by Jac Jemc
She hands me the book and I flip through. The pages of plaited script aren’t readable, but the short excerpts written in a messier, more childlike hand are.
Mother is still beautiful, but her heart thumps, wet and heavy. I hear it in my ears. When I see her, my fingertips tingle. Last night, I watched her turn the lamps off, and her skin gripped some of that light, even in the dark.
At breakfast today, I watched Mother disappear. The sunlight shined around her and half of her face faded out. She stares at me. She thinks I pushed Alban from the tree.
Tonight, by the fire, mother could not keep herself awake. Her eyes look snuffed out. I tried to tell her about my time in the woods, but she responded only with taut nodding, drowsy. She asked the same question over and over, “How did you spend your day?” like I hadn’t already answered.
Mother may be an impostor. Perhaps she’s been replaced.
I read in my detectives’ book that no two ears shape themselves the same way, like fingerprints. I examined earlier photographs of my mother. I searched for one that showed the outline of her ear and memorized the curls. Sitting beside her, though, I’m disappointed to see her ears remain the same.
Mother keeps a copy of Alban’s birth certificate by her rocking chair in the front window and stares at it. The blue of her eyes seems clearer now, as if too much light has gotten in. I would like to tear that piece of paper apart.
Father has been gone for days. A week? The longest yet. Would it be better if I ran away, too?
“Is this Rolf, do you think? How did it get into our house?”
Julie looks as if she’s not yet woken up. Her eye makeup is smudged, her skin is slick with the oiled swell of morning. “I don’t know. Maybe they lived in this house first? Then moved next door? Or maybe they lived there and then moved here and Rolf moved back?”
“And the other writing? Have you been able to decipher any of it?”
“I haven’t tried.” Julie hoists herself up and exits the room. “I have to get to work.”
I follow her. She doesn’t stop in the kitchen. She opens the front door to let herself out. “Julie, are you going to shower? Change your clothes?”
She looks up at me, one hand on the knob. “I know what I look like,” she says, as if her appearance were an unchangeable fact. In that moment, I trust her expertise. She closes the door.
I make myself coffee. I tell myself that if I stick around here, I can hunt this book for answers. That’s more important than work. I pause and say, “This should be a big deal. Maybe reconsider.” Not calling in is grounds for immediate termination, but I take the chance.
I return upstairs.
Last night, I found Mother’s teeth in a dish on the bathroom sink. I went to their bedroom to ask about them, and their door was open. I heard only breath, like pistons firing. I saw the back of Father’s head. “Mother?” I said, and her head fell to the side to look at me, but what I saw can’t be true: she had no face. I recall the outline of her jaw and her mussed hair, but no features. When she said my name, I didn’t see her lips move. I ran back to the bathroom and cried. I wanted to dash her wretched teeth to the ground. This morning Mother scolded me for having gotten out of bed in the night.
The paper changed from a creamy stationery to a flimsier onionskin.
Eleanor Marie born at 9:45 a.m. Tuesday. She is too small and wiggly for me to hold her. Her eyes dart around like a lizard’s. If I give her my finger, she holds on tightly. Even when she sleeps, she jolts. Mother wonders when she will calm down.
Eleanor makes all sorts of noises. I think I can understand her, but Mother says that’s impossible.
Mother compares Eleanor to Alban constantly, talking about when Alban was a newborn. I watch the way Father stares at Mother feeding Eleanor. He has not been leaving as often, thank goodness. When I am alone with Eleanor, I tell her I will always look after her and give her guidance. This is the role of a big brother.
And then the neatly written entries end. I scan through the pages of layered text, but time has lightened and smeared the graphite so that it looks less like letters and more like a pattern, unreadable. I blur my eyes, looking for a hidden message. I remember from my childhood the shape of a dolphin forming from a stereogram. No such resolution is revealed, though. I put the book onto Julie’s bedside table. I head down to the basement to develop some photos. I try to see what it is I’ve been looking at.
36
“WHAT’S WRONG with you?” Connie says. “Why do you look like that?”
I touch my hair delicately. “Like what?” I can feel the tangles beneath my palm.
She lowers her voice. “Your hair is all mashed onto one side of your head, and—I’m sorry—I’m only telling you because I’d expect you to do the same for me, but you smell awful. Like urine, maybe?”
I sniff at my arms and ask myself, How long does it take to become immune to a smell, to trouble?
“Julie, we’re supposed to meet with the investors this afternoon. Did you forget?”
“No,” I say. “Why?”
“Tim, Julie and I are taking a personal hour, okay? We’ll be back soon.” Our colleague raises his eyebrows and Connie rolls her eyes and takes me by the arm. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she whispers in my ear, and I don’t resist.
She unlocks the car doors and says, “Wait.” She pulls an old camping blanket from the trunk and places it on the passenger seat before she’ll let me sit. “Okay. Go ahead … You in? Watch your elbow.” She shuts the door.
On the way to the house, Connie asks me all sorts of questions that don’t seem to matter, and then we pull up and I follow Connie to the porch. “Okay, open her up,” she says.
I stare at her.
“Where’s your purse?” she asks.
I shake my head.
