When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  Only in daylight do I give up my perch. I rise to my feet, arching my back from the stiff muscles that come with three or four hours of lying on the hardwood floors. I creep across the room slowly, deliberately, one step at a time, my legs half-asleep. And I’m jealous of them because at least some small part of me still knows how to sleep.

  In the shower, I shampoo my hair. I reach for the conditioner and end up dumping another handful of shampoo on my scalp. I wash my body and then, because I can’t remember if I did, I wash it again. Though later, when my skin starts to secrete a sour smell, I wonder if I washed at all.

  I head off for a cleaning assignment. As I scrub away on the homeowner’s porcelain floors, I notice that my fingernails are still intact. Not a single nail is torn. There’s no dried blood clinging to my fingertips because they haven’t been bleeding. Even now I feel the sharp edges of the screw head burrowing into my fingertips, and I’m not sure if that happened or if I only imagined it did.

  I lock up before I leave. I load my paraphernalia onto the back end of Old Faithful. Mop, bucket, rubber gloves. The September day is sunny and warm. I ride in the street, on tapered one-way streets, which narrow with parked cars like the thickening of arteries with deposits of fat.

  I stop for coffee and a donut, taking them to go. “Have a good one, Jenny,” the owner of the bakery says to me as I leave, and I think maybe she doesn’t have it wrong after all. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe I really am a Jenny, since I’m no longer Jessica Sloane.

  I pedal past a police station. On the sidewalk before the brick building, I pause. I think about stepping inside, asking them to fingerprint me. Maybe they can look my prints up in their system and tell me who I am. But I’m not sure that’s how it works. I’m sure they’d need a reason to fingerprint me, and I’m not sure I have one to give. Not a good one anyway. Not one that wouldn’t raise red flags.

  But then my mind drifts to the notion of DNA, one of those in-home kits that you mail away. Those that claim, with a simple swab of the cheek, to help you figure out your family tree, find distant relatives, discover unknown ethnicities. It’s just what I need. To figure out who I am.

  I return to the coffee bar on Dearborn and sit there on the blue velvet sofa, waiting for the man from the garden. Hoping he’ll come today. I see orange everywhere I look. On a shirt, a shoelace, a flyer taped to a store window, in a flower bed. But none are the man.

  I go to the garden, slipping back in between the honey locust trees and finding my way to Mom’s favorite spot. It’s empty, except for a bird, a little brown thing, a sparrow, pecking away in the dirt for food. I scare it away as I make my way to the edge of the raised bed, sitting on the marbled edge, my eyes circumspect but also tired. The twitch in my eye has yet to go away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. It twitches incessantly, only stopping when I dig the heels of my hands into it and press hard.

  After an hour or two, I give up. I take the long way back to the carriage home because I’m in no hurry to return. I bike past the elementary school at the corner of Cornelia and Hoyne, a stately structure made almost entirely of red brick, four floors that are tall and thin and deep. Kids play outside, on a parking lot playground beside the school building. The flag is at half-staff; someone has died. The kids are rowdy, unruly, loud, like howler monkeys defending their territory. They scurry to the top of the jungle gym, laying claim to the swings and slides.

  I round the corner at Cornelia. A bell rings, calling the kids inside from play. They’ll go home soon; it’s midafternoon. Once they’re gone, the world is suddenly silent. The trees stand tall and proud, the sun’s light getting scattered at random through their leaves, dusting the sidewalk.

  As I near in on the greystone, I watch as, across the street from it, a little boy schlepps a bucket, waddling down to the sidewalk with his mother on his heels. He flips the bucket upside down and a stack of chalk falls to the concrete. It makes a racket. A single blue piece nearly rolls into the street but he stops it in time, running awkwardly after it. His mother asks him what he’s going to draw, waving her hand at me, calling out hello. He’s going to draw a hippopotamus.

  Ms. Geissler is also outside. She’s bent at the waist, picking weeds from her flower bed, plucking and gathering them in her hands. She wears gaudy gardening gloves and, on her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat that keeps the sun from her skin.

