by Mary Kubica
And then I let slip the one thought that’s put down roots in the back of my mind, that’s replaced all logical thought.
“Why are you keeping my father from me?” I scream.
Her face falls flat and she goes white, even whiter than she was before. She shakes her head, presses a hand to her mouth but says nothing. Nothing at first, before she carefully breathes out, treading lightly, “You’re quite sure you saw a man in there?”
My heart nearly sings in relief. She believes me. She believes me.
I nod vigorously.
“Perhaps you’re right then. Perhaps someone is there,” she says with concern as she draws back the door and lets me in. “Why don’t you go see,” she suggests.
I think of my father, so close within reach. I soar past Ms. Geissler on the staircase, taking the steps two at a time up to the second floor. There I stand beneath that little hatch that leads up to the third floor. I listen for footsteps at first, hearing nothing, but remembering that I’ve stood here before and heard something.
He was here that night. Standing above me. Was he trying to contact me, to get my attention? To let me know that he was here?
I reach for the cord and give it a tug. The ladder unfurls before me, unfolding into makeshift steps. Two of the steps are split. Another is missing, just as Ms. Geissler said.
She warns me, “The steps, Jessie. They’re not safe,” though I go anyway, clutching the hand railing, which is unstable at best. “Bring the flashlight with you,” she says, attempting to hand it to me. But I don’t take it.
“There’s a light,” I tell her. “I saw the light. I don’t need a flashlight,” but she tells me to take it anyway, as she gives it a shake. I take it only to appease her, tucking it under the crook of an arm.
I begin to climb. I move slowly, walking though I want to run. The fourth step gives on me, splintering, and I shriek.
“Jessie!” Ms. Geissler yells, asking if I’m okay.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I say, gripping the railing harder and pulling myself up and over the broken step.
Ms. Geissler makes no attempt to follow, but stands instead at the bottom of the stairs. She crosses her arms against her chest, watching as I go. She tells me to be careful. She tells me to go slow.
I reach the top step and hoist myself into the attic. The room is murky. Out the open windows, the sun is lost somewhere beneath the horizon. It’s still nighttime, and yet there’s a flush to the sky. Morning will be here soon.
I barely make out a lamp, the same lamp that for the past few nights radiated light. One of those old Tiffany-style lamps, with the stained-glass shade. But when I go to turn it on, nothing happens. The lamp is dead, the lightbulb burned out. I turn the knob around and around but still nothing happens. All I hear is the idle click that mimics my heartbeat.
I orbit the room, looking for him. I trip over things that I can’t see. I hold my breath and listen, but I hear nothing. “Hello?” I ask, more begging than inquisitive.
“Come out so I can see you,” I whisper to the man. My father. I tell him I know that he’s here. That I want to see him, to meet him. That I’ve been waiting my whole life. I take small steps around the room, using my hands as a guide. My heartbeat pounds in my ear as I hold my breath, listening for breath, for footsteps, for him. A game of Marco Polo.
“Marco,” I chant aloud to myself, but there’s no reply.
I reach for the flashlight Ms. Geissler gave me. I turn it on. It casts a meager glow around the room, not much but enough. The light bounces on the wall from the tremor of my hands.
What I find is a wall of cardboard bankers boxes—dozens of them—with holes chewed out. Rodent droppings and old building supplies. Gallons of paint, boards of hardwood, boxes of screws and nails.
A makeshift nest—clumps of twigs and leaves—is nestled into the corner of the attic, and on it, there’s some hairless and fetal-looking thing that looks like it’s just climbed out of its mother’s womb. A mother squirrel stands over her baby, scowling at me.
What I don’t find is a four-poster bed. A white comforter. A cord dangling from the ceiling. A man. None of those things are here. It’s just a ratty and dilapidated attic inhabited by squirrels, just as Ms. Geissler has said.
I feel like I can’t breathe. The pain in my chest is immense, in my arm, my jaw, my abdomen. The room is empty, though as sure as I live and breathe, I saw a man here.