37
“COME IN!” I shout from the darkroom. They don’t hear me.
I wash the fixer off the photo I’ve been developing. I hang it to dry. I worry about being found out. Julie will be furious I’m not at my office. She won’t accuse me of anything before she checks the bank accounts. If I say I feel sick, it wouldn’t be untrue. I consider staying in the basement. Maybe they’re just stopping home to pick something up. Maybe they’re grabbing an early lunch. I hear two sets of feet climb the stairs to the second floor. I lose track of their voices beneath the hum of the house.
I lean in to look at the picture I’ve just clipped to the line. The tree trunks cluster in a row like tick marks on a timeline. I look in the branches for anything. I try to remember what I was trying to record when I’d snapped the photo. I think about how to help her. Julie, the dedicated perfectionist, was known for following through. But now, all of her patterns have splayed into chaos. The balance of our collective reliability has been thrown off. If she’s not in charge, no one is.
I crawl out of the basement. Worry at how long I’d need to hide down there powers my movement. I reach the top of the second-floor stairs, undetected. I pause outside the door. I lean against the wall. I am afraid I’ve waited too long now to let them know I’m here.
Connie says, “This place is a mess. I’m sorry, but it is.” Julie doesn’t argue. She says nothing. I consider breaking in, but Connie goes on. “Schmutz pact, but it reeks in here. Do you remember what a schmutz pact is? Like if you have a little dirt on your face, as a true friend, I will tell you so you can take care of it, rather than letting you walk around like that.” She coughs. “Don’t look at me with those big eyes. Fix this place. I’m a friend, and I’m giving it to you straight. Figure out where that smell is coming from. Let’s get you into the bathtub.”
I pivot my body into the doorway. “Hey—”
Connie screams. She bumps into the dresser behind her. She grabs at her spine where it caught the corner. “James! Jesus Christ! Have you been here the whole time? Holy fuck.” She leans on the dresser. She looks at Julie. Julie hasn’t said a thing. She hasn’t even looked at me. Connie notices this. She
examines my face. She waits for an explanation. She waits for one of us to own up to something.
“I’m sorry, I was down in the darkroom. Why are you home? Is everything okay?”
Connie’s breath is still working itself out. I watch her nostrils expand and contract. I can see her collarbone flare into view. “That explains why the door was unlocked. We need to clean Julie up. Wouldn’t you agree?”
I nod tentatively, unsure if this will elicit a reaction from Julie.
“Why are you home?” Connie asks me.
I panic and lie, “Oh, to let in an electrician.” I wait for a moment that I can walk away to make a call, to make the story true.
“Oh, yeah? Julie, did you know an electrician was coming today?” Julie remains still. Connie glares at me, as if Julie’s behavior were my fault.
The two of them disappear behind the door. I wish I’d told Connie I could take care of Julie myself. It feels too late. It feels like help we need.
38
CONNIE RUNS THE bath and undresses me and I don’t wonder why James isn’t the one doing this and I let Connie see the bruises newly formed near my ankles and along my armpit. “Let’s be real here,” she whispers, as she holds my arm and I lower into the warm water. “Is he hurting you?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
I think of James’s overdrawn account, of the slow suspicion that grew when I saw the ATM withdrawals from our joint checking, small sums—twenty or forty dollars—amounts that he would normally have taken out of his private funds, until he couldn’t. Of how I ignored it for a while until the frequency increased and I asked if he’d gotten his ATM cards confused and how James had broken down and told me what had happened, of how he had started visiting the OTB on his lunch hour, laying down cash on races, forming what felt like friendships with the other guys urging their workday along with a shot of adrenaline at noon, ordering hot wings and beer as an alibi. I think of the cave James is convinced he visited, of all he’s dismantled, and I remember that I have no answer for where the bruises come from or for where I disappeared to when the house swallowed me up, and we have no explanation for the noises—the intonation or the deep breathing in the night or the voices looting our dreams—and no reasons for the drawings or the children in the woods, things we see together, even if we’re apart. My instinct is to pin the trouble on James, but I ask myself if it might be easier to believe it’s neither of us, so that we might trust each other and try to solve this mystery together.
Connie sits on the toilet, and I think about whether she noticed how much the bathwater rose when I sat down in it. It’s something I’d worried about since I was a teenager, the serenity of a bath marred by my anxiety about my own volume. She is so thin, so elegantly formed. I feel certain she knows the water she’d displace wouldn’t be more than an inch or two.
“You don’t have to talk to me. I know we might not be as close as I feel like we are. We haven’t kept in touch. We’ve only just reconnected. But I hope you’re talking to someone.” Connie stares straight ahead, trying not to look at my body.
I don’t scrub at myself. I dunk my head under once, filling myself up with that submerged rumble, holding my breath, but not for as long as I know I can. I don’t want to unnerve Connie. I don’t want to make her think I’m trying anything dangerous. When I sit up, the water rushes off me and I hunch over, my head resting on my bent knees, and only when Connie stops speaking do I realize she was talking at all.
I wish for something clear to say, for a cock to crow, for an alarm to sound: anything.
