Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  When it completes its bow, the shade begins an elaborate pantomime, leaping and rolling silently through the room, lunging out with its arms in all directions. It takes me a while to realize that it’s imitating my brother’s style of catching leaves, doing its best to exaggerate what is already high melodrama. Though I find it funny, I don’t allow myself to laugh or even smile. I lie motionless in bed, keeping my breathing as shallow as possible to minimize the rise and fall of my rib cage. My stillness seems to confound the shade. It stops and taps its foot, then breaks into a new impression, this one of me—knees bent, arm shooting out like a frog’s tongue hunting flies—all with such a theatrical seriousness that I find it even funnier. Yet I remain unmoving. Again and again, from one act to the next, the shade changes the performance. I stay frozen throughout. I don’t want to disturb it. I realize that I am, in fact, afraid. Not that the monster will hurt me, but that it will go away.

  In the morning, at the breakfast table, everything is so normal I almost doubt the shade visited me at all. My father begins weekdays with coffee and the telephone, which means that Dean and I begin them with cereal and silence. The phone hangs on the wall next to the refrigerator, and the cord is just long enough to reach my father’s seat on the opposite side of the room. It stretches directly over my mother’s chair, taut as a tripwire, cutting off the table from the rest of the kitchen. But my mother doesn’t sit much anyway. She hovers on the other side of the wire like a hummingbird, pouring more coffee into my father’s mug or dispensing cups of fruit to me and Dean that we pretend not to see. Each time she crosses back to the table, she bumps the telephone cord—inadvertently, I think—and each time my father rolls his eyes in annoyance.

  There is a total of maybe thirty minutes during which my family gathers in the kitchen each morning, and my dad is on the phone for the first twenty of them. He runs a shoe store, and though the store closes for business at the end of each day, my father never seems to. I like listening to him. He has a deep voice that rolls from his throat, unless he’s annoyed or angry, when it comes out in short bursts like punches. As a rule, he doesn’t say much, so I hungrily take in every word of his morning phone calls. They are always work-related, and almost always problem-related, which is another reason I listen so intently. If I can understand some of these problems, maybe I can help figure them out, give some advice, and then my parents will be worried less and happy more. It’s not that I offer up suggestions right there over my Cheerios. At nine years old, I don’t presume to have all the answers, but I hope to someday. For now, I take in the sound of my father’s voice and do my best to catalog the issues for later examination. On most days, that is. Today all I can think about is the monster.

  When my dad is done with his call, my mom takes the phone from him and hangs it back up on the wall, freeing herself from the tripwire. She sits down lightly—I’m not certain her butt actually touches the chair—then nibbles on a piece of toast and tries to engage my father before he leaves. We know it won’t be long before he does—ten minutes tops, five if his face is red after his phone call, which means something in particular is troubling him.

  “Everything okay?” my mom asks. Her first question is always the same.

  “Everything’s fine,” says my dad. His response, too, never changes, red face or not. He adjusts his tie—needlessly, since it’s already as straight as the part in his hair. Then he unfolds the newspaper and spreads it over the table.

  In the precious minutes before he folds it back up and leaves for the day, the rest of us will compete to siphon some of his attention away from the news. My mother and Dean are much better at this than me, effortlessly offering up whatever comes to mind.

  “Can you believe that storm yesterday?” says my mom. “Pretty late in the year for thunder, if you ask me.”

  “What if I don’t ask you?” says Dean. He grins, pleased with his cleverness. It’s not a bad wisecrack. I wonder who he stole it from.

  “Well,” says my mom, “if you don’t ask, I won’t tell you.” I can’t decide if she didn’t get the joke and this is her sincere reply, or if she did get it and this is her comeback. She rolls her eyes and glances at my father, but he doesn’t seem to be listening. He raises the newspaper before him and turns the page.

  “Maybe after school,” my mom continues, “you and your brother can get out the rakes and clean all those leaves off the lawn. Then this weekend you can set up your new pitching toy before it starts to get too cold.”

