One by One
Page 9
“What should I do?” she asked as he approached his room.
Finally, he stopped and turned, an exasperated look on his face. “Just relax,” he said. “Go to your room, lie down, read a book. Everything will be fine. I promise. You just have to calm down because honestly, you’re making it worse for both of us.”
Alice sighed and let her head drop. There was no fighting him, not at the moment at least. Without another word, she turned and walked back to the dim, half-light of her room.
“Mom’ll be home in a minute,” Dean called after her, a hint of guilt rising in his voice. She shut the door, refusing to respond.
Alice dropped back onto her bed, wondering if she would ever actually begin to feel at home there. It was so different, even from the night before, when her mother piled in next to her, the two of them sleeping off the bad dream.
Bad dream.
The house creaked, seemingly summoned by the thoughts running through her head. She considered a nap, but it was a foolish idea. She was exhausted from the night before, but sleep wouldn’t come, not until some of the unanswered questions in her mind were finally settled. The painting, the cat, and, though she hated to admit it, the face at her window. Any of them alone might be enough to overlook, but together, they combined into something darker and impossible to ignore.
Alice turned to one side, her eyes closed as she considered it all. The house moaned, and the familiar sound of crackling wind and snow sounded more and more like footsteps on the roof, in the upstairs bedrooms, maybe even in the crawl space. She closed her eyes tighter, trying to will herself to sleep, to skip through time like a scratched DVD to the moment when her mom arrived home. After a few agonizingly slow minutes, she rolled over to her other side.
And that was when she first saw it.
There was a tiny, green book sitting on the bedside table. It was so small, so inconspicuous in the darkened room, that it was a miracle that she saw it at all. She tried to remember putting it there, wondering where she might have gotten it. But a few moments later, she realized what she already knew. It wasn’t hers. She had never seen it before in her life. She crossed the room and glanced back out in the hall, checking for Dean, wondering if this might be some kind of trick, before she hurried back in and pulled the door closed.
Alice picked the book up and turned it over, studying the worn-out cover. At first, she thought it might be an old library book, until she saw the clasp. Before she could second-guess herself, she popped the clasp, and the cover fell open. It was a diary. She flipped through the pages, noticing the interesting progression from a child’s awkward scribbling to a slightly more refined hand.
“Weird,” she said as she tried to make out some of the pages. She spied a name that ended all of the entries, written with a neat, light script.
Mary.
The name echoed through her mind, and the wind gusted, angry, until the word forced its way out of her lips.
“Mary.”
She said it aloud, the sound of her own voice frightening her in the dark of the room as the wind threatened to tear the roof off the house.
“Mary.”
She said it once more, unable to stop herself for reasons she couldn’t understand, and somewhere above, separated by layers of ancient wood and nails, she heard a moan.
In the silent moments that followed, she tried – dear god how she tried – to convince herself that it was just the wind. It still whipped furiously, still tore at the shingles, threatening to pry them free, to fling them away like old scabs. The moment stretched, and Alice realized she wasn’t breathing; she’d been holding her breath so long that it actually hurt. She finally exhaled, and the sound of herself, something other than the wind, only further convinced her that the moan hadn’t been the wind at all.
So she sat with the book in her lap, unmoving, poised like a small animal, a rabbit or a squirrel whose only defense is to not move. Her heart pounded, and when Dean swung open her door, she screamed.
“What was that?” he asked.
“You heard it?”
He nodded, his eyes drifting upward. The two of them stood silently, waiting for it to return. Finally, when the silence washed over them, Dean spoke.
“Should we…go check it out?”
“No,” Alice cried.
“What if a branch fell on the roof or something?”
“What are we going to do about that? You gonna climb out there and fix it?”
But Dean ignored her, staring at the spot above his head as if he expected the ceiling to come to life.
“I’m going up there,” he said as he strode out of her room and back into his.
“Wait,” Alice said, her voice more of a whine than she meant it to be. She met him back in the hall, just as he emerged from his room with an aluminum baseball bat. “What’s that for?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“I thought it was a damn tree.”
“Just…be quiet.”
They walked up the narrow staircase, Dean in front, bat at the ready, and Alice behind. She walked too close to him, one hand on the back of his shirt as if the two of them were walking through a haunted house, each afraid to lose the other. He glanced back once, casting his eyes at her hand, her tiny fist gripping the fabric.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
They crested the top stair and peered down the long hall to their parents’ room. Dean started taking a few steps when Alice pulled him back by his shirt.
“What is it?”