39
I LOOK AROUND for the journal, but don’t find it on Julie’s nightstand. I get down on the floor to see if it fell beneath the bed. I see a square outlined in light, like what might peek around a trapdoor. I scoot under the bed and my fingers hunt the edges, trying to find a place to pry up the boards to see what’s below. I knock, and the space beneath me echoes. I can’t find a way to budge the seam of light, though.
“James?” I hear in the room around me. I don’t answer. I hear a creak. I think about Connie setting my naked wife on the bed. She must be rifling through our drawers for clean clothes. Maybe she combs Julie’s hair. I hear a bird’s ritual call from beyond the room, too. The fowl are getting more insistent.
When I was a child, I feared the day I would identify what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to stay free. The worst nightmare appeared to be recognizing how you wanted the world to change.
40
CONNIE CALLS for James. I am used to his disappearing. She walks out to the hall and shouts his name, but he doesn’t answer, and I sit on the bed and wait, clear, damp, and heavy, and then something grabs my ankle and I scream and stomp.
It’s James’s voice I hear call out from beneath the bed, and he emerges, one hand kneading the other, trying to make it feel something other than pain.
“You frightened me,” I say, by way of apology.
“Seems like.” He wriggles himself free.
I don’t ask why he was under the bed, but Connie does. “James, where the hell were you?”
James doesn’t answer, and Connie asks where the dirty clothes should go and I point.
“James, you know that Julie has something she’s afraid to talk about. She won’t tell me, but something has her unglued.”
A siren sounds in my mind, and I spring into motion and shove Connie out of the room and down the hall. She’s so surprised that she doesn’t resist. She keeps moving down the stairs without my prodding.
“Julie! Stop! What the fuck?”
I follow her, clutching the towel around me, slipping down the last stair, bashing my tailbone, but struggling to stand right away, my body still dripping.
She turns at the crash, finds me on the ground. “Whoa, are you okay?” She pauses.
Even in this moment, she is worried about me, but I reject that worry. I push past her and open the front door and wait for her to go, but she won’t cross the threshold so I step outside, nearly naked, so she’ll follow me and she does.
“Connie,” I shout-whisper, “I didn’t ask for that. I need to figure some things out before I start naming this situation, but this is not your responsibility. You think my husband doesn’t know that something’s off?”
Connie throws up her hands. “Get yourself back to the office. Or maybe don’t? I don’t know that you’re the best face to put in front of the board.” She stomps down the porch stairs.
“Tell them I’m home for the day,” I call.
“Tell them yourself.” She slams her car door and takes off.
I walk back inside and lock the door. I gather the strength to deal with James and tug myself upstairs, feeling the ache in my tailbone now. When I pass the guest bedroom, I see a dark shadow and freeze, keeping my eyes on it. “James?”
“Do you have something you want to talk to me about?” James asks from the other room. “It seems like you do. I didn’t need Connie to tell me that. I was trying to be—”
“James.” I stop him. “Could you come here?” The shadow shifts.
“What?” Then he is next to me and I hear him gasp, and I know he is seeing what I see. “What the…,” he whispers, afraid, as I am, of something, unsure if we fear scaring the dark spot away or inviting it to stay.
“Hello?” I call into the room but nothing responds. “That’s a person’s shadow, right?”
“But from where?” he asks.
My heart is rattling and I want to step into the room, but can’t bring myself to do it. James steps forward before I get the courage, and as soon as he moves, the shadow disappears, and I look behind him to see if his body is now blocking some light, but the angles don’t work that way, and James goes into the room to look for the cause, waving his hand around, trying to figure out what window’s light strikes that wall, and he peers outside to see what could have conned our sight. He shakes his head, and when his eyes meet mine, I begin to weep, and he rushes to me and takes me to
the bedroom, where we lie down, me still in that damp towel, and I finally breathe normally and hug him until I can’t even feel him around me.
41
WHEN JULIE FINALLY drifts off, I duck away to call an electrician, running through the search results until I find one who can pay us a visit today. When he arrives, though, the sound has silenced itself. Without that to point to, I have little to share as a possible symptom of the problem. I describe it. I lead him to the breaker box in the basement. He takes out clamps and gauges. He runs tests. I follow him around as he plugs his equipment into outlets. He tries to pull a clue out of the energy in the walls. When he deems everything in order, he packs his bag. I pay him in cash. I see him out and then I hunt for an answer on my own. I climb stairs. I knock on walls. Still I feel cut out of the equation. We’re a part of this now. Let us in.
The sun’s angle softens. I jostle every room. The moon slides into place. I drive to the bar. I only know the one that Sam has taken me to. Tonight, at least half the seats are filled. This is what busy feels like in this town.
I ask any person who sits down what they know about the house. Everyone I talk to has a different story. The bartender ignores me at first, the same way he did the last time I came in. Then he starts to hear what I’m being told. When someone says something he thinks is wrong, he stuffs those gnarled old hands into his pockets until he can break in to correct the person. Each customer is insistent on his own truth.
That the son was an only child.
That there was no son, just the father and the mother and the girl, no brother.
That the sister died and the town ignored it.
That the sister was lost and never found.
That they lived in our house first and then the house next door, and vice versa.