by Megan Hart
“Night, Mama.”
“Night-night, baby. In the morning we’ll check out the chickens, okay?”
“Okay.” He nods and snuggles down into the nest of his blankets he’s made since he didn’t really make the bed but simply tossed the sheets and comforter on top.
Tomorrow, she’ll help him strip this down to the mattress and fix it, but for now it’s late. They’re tired. She kisses her boy again, holds him close for a minute or so. Then she says good-night, leaving the door open without being asked.
In the bedroom she and Ryan will share, she finds him already in bed. Surprisingly, Ryan has a notepad and pen, his reading glasses slipped to the end of his nose. He’s scribbling furiously, but he looks up when she comes in and sets it aside.
“I’m beat,” he says. “How about you?”
“Yes. Pretty tired. Lots to do tomorrow.”
He nods, though she knows of course he has no idea what she means or intentions of helping her do any of it. “But this place. Great, huh?”
She sees so clearly in his eyes that he wants her to say yes, but how can she, when she’s not sure it would be the truth? “Ryan...”
Before she can continue, her husband says, “Mari...listen.”
She listens, silent and still.
He runs his fingers over the hair falling over her shoulder, tangling his fingers in it. “I know this isn’t what you would have ever expected. I know this isn’t what you dreamed of.”
He’s wrong about that. Mari has dreamed about coming home. A lot.
“But I want you to know, this is going to be great. I promise. It’s going to be all right. I know it must feel strange—”
“No. Not really.”
It should be weird to be back here after all this time. After how she’s grown and changed. Yet nothing about this house feels strange, and that’s somehow both a comfort and a strain. She can’t explain it to him, not Ryan, who’s lacked for nothing in his life. He thinks deprivation and hardship is being forced to watch the commercials instead of forwarding through them. He would never understand how she feels. She’s not even sure how she feels, herself, just that there is something so familiar about coming back here that it’s almost as though she never left...and she definitely doesn’t want to tell him that.
Ryan looks so relieved, almost like he might cry. “I want you to know how much I love you. You know that, right?”
“I know. I love you, too.” She means it, of course. She has loved Ryan from the first time she saw him. A prince, come to rescue her.
“This is going to be good for us, Mari. I promise you.”
Ryan has broken promises to her before. Mari nods and kisses him. Long and slow. She can feel him reacting, though in truth she’s not sure if she intends to make love to him or if she’s simply seeking the comfort of his mouth.
They make love.
After, Ryan turns out the lights. Beside him, eyes wide-open to the dark, Mari listens to the sound of his slow breathing. “Ryan.”
He mutters something that he probably thinks is a full reply.
“How did you find this place? How did you arrange for this?”
He snuffles. She thinks he might be too fast asleep to answer her, but he’s only taking his time. “What do you mean?”
“This house,” she says. “How did you find it? How did you arrange to rent it for the summer? What happened to the people who were living here before?”
“Oh. That. That was easy, babe, don’t you know?” He chuckles sleepily. “No, I guess maybe you didn’t think about it. I had the management company take it off the rental sites. The house came furnished. Not the greatest, but it’s only for a few months.”
“You gave the...?” Mari sits. “I don’t understand.”
“Babe, this house,” her husband says and interrupts himself with half a snore. “My dad was renting it out and when he died, I just kept up the agreement with the listing agency. It’s yours. It still belongs to you.”
The bed shifts and rocks as he turns on his side. Silence. He’s asleep.
Mari blinks. Blinks. Blinks. The sudden, raw and unusual sting of tears forces her to get out of bed and stumble to the bathroom, where she splashes her face with water over and over until she fears she’ll either drown or get washed away down the drain. She stares at her face in the mirror until she recognizes it. It takes a long time.
“Would they have taken you away?” Kendra had asked, and Mari had answered yes.
Yes, someone had come and taken her away. Someone had found her hiding beneath the kitchen table and pulled her out, kicking and screaming and clawing, desperate to get away. Someone had stolen and rescued her at the same time.
