The Bargaining (19 page)

“Shut your mouth!” she hisses and charges toward the boy, who takes two steps back as he watches her hand raise above her head like it's on a hinge.

I wake up flinching, the image of the woman's swinging arm outlined in silver moonlight, a handprint on my waking memory.

I weave my fingers into a basket and rest my aching head in them, searching for something else to think about than that horrible, tortured hand attached to a wretched, tortured woman.

And though I search for a happier thought, I come up short and think instead of another tortured soul.

Miller. And what he said to me just before I left his trailer tonight.

He isn't wrong. If he was, I'd be sleeping like a baby right now, snug in the warmth of my rightness. Instead, I'm pushing around the scattered rubble of my mind, living in a half-conscious state of waking nightmare, lying on top of the covers, even though the June gloom chill of outside has made its way inside, the house grumbling under the insistent breeze that won't leave until July, when the Pacific Northwest finally gets to enjoy what the rest of the country calls summer.

“If you believed it was hopeless, you wouldn't still be thinking about all the ways it might have been different.”

He said it like it was a good thing to dwell on the very event everyone else in my life seems to wish would just fade to dark. Instead, the grit of desert sand lingers on my skin,
making its way underneath to scratch me into madness. I can still feel the grime of it on my hands.

And as I trace the lines of my palms with my fingers, I do indeed feel some of the grit, but when I look down, all I see is a fine white residue. And from under my fingernail this time, I pluck out a chip of evergreen paint.

“Sorry, but no amount of paint could cover this mess,” I say to the imaginary Miller sitting on the edge of my bed, who's looking at me like I still don't understand anything. And most of me thinks he's probably right.

Then the thought of Miller sitting on the side of the bed I'm lying in—with my T-shirt and underwear and nothing else—flushes my face with heat, and I'm right back to wondering how I could have misjudged him so much.

I roll over to face a new direction, which is why at first I think the thump behind me came from the bed frame hitting the wall. But as I lie still for another moment, I hear it again, a soft but distinct thud on the wall I share with the room next door.

I sit up in bed as quietly as I can on the squeaky bedsprings, kneeling as I lean toward the wall, pressing my ear to the cold plaster with its cracks tracing thin veins across the surface.

Another thud, this one inches from my face. And harder.

I consider going downstairs to get April, but her room is so far away, and this sound is so close, and it's probably nothing. Maybe she left the window open while she was cleaning in there today.

Before I can blink, I'm standing in the doorway of the room with the painting of Jack staring at the closet across the way. I squeeze my hands together, my fingers still searching out the film of dried paint.

“You're not dreaming,” I tell myself. I say it a few more times to make the point.

I squint through the silver light at the mural and think about the sixty-four smaller versions of it stacked up neatly in Miller's trailer and consider how the one I handled while I was there could have left its mark on me. But I don't fully trust this story I tell myself, either.

Then I picture Miller coming out here by himself for days, weeks, months after his parents died, pushing his brush across the wall, carving the hollows of his brother's cheeks, tracing the events of a childhood he could never let go, until his uncle brought him home.

I can barely see to the other side of the room in this dark, even with the light trickling in through the window, its moth-eaten white curtains indeed billowing behind an open sash.

“Get a grip, Penny,” I scold myself, moving across the room on wilting legs. I pull the window closed and slide the lock into place before turning to the mural, my mind ­resolute to eliminate all possibility of absurdity. The smeared swing still hangs from the farthest tree in the ­distance, but other than that, I see no difference in the painting from earlier.

“What the hell happened to you?” I ask Jack. I still can't bring myself to call him by name. Not aloud. Maybe I know that naming him will make his disappearance a trauma I might have to bear as well.

He stares defiantly at the closet now robbed of its mattress tunnel. The closet door stands ajar, just as I left it before, the damp handprint mopped and almost forgotten. The picture on Linda's digital card will take a little while longer to banish from my mind, deleted or not.

As I turn back to the mural to bid the boy goodnight, I catch sight of an infinitesimal change that nearly escapes my notice. I wish it had escaped my notice. I wish I hadn't looked back at the mural. Because now I see the tiny frame of a brown structure, so mired in the thick of the trees at the densest part of the painting, I can only make out the outline of the structure by squinting. Even then, the brown of its sides blends almost completely with
the trunks and tangles of tree branches that seem to be embracing it. But there's no mistaking the shed—the one that wasn't part of the mural before. I'm nearly positive.

I look at Jack's face, my own face close enough to the wall to feel his breath if he had any to breathe. And from this angle, I would swear that his eyes have shifted just the slightest bit, now not focused on the closet across the room but on the window behind me.

I feel warmth on the back of my neck, and though impossible, I swear I feel the tiniest breeze part my hair. Breeze from a window I just shut.

Turning as quickly as I dare, I peer at the window, its curtains dancing in front of the panes. The brightest beams of silver moon flood the space in front of it—
was the moon this bright before?
—and I close my eyes against the glare for just a second. When I open them, I'm staring at the curtains once more, though they hang board straight against the now dark night sky, the moon obscured by a passing cloud.

But as I let my eyes fall to the floor beneath the hem of the curtains, I see the outlines of two sets of small shoes, one on each side of the closed fabric.