  “Mom, it’s called a pitchback,” says Dean. “And it’s not a toy. It’s for practicing.” Dean and I are both in the same baseball little league—or we will be, in the spring, when I’m ten and old enough to join. The pitchback is a small, stiff net in a metal frame, like a vertical trampoline. You throw the baseball at it and it springs right back to you, so you can practice without a partner.

  My mother sighs. “Oh, whatever it’s called.”

  The two of them go on talking—my mother of the leaves and the yard and things that need to get done around the house, Dean of baseball and how many hits he’s going to get next season. My father remains lodged behind the newspaper as the minutes tick away. Any moment now, he’s going to stand up and head for the door. He’ll tousle Dean’s and my hair, then give my mom a kiss. “Bye, dear,” he’ll say. “Be good, gents.” Then he’ll be gone. I realize I’m running out of time to be a part of the conversation. When I finally open my mouth, the words burst from me like some sort of confession.

  “I saw a monster last night.”

  If I was hoping to cause a sensation, elicit some dramatic response, I’m disappointed. My father’s eyes stay on the paper. My mom looks at me in a sort of vague, confused way, like she’s scanning her internal mom playbook for the right thing to say. Only Dean reacts, with a shrug and a snort.

  “Bullcrap,” he says.

  “Dean,” my mother admonishes him. “Language.”

  “It’s real,” I say, both excited that someone acknowledged my revelation and frustrated that it was Dean, and that he doesn’t believe me. “My door was closed, and the shade turned the knob and opened it from the outside.”

  “The shade?” says Dean.

  “It’s like a person,” I continue, a bit breathlessly, “but totally pitch-black, so all you can see is darkness, but it’s darker than darkness.”

  “You stole that idea from Peter Pan,” says Dean. “It’s Peter’s shadow.”

  “No, Peter Pan’s shadow was flat.”

  “Two-dimensional,” says my mom.

  “Right,” I say. “Two-dimensional. It can only stick to walls or the ceiling. The monster was three-dimensional, maybe more.”

  “Stupid,” says Dean. “How could it be more than three-dimensional?”

  “Well, three at least.”

  “If you saw a monster, why are you still here? Why didn’t it eat you?”

  “It’s not that kind of monster.”

  “What was it doing?”

  “I don’t know. Kinda dancing, I guess.”

  Dean nearly explodes from laughter, but his mouth is full of milk and cereal, and he desperately tries to keep it shut. His face clenches and turns bright red. The effort to restrain himself makes him laugh even harder, his whole body convulsing silently but violently, until a Cheerio actually pops out of his nose on a thin jet of milk. Finally he bursts, spitting up the rest of his mouthful.

  “Dean!” says my mother.

  “A dancing monster!” he squeals. “Elliot saw a dancing monster!”

  I feel my face flush, like my father’s does when he gets angry. I know this is just Dean being Dean, but it still hurts.

  “It’s not a dancing monster!” I shout back.

  “But you just said it was.” Dean jiggles in his chair, like he’s about to pee his pants. “You said it.”

  He’s got me there. I don’t expect this kind of weaponized logic from Dean, and it stuns me into silence. My face grows hotter, and I feel the tears start to
build behind my eyes. My mother notices.

  “Okay, you two, that’s enough,” she says. “Dean, clean that up. Elliot, please don’t get so worked up about it. He’s just teasing. No need to get emotional.” She turns to my father, who is still absorbed in the newspaper. “Richard, I think we should get someone to come look at Elliot’s bedroom door. It doesn’t lock properly. Any little draft can blow it open.”

  “This house isn’t so drafty,” says my father. “And why does he need to lock his bedroom door, anyway?”

  “Because of the monsters.” Dean is still giggling. “And the trees!”

  “What trees?” asks my mom. “By his window? What’s wrong? Are they bumping against the house?”