  I see her and feel a rush of anger well inside me. A rush of anger and unease, among other things. I think of Ms. Geissler there in the third-story window watching me at night. The third story, which is overrun with squirrels. The third story, where she claims she hasn’t been in months. I think of the eyes, of her eyes, pressed to the window like the eyes of an owl, big enough and bright enough to catch prey on even the darkest of nights.

  But it’s more than that too, because I’m certain that someone has been in the carriage home when I wasn’t there. Only two people should have a key to that home, and it’s Ms. Geissler and me.

  The carriage home is technically hers, but as far as I’m concerned, she shouldn’t be allowed to come and go without reasonable notice. Without letting me know in advance, twenty-four hours in my opinion. It’s one thing if the pipes had burst or sewage was overflowing from the toilet, but so far, that’s not the case.

  I think of what Lily the apartment finder said about carriage homes not abiding by the same rules as prescribed in the city’s landlord-tenant ordinance. Living here, I wouldn’t be protected in the same way, she’d told me.

  Did she mean I’d have a complete lack of privacy? That Ms. Geissler could enter my home without permission? Open and close my window shades? Stare in through the glass at me?

  For some reason, I don’t think so.

  At first I think I should keep going, that I should pedal right on by. But then I have second thoughts. I want to speak to her, because there’s something nefarious going on here—many nefarious things—and I want to know what it is.

  I force down the kickstand of Old Faithful and stand, hands on my hips behind Ms. Geissler. As I do, words emerge. I don’t think them through.

  “Why have you been watching me?” I ask.

  Her smile is warm. “Jessie,” she says kindly, as if she didn’t hear my question or the tone of my voice at all. Instead she says that it’s nice to see me today. “How about this weather?” she asks, hands elevated, praising the sun and the sky for this glorious day.

  And I’m thrown easily off track, thinking then only about the weather. Forgetting about the pair of eyes watching me at night. Forgetting the fear I felt at stepping inside the carriage home and finding the shades open wide.

  I snap to. “Why have you been watching me?” I ask, and her face clouds over in confusion. Her eyebrows crease.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she declares.

  “I saw you,” I assert, pointing a finger at the windows up above. The windows that are dark now, not a light on inside. They’re obscure, shadows only. The only thing that I can see is the outside world getting cast back at me. A reflection. “Standing up there,” I say. “Three nights in a row now,” I say, though the truth is that I’ve lost count. It could be three. It could be four or more. “You’ve been staring into the house, watching me. Spying on me. Why?” I demand. “Why are you watching me?”

  The smile slips from her face. Or rather gets replaced with one that’s more pitying. Ruts form between her eyes, deep trenches in the skin. She pulls the hat from her head and a great big cluster of hair falls from her head, getting trapped in the straw brim. Like Mom’s used to do before she bit the bullet and shaved it all off. I see her and me standing together in the shower basin. Starting with an electric shaver first, and then a cheap, plastic disposable razor. Rubbing gobs of aloe vera on it when we were through.

  “Well, aren’t you going to say something?” I ask when Ms. Geissler doesn’t say anything. I can’t st
and to see her looking at me piteously, saying nothing. “You have no right,” I say, my eyes lost on the clump of hair that has fallen out of her scalp. She grabs a hold of it, plucks it from the hat and releases it to the wind. “No right,” I tell her, “to be spying on me.”

  “Jessie,” Ms. Geissler says. Her voice bleeds of sympathy, empathy. Or darn good theatrics. I don’t know which, but whatever it is, I don’t like it one bit. “Jessie, dear,” she says again. “You’re still not sleeping, no?” she asks. I feel my knees become liquid. They soften. I want to say no, that I haven’t been sleeping. I want her to tell me to try warm milk. A spoonful of honey. To listen to music before I go to bed. Calming music. Lullabies. Not because I trust her; I don’t. But because I want someone to tell me about the music and the voices that come to life in the ductwork at night. About Jessica Sloane.

  In that moment I see her, Jessica Sloane, in her purple bathing suit, lying dead on the street. Pigeons circle around her, staring at her with their beady eyes.