I stand looking out the window and toward the carriage home. I don’t know how long I stand there, staring, thinking that maybe he will appear. That somehow we’ll have swapped places. But he never appears.
I make my way back down the steps, where Ms. Geissler stands waiting for me. On her face is a complacent look. An I told you so look.
“Find what you were looking for?” she asks, though I can’t speak. A lump forms in my throat, but I will not cry. I cannot cry.
“I told you, Jessie,” she gloats, and I know then that she did this only to humor me. “There is no man there. Squirrels. Only squirrels.” And then she thrusts the ladder back up so that the squirrels can’t take over the rest of her home.
She shows me the door, but before closing it on me, she first asks, “Did you ever think, Jessie, that you’re only seeing what you want to see? You need help.” She all but pushes me out of her house and slams the door behind me. I hear the sound of a lock clicking shut.
The porch light goes off, and once again I am submerged in darkness.
I set myself down on the top porch step, feeling exhausted. My body aches from the lack of sleep, from ten nights of my mind depriving me of sleep. It’s an insidious way to die, I think, from lack of sleep because there is nothing gory about it, no blood, no guts, and yet the effects are just as gruesome. I know because I’m living it.
As the sun begins to rise on the eleventh day, it’s only a matter of time until I die.
This is what it feels like knowing you’re about to die.
This is what Mom must have felt like knowing she would die.
I sit on the stoop and talk to myself, blathering about what’s happening to me, hoping to make sense of it, but striking out. I can’t make sense of it. I count to ten to make sure I can still do it, losing track at number six. I cry, a proper cry, shoulders heaving, the first in a long time. My heart, my head, everything hurts. I fold over sideways on the porch step, rolling up into the fetal position, pulling my knees into my chest, wondering if this is where I’ll die.
* * *
All at once I look up and have no clue where I am.
By now the sun is just barely beginning to rise. It turns the world from black to gray. One by one people appear on the street before me. Joggers, early-morning commuters.
As a hint of daylight fills the sky, I suddenly catch a glimpse of something on the other side of the street. It’s a man in jeans and a jacket, bustling down the street with his hands in the pockets of his pants. His chin is tucked into the coat to keep warm, and there’s a hat on his head, an orange baseball cap, and for this reason I know that it’s him.
But how did he get here? How did he slip out of Ms. Geissler’s home without me seeing him?
And that’s when the answer comes to me. The balcony. The one that leads from street level up to the third floor.
He climbed down the balcony before I had a chance to go up the stairs, sneaking out as I cut across Ms. Geissler’s lawn. That’s when the light in the window went black. It went black because he’d already left. As I examined the attic with a flashlight, he was at ground level, looking in through the windows, watching me.
I rise quickly, calling for him, waving my hands to get his attention. I fall down the porch steps, all six or eight or ten of them. “Excuse me!” I scream, but if he sees, if he hears, he doesn’t look and he doesn’t wave back. He doesn’t slow down. He never stops moving. He’s in a hu
rry. He has somewhere to be.
I run as fast as my legs will carry me, which isn’t fast.
The twitch in my eye has gone from one eye to two, so that they both spasm and I can’t get them to stop. My hands shake. My arms ache, my legs ache, my back aches and, as I move across the street, not looking either way before I cross, a passing car nearly runs into me. The driver slams on their brakes to keep from hitting me.
I stand there in the street, three inches before the hood of the car, staring at the panicked driver, myself unfazed. Because I don’t have it in me to be scared. The driver shoots me a dirty look. When I don’t move, she douses the window with windshield wiper fluid, splashing me as she hoped to do. She screams out the window at me, and only then do I go.
By the time I turn away from the car, the man has advanced a quarter of a block or more. He’s harder to see than he was before, farther away. Every now and then I see the orange cap bobbing and weaving down the street, but then it gets blocked by a low-hanging tree limb and I can’t see him.
I panic; I’ve lost him.
But then again it returns, and I follow along.