  “The ones in the front yard,” says Dean. “Elliot thinks they’re alive.”

  “Well, they are alive,” says my mother. “All plants are alive.”

  “No, Elliot thinks they’re going to grab him,” says Dean. “That’s why he needs to lock his door. That and the monsters.”

  There are so many points I want to argue that I don’t know where to begin. First, I want to tell my mom that the trees did seem alive—I mean really alive, conscious, not just in a plantlike way. Second, I never said I needed to lock my door. Third, I also never said that the trees were trying to get us in some evil way, or that I was afraid of them. Or that the monster was scary. Why would I want to lock it out? But all of these retorts jumble together in my throat and can’t get past my tongue.

  I’m still silent, and Dean is still giggling, when time finally runs out. With a deep sigh, my father folds his newspaper, drains the last of his coffee, and stands up from the table.

  “There’s no such thing as monsters,” he says.

  And that’s the end of that conversation.

  The shade only gets bolder after this, though I make a silent vow not to talk about it anymore. It continues to visit me in my room almost every night, sometimes opening the door, sometimes slipping under it. Less frequently, it appears in other places—once, for example, when I’m sleeping over at a friend’s house—but always at night, when it can find the darkest, quietest corners to play in. There are other monsters, too. One is like a sparkling crescent in the corner of my vision. Another takes the face of an old man in the tree outside my window. On Halloween, I peer out from under the covers to find a particularly bold incarnation rummaging through my dresser. It’s a fat man, dressed in black like a burglar. Unlike with the shade, I can see his face quite clearly, and it’s both thrilling and a bit unsettling when he turns and smiles at me, as if he’s been caught stealing and doesn’t really care.

  The menagerie is not confined to my bedroom, or even my neighborhood. In January, when Connecticut has sunk into the deepest part of winter, my family takes its first vacation. Though money is tight, my father insists that we go to Florida, because that’s what people do. To be surrounded by snow one minute and on a beach in the tropics the next is a revelation, like waking from hibernation, or crossing into another universe. The monsters feel it, too. They are everywhere—hidden in the palm trees, skipping over the waves.

  Dean and I spend more time in the ocean than out of it. My father, prone to sunburn, is often forced to retreat into the hotel’s air-conditioned lounge, so my mother draws lifeguard duty. She doesn’t seem to mind, though after four days she has yet to dip a toe in the water, which seems wrong to me and Dean. After one especially exhausting bout in the waves, we crash on our towels and cajole her until she finally starts to cave.

  “Is it cold?” she asks.

  “No,” we tell her. This is both true and false. Though the water doesn’t feel cold to us, we know it will to her. But I also believe she’ll like it once she gets over the initial jolt. So this is a half-truth, combined with a white lie, which doesn’t seem so bad.

  “Is it safe?” she asks. “Are there sharks?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” we tell her. This, of course, is not an answer. We have no idea whether there are sharks. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about it until my mother asked, and now I’m a bit concerned myself.

  But she’s convinced. She puts aside her magazine, hat, and sunglasses. She brushes the sand off her legs, which seems silly since she’s about to go in the water. From our towels, Dean and I cheer her on as she tiptoes across the hot sand and lets the water brush across her ankles. Her shoulders rise at the chill, but she doesn’t stop to chide us. She pushes on, steering between two sets of breaking waves, toward a bluer channel where the water is calmer. In a moment she is submerged past her shoulders and swimming.

  “Wow, she’s really going for it,” says Dean.

  We realize something is wrong. My mother’s head is barely above the surface, and her arms aren’t stroking but waving, then thrashing. She’s moving quickly out to sea through the narrow channel between the waves.

  “What’s happening?” says Dean, his voice rising. “What’s she doing?”