She pointed to the crawl-space door. The latch was still in place. Dean shook his head. “I’m not touching that.”
“Should we check it?” she asked tentatively.
“Hell no.”
Alice, despite her curiosity, couldn’t help but respect his honesty. They passed the bathroom, taking time to glance in and check the dark corners before moving on. Their parents’ room was one of the brightest in the house, and the white light shined down through the skylight overhead. Snow, loose and windblown, was beginning to pile up around the window. By the time the storm ended, Alice wondered if there would be any light shining through at all. They checked behind the doors, in the closets, even under the bed, but found nothing of note.
“Happy?” Dean asked.
“You were the one who wanted to come up here.”
Regaining a bit of his usual swagger, Dean turned and walked back the way they came. Alice lingered for a minute, staring up at the ceiling and the snow dancing on the skylight. It seemed alive somehow, and she had the sudden urge to go out there, to climb out onto the flat span of roof and stare at the wisps of flakes.
Chapter Nine
Alice stared at the small book on her end table for a long time before she worked up the nerve to open it again. She had the strange, impossible feeling that the book was somehow alive, that it wanted her to pick it up, that it wanted someone to see whatever secrets might be inside. It was silly, even she knew it, but the idea took hold in her brain with barbed little claws, refusing to let up. She’d already flipped through it once, and nothing bad had happened, but that fact did little to calm the ominous feeling that stirred inside her.
Mary.
Was she someone who lived here before? Though worn, the book was still in good condition, the spine still sturdy and sound. A leaf was embossed on the cover, though Alice didn’t know what kind. It reminded her of similar diaries her mother had bought her in the past for Christmases or birthdays. The faux leather was scratched in spots, but overall, it was in mostly stable condition.
She wanted to read it.
A million questions were spinning through her head, the most pressing being, how exactly had it gotten here? She didn’t know, and in some deep-seated part of herself, she didn’t care.
Does it really matter?
Who knew where the book had been and, even worse, what secrets might be lurking beneath its cover? In a sickening rush, her mind flashed back to the time when she was walking around the state fair by herself. It was one of the few times she’d ever been allowed out of her parents’ sight in a public place, and she reveled in it, feeling big, grown.
It was hot that day, over ninety degrees, but she didn’t mind. She never noticed the boy coming toward her, not in the crowded throng of people that flowed from place to place like water, gathering and pooling like puddles in front of rides and food trucks. He was probably fifteen, and he was flanked by a few other boys his age. Alice remembered thinking he was tall, taller than her father at that point. Something about that detail still stuck with her.
He’d slipped his phone out of his pocket, and as she walked past, he held it in front of her face. She didn’t have to look. After all, he was at least fifteen, and he and the rest of his friends scared her. They weren’t the types that good girls talk to.
But she did look. And what she saw was a naked woman splayed out with men surrounding her. They were all naked as well, and something in the way they looked, closing in on her, made Alice think it was some sort of ritual, that the woman in the picture might be dead by now. She knew what they were doing. She was plenty old enough to at least grasp the basics. But that picture looked less like what she imagined sex to be. This wasn’t a shared moment of love. It was an offering.
It was just a peek, but it was enough for her to fill in the details. Her face was, apparently, enough as well, and the boys fell onto each other, laughing deliriously as they ran away.
Was it a game then? Walking around the fair, showing porn to kids? Alice thought about it the rest of the day, asking herself why they did it, what it meant. She couldn’t get the picture out of her mind. It was a glimpse into a dark, adult world that she wasn’t ready to think about yet. She spent the afternoon talking to herself in a voice that was remarkably like her mother’s.
What is wrong with people?
This is why you don’t go walking around without your parents.
And yet, that night, she thought of the picture again, the image filling her mind, her room, taking her somewhere she’d never been, never asked to go. She was afraid, but there in the dark, Alice didn’t fight it, and when she slipped her hands between her legs, it wasn’t fear she felt but something stronger, something brighter. Alice slept hard that night, and when she woke up the next day, she went straight into the shower and stood there, letting the scalding water peel the wrongness off her.
She had done a good job of burying that memory, stomping the dirt down on top of it, doing her best to keep it from rising up once more. But in that moment, looking at the book, she could think of nothing else. Her skin was alive in a wave of prickling goose bumps when she finally touched the cover. Once she lifted it from the end table, a bead of sweat dripped down her head, and she sighed.
