When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  She says that anything Mom wanted done, she had to ask me twice. That the lunch Mom brought along for me, I refused to eat. That I was a far cry from shy, and would spend half of my days in her home creating a show to perform for her and Mom before we’d leave.

  “You used to march around, insisting like the dickens that your name wasn’t Jessie. Because you didn’t like it back then, I think,” she says then, saying I was adamant about it, insistent that my name wasn’t Jessie. That my name was something else, but she doesn’t remember what. “You would pout your face and stomp your foot and insist that people stop calling you Jessie. Stop calling me that, you’d cry, face turning red. Your mother would go along with it for a while, trying to ignore your antics. Because she knew you were doing it for attention and, if she didn’t give in to you, sooner or later you’d quit. Though rarely did you quit,” she smiles, telling me I was a headstrong little girl.

  “You knew what you wanted,” she says.

  Eventually Mom would have enough of it, Eleanor tells me, and she’d get down to eye level and say, That’s enough, Jessie. We talked about this, remember?

  But I have no memory of this at all.

  Why would I go around masquerading as something other than Jessie? I don’t have time to come up with an answer because soon Eleanor is telling me how I used to carry an animal everywhere I went—a stuffed dog or a bear or a rabbit—but I couldn’t care less about that because what I’m wondering is why in the world I would be so unrelenting about that name. About the name Jessie. Why I would insist it wasn’t mine.

  “And then there was your mother’s name,” Eleanor says before I have a chance to think it through, and I ask, “What about it?”

  Her eyebrows crease. She removes a pair of glasses and sets them on the countertop, rubbing at her eyes. “It’s just that most little girls call their mother Mom or Mommy.”

  She leaves it at that and so I ask, “And I didn’t?” thinking suddenly that Eleanor is mistaken. That she’s wrong. Time has altered these memories of hers, or she’s mistaken Mom and me for some other cleaning lady and child. Another child with dimples like mine. Because in all my life, she’s only ever been one thing to me—Mom—or so I think.

  Eleanor shakes her head and at the same time I see my hands before me, gripping the edges of the countertop, also shaking.

  “You didn’t,” she says. “You called her by her given name.”

  Eleanor tells me that Mom would put up with it to a certain extent but then every now and again she’d get down and whisper in my ear, We’ve talked about this, Jessie. Remember? Same as she said about my own name. You’re to call me Mom.

  “For a short while, you’d remember. You’d remember to call your mother Mom. But before too long, you’d forget and go back to calling her by her Christian name. Eden.”

  I don’t remember doing that.

  eden

  January 16, 1998

  Chicago

  I drove the speed limit the entire way, not wanting to draw attention to myself. It snowed much of the time and the roads were slick, though being a Midwesterner, I’m quite accustomed to driving on slick roads. This wasn’t my first time with snow. And yet it was my first getaway, my first flight. My first vanishing act of what I hoped wouldn’t be many, because I prayed that the world would let me disappear, that he would let me go.

  I found myself staring in the rearview mirror nearly the entire time, all along Highway 42 and to the interstate, knuckles turning white from their grip on the steering wheel, though I knew there was no logical way he knew where I was, or that he watched me leave. But still.

  He might just be there.

  When I arrived, the first thing I did was find an apartment that I could afford, which wasn’t easy considering I have so little in the way of money, nearly nothing at all, quite literally ten dollars more than was the rent payment, which means that for the immediate future, we’ll be eating bread and cheese. I purchased a paper at a newsstand and, on a snow-covered park bench, scanned the for-rent ads, settling on a studio apartment in Hyde Park. The building is all wrapped up in a creamy yellow brick facade that’s gone to rack and ruin; it looks abandoned, uncared for and unloved, like me. The ad trumpeted a French Renaissance charm but if it’s there, I can’t see it.