  At my silence, he runs off toward a lifeguard tower that seems impossibly far away. I stand alone, frozen, and watch in horror as my mother gets smaller. My mind goes utterly blank. Fear has swollen my heart near to bursting when suddenly a black shadow under the water approaches my mother from the side. I’m afraid it’s a shark, but when it bumps against her, she doesn’t react. The shadow stays with her, pushing her sideways until she’s out of the channel and among the waves. Her outward drift stops. Her head rises. Slowly, haltingly, the waves carry her back toward the shore. It was the monster, I realize. The shade from my bedroom. The monster saved my mother’s life.

  By the time my father reaches us, my mother is sitting on the beach, wrapped in towels, shaking with cold and fear. She stares silently at the sand between her feet. She hasn’t spoken, not even to respond to our efforts to help. When my dad arrives, Dean and I talk over each other, trying to explain what happened. In my distress, I forget my vow.

  “The monster saved her,” I say.

  My father stiffens. Dean abruptly stops his jabber. My mother’s head jerks toward me, her eyes wide, almost baleful. My heart stutters, and I suddenly feel cold.

  “That’s not funny, Elliot,” she snaps.

  My voice is small. “But I saw it.”

  Dean glares at me. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “You weren’t there!” I yell.

  “Because I was going for help!”

  “That’s enough,” says my father, instantly ending the argument. He draws me aside, away from Dean and my mother. “Elliot,” he says, “Mom was caught in a rip current. That’s what was pulling her out. It happens all the time. Okay?” When I don’t respond, he rubs my shoulders. “You know what?” he says. “When we get back home, we should work on your baseball. You like baseball. You’re looking forward to little league, aren’t you? You could be a great baseball player.”

  I do like baseball. I am looking forward to little league. That my dad believes I could be a great player cheers me. That he wants to help me warms me even more.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  My body begins to unclench. I nod.

  “Good,” he says.

  I look over at my mother. She is still shaking, still staring at the sand between her feet. “Mom’s so angry,” I say.

  “She’s just scared,” says my father. “She’ll get over it.” His hands fall from my shoulders. “Still, if I were you, I’d keep this monster stuff to myself.”

  After

  After you die, you find yourself in a room with a single door—though, admittedly, the room is not a room, and the door is not a door, but, well . . . Anyway, there you are, in a room with a single door, waiting. You are not sure for what or whom, until the door opens and Jollis enters. Of course, you think—you were waiting for Jollis. He carries a pencil and clipboard, as well as a professional air that, when he sees you, melts into a warm smile. He collects himself quickly, however, regaining his businesslike demeanor before proceeding to the body.

  You hadn’t noticed th
e body until now. It lies on a table in the center of the room. It is your body, the one from which you just departed, the one in which you lived your life. It is exactly as it was—or, rather, exactly as you last left it, since it started out much different, and kept changing along the way. Most of those transformations—good or bad—just happened. Bones lengthened, muscles expanded (later, bones contracted and muscles shrank). You remember outgrowing your clothes as a child, and years afterward when your hair started to thin. Other changes, of course, were self-inflicted. That bit at the end, for example.

  Once beside the table, Jollis pauses. He gazes upon the body with a deep wistfulness that blends into admiration, even reverence. You find this odd. You yourself can’t recall ever looking at your body that way. Jollis must be half-blind, you think, or at least terribly nearsighted. He seems oblivious to those particular features of the body that caused you so much grief. The length, for one, wasn’t what you would have liked. And that nagging softness around the middle was hardly ideal. The teeth might have been straighter and whiter. You could go on, but somehow these things don’t provoke you the way they once did. It’s as if you can now view your body—your former body—through Jollis’s eyes, and you like what you see.

  Jollis shakes himself from his reverie. He reaches toward the body’s head to gently tap the brain itself. At his touch, it begins to emit a stream of light that flows into the room and beyond.

  “What’s that?” you ask.

  “Your memories,” says Jollis.

  You lean in for a closer look. You discover that this incandescent river is made up of individual filaments of light, innumerable and very fine. Various scenes play out along the fibers, full of faces and moments you recognize, but just as often including ones you don’t.