I listen for the sound of footsteps, and though I’m a half a block away, I hear them. They’re tenacious and quick, and for this reason, I know that they’re his. I follow, having only the drum of footsteps to guide me, the drum of footsteps, steady like a beating heart.
But then, as I round the corner and pick up the pace, I hear something else too. They’re words, breathed into my ear. Earth to Jessie, I hear, and I spin suddenly on my heels, glaring at a man who follows from behind. He’s dressed in a suit and tie, an overcoat draped over him, smoking a cigarette. In the other hand, a coffee cup.
“What are you looking at?” he grills, tossing the cigarette to the ground. He grinds it into the concrete with the toe of a shoe and immediately reaches into his breast pocket for another. I turn away, saying nothing.
And then another noise comes. It’s so soft, so subtle, hardly more than a whoosh of air against my ear, as I come to a red light and stop. Psst, says the noise, like the buzzing of a mosquito in my ear. I’m at a street corner, my eyes peeled to the walk signal, waiting for my turn to cross, hoping it was soon before I lose track of the orange cap. The street is congested, early-morning rush hour dissecting me from it.
Psst. Hey you, I hear, hey, Jessie, and I jump, my eyes turning away from the street to see who it is and who’s calling me. The man with his cigarette is gone now, around the corner and out of sight, leaving a wake of smoke trailing behind. Behind me stands a corner coffee shop, the first floor of a three-story light-colored brick building. There are people milling around outside, just a small handful of them, though their bodies are turned away from me.
Jessie, I hear again, and I snap to attention. Who said that? Who’s calling me?
There’s a sudden chill in the air. I shiver. I pull my sweatshirt tighter around me, eyeing the people outside the coffee shop and taking them all in. But there’s no one here that I know.
I turn away but still can’t shake the feeling that someone is following. That someone is watching me. It’s a gut feeling and there, at the fringes of my awareness, I feel it. Eyes on me though they’re outside my field of view, burning a hole in my back.
On the other side of the intersection I pause, looking backward one last time, because I just can’t shake that sense of being watched. And then I hear it again.
Psst. Hey. Hey, Jessie, and I turn suddenly, a spinning toy top on its tip. I almost lose balance; I almost fall to the ground. The world spins on its axis and I don’t know what to blame for it, the lack of sleep or grief.
A man and woman walk behind me now, holding hands. Midthirties, pushing forty. They look slick and sophisticated, she taller than him in high heel boots, though they’re both pinched and slim. “Did you call me?” I ask, but they exchange a look and tell me no. They part ways, slipping around me, one on either side. Once they pass, they rejoin hands, looking into each other’s eyes before gazing over their shoulders at me. They laugh. I hear words giggled between them. Lunatic and crazy. They’re talking about me.
And then there’s a hand on my back. A warm hand that touches my bare skin from behind. It caresses me as every single hair on my arms and legs goes erect and I can’t help myself. I scream. I jerk away, spinning around to find no one there. There’s no one standing on the sidewalk behind me, though I hear it again. I feel it again. Lips pressed to my ear, whispering, Earth to Jessie.
I shake my head, willing it away, telling myself that it’s nothing. That it’s only the wind. I look up, coming to, realizing that I’ve lost track of the man I am sure now is my father. He’s gone. I listen for the sound of his footsteps, searching the horizon for the orange baseball cap. I start to panic—eyes desperately lurching this way and that, hoping to see that pinprick of orange way off in the distance. I stagger down the street like a drunk. I can no longer hold my body upright because it’s begun to collapse on me. I try running but I can’t run, and so it’s a shamble at best, feet dragging.
A hand latches onto my arm, a voice asks if I’m all right. I peer down at the hand on my arm, seeing a spindly hand, a bony hand. Rivers of blue veins roll across it. There’s dirt wedged beneath the fingernails, lining the edges of the nail bed, and that’s how I know. I know this hand; I’d know this hand anywhere. This is Mom’s hand.
My eyes shoot up, taking in the woman draped all in white. She looks nothing like Mom. And yet, she says, “Jessie.”
