The Bargaining (15 page)

“It's time, Doris.”

A small woman nods in response, hardly hearing the tall man behind her, but flinching at his touch when he approaches. She's
clutching a wool coat, wringing the scratchy thing in her hands.

“He'll need a jacket. There was a cold snap.”

“It's time to go,” the man says again, a response they both seem to think is inadequate, their bodies sloped away from each other.

The man walks out the door without another word, and I hear the car start somewhere outside.

She turns, her eyes searching even though there's a small boy not more than eight years old right in front of her. A boy with burnt red hair. Then she crouches, but she doesn't reach out to the boy.

“Uncle Dom is on his way over. Don't open the door for anyone else, okay? Mommy needs to go lie down for a while.”

“Why can't we go with Dad?” the boy asks.

“Only Uncle Dom, okay, sweetie? Mommy just needs to lie down.”

She shuffles to the bedroom, her feet never quite leaving the floor.

Her bedroom door hangs on its hinge, refusing to close all the way, and I follow as the little boy slips down to the basement as soon as the bedsprings from her bedroom sigh.

In the basement, the boy slides a box aside marked “Jack, 1993–1995” and another marked “Taxes” until he finds the one he's looking for. From the box marked “Xmas,” he pulls Matchbox cars and University of Washington pennants, a plastic bronze trophy of a pitcher on the mound twisted in perpetual freeze. He shoves those and the actual Christmas decorations aside in favor of the real prize—a Huskies hat that he slides over his head, folding the bill until it fits.

Upstairs, a knock at the door. The boy piles the trophy and the
cars and the pennants back into the box, then pushes the other boxes back into place, the only evidence of his presence a tiny drag mark in the dust on the floor. He runs up the stairs two at a time and opens the door to a man I recognize from a framed newspaper clipping, the smell of coffee now strong in my nose.

“What's this?” the man asks, flicking the bill of the boy's hat.

The boy takes it off quickly, hiding his face from his uncle, but not fast enough.

The man stays in the doorway for a second, and the boy twists the hat in his hand before shoving it into a bookcase and closing the front door behind his uncle, who eyes the bookcase now too.

“She's asleep,” the boy tells him, even though the man never asked.

He walks past the boy and knocks softly on the open bedroom door anyway. He waits for a muffled answer, then goes inside and closes the door behind him.

“I know,” I hear the boy's uncle say. “Shhh, I know. You have to be strong. You have one son in there who can't understand—”

“How could he understand? I can't even understand! We're monsters, Dominic.”

“If you really feel that way, then it's not too late.”

“No, Dom. No. I'm not having this conversation again. I can't.”

“I could leave right now. I could get to Burt in enough time.”

“Don't you see? It's already too late. Once we made the d
ecision . . . there's no turning back from that.”

“The price for that decision was too high. The Doris I know would never have paid it. Why didn't you let me keep trying? He needed help, not—”

“You didn't live with him, Dominic. You didn't see what we saw. And the Doris you knew? She died a long time ago. Now let me sleep this day away. Please, just let me sleep it away.”

The boy's mother doesn't move from bed all day. She doesn't turn over. She doesn't shift. She lies in her room and stares at the far wall, visible from the hallway by the crack in the door the boy's uncle left when he finally succumbed to her wish to be left alone. Her face reflects on the vanity mirror.

The boy's uncle walks from the living room to the kitchen, then back to the living room, then back to the kitchen. He paces all day. The boy stays in his room, absently moving his toy cars from surface to surface, lining them up, lifting his head of embers at each crack and click from somewhere in the house.

By the time the day bleeds into night, the boy puts himself to bed. He scratches at his arms nervously until little trickles of blood smear his skin and crust underneath his fingernails. He stares at the ceiling, moonlight turning his face a sickly green.

A key finally rattles the lock.

“Doris,” the boy's uncle says.

Bedsprings creak to life.

“Doris!” he says louder, but his voice shakes.

The bedroom door at the end of the hall opens, and the little boy leaves his bed too, hovering inside his own doorway. The woman leans against the boy's uncle as the front door opens and her husband comes in, looking past her. Past them all.

A stooped figure enters behind the husband, a head bowed, a form so caked in earth it looks more like a root than a person. The only clue that it's human lies in the whites of two wide eyes.

The woman goes limp against the boy's uncle. Her hand flies to her mouth, her words hiding behind it.

“My baby.” The woman pulls out of the uncle's support and folds herself around the muddied thing. She breathes words muffled under dirt-clotted hair. She strokes the cheeks of a face barely visible, clutches a body that stiffens against her, kisses hands that release small piles of soil on the floor before uncurling.

The small boy in the bedroom doorway looks at his own empty hands and digs the dried blood from underneath his fingernails, eyes traveling back to the figure in his mother's arms with reluctance.

Then he looks at his uncle, but his uncle is staring at the filthy figure in front of him too.

And though the uncle opens his mouth to say something first, the little boy robs him of his words, blurting a confession that saps the room of its last remaining sound.

“That's not him.”

Sleep launches me from unconsciousness like a ball from its cannon. But even though I'm not in the dream anymore, I still feel somehow like I'm flying, the bed under my legs a million miles away.