  On the way into the building, I watched a drug deal transpire on the street. It happened right there, right before my eyes, two shadowy figures lurking beside the building, where the tall structure obstructs the sun’s rays, making the men harder to see. They were men, of course, because I find it hard to believe that two women would stand on the street corner trading money for drugs, a wad of folded-up cash for the clear plastic bag of pills that passed from one hand to the next. I never saw their faces or their eyes, for their heads were cloaked in the hoods of sweatshirts like headscarves. And yet the men were tall, lanky, flat. Undeniably men.

  We passed by quickly, my eyes tethered to the broken concrete of the street, feet kicking up pebbles as I went, certain I could feel their eyes on me. I inserted my key and ducked into the foyer of the apartment complex, grateful to be separated by a wall of glass.

  We can’t stay here forever. It isn’t safe, I don’t think.

  And now, inside the apartment, I bolt the door behind me and stare out the peephole for a minute or two, to be certain no one followed me in. Not the drug dealer or his buyer, and not anyone else. I move to the window next, parting the dusty, broken mini-blinds with my fingertips, peering out, my fingers turning gray with dust. I survey the street below to be sure we haven’t been followed, that no one knows we are here.

  The last tenant had been recently evicted, her belongings never reclaimed. Because of this, I’ve been endowed with a foul-smelling sofa, a banged-up table, a mattress with worrisome stains. That and a carton of eggs that expired last week. I don’t think we’ll eat them.

  I open the newspaper and again turn to the classified ads. But this time, instead of searching the apartment listing, I go to the wanted ads, searching for a job as a house cleaner because really, that’s the extent of my qualifications, and after the stunt I pulled at the hospital, references are out of the question. Must be courteous, conscientious, previous experience preferred, I read. Must speak English. Have good communication skills, a great work ethic. The wages are noted; I tally the number of hours I will need to work to pay another month’s worth of rent in this shoddy complex. Sixty hours—that’s what I’d need to work. Though we also need to eat.

  This is no longer just about me.

  I try to relax but she’s kicking and upset now, thrashing about, and I find that I can’t relax. I tell her it’s okay, that she doesn’t need to worry, that she’s safe here with me, though even I don’t know if that’s true because I have yet to decipher if we’re safe here, if I’m safe. I stroke her, running my hand along the flushed skin, and for a moment—only a moment—she stops fighting. She gives in.

  I try on a name for size.

  “Jessie,” I say, taking her stillness as consent.

  I’ll call her Jessie.

  I’m not a bad person, I remind myself, though in that moment as I sit—watching a roach as it scurries across the worn carpeting, reaching a wall, shimmying along the baseboards to where the rest of its family no doubt lies waiting—reflecting on the last twenty-four hours of my life, the last twenty-four days and weeks, I’m not entirely certain that’s true. All sorts of emotions get churned up inside me, everything from sadness to regret and shame, and I think of him standing unsuspectingly at the cottage, knocking on the door in vain.

  “You’re not a bad person,” I incant, believing that if I think on it long enough, if I say it enough times, a thousand times over, it might somehow turn true.

  I didn’t set out to do the things I did. There was never any willful intent, any malice, only a pining for something I didn’t have, something I so desperately neede
d. You wouldn’t condemn a famished child for stealing a loaf of bread, now would you? A homeowner for shooting an armed intruder to protect his family?

  I’m not a bad person, I decide, far more resolute this time.

  I only did what I had to do.

  jessie

  When I finally make my way back to Cornelia Avenue, it’s evening. The colors of the sky have begun to change. Shadows fall across the street. The sun is thinking about going down.

  I walk along Cornelia beside Old Faithful, staring at the million-dollar homes that fringe the street. They’re mostly newly gutted homes with small tracts of grass. For each home lies a single tree on the road verge, fully grown. Its leaves form a canopy over the street where it joins with the tree on the other side. Conjoined twins.

  The temperatures have fallen. It’s no more than fifty-some degrees outside, a cold that creeps under my clothing, chilling me to the bone. The heat in the carriage home is stingy at best, when it runs. Though I toyed with the thermostat this morning, setting the temperature to seventy-two degrees, the furnace never kicked on before I left. When I arrive, it will be cold inside.