  Ms. Geissler stands before me, staring. “Jessie, are you all right?” she asks, and only then do I realize that she’s been speaking to me. That she’s been speaking to me and I didn’t hear a word. “You don’t look all right,” she decides, empathy in her eyes, but I won’t let her divert me from my track. I look around, remembering where I am. Remembering what I was going to say.

  “Slept like a baby,” I lie.

  I look to the ground for the clump of hair that fell from Ms. Geissler’s head, but it’s not there. All there is is a cluster of leaves, a mixture of yellows and browns that shrivel on the lawn. As my eyes rise to Ms. Geissler, she replaces the hat on her head. And there I see it. A single wilted yellow leaf, folded like a moth in its cocoon, clinging to the straw of the hat.

  There was never a clump of hair. I’d only imagined it was hair. It was just leaves. Leaves falling from a nearby tree, getting snagged on the hat as she hunched over the lawn, tending garden.

  “I see you there in the window. Every single night. I know you see me. You were in my home,” I snap, my tone turning vitriolic. “That’s trespassing, you know?” I say. “An invasion of privacy. I could call the police. I should call the police.”

  She’s quiet at first. “Jessie, honey,” she says, the look on her face one of concern. Condolence. Shame. “Oh, Jessie. Poor, poor, Jessie,” she says instead, pitying me, ignoring my threat to call the police. She takes a step toward me, makes an attempt to stroke my arm with her gaudy gardening gloves. But I pull back. “You must be mistaken, dear,” she says. “The third floor, I told you already,” she says, making a sweeping gesture of the greystone behind her. “I don’t go up there anymore. I haven’t been up there in months.”

  It’s a lie. I know that’s not true. I know because she was there.

  “I saw the light on in the attic. I saw you standing there in the window looking out. Watching me.”

  “No,” she says to me, shaking her head, looking concerned and confused. “There are no lights up there in the attic. I’d had a lamp once, just an old floor lamp, nothing special, but the squirrels chewed their way right through the cord. Can you imagine?” she says then, tsking her tongue and shaking her head. “Pesky little things. It’s a wonder they didn’t electrocute themselves.” And for the briefest of moments it sounds so genuine, so real, that I almost see the squirrels’ overgrown teeth gnawing their way through the cord, cutting power to the floor lamp.

  But not quite.

  “I know what I saw,” I insist.

  But somewhere deep inside me, I also wonder if I do.

  “You must be mistaken, Jessie,” she says. “Maybe it was a dream. You’ve lost your mother. Grief can be a terrible thing. The isolation, the desperation—” But I stop her before she can cite for me the stages of grief. Her eyes now are chock-full of condolence. Sorrow. They mock me. I know what she’s doing. With her pitiful eyes and her compassion, she’s trying to make me question my own sanity, to make me think I’m crazy. A by-product of the insomnia and the grief.

  But I know what I saw. There was a light on in the third floor. There were eyes in the window, watching me.

  “Then let me see,” I insist. My words are assertive. I attempt to call her bluff. “Let me go to the attic. Let me see for myself that there is no light there.”

  Her lips curve upward. She grins. Not a happy smile, not a mocking smile, but an appeasing one. She’s placating me. “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s quite the mess, Jessie. I don’t even think it’s safe to go up there,” she says. Not until she can get her contractor out to clean it up, which she says she really needs to do. It’s been too long and the attic, for now, is just a waste of space. And then she says that she must go. Rain is on its way, she says, staring skyward. Until now I didn’t notice the storm clouds rolling in. It was all blue sky and sun, but now it’s not. Now there are clouds. “The weeds are calling me,” Ms. Geissler says, turning, stepping closer to the thistle and away from me.

  And then, in that moment, from up above, the clouds burst apart at the seams. Rainwater comes pouring down. Just like that, the sun-dappled sidewalks are gone, getting replaced with puddles. I take my eyes off Ms. Geissler, looking down, to see my feet submerged in a puddle of water. Across the street, the little boy’s chalk hippopotamus gets washed away, rallying his tears. He begins to cry. But not before first throwing his chalk so that it breaks in two, screaming, “It’s ruined,” and then stomping off and heading inside, hot on his mother’s heels.

