The Dwelling: A Novel (32 page)

What else has he got that’s only his, that only he uses.

Debra had walked her through the downstairs, more coat pockets, old briefcases, his knapsack that he took to the gym; when she told her to look inside his winter boots, she drew the line, feeling that Debra—her friend—
wanted
her to find something incriminating when there was nothing. After an hour on the phone, an hour of sticking her hand into the most absurd places, growing more and more suspicious, more and more frightened—as much as by what she was doing as what she was looking for—she finally got off the phone, pleading an appointment and offering the promise that she would call a lawyer, “just to see.”

What else has he got that’s only his, that only he uses?

The ad for the day-care closest to the house on Belisle had said that electronically transmitted applications were acceptable before the fourteenth. E-mail.

Dennis was an LPP guy: little pieces of paper. There had been dozens of them found on her search through his things. None of them had any meaning for her, all pertaining, she suspected, to work: indecipherable things that said, “110 bcu. 120,” and appointment notes, all men’s names, likely work-related since they were all daytime hours. Debra was disappointed each time they found one.

She’d been a computer widow one long year, when Petey was about six. Dennis had bought a brand-new computer “for the family” that Christmas and was enamored. He’d spent hours every evening after Christmas playing with it, and when the initial thrill abated, he continued to use it religiously, for work, she assumed, and had taught both her and Petey some basic uses. Petey played computer games, becoming easily bored with the Step 1–2–3 to Grade Two! types of games that Dennis bought for him. Slowly, over the year, it became Dennis’s toy.

Barbara tried to jot down some notes on her work experience on a piece of the printer paper beside the typewriter. She got lost several times. She started again.

The password had been easy enough to find. It was written on a Post-it tucked on the bottom of the keyboard. That hadn’t exactly been detective work. She had seen him do it. She’d asked him what it was.

The password got her into the programs. On the bottom of the computer screen there was a little symbol of a letter. She only vaguely understood the concept of e-mail, had certainly never sent one and didn’t know the mechanics of how it worked, even, but it really was point-and-click—who’d have thought?—and from there it was easy enough to decipher in-box from out-box and so on. It took a little longer to figure out “sent.”

The pen was still in her hand, but by then Barbara was staring off into space, her face slack with remembered disbelief and the hurt. The terrible hurt. Real physical pain. A bone breaking. She’d curled up into a ball, clutching her stomach in very real pain on the floor of the office and let out a wail. Without warning, everything she had eaten the night before and that morning, mostly nothing, a piece of toast and a couple of sips of coffee, came rushing up and she vomited right there on the spot, some of the vomit hitting her hand, warm and horribly wet. The taste of it in her mouth forced her up off the floor and into the bathroom. She rinsed her mouth and bent over the toilet and threw up again. Off and on, for an hour, until her sides hurt, her throat burned, and her jaw ached from being forced open so wide, so often.

She pressed her eyes tightly shut, trying desperately to get the memory out of her head. Finally she curled her hands into fists and closed them so hard for so long that it became distracting. Did it until it hurt. That helped.

Ancient history.

She wrote two sentences about organizing the Festival of Learning, and then gave up. Just for a little while she would do something else. It would all fade in a half hour or so, she knew from experience. She wondered, ironically, if she could add “effective knowledge of e-mailing” to her special skills. Wouldn’t that be a kicker?

It was several hours before she sat back down at the typewriter and worked on her résumé in earnest, putting behind her the memories of what was ancient history. In between she cleaned her house.

The sun was bright again, for several days in a row. It poured in through the windows on the south side of the house, lighting the hall and making even the bathroom, with its menacing and mysterious tub, seem benign. She flung open the windows in all the rooms and let spring-summer inside. It cheered her considerably.

When she was downstairs collecting her dust mop, she put on a CD. Dusty Springfield. She sang along. Even the sad songs were okay, buffered as they were by her own ignorance of the lyrics.