Still holding the journal, she pushed her heavy door closed, leaning her shoulder into it, listening to it hiss across the thick, old carpet. When it finally clicked into place, she turned the lock gently. Dean didn’t seem to be around, and even if he was, he wouldn’t care what she was up to. Still, if he heard the door lock, it might be enough to pique his interest. She’d held the doorknob for a moment, ears perked, listening to the sounds of the house, trying to figure out where he was. The knob, cold and brass, wiggled a bit in her hand as she turned it, easing the latch closed as quietly as possible. All the inside doors seemed to do this, as if they might just pop off in her hand without warning. It was, she assumed, on her dad’s ever-growing list of things to fix.
Once she was certain she had complete privacy, she crept back to the bed and opened the clasp on the front of the book. The book fell open in her hands, and at once, she could see how worn it was. The earliest pages near the front had begun to yellow and wrinkle with age, some of them so much so that it was hard for her to read them. The others near the back were still crisp, the scrawling print still legible.
Alice flipped to one of the earlier entries, studying it. The pages weren’t dated, which appalled Alice on some deep, unspoken level. The entire purpose of a diary, as far as she was concerned, was the steady documentation of days. It had to be specific, tangible, a perfect little snapshot of that mood, that moment in time. This diary was, well, just messy. A list of things that happened. The idea that Mary was so unkempt almost killed a bit of the magic and mystique that the diary allowed to swell up in her mind.
Even so, she picked a random page and began to read.
I’ll never know what it’s like to be a parent. I know that now. I can only watch from the outside, wondering what it’s like, daydreaming about the details, the changes, the sleepless nights, the unconditional love that makes it all worth it. That’s the idealized version, of course. That’s how it begins.
I know how it ends.
I think a lot about what a parent’s ultimate goal would be. I once heard that the idea is not to raise children but to raise adults. To create something that can sustain itself. I wonder how many parents think like that, who have the foresight to always think of those kids as future adults. I don’t see it, at least not in my life, not moment to moment. It becomes something different, something more like survival when kids begin to think for themselves. When “they come online,” as my dad used to say.
They’re little people, even when they don’t seem like they are. I always thought kids were stupid, just because they didn’t make good decisions. For adults, making good choices is everything. But even the smartest kids are capable of stunning lapses in judgment. The next thing you know, they’ve got kids of their own, and we all like to act surprised when they keep on acting like fools.
No, I’ll never understand parenthood, at least not from the other side, but I think I understand what the job is all about. You can blow it up, tear it down, stack it in whatever shape you like, but there’s really only one true goal for a parent.
Make sure the kids make it out alive.
It’s a simple measuring stick, but a powerful one all the same. I won’t know for sure until it’s too late, but if I had to guess, my parents will end up being failures by that measurement. I just can’t imagine still being alive at eighteen.
Alice let the final sentence sit in her mind. Who the hell was this girl? Everything about the diary had made her think the writer would be someone near her age, but her words? They went deeper than anything Alice had ever seen.
You don’t have friends like that, a voice whispered, only to be immediately answered by another, darker voice.
You don’t have friends at all.
An idea swirled in her mind. Alice at school. Awkward. Mostly alone. There were people there. Acquaintances. People who seemed to like her fine, but nothing like what other girls seemed to have. There was always Alice, struggling to make friends. Jealous of the breezy way other
girls seemed to fall in with each other.
Then, there she was. Mary. Swooping in, taking her by the crook of the arm and whisking her away.
“Come on,” she might say, “let’s get away from these little girls.”
But you’re a little girl.
It didn’t matter. She let the fantasy run its course. Mary was older, deeper, more interesting than any of the other girls at school, and she was probably tougher than any of the ones who picked on her.
They would be jealous.
Of course they would.
It reminded her of movies and TV shows where the good girl suddenly falls in with the new girl in town, the one who listens to weird music and pisses off parents just because she can. It was all beyond silly, but it was wonderful too, more real than most of the actual friendships she had.
She kept reading.
Dad never got around to fixing things like he said he would. The house was older than all of us combined. It was falling apart all around us, but he wouldn’t hear it.
“A man takes care of things,” he’d say, smiling.
He wasn’t smiling for long.
I wonder if I should have seen it coming, the way he changed. The way Mom changed. The way we all changed.
I was too young to see anything. How could I have known what he would do? What we would all do?
It was a short entry, but the brevity seemed to make it even more special and mysterious. Was this the family that had lived here before them, a family full of secrets? The dad sounded a lot like her own dad in some ways. Eager. Self-assured. Ultimately in over his head.
But that last bit. How could I have known what he would do? That line chilled her. She let herself imagine what that might be about, but only for a moment. Then she turned to another page.