Page 20 of Dread

The zipper on the first bag sounded obscenely loud. Metal teeth closing over fabric, a long, continuous rasp that filled the bedroom and didn’t stop until it reached the end of the track with a final click that might as well have been a door slamming.

I lifted the bag. It weighed nothing -- clothes for a child who weighed forty pounds -- but my arms registered it as substantial. Lead in canvas. I carried it through the living room, past the kitchen table where Ellie’s caterpillar drawing still sat beside the half-empty juice box, past the sofa where she’d fallen asleep watching cartoons the night Dread brought over ice packs for her knee and didn’t stay for dinner.

Ellie followed. Not beside me. Behind. Her footsteps on the worn floorboards had a rhythm -- slow, deliberate, each step placed with the dragging reluctance of someone walking toward something they’ve already decided against. No helping. No arguing. Just presence, unhappy and unwavering, trailing me through the townhome like a shadow I couldn’t outrun.

The front door was closed. I set the bag beside it and looked through the screen at the compound -- the gravel lane, the empty rockers on the clubhouse porch, the yard where Ellie had chased a red ball yesterday, fallen, and run straight to Dread.

Ellie stopped behind me.

She’d quit asking questions somewhere between the bedroom and the front door. That bothered me more than if she’d cried. I reached for the knob, then stopped. Eight days ago, I would have had us loaded and gone already.

“Mom?”

I closed my eyes. Apparently, leaving had gotten harder. Ellie’s bare feet shifted on the floorboards. One step. Then nothing.

One breath. Two. Then I turned the knob.

* * *

The cicadas had reached their evening pitch by the time I carried the second bag to the SUV. That frequency -- all ridge and no valley, a constant white noise that vibrated through the gravel and up through the soles of my shoes into the bones of my ankles. The compound gate stood open at the far end of the lane, the chain link catching the last of the sun in dull silver glints, and beyond it the county road stretched empty in both directions, waiting.

I heaved the second bag into the rear hatch. It landed beside the first with a soft thud of canvas on carpet, and I stood for a moment with my hands braced on the bumper, breathing. The SUV smelled the same -- that blend of synthetic upholstery and the pine air freshener I’d clipped to the vent six months ago, now reduced to a brittle brown nub that gave off nothing. Underneath it, another smell. Faint. I didn’t place it right away.

Ellie followed me back and forth between the townhome and the SUV, her bandaged knee slowing her enough that I had to shorten my stride. She stayed close and unusually quiet, watching each bag disappear into a vehicle she’d spent the past week pretending didn’t exist. Every time I passed her, her eyes followed. Silent. Accusing with a skill only children have, where the accusation isn’t spoken but lived, carried in the set of a shoulder or the refusal to look away.

I straightened. Wiped my palms on my shorts. Turned back toward the townhome for the third bag.

The interior had that hollow quality places get when you’ve started emptying them. The kitchen counter bare except for a single juice box Ellie had left, the straw bent at its permanent angle. The living room sofa cushions dented where we’d sat, the impressions of our bodies still visible in the fabric like fossils. I moved through it quickly. Didn’t look at the walls. Didn’t pause at the bedroom doorway where Ellie’s twin bed was still made, the sheets pulled tight just as she’d left them this morning because she’d been in too much of a hurry to go outside and hadn’t bothered with the blanket.

The third bag was the heaviest. Mine. Clothes, toiletries, the small jewelry box that held nothing valuable but everything irreplaceable -- Ellie’s hospital bracelet from the day she was born, the silver pendant my mother gave me when I graduated high school, the shell Ellie found on a Lake Michigan beach two summers ago and insisted was magic because it was pink on the inside. I zipped it closed. Lifted it off the bed. Carried it through the living room and out the screen door, which whined on its hinges same as it had every time, a sound I’d stopped noticing and was now noticing again with the acuity of someone saying goodbye to a place they hadn’t meant to love.

I stopped at the rear of the SUV.

The hatch was still open. I’d left it that way -- arm extended, hand on the metal, the hydraulics holding the door at its full height while I loaded the first two bags. The hatch stood open at the same angle. I looked into the cargo area and stopped. Something had changed.

The first bag -- Ellie’s -- had been unzipped. Not fully. The zipper pulled back about eight inches, the teeth separated, the contents visible through the gap in a disorder that wasn’t mine. A folded shirt -- the blue one with the butterflies, the one I’d placed on top -- was draped half-out of the side pocket, one sleeve hanging free, the collar crumpled. Ellie’s drawings, which I’d stacked carefully beside her clothes, had been shoved to the far corner of the bag, the edges bent, the top sheet -- the caterpillar for Harlow -- creased along one fold as if someone had rifled through them quickly, searching for something specific or simply ensuring that nothing remained undisturbed.

I set the third bag down on the gravel and stopped. Leaving suddenly wasn’t the most important thing on my mind.

The second bag was worse. My laptop sleeve -- the neoprene case I kept zipped at all times, the case that held nothing but the laptop and the charging cable coiled in its specific pattern, plug facing left, cord wound clockwise -- was open. The zipper pulled back to its full length. The cable inside had been moved. I could see it without touching -- the coil looser, the plug facing right, the cord arranged in a haphazard loop that bore no resemblance to the methodical spiral I’d created this morning when I packed it.

Nothing appeared to be missing. The laptop. Charging cable. Ellie’s drawings. Everything I remembered leaving in the SUV was still there.

Whoever had gone through our things hadn’t been looking for something to steal.

Everything touched. Everything searched. Everything confirming that someone had been here, in the compound, in the five minutes it took me to walk from the SUV to the townhome and back, and had gone through our belongings with a thoroughness that left no doubt about what kind of man he was.

The smell hit me then. Not strong -- faint, stale, clinging to the interior carpet of the hatch like smoke clinging to fabric long after the cigarette is gone. That chemical note. Not the sweet, almost vanilla undertone of American Spirits or the sharp acridity of Camels. A cheaper blend. Something with a synthetic edge that caught in the back of the throat and stayed there, recognizable because I’d spent three years breathing it across a kitchen table while a man I loved told me what was wrong with the way I folded towels.

My hands pressed harder against the SUV. The metal was warm from the day’s heat, almost hot against my palms, and I leaned into it until my forehead touched the edge of the hatch and the cicadas filled my ears and the compound continued around me like nothing had happened.

I scanned the gravel. The narrow gap between our townhome and the next unit, twenty feet of shadow where the porch lights didn’t quite reach. The tree line beyond the east fence, where the maples threw deep pools of darkness onto the ground beneath them.

Something was standing in it.

Just past the fence, where the shadow ran deepest, a shape held still long enough for my eyes to catch it and lose it in the same second -- the outline of a man, upright, facing the compound rather than the road, gone before I could be certain I hadn’t built him out of branches and wanting to be wrong. I didn’t move. Didn’t call out. Stood at the rear bumper with my heart slamming against my ribs and stared at the exact spot until my eyes ached from not blinking, and the shape didn’t come back, and the maples went on being maples.

Half of me had already decided I’d imagined it by the time headlights swept the lane behind me. The other half never quite let go of it.