Petey had left the empty tins of pudding on his dresser, along with the spoon. Otherwise, his room was tidy, if (probably) dirty. She moved everything out of the way for her mop, pushing the dresser away from the wall and retrieving two mismatched socks and a Matchbox car, before dusting behind it. Motes of dust flew everywhere, in spite of the spray of oil soap she gave her mop. She rolled up his little rug and left it in the hall for later shaking. Under his bed there were a number of books and two empty wrappers from the peanut-butter cups, and pajama bottoms that she had thought were in the wash. She stepped on a piece of Lego, shrieking with pain when it dug into her arch. Lego was deadly. All in all, she was in a good mood.

She would get one of the jobs, of that she was certain. She hoped for the secretarial thing, but would take the childcare work. If nothing panned out—a pointless exercise in futility, that sort of thinking—she would apply for a cashier’s job at any number of the stores just blocks from the Belisle house. She felt like there were (suddenly) endless options.

The worst parts done, under the bed, behind, under the dresser, she turned her attention to the rest of the floor and gave it a once-over, pausing now and then to rub at something with the cloth she kept with her for tougher marks. She would have to come back for two: a dust-coated splash of what looked to be dried apple juice and an unidentified blue mark that scraped off—partly, with her thumbnail.

Barbara was just on her way to the bathroom, for a sturdier cloth and some chemical elbow grease, when she saw yet another mark on the floor that hadn’t been swept away with the mop, noticeable only with the sun shining on it. She backed up a step or two and tried finding it again. When she did, she knelt down for a better look. It was alongside the cubbyhole door.

It was a footprint. That in itself wasn’t strange—she had found a footprint beside the apple-juice mark, but it had apparently been covered in a sock at the time—except that this footprint was substantially smaller than the sock print. She looked closely at it, putting her hand down beside it, wondering if it was some sort of optical illusion. But no, it was small. It was smaller than the length of her hand, practically a toddler’s footprint. And complete. She could count all five toes.

She looked at it for a long time.

Eventually she shrugged. She hadn’t washed all the floors when they’d moved in. Obviously a small child had looked at the house with its parents before Barbara and Petey. She/he had left their mark. (She just hoped they hadn’t stepped in pee or something disgusting before they’d done it; nasty germs might have been left.)

She got up off the floor and went and got a cloth. She rubbed the mark away easily. She finished her dusting of the floor and, for no good reason at all, was reminded of the night she heard Petey sleepwalking.

The footprint had been facing outward. As though leaving the closet.

My mother’s dead.

That’s terrible.

By the time she was once again ready to work on her résumé—
no bad thoughts allowed!
—she was feeling pumped and in control. The upstairs sparkled. If she finished in time, she could stop at the copier’s, get several made and be back in time to do the same for the downstairs. Dusty Springfield was on her third tour when she sat back down to the typewriter.

Everything was going to be fine.

There are no alleyways all the length of Belisle Street; it is one of the few distinctions of the neighborhood. Instead of an alley, Belisle and its backyard sister, Harrod, are separated by a copse of birch trees that have been standing for as long as anyone can remember. Most of the houses have back gardens, whether planned or the very opposite. A great many of the homeowners over the years had put up fences that ran the length of their property, protection against the small animals that make the mini-forest their home. A narrow path had been beaten down from the time of the first child to live there, and so the “back way” is passable, but only on foot. Branches and the unpredictable undergrowth have made even bike riding inadvisable. Every few years a neighbor gets up a petition to turn the back way into a real alley, wanting to park his car and bring in his groceries in anonymity. So far, they have all given up. Cars are parked in driveways or on the street; garbage and recycling is toted out front, deliveries, moving vans and guests all enter and exit through the front street; neighbors with a tendency toward embarrassment have learned to ask for paper instead of plastic.

There was a good four feet on the east side of the house, between it and the hedge. When Petey got home from school, he looked anxiously toward the side of the house, as though expecting to see something there, then ran up the steps and inside. It was a cool place, he bet. He hadn’t spent any time exploring the yard, at all.