  As I make my way along the street, the dread of nighttime creeps in. The fear of eight long hours of darkness with nothing to do and only morbid thoughts to keep me company.

  The front door of the greystone is open as I approach, though Ms. Geissler is nowhere to be seen. I stop on the sidewalk, wondering if I should let her know or if I should keep going. What I want to do is keep going, but my conscience says otherwise.

  There’s a garden on the front lawn of the greystone, one I didn’t notice before, but now I do. It’s not huge because city living doesn’t allow for things to be huge. But it’s magical. A blanket of yellows and oranges and reds that warms the earth. Tiny white butterflies hover above the blooms, levitating midair.

  I blink once and they’re gone because most likely they were never really there.

  I make my way down the walkway, climbing the steps toward the front door. The home is large; three stories tall with a garden apartment to boot, one that peeks at me from beneath street level, hidden behind a black metal fence.

  As I knock on the door, it pushes open more than it was before. My eyes take in the foyer, a carpeted runner, an unlit chandelier that dangles from the ceiling. “Hello?” I call out into the empty space, but if my landlord is here, she doesn’t hear me.

  My fingers press the doorbell and I hear the chime of it from inside, but still, there’s no reply. “Hello?” I call again, laying a hand flat against the door and pressing it the rest of the way open. My feet cross the threshold as I step into the home.

  I reach for a light switch and toggle it up and down, but nothing happens. The chandelier above me remains dark. It’s not black in the home because the sun has yet to go all the way down. There’s still some light outside, but it’s fading fast. Soon it will be gone.

  “Ms. Geissler?” I call out, explaining who I am and why I’m here. “It’s Jessie,” I say. “Jessie Sloane. Your new tenant. I just moved in to the carriage home,” I call out, and at first I think the worst, that she’s here somewhere, but that she’s hurt. That she’s had a nasty fall. That she can’t answer me because she’s lying on the ground just waiting to be found. That she’s dead.

  I don’t think the obvious. That Ms. Geissler’s in the shower and can’t hear me. That she forgot to close the door on the way out rather than the way in. That she’s not here.

  “Ms. Geissler?” I call again, with an urgency to my voice this time. “Hello? Are you here?”

  And it’s only then that I hear the sound of a piano playing from upstairs. Classical music, I think. The kind you’ve heard before because it’s famous. Mozart. Beethoven. I don’t know which. The piano is quieted down from the distance, diluted, but still I hear it, the music staccato-like, sharp and disconnected.

  And I breathe a sigh of relief because she’s here. Because she’s fine.

  I could go home now.

  I should go home now.

  I should pull the door fully closed behind me and leave.

  But instead I find myself hesitating at the base of the stairs. My hand grips the baluster as I stare up the flight of stairs, into the dark, cavernous second floor of the home. Because now the classical music has turned into some sort of ballad, and I find that it’s haunting and beautiful.

  That it’s calling me, summoning me up the stairs.

  Begging me to come and listen, to come and see.

  And instead of leaving, my feet carry me up the stairs before I can think this through. I hold my breath as I go, listening only to the sound of the piano. Climbing upward, one step at a time.

  The house is large, each room sprawling and grand, though they’re hard to see for the scarcity of light, which becomes even more dim with each minute that passes by. Upstairs, my legs carry me to the bedroom from which the music comes. The only room that, as far as I can see, boasts light. The door is pulled to and so there’s only a sliver of it. Only a sliver of light peeking from beneath the door slab.

  I go to it.

  Standing before the closed door, I listen to the sound of the piano play. My hand drops to the door’s handle and it’s unintentional when I turn the knob. I can’t help myself; it just happens. I press a hand flat against the door and push it open, so slowly so that it doesn’t squeak. I see her there on the piano’s bench, her back to me. Her fingers move nimbly over the piano keys, foot pressing against the pedal with obvious expertise. I find myself entranced by her song, by the rhythmic motion of her hands and feet.