Rounded black shoes, clumps of mud oozing from the soles, puddling on the floor. I put my hand against the wall
behind me because I can't stop myself from backing up. But I can't back up any farther than that, and suddenly my heart is a rabid animal in my chest, and my legs are going to give out.

The clouds relinquish their hold on the moon once more, and to my horror, I can see more now, the silhouettes of two little boys, neither more than five feet tall, standing stock straight behind their respective curtains, staring at the same closet the boy in the mural stares at.

Until one turns to stare at me, and the other follows.

The curtains billow under their impossible breeze once more, and this time I can see the boys fully. Their enormous, drooping eyes, the bottom lids pulling skin down to the ­middle of their faces. Their arms and legs bent and knotted at painful angles. Their fingers long and pointed, splintering to jagged ends.

Their jaws lowering, dropping, pulling, their mouths emitting not a single sound.

My legs finally give way to the fear, and I drop to the floor, my voice lost in this cluttered room.

Then, as quickly as they appeared, with the frantic gulp of one breath, they've vanished, the clouds once again taking the moon captive.

I regain movement quicker than I thought I'd be able
to, and I dash to the window, ripping the curtains back with enough force to pull the rod off the wall's hooks, one rusted finial coming away and clattering to the floor.

I check and recheck the window. It's closed. Of course it's closed. I hear a door open downstairs. April's bedroom door. I hear her feet padding up the stairs.

As I turn to meet her in the hall, I look across to the twin room directly in front of me. There, standing in front of the open window are the boys, their shoes glistening with the same mud.

“Penny? Is that you?” I can hear April at the end of the hall, but I can't answer her. All I can do is stare at the boys, their mouths agape, their eyes as white as the moon.

“Penny?”

Before she can reach the doorway, the taller of the two boys clasps his long, crooked fingers around the frame and crouches on the sill, pulling one leg over and then the other. The second boy follows, his back hunched with the unnatural angle his wrong joints have to move against. And with one look back at me, his bottom jaw dusting the backs of his hands, he jumps from the ­window.

April is beside me now, staring at the same open window. She moves in front of me, tired eyes on top of dark
crescents. In this light, she looks like she's been punched on either side of her face.

“Penny, what?” She puts her hand on my shoulder, shakes me a little. But I can't begin to tell her. It's not possible to put into words what I couldn't have just seen.

Except I wasn't the only one to see it.

I push past April and run back to the room with the mural. Jack is there, just as he should be.

I get up close, searching for the little shack. It's still there, too, held in seclusion by its protective trees. But Jack's eyes are focused once again on the closet behind me.

“Penny!” April is shouting now, and I turn to face her, horrified at what I might see next. But it's just April, staring at me expectantly.

“What did you hear?” I ask. I plead, actually.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you hear them too? Did you hear them knocking on the wall?”

Now April is the one looking horrified. She swallows, but that does nothing to coat her still raspy throat.

“You're scaring me, so I'm going to need you to slow down a bit,” she says, approaching me cautiously.

I laugh, a move that takes both of us by surprise. “Of
course you didn't hear them. It's impossible to hear what's not there,” I say.

“Come here,” she says, holding an arm out to me.

I look back at the mural. I look at the closet, its door open, its walls and floor blank and clear but for the tiny matchbox still tucked into the darkness. I look back to April, her arm still out. I don't even know what she wants. To shake me again, to tell me to snap out of it, that it's been far too many months and it's time to get a firm grip on what life looks like after you make horrible decisions. To pull me out of this room so she can get some sleep.

I walk toward her anyway, and her arm encircles my shoulders and pulls me into the hallway, out of the room with the mural, out of sight of the doorway where I couldn't have seen two boys crawl out the window moments earlier. And then she puts her other arm around me and puts a hand behind my head, and I try to remember the last time I've felt anyone hold me the way she's holding me.

Like they know how bad it really is.

“I thought it was real,” I tell her, my words muffled in her fleece robe.

“I know,” she says softly.

“I'm not sure I can even tell anymore,” I say, startled at my own confession.

“I know,” she says again.

“What's happening to me?” I ask her. I don't even try to guess at what her answer might be.

She's quiet for a long time before she says, “You're grieving.” And though I know I should believe her, something in the way she says it—like a guess rather than a statement—makes me doubt.

But she holds me in that hallway for so long my legs start to ache from standing there. Then without a word, she guides me downstairs and sits me down on her bed. I vaguely register the crisp new linens and curtains she's added to the otherwise unchanged room. I spot a Maggie's Grocery basket with clean towels rolled and perched atop the counter in her teeny bathroom.

I sit upright on those fresh new linens until exhaustion finally takes me, and I fall over and curl to the edge of the bed while she lies beside me under the covers, both of us staring into different shadows of a house neither of us really knows what to do with.

“How did you know?” I ask her, the stillness of the room the only indication she's still awake, too.

“Hmm?”

“How did you know to come upstairs? Did you hear the curtain rod fall?”

She's quiet, and if I weren't so tired, I would roll over to look at her. Her silence is more prolonged than it should be.

“No, I was already awake,” she says. “The toilet . . .” and she drifts off, and pretty soon, so do I. Just before I doze off completely, I feel the mattress shift, and then April's weight is absent.

15

A
PRIL IS WEARING HER GLASSES,
so I know she means ­business.

“We're just going to go in, get what we need, and get out. I will not get swept up in the history. I will not get swept up in the history. Say it with me.”