And now Ryan’s brought her back.
FOURTEEN
KENDRA COULDN’T SLEEP.
At home, her dad made them all close their windows in the summer to keep the air-conditioning inside. This house didn’t have air-conditioning, which meant open windows. Which meant she was like, sweltering. Even kicking off the blankets didn’t help.
She turned on her side to stare at the two windows overlooking the backyard. The night was too dark out here. No street lamps, nothing. She knew the mountain rose behind the house and all she’d see was trees even if there was light, but trees would be better than the huge, blank void outside the glass.
She just wasn’t used to this, that was all. Everything was too dark and too quiet. It was all too new, and not in the exciting way like the night before Christmas or a vacation or the first day of school. She yawned, eyes heavy, but sleep just kicked her in the teeth and ran away.
She heard something outside.
Something like a crunch, crunch, crunch. The shuffling noise of feet in leaves or grass. The snap of a twig.
Kendra sat up straight in bed, heart pounding, ears straining toward the open window. Instead of being too hot, now she was too cold. The sweat trickling down her back was like ice.
This room was so small that her bed was within reach of the windows, but she totally didn’t want to get any closer. Not even to see. Kendra put her fingertips on the windowsill and pushed her face under the wooden frame, anyway, not quite close enough to press her nose against the screen. She blinked and could see nothing but darkness. But then...there. No, higher. A flash of light. Two flashes. Not like lightning. More like what it looked like when you shone a flashlight in a cat’s eyes in a dark room, there and gone so fast she thought she might’ve imagined it.
The shadows moved. The shuffling sound grew louder. Kendra held her breath, listening and staring, but if something detached itself from the trees and moved across the yard toward the house, she couldn’t see what it was. She could hear it, though.
Across the room from her, the wink of light from her dresser mirror caught her attention. She bit back the urge to say Bloody Mary three times, calling forth the spectral girl from that slumber party game they’d all played in elementary school. There was nothing there, Kendra told herself. Nothing.
Something screamed.
Kendra stumbled back from the window, hit her bed with the backs of her knees and fell onto it. She clapped her hands over her mouth to hold back her own scream. She wanted to yell for her mom and dad, but all she could do was listen for more screams. What was out there?
The noise didn’t come again, not for a long ten minutes or so. Kendra relaxed. There was nothing out there in the night screaming. Whatever she’d heard wasn’t a monster or anything like that. Monsters didn’t exist. If she went and told her parents she was scared of something she’d heard outside, they’d just laugh and tell her she’d been dreaming. Or maybe they’d go out to see what it was and end up getting killed and eaten by some backwoods freakazoid hillbilly monster that had flashing eyes and screamed like a woman.
Kendra put her head under the pillow, but it took her a really long time to fall asleep.
FIFTEEN
IN THE MORNING, there was breakfast. Coffee, brewed just right. Toast and eggs that Ethan was excited to t
ell Ryan came from the chickens scratching in the yard behind the barn. Scrambled, mixed with cheese and bacon, the way Ryan always liked them. His dad had liked them that way, too.
“This is great.” He filled his mug with sugar and cream, sipping it.
She looked at him over the rim of her mug. She sipped, watching him. “What are you up to today?”
Ryan cracked his knuckles and rubbed his palms together. “Unpacking the boxes of files. Setting up my office. Shouldn’t take long.”
He’d taken the small den off the kitchen. It had been a screened porch a long time ago. Now the screens had been replaced with glass, turning it into a three-season room. It would be too cold to work out there in the winter, but on the shady side of the house with a ceiling fan going, it would be fine even in the summer heat. In pictures of the time when Mari lived there, towering cardboard boxes had overflowed with magazines and newspapers. New stacks of boxes now filled it, but he’d be unpacking them later today and organizing all of it. Anticipation made him a little giddy as he grinned across the table at his wife.
