Page 5 of The Girl from Widow Hills
I’d heard if you were ever trapped underwater and didn’t know which way was up, you could orient yourself by blowing out air and following the bubbles—a trail to safety. The open window worked much the same. If I ever needed it, I’d feel the air moving and know which way was out.
I must’ve forgotten to close them after the last time.
But a jump from up there would’ve done a lot more damage than dirt on my hands and a scratch on my foot.
Rick shuffled his feet, and it was only then that I noticed he was barefoot, too. That he’d heard me or seen me in the night and rushed out to help before grabbing his own shoes, or a coat. He circled to the back entrance of the house, and I followed.
“My son, he used to keep a key . . .” He bent down to the bottom rail of the wooden steps. Fished his fingers into the splintered hollow. Pulled out something coated in mud. He placed a hand on his knee as he straightened again, then handed me the metal with a crooked grin. “Still here, I’ll be.”
I slid the key into the back door, and it turned. “Hallelujah,” I said. I handed the key back to him, but he didn’t take it.
“Just in case,” I said. “Please. I’ll feel better knowing you have a copy.”
He was frowning when I placed it in his open palm, but he slid it into the pocket of his sweatpants. He looked like a different person in the night, without his jeans and flannel shirt and his beige work boots laced tight, regardless of the fact that he had long since retired from his job as a general contractor. He had just turned seventy earlier this year, his hair a shock of gray over a deeply lined face—all proof that he’d spent decades out in the sun, building his own life by hand. He still tinkered around in his shed, still told me if I ever wanted to finish the upstairs space, we could do it together. But apart from his typical attire, he seemed smaller now. Frailer. The contrast was unnerving.
Rick entered the house first and flipped the light to the kitchen, peering around the room. The wineglass had been left in the sink. I felt the urge to straighten up, prove I was taking care of this place. That I was worth it. He was soft-spoken but perceptive, and his gaze kept moving, to the arched entrance, to the dark hall.
Rick was the one I’d gone to when I’d found a baby bat hanging from my front porch in mid-daylight; when there’d been a snake at the foot of the wooden steps; when I’d heard something in the bushes. He’d said the bat had probably gotten lost, then he’d used a broom to urge it along; he’d declared the snake harmless; he’d told me to stomp my feet and make noise and act bigger than I was to scare whatever might be watching. Most of the wildlife had been driven farther back with the development over the past couple of years, but not all of it. Things got lost. Things staked their claim. Things stood their ground.
He was looking over the house now as if he could see its past remaining. Different people inside, with a different history. He twisted the gold band on his ring finger with his other hand.
“I heard you yelling,” he said. “I heard you.”
I closed my eyes, searching for the dream. Wondered what I’d been calling into the night. Whether it was a noise or a name—the word on my tongue, in my memory, as my eyes drifted over the bare kitchen table. The box of her things tucked out of sight in my bedroom closet now, where it had been stored since it had arrived two days earlier.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, no, don’t be.” His hands started to faintly shake, as they seemed to be doing more and more now. The tremors, either from the start of illness or from craving his next drink. I didn’t ask, out of politeness. Same way he didn’t ask about the marks on my arm even though his gaze would often linger on the long scar, eyes sharp before cutting away each time.
He raised his trembling fingers to my hair now, pulling a dead leaf from a spot above my ear. It must’ve gotten caught as I walked through the lower-hanging branches between our properties. “Glad I found you,” he said.
I shook my head, stepping back. “I used to. I used to sleepwalk. I don’t anymore,” I repeated, like a child who didn’t want it to be true.
He nodded once. The clock on the microwave said it was 3:16. “Get some sleep,” he said, pulling the back door open.
I had to be up in less than three hours. It was pointless. “You, too.”
“And lock up,” he called as the door latched shut behind him, the silverware drawer rattling. His bare feet made hardly any sound as he walked down the back steps.
Now I peered around the house like Rick had done, like I was looking for signs of an intruder. Holding my breath, listening for something else that might be here. Even though it was just me.
I trailed my fingers down the wall of the dark hallway as I headed for the bedroom door, gaping open at the other end. I flicked the switch just inside. The sheets were violently kicked back, pulled from the corners of the mattress. A chill ran through me. The scene looked familiar—the aftermath of a night terror. Though I hadn’t had one in years. My childhood doctors had attributed the episodes to PTSD, a result of the horrors of those three days trapped underground.
It was the box on the shelf of my closet, I decided. My subconscious, triggered by that almost-memory—of the cold and the dark—that may have been real, but maybe not. That same nightmare I used to have as a child in the years after the accident:
Rocks, all around, everywhere my hands could touch. Cold and damp. An endless darkness.
I used to wake from the nightmare feeling that even the walls were too close—kicking off the sheets, throwing out my limbs, pushing back against something that was no longer there. The fear lingering in place of the memory.
I remembered what my mom used to do back then. Hot chocolate, to calm me. The pills, to protect me. A hook and eye on the top of my door, for night. A rattle, the first line of defense, so she would wake. So she would stop me this time.
I turned back for the hall, and the glow from the bedroom lit up the wood floor. A few drops of blood trailing down the hall. I couldn’t tell whether that had happened before I left the house or just now. I followed the trail, but it stopped at the entrance to the kitchen again. On the left, the hall forked off to the kitchen and another bedroom, which I used as my home office; on the right, the arched entrance to the living room led straight to the front door. There was no sign of blood anywhere else. Just this hall.
I sat on the living room sofa, examining the cut on my left foot. Something was wedged between my first two toes. A splinter, I thought at first. But it was too shiny. A small piece of metal. No, it was glass. I pulled it out with my nails and held it to the light, narrowing my eyes, to be sure.
It was small and sharp, coated in dirt and blood, impossible to tell the original color. I looked around the room, searching for something that had been broken. A vase on the coffee table; a glass mirror over the couch; a lamp on my bedside table. But nothing appeared damaged or disturbed.
I kept going, room by room. Checking upstairs, even, though I kept nothing fragile there. The stairway didn’t have a light switch, and I felt my way through the dark, trailing my hands along the narrowed walls. The moonlight slanted through the open windows, and the shadow of the rocking chair came into focus. I reached up for the chain to turn on the light, but when I pulled it, nothing happened. I felt around the space above my head, but there was no bulb attached to the base. Now I couldn’t remember if there ever had been.