  I look back toward Ms. Geissler, but already she’s gone.

  In the distance, a screen door slams and there I am.

  Hair matted down, wet clothes binding to me. All alone.

  * * *

  The rain, only a cloudburst, is through. Over and done with. No sooner had I fled the lawn for the cover of indoors than it stopped. The sun forced its way through the clouds again like a baby chick breaking free from an eggshell. The world turned yellow, golden.

  Drop by drop the rain disappeared, going back up the way it came down. And then the sun set, turning the world to pink and then purple and then black, welcoming another sleepless night.

  I stare out the window and into the third story of Ms. Geissler’s home. I stare until my eyes get tired from it, so tired that my retinas begin to burn, the lid continuing to twitch. And yet I can’t bring myself to blink because in those milliseconds, I might miss something, a flicker of light, eyes in the window staring back at me. The house itself blurs, softening at the edges because I’ve been staring too long.

  But still, I don’t blink.

  The shades on the third-story window are drawn. All three of them pulled taut. Like the world outside, the room is dark. For hours on end, there’s no one there. Evidence that I’m mistaken. Evidence that I am wrong. That Ms. Geissler hasn’t been standing in the window watching me at night, and that my imagination only made it up. It couldn’t have been a dream because when you don’t sleep you don’t dream. And so instead it was my mind playing games with me.

  All night long, the window remains empty and black. It’s cold in the carriage home because I’ve turned the heat completely off in an effort to prevent noises from sneaking in through the ductwork. So far, it’s working. There are no voices; there are no pings. No music. But as a result, the temperature in the carriage home hurtles to fifty degrees. My fingers and toes go numb.

  As I lie there in bed listening to the tick, tock of the wall clock, it dawns on me. Mom is not my biological mom. It seems so transparent, so glaring there in the witching hour. As if it’s been staring me in the face all this time and I just failed to see. I look nothing like her, for starters, which doesn’t necessarily matter because for all I know I’m a dead ringer of my dad. But still, it’s cause for doubt.

  If Mom is not my biological mother, then how did I come to be with her? How did I come to think of her as my mom?

  Mayb
e it was something innocuous, like she adopted me as a child. And in an effort to keep me from my birth mom—who, for all she knew, would try and track me down in an attempt to regain custody—she stole a dead child’s identity and gave it to me so that I’d be impossible to find. Maybe my birth mother was abusive, neglectful. Or maybe she was thirteen years old, a victim of rape, not ready to be a mother. A teenager who’d gotten loaded at a party and went too far with some guy. Mom was saving me from a life of abuse and neglect at the hands of a reluctant mother.

  Or maybe it’s not so innocuous after all.

  Maybe it’s more toxic than that. Maybe I wasn’t adopted, but rather taken. Kidnapped. It’s a thought I go to only because it’s the middle of the night, the time my imagination most often takes flight.

  Did Mom kidnap me?

  I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt for thinking these things about Mom. That she took me. That I’m not hers. That she did something illicit, that she did something wrong. I think of myself, twelve years old, Mom, woozy on a glass of wine, confessing, A long time ago, I did something I’m not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me.

  And that’s how I got you.

  I know now what she means.

  Eleanor Zulpo, the woman Mom used to work for when I was a girl, told me that as a child, I insisted my name was something other than Jessie. She remembered that I’d pout my face and stomp my foot and demand that Mom stop calling me Jessie.

  Jessie isn’t my real name. That much I already know. It’s a name Mom forced on me, one I accepted with resistance, because even a three-or four-year-old knows their name and isn’t quick to change it.

  But not only did I call myself by a different name, but I called Mom Eden. Did I call her Eden because she wasn’t my mom? Because she’d kidnapped me? Because my mom was someone else, and if so, then who?

  In the back of my mind I tell myself that if, if, Mom kidnapped me—that word itself lumbering through my brain, clumsy and awkward, finding it hard to travel from neuron to neuron because the very idea of it is so incompatible with Mom, who was always so loving, so kind—she had a good reason to do it. She wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill child abductor.