Impulsively, he leaned to kiss her. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Being you.”
Mari smiled. “I don’t have much choice, do I? I am me.”
“No. But you’re awesome, you know it?” Screw his psychiatric career, Mari was going to help Ryan exceed anything he’d done in the past.
Hell, anything his old man had done, too.
“Am I?” She tilted her head in that curious way she had.
“Yes. You are.” Ryan got up, leaving his plate on the table but taking his mug to refill it from the coffeemaker on the counter. He leaned on the counter to look at her as he drank with an appreciative smacking of lips. “You make kick-ass coffee, you know that?”
“Learned from the best, I guess.”
She meant his dad. “Do you ever miss him?”
Mari looked faintly surprised. “Don’t you?”
Ryan didn’t, really, in anything other than the vaguest of ways. He’d loved his dad. Idolized him, to a certain extent. But they hadn’t been close. He shrugged.
“Sure, sometimes I think about how I’d like him to see what I’m doing with my life. See the kids. That sort of thing.”
“People die,” Mari said quietly with a shrug. “Everything dies.”
She had such a way of putting it all into perspective. Ryan kissed her temple. “Yeah. I know. Listen, I’m going to get to work. Lots of paperwork to sort through. What are you going to do?”
“Unpack, I guess. Run some laundry. I can hang it up on the line,” she added, sounding pleased. “The smell of sunshine on sheets.”
“Great, great.” Ryan was already far away, looking through the kitchen into the screened porch. “Hey, babe, is the ’net hooked up?”
“I thought you were going to take care of it. Kendra said last night it wasn’t working.”
“Right.” Ryan frowned, then shook it off. “You know what? Let’s go off the grid this summer.” He grinned, excited at the thought, and kissed her again. “It’ll be good for us. Get disconnected. Really just get back to nature.”
“Are you sure? The kids—”
“They’ll survive.” Ryan squeezed her. “I’m gonna get to work.”
There was a door he could lock between the kitchen and the den, and one from the den into the backyard, which meant at any point during the day that he needed a break he could slip out onto the soft grass and the hammock strung between two trees. But not now. Right now, Ryan was going to get busy.
Putting his mug down on the long, battered wooden table set up beneath the row of windows, he found his laptop case. He pulled out the computer and settled it into place. The wireless mouse, next. He’d brought his computer chair from home, so he’d be sure to have a comfortable place to sit, and for a moment, that was all he did.
From the kitchen, muffled through the closed door, he heard the murmur of his wife talking to someone. Probably Ethan. Ryan closed his eyes and imagined what it had been like all those years ago, when Mari had been in this house, not speaking at all.
What had it been like for her?
He was going to find out. For a moment, listening to the lilt of her voice, the soft, low chuckle he always admired, Ryan thought about packing them all up and taking them back home. Abandoning this project before it had begun. Before it could change things, he thought, opening his eyes and watching his wife’s shadow move under the crack at the bottom of the door.
But things had already changed, hadn’t they? And they would keep changing, because that was the way the world worked, and if he didn’t change with them, he was going to let his family down.
Ryan looked around the room at the stacks of file boxes, each neatly labeled in his dad’s hand. Files. Recordings. Research Materials. Video. In one corner, an ancient and gigantic television sat on a spindly legged table that didn’t seem strong enough to hold it. Also, a VCR and DVD player, along with a tangle of cords and cables. That’s where he’d start, but for the moment Ryan just sipped his coffee and looked around at the mess that was going to make his future.
He wasn’t going to let anyone down.
SIXTEEN
NOT EVERYTHING IN this kitchen is new. The cupboards under the counter are still lined with paper covered in orange-and-green flowers. They’re faded and dirty, in some places scraped by the pressure of pots and pans. The house included kitchenware. Mari’s not sure what sorts of meals she’ll prepare in these unfamiliar pots and pans and serve on strange dishes, but she’s sure they’ll be better than half-warmed franks ’n’ beans or boxed macaroni and cheese made with water, not milk and butter. Much, much better than dog biscuits. But not, she thinks with half a smile, better than a chocolate snack cake.