  And then she stops playing.

  And it strikes me suddenly, an awareness.

  She knows that I am here.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  All at once I feel like a trespasser. Like I’ve gone too far. This is not my home and I have no business being here.

  She doesn’t turn. “Something I can help you with?” she asks and I gasp first before I laugh. A nervous laugh. An exhausted laugh. One I can’t make stop though I try. And only then does she turn and look at me as I press my hands to my mouth to smother the laugh.

  Ms. Geissler looks to me to be about sixty years old. Her hair is short, a dyed blond that’s feathered around the edges. She wears glasses, dark, plastic frames that sit on the bridge of her nose. There’s a frailty about her, her body gaunt, cloaked in a cotton dress. She rises to her feet and only then do I see that she’s petite. There are lines on her face, laugh lines, frown lines, crow’s-feet. And yet they look more regal than old. She’s a beautiful woman.

  “Jessie, isn’t it?” she asks, and though it takes a minute to find my voice, I say that it is. She says that it’s nice to meet me. She steps toward me, slipping her hand into mine. My hand shakes as it did this afternoon, a quiver that won’t quit.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I say. Though I’ve done far worse than interrupt. “I rang the doorbell. I knocked. The front door was open,” I explain, voice as doddery as my hands, just barely managing to scrape the memories together and remember why I’m here. “You left your front door open,” I say again, for lack of anything better to say.

  “Oh,” she says, chastising the door latch. How it’s old. How it doesn’t work properly. How she needs to get it fixed, as she needs to get many things in this old home fixed.

  “How is everything with the carriage home?” she asks instead, and I tell her fine. I say how much I like it. I compliment the hardwood floors because I can think of nothing else to say. I say that they are pretty. I thank her for letting me stay there. She says it’s no bother.

  It’s awkward and uncomfortable, all the conversation forced. I think then that I should leave. I’ve overstayed my welcome because I was never welcome in the first place.

  But just as I’m about to say my goodbyes and go, a noise comes
from somewhere upstairs. From the third floor of the home. What it sounds like to me is the thud of a textbook falling. Something heavy and dense. I glance upward, finding a hatch there, a pulldown ladder that when folded up and stowed away becomes one with the ceiling, as it is now.

  “What’s that?” I ask, but Ms. Geissler’s face goes suddenly blank, and she shakes her head, asking, “What’s what?”

  “The noise,” I say. “Is someone there?” as I point up toward the ceiling.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she replies.

  I hold my breath and listen in vain for more noises coming from up above. But they don’t come. The house is silent, and I know then: I made it up.

  My eyes burn. I rub at them, making them more red than they were before, still aware of my shaking hands.

  “I must be mistaken,” I say, holding my hands out before me so that I can see the way they tremble. They’re cold. But that’s not the reason for the trembling. It’s something far worse than that, I think. Something neurological. I have my brain to thank for this. Because after all these nights without sleep, my brain functions are out of whack.

  I try and convince myself that the shaky hands aren’t degenerative. That they aren’t getting worse. And yet there’s no denying the fact.

  My hands are shaking far more than they were this afternoon.

  It’s as if she can read my mind.

  “You’ve been having trouble sleeping,” she says, more of a statement than a question. She’s not asking me because she knows. Behind the glasses, her eyes are a soft gray, staring at me in pity. I wonder how it is she knows I haven’t been sleeping. Does it have something to do with the dark circles under my eyes, the bags, the red pools of blood that flood my sclera?

  “I saw your light on late last night,” she says by means of explanation, and I think of myself last night. Hearing the strange pinging sound through the floor register, the voices, and turning the light on to investigate. It was nothing, of course, though still I spent the rest of the night lying in bed unable to sleep, forever indebted to the sun when it finally decided to rise and I headed off in search of caffeine, my magical potion, which becomes far less potent with each passing day that I don’t sleep.