something metal. With his fingers he began to dig around it, to assess its size, his goal to remove it from the earth. He cut several inches into the dirt on either side of the object, and then it dawned on Joseph what it was he’d discovered; a rail. To confirm this, he began to dig a few feet to the left of the single rail he’d uncovered, and then a few feet to the right. Eventually he located the parallel rail, and, with a little more effort, a rotting wooden tie. He slid out from under the bushes, astonished by the thought of a buried train line—from where, he wondered, from the ocean? He began to walk a straight line from the rail he’d discovered across his backyard, mumbling to himself as he did. His mother, who was in the kitchen, noticed him doing this when she glanced out the window to see what he was up to. She dried her hands on a dish towel as she walked toward him. She called out his name. He stopped, looked up and eagerly waved her over. When she was close enough to speak to him without shouting she said, “It looks like you’re marching.”
“I’m following train tracks.”
“Train tracks?”
Too excited to explain, he said, “Let me show you.” He took her hand and led her to the bush he’d been under. As they walked she noticed how dirty he was; she refrained from commenting. “Look at what I found,” he said, pointing under the bush. His mother had to get on her knees—for a moment he saw just how small he was and how his world was full of extraordinary minutia—then excitement rushed over him and the thought was gone, never fully formed.
Before his mother understood what it was Joseph had found she saw the glint of metal and wondered if he’d unearthed something electrical. Her heart sped up, and she began to back away and admonish her son. Then she saw what actually he had unearthed, and linked it with what he had been saying, and her concern vanished, and she was taken by curiosity. “These are train tracks.”
“Yeah. I was following where they went.”
She stood up, brushed off her slacks and looked across the yard in the direction Joseph had been walking. “That would take the train right into the ocean,” she said. She regained her sense of concern and said, “You shouldn’t dig in the yard like that. You might hit a wire and electrocute yourself.” Then she said, “But this is interesting. I’ll have to stop by the library, see if a line ran through here.”
“Why would a train go into the ocean?”
Joseph’s mother looked in the direction of the beach that lay across the street, just behind a great yellow house with a widow’s peak she found romantic. “Maybe there was a loading dock at one time.” She doubted this; to have all signs of commerce cleared away for what was now a residential area seemed unlikely. “Or maybe the tracks curved that way into town.” She turned and faced the road to town. She imagined a train roaring through the house, tearing up the earth as it rode on its sunken rail. “Come on,” she said, back from her reverie. “Let me make you some lunch. We’ll figure it out later.”
Late October, walking home from school, kicking through fallen leaves, Joseph spotted a cat. Instead of running away, the cat stood still, tail raised and curling like smoke from a chimney. Joseph crouched in front of it, letting his backpack drop to the ground behind him, and opened his hand to the animal. It approached him and licked the tips of his fingers—the roughness of its tongue pleased Joseph. He saw that the cat had no collar, so he named the cat: Marla—after one of the girls in his class (who was always nice to Joseph).
When Marla began to walk away, he followed. She walked past the cottage toward the house next door. She slipped under the picket fence. He tried to see between the fence slats, but the pickets were tight together. He backed up, considered running to the lilac bushes and crawling underneath, but opted instead to climb the tree which stood in the center of the roundabout in front of the cottage, so he could see over the fence and see where the cat had gone (maybe it would go into the cellar?). Once in the tree, he spotted Marla immediately, bright white and black against a backdrop of dried leaves.
Adjusting his position on the branch he’d climbed to, Joseph glimpsed something white in the uppermost window of the house next door. He focused his attention on the small pane of glass and saw that at the window was a little girl in a white dress. He was startled, and for a moment lost his balance—she reminded him of the girl he’d seen in the shed (and mostly forgotten about, except when he couldn’t sleep at night). Once he regained his balance, he looked again at the window, and realized she was watching him. Hesitantly, he waved. She waved back. He stared at her for a long while, and when she backed away, into the darkness of that upstairs room, he continued to stare, until the muscles in his arms and legs began to tremble from the strain of keeping him balanced in the tree.