She bought a box this morning and wants to find a place to hide it...just in case. Not up high where she’ll have to stretch for it. Someplace low. Tucked away. A place where nobody would think to look for it.
Not that any of them would. She bought plenty of snacks. Fruit and crackers and cheese sticks for Kendra, gummy dinosaurs for Ethan and a package of Snickers bars for Ryan to keep in the freezer. She didn’t even really buy the snack cakes for her to eat.
Just to have.
Bending, she pushes aside some cookware to shove the box back into the shadows of the cupboard. Her fingers brush against something; she recoils by instinct, but it’s nothing nasty like a spider or even a dead mouse or rat—she’s seen plenty of them in her time. Mari pulls out a crinkling package. Yellow cake inside. Her mouth squirts saliva at the memory of the taste of spongy cake and thick, sweet cream made without a hint of anything dairy.
She rocks on her heels, the package in her hands. It’s been in that cupboard for a long, long time, undisturbed. No sign of mold or rot, though the cake itself has shrunk. Dehydrated. If she opened the plastic, maybe it would crumble into dust right there. She bets eating it would make her vomit...but it would still be sweet.
The normal thing to do would be to toss this remnant in the garbage and forget she ever saw it just as she’d forgotten hiding it there in the first place. It’s no good to her now. She doesn’t have to eat it and couldn’t if she wanted to.
“Here. Eat this. It’s good. It’s called a treat.” He pressed it into her hand.
Mari sniffed it. Took a lick. Then a bite. Then shoved it into her mouth, three bites, it was gone. It was good. She made a pattern in the air with her fingers.
More?
“One’s enough.” His hand stroked the tangles of her hair. “More will make you sick. Where’s the comb?”
Her hair was soft and smooth when he finished, and Mari couldn’t stop touching it. With clean, soft hair, she felt...
Pretty.
“Yes,” he said, watching her hands move. “Very pretty.”
More?
He laughed and shook his head. “It’s called a treat because it’s special. If you have one all the time, it won’t be so good
.”
From inside the house came the sound of Gran’s mumbletalk shouting. He looked at Mari. “Don’t tell her.”
Mad, Mari said.
“She won’t be mad. But she’ll want them for herself.” He tucked the box away into his backpack and stood. He ran a hand over her hair. “Be good, Mariposa.”
Be good.
“Babe?”
Startled, shamed, Mari shoves the box of new snack cakes and the old one back into place in the far, far back corner of the cupboard. She gets to her feet, brushing off her hands. “Ryan. What’s up?”
“What are you doing?”
“Putting away some things. Thinking about what to make for lunch.” Mari clears her throat and crosses the floor—tile now, not worn linoleum. It feels cool and slick on her feet, though beneath it she still senses the slope of the boards. She kisses him. “How about some chicken and biscuits?”
“You’re gonna make me fat.” He grins and snuggles against her.
“Hush,” she murmurs. “You’re not going to be fat. You care too much to get fat.”
That came out strange, but Ryan doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy dancing with her in the kitchen. Twirling her out, then back. Dipping her. Mari can’t help laughing at this—Ryan’s not the best dancer, not that she is. It doesn’t matter. Dancing with her husband is fun. She links her arms behind his neck as the dance slows. They move in a small circle, their toes touching.
“I love you,” she says. It’s important to say it. For him to hear it.
Here in this kitchen, Mari needs to be this woman. A wife and mother. Someone loved and who loves in return.
“Love you, too, babe.” Ryan kisses her, his attention already being pulled back to the boxes of papers he’s got stacked so high in that den. “What time’s lunch?”
“Soon.”
He grins and twirls her again. Another dip. Another kiss. Then he’s back in the den, and she can hear the sound of his whistling. Of her husband being happy.