He dumped his backpack on the floor. He listened for his mom, and, after a second or two of hearing the unfamiliar
tap tap tap,
he poked his head around the archway between the hall and the living room and saw her at the end of the dining-room table, pecking away at the keys of her little typewriter, her forehead crunched in concentration.

She heard him. “Hey, baby,” she said distractedly.

“Hi.”

“I’m just typing up my résumé, I’ll be done in a couple of minutes. How was school? School okay?”

Petey mumbled something that she didn’t catch and she looked up quickly; he could almost see her doing a quick assessment in her head. Clothes unsoiled, face clean of dirt and tears, no pinched look (no more than usual), and she smiled swiftly, and bent her head back over the keyboard. She resumed her awkward pecking until the carriage bell rang. She wiggled her shoulders and glanced back at him once more with a satisfied smile.

“I might just get this right,” she said.

“I’m going out in the yard, ’kay?” he said.

“Okay. Don’t go far. Dinner in an hour or so.”

The pecking started again, just as Petey closed the door.

It was still nice out, although the sun had been hidden behind clouds for most of the afternoon and it looked like it might rain. Petey pulled his jacket down over his belly—it was getting too small, but he didn’t want to say anything to his mom because mostly it was getting too small in the
front,
and that was about being a husky kid and he didn’t want to talk about it—and stepped off the small stoop, standing on the sidewalk for a heartbeat, as though establishing his presence. He took a deep, manufactured breath, then ducked his head covertly and headed toward the side of the house.

The grass was just starting to turn green. The sidewalk went around the other side of the house to the backyard, so there was no path between the east side and the sidewalk. Petey took big steps as though wanting to disturb the earth as little as possible. It was different at the side, though. It was narrow and dark between the hedge and the house. The house next door had only one window along that side, at the top. Petey’s house didn’t have any windows on the west side, and for a little bit that fascinated him. The houses all looked so much the same he hadn’t considered that they might be different. His mom’s room, the biggest, had a window on the east side. He could see it—although not
in
it—if he looked up from where he stood. Maybe the neighbors’ had an opposite layout? He compared the two houses in the most casual way, a thoughtful, responsible expression on his face, a look of casual curiosity. Then he got to business.

It was nice and private with the hedge.

Petey bent down in a crouch, resting on his heels, mindful that the ground was wet. The hedge hadn’t grown through yet, but was so old and thick and tangled with branches that he had to squint and tilt his head to see clearly through to the other yard. In a month, the hedge would be green and thick with little pale yellow flowers. They’d had one just like it at their old house. He even knew how it would smell. He and Jeremy used to eat the buds when they were small. They tasted sweet.

He looked over to the back corner of the garden, of which he had a perfect view, where he had seen the two children yesterday.

A big rock was directly in the path between the house and the hedge. He gave it a push until it turned over. A fat slug, gray and wet-looking, was stuck to the bottom. He nudged it with his finger. It gave slightly like a booger, but didn’t move. He rolled it over with his finger and it complied. It left behind a smear of boogerlike stuff. He wrinkled his nose. He was a beetle man.

He looked over to the corner of the garden.

The slug woke up enough to move its body in a rippling motion. Petey knew that it wasn’t moving but heating itself up. He prodded it gently with his finger. There was no reaction. He peered at the ground, broken and raw, where the rock had pulled loose. There were no bugs yet, but a number of little white tubular things were scattered in the black dirt. Larvae. They were probably beetles.

In a preternaturally slow movement, he pulled the rock back into place and found his mark in the backyard.

And they were there.

Two of them. The little girl and the boy about his own age. They were barefoot.

“Come and play,”
the boy said. If the girl had said it, Petey might have hesitated. But because it was the boy (and somehow, because they were barefoot) he went.

He stood up on legs that had decided at the last minute to shake. He walked the length of the house, a child’s natural suspicion apparent in his posture, eagerness and curiosity on his face. He jumped over the rock, and then over some brush and debris from previous years, previous owners, and in the seconds it took to go the length of the house, the two children had disappeared behind the trees and brush that grew randomly along the back garden.