Joseph spent the following afternoons prowling around the perimeter of his neighbor’s house in hopes that the little girl would come outside. He thought about knocking on the door and once stood at the front gate—considering the possibility—but got no further. Sometimes, as he crawled along the lilac bushes Marla would join him, slinking in and out between the trunks. When he lay still long enough, she would climb onto his back. When she did, Joseph tried not to move, because he liked the company and the weight of her warm body. Eventually she would grow restless and walk out into the yard Joseph couldn’t bring himself to explore. He’d often end his outings—as the sun set—by climbing the tree in the front yard and staring at the window where he’d seen the girl.
One evening, after dinner, when his folks had finished washing up and were chatting over cups of coffee, they mentioned the house next door. They were discussing the neighborhood and Joseph’s father asked, “Have you ever seen anyone come in or out of that big house next door?” Joseph stopped playing (he was under the dining room table, steering his cars along the pattern on the carpet). His mother said, “No. I noticed that too. I was chatting with Mrs. Garnett—she lives at the top of our street—and I asked if the house was vacant. She said as far as she knew, it wasn’t, that a family of three lived there. She said they were very private people—they were the ones who put up the high fence. One of the ladies at the school told her that she thought the family was very religious and home taught their child.” Joseph’s father said, “A fundamentalist family in this town? Maybe there’s an invalid next door, and everything’s delivered.” His parents’ speculation ended soon after, and as far as Joseph knew, his parents’ promises to investigate further never materialized, much the same way his mother never followed up on the buried tracks.
The first snow of the season left only a dust of powder on the ground. The second snowfall buried Marion in a foot of snow. Having not seen the girl in nearly a month and with the cold growing bitter, Joseph had become less vigilant about his watch. Occasionally he sought out Marla, but she, too, had become of dim interest. Now he tended to spend his afternoons in his bedroom, playing on the floor with his toy men or cars or blocks.
One such afternoon he happened to glance out his window and saw, behind the now bare lilac bushes (a fence of black, pointed sticks), the little girl. She wasn’t wearing a coat, just a little white dress and white stockings pulled to her knees. Her feet were hidden by the snow. Joseph took his jacket and was outside, was in the backyard, was facing the little girl through the grate of bare branches.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” she said. “Is that your yard?”
He looked over his shoulder at the enormous white plain around him. “Yes. Do you live in that house?”
“Yes. What’s your name?”
“Joseph.”
“That’s a handsome name.” Which sounded very adult to Joseph, and made him feel he was dealing with someone not only mysterious, but more
mature and probably smarter. “I’m Abigail. I hate my name. How old are you?”
“Eight,” he said, careful to answer her questions directly.
“I’m nine.”
“Is that your room?” He pointed to the small upper window. “Up there?”
“Yes.”
“It must be great, living so high up. Can you see the ocean?”
“No.”
He was unsure if she was telling him she couldn’t see the ocean or that it wasn’t so great to live so high up. Her answer was so abrupt, though, he was afraid to ask for any clarification.
“Why haven’t I seen you out?” he asked.
“My parents won’t let me. They’re away. I’m cold. Will you come in?”
Joseph knew he shouldn’t without telling his parents, but she wasn’t wearing a jacket and it was terribly cold. “Okay,” he said.
He expected they would go around to the front door, or that there was a side door he’d never seen, but instead, as he crawled under the branches (they made zipper sounds across the back of his jacket), she opened the cellar doors. When he stood up and could see down the yellow-lit steps, his chest filled with terror. Before he could back down, turn and go home, to his room, to the kitchen where his mother was cooking, Abigail stepped over the bunker lip and down the first few cement steps. She turned and said, “Come on.”
What, from the top of the stairs, had looked like a square of the cellar floor, was in fact only a landing. At the second landing, which Joseph had also hoped was the cellar floor, he stopped and said, “Where are we going?” Above his head was a bare incandescent bulb, screwed into a socket which was set into the wall.
“I want to see if I can get to the trains. You can protect me.”