I find the floor, still not trusting my feet, but with each step, the house around me feels a tiny bit more real. I make my way to the room at the end of the hall and stand before the boy in the mural, painted face locked in far-off wonder, just as it was the last time I saw it. The last time I saw it while I was awake, that is.

It should make me feel better, but it doesn't. Whatever happened while I was sleeping wasn't a dream. Not like any dream I've ever had. I look down at my hands and there, just visible under the moon's invading light, is the thinnest layer of dried paint tracing the ridges of my fingerprints. I examine one of my fingernails a little closer and dig a tiny clump of dried paint from underneath it.

I look at the boy in the painting.

“What the hell did you just show me?”

I dare him to lure me back in so I can tell him to go to hell this time, but a sound from the middle bedroom draws me back.

“Jesus, no wonder I can't sleep in this place.”

I'm not even back in the room before I conclude that it's tapping.

I've heard the sound enough. More than enough.

“I'm not going outside,” I tell Rae. I'm tired of her. I'm just plain tired. After her last visit to me the other night. After that weirdness with the mattresses. After my epic confession of my overall horribleness to Miller. After this bizarre mural I've already vowed to paint over first thing in the morning, even if it takes five gallons of primer and ruins all of April's “charm.”

Tap. Taptaptap.

“Go
away
!” I tell Rae, thinking my voice must be pretty loud, loud enough to wake April, but no longer caring. She can hear me lose my last marble if she wants to.

Taptaptaptaptap.

“Would you just leave me—” I stop, because I see something I shouldn't when I reach the room and look to the window. Impossibly, I see the briefest outline of a hand leaving the pane. But the smudge where it was is unmistakable. A handprint, smaller than mine, in the lower corner, right where I found one in the room across the hall on our first day in the Carver House.

I sneak to the window, expecting to see the same branch tickling the glass I saw the other night. Needing to see the same purple curls on the other end of that branch. But what I see when I look out the window is not Rae. It's the shadowed figure of a little girl, long dark hair obscuring her face.
She wears a white summer dress, her bare feet and hands and arms and legs making me cold just knowing they're exposed in the chilly night air.

I open the window and consider calling out to her. But once I've pushed the window open, I can't think of what I should say.

She doesn't give me an opportunity. Instead, she turns on her bare heel and darts into the woods behind her.

“Hey!” I yell without thinking.

I pull my jeans over my nightshirt and grab the nearest sweater, locating my boots by the back kitchen door where I left them after Miller dropped me off.

I slam the door behind me and stumble outside, finding myself once again at the base of the tree below my bedroom window. I peer into the darkness in the direction I saw the girl go and have just about convinced myself she was never there when I see the slim impression of two feet, sunken deep into the mud by the tree. Sunken as though a heavy weight had pushed the girl, rooted her to that spot.

“Hey, are you out there?” I call. I take a few steps into the woods.

A twig snaps in response. I take another step forward.

“It's okay,” I say, hoping I'm not terrifying this kid more than she might already be.

After the longest silence yet, a scream slices the air. I back into one of the trunks and feel the cool bark catch the balance I've lost. My heart knocks against my ribs.

I scan the darkness before me, my eye seeking out the movement of each swaying branch. The night breeze reaches beneath my sweater.

“I'm here!” I call stupidly. Is that supposed to make her feel better? I try to make my brain rest on a reason for the little girl being out in the woods, and though I can conjure several possibilities, all of which are horrifying, I push myself from the tree and launch into the forest, using my hands as guides, the needles snagging whatever clothing they can reach.

I will April to hear what's going on, but I don't dare go back into the house to get her and risk losing this poor girl.

I train my ears and wait for another clue as to the direction she might have gone. Another breeze finds its way through my clothes.

“Call out if you can hear me!” I yell to the girl—and maybe a little to April—then watch my breath form in front of my face. I silently beg the moon to cut through the tree line and give me at least a glimpse of the path in front of me.

I stop for a moment to find my bearings, wondering for the first time how I might find my way back, if in fact I do find
this girl. And suddenly, the memory of the rest stop floods over me.

“It was just Rae that time,” I remind myself. My voice sounds so assured, so certain, I almost believe it.

“Can you hear me?” I try again.

And then I hear breathing.

The short puffs, the gulps in between that try to dampen a throat dried by panting. I hold so still, I think my pulse might reverberate through my feet and vibrate the forest floor. I scan the darkness, and my vision—finally beginning to adapt to the inky night—traces the outline of a small structure that looks from this distance like a large wooden shed.

The trees around me groan, and though I know it's not possible, they feel closer to me now, their cold bark suddenly visible in my periphery.

Then, from the side of one of the dark edges of the structure, I see silver clouds of air, formed at the ends of the smallest set of lips.

“Hey, it's okay! I'm not going to hurt you!” I call. But before I can take another step forward, the breath dissipates, the mouth retreats, and I hear a door creak on a set of rusted hinges and slam shut.

“Hey!” I call, plowing forward and finding a chipped green door on its splintered frame. I look down and see the
vaguest impressions of two small feet left in the mud.

“If you disappeared tonight, do you think anyone would notice?”

I whirl around, my hand slamming against the knob of the splintering green door. Rae's breath is still warm against my ear. Now she stands several paces away, giggling in a way that's far too immature for her.