I’m so taken aback that I don’t have it in me to respond. She stands before me, a halo of sunlight bearing down on her. She wears a wispy white blouse that billows in the early-morning breeze, the top button undone so I catch a hint of the pale skin beneath. On her bottom half is a skirt, a long one, stretching clear to her feet so that I can’t be certain they’re there. She looks fragile, delicate and, as she draws her hands through her hair, strands come with it. Clumps of hair fall from her scalp just like that, getting trapped between her thin fingers. Through the thin, floaty blouse I catch sight of her breasts. The breasts flat, nipples gone. Serrated suture marks crisscrossing her chest, the way Mom’s used to be.
“Mom,” I say. As impossible as it sounds, this woman standing before me is Mom.
“Mom,” I beg this time, trembling as I reach for her, wanting nothing more than to draw her close, to wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her in tight. I’m crying now, tears falling freely from my eyes. “Mom!” I plead, but before me she pulls suddenly back, sharply back, her eyebrows pleated. Her mouth drops open and she asks, “Do you need me to call someone for you? An ambulance, maybe?” as she stands a good three feet away and retreats a step for every step that I draw near. I grab for her again, but she tugs her arms out of reach from mine, setting them behind her back.
“I’m not your mom,” she states. And it’s so assertive, so firm, it gives me pause.
My eyes calibrate the image I see, the woman with the red hair and green eyes dressed in all white. Except that her hair is intact and what I saw as suture marks are instead lace.
It’s not Mom.
I drop my hands to my sides, as she asks again if I need help, if there’s someone she can call for me. I bark out no, though all at once I realize that I have no idea where I am, that the streets and the buildings are unrecognizable to me. That I’ve never seen them in my whole life.
Where am I?
How did I get here?
A siren wails off in the distance.
A car door squeaks open and then slams closed.
People push past me on the sidewalk, in a hurry to get here or there as the woman disappears into the crowds.
I cup my hands around my mouth, screaming up and down the street for my father.
And then, when I think all hope is lost, I see him. Out of the corner of my eye, somewhere in my peripheral vision, I catch a glim
pse of orange as it slips behind the glass door of an apartment building on the other side of the street. I go to it, tugging on the door handle to follow him in, but find the door locked.
I press my face to the glass, staring inside. The lobby of the building is near empty. It’s dated and retro with 1970s linoleum tile, the kind that seeps with asbestos. Where are we? Does he live here? Does he know someone who lives here? The tile is partly covered with some sort of commercial carpeting, bland and gray, to disguise the ugly tile. A postal worker separates mail into a million bins and though I knock on the glass for him to let me in, he ignores me. Either he can’t hear or he doesn’t care. He just goes about sorting the mail as if I’m not here, as if he can’t see me, as if I’m invisible.
And I wonder then if I am invisible, if I am already dead.
I tug again on the tempered glass door. The hollow metal frame rattles in place. I smash the heel of my hand against the glass to no avail.
I begin to make my way around the building, in search of another way in. A freight entrance, maybe. But before I’ve gone twenty feet, a tenant comes tearing out of the building, eyes set on an incoming bus. I race back to the door, managing to slip in a hand in time to prevent it from latching. I sail inside. Behind me, the door closes tight.
My eyes look to the left just as a flash of orange disappears behind a door. A black-and-white sign beside it reads Stairs, the steps themselves explicated by a zigzag line. He’s going upstairs. I follow along, racing toward the stairwell and after him.
I press hard on the steel door’s push bar, making my way into the stairwell. I run, scaling the steps two at a time, clinging to the banister with a sweaty hand, pulling myself up the concrete stairs. The air is stuffy, suffocating, hard to breathe. There’s a notable lack of oxygen in here. It’s unventilated; there’s no access to fresh air. I choke on nothing and it takes a moment to regain my composure, to stop myself from choking on the musty air.
There are sixteen floors in the building. Above me, I hear footsteps as they climb upward at a better clip than me. He’s going too fast. I can’t catch up. I call to him, but if he hears, he doesn’t let up.