Chapters 1-3

2009-09-28T21:35:00.003-04:00

Chapter 1

The siren drives an ice pick through my brain. Explosions of light burn the backs of my eyelids. I pull to the curb to let the fire truck go by, press my forehead to the steering wheel and wait for the pain to pass.

There’s always an emergency somewhere in L.A.. Now it’s in my adrenaline-spiked veins.

I look up to see the day smeared through my watery eyes. A parade of palm trees dissolve into hazy sky down one side of the street, utility poles lurch down the other. If I could blur the edges a little more maybe I wouldn’t even be here.

Sitting in a rental car on 25th Avenue in front of the beige shopping center where I used to buy candy on the way home from elementary school: this was not the plan.

My heart blows out of my chest when a car honks right behind me. My bad. I waited a millisecond too long for the fire truck to pass. I pull away from the curb, go past the Safeway, the Starbucks, the Rite-Aid, and take the left onto Altamira Drive, down the hill and three more blocks to our house.

“Fine, I’ll drive by. But no way am I going in,” I say out loud to my control-freak brother who isn’t in the car to hear me.

Until John called three weeks ago, I’d started to believe I could not come back to L.A. at all. Just let my childhood slide off the raft along with my mother. But there was that tiny matter about becoming a legal adult.

“Hey, sis. Big birthday, huh?” he said when I answered the phone ringing from the clump of jeans on my dorm room floor. I was in bed trying to fall sleep, but it was three hours earlier in Seattle where he was.

“Hey, boss.” My name for him way before he went to business school. I like to think I saw it a lot sooner than he did.

“You going to wild parties and having sex with strangers?” he asked, as if he didn’t know me better. John likes to pretend that my hypersensitive head is an attitude problem. If I’d just buck up, and you know, get out more.

“Listen,” he said, getting down to business. “I need you to come home over spring break so we can sign a bunch of papers, get the house on the market. It’s costing me a fortune to keep it up.”

“Can’t we do this by fax or something?” I said, the big whine creeping into my voice. John is eight years older and talking to him never fails to make me feel like the little kid I was when he stopped being a little kid.

“We could,” he said. “But I think it’s time we did something with Mom’s ashes. Lucy’s due in April so I won’t be going anywhere after that.”

As it turned out, Lucy went into labor weeks early. By that I mean two hours ago. So I took John to the airport right after the memorial service. Which is why I’m driving his rental car without him in it, and cursing him for leaving me to deal with the realtor while he deals with, well, fatherhood.

I tell myself, using my father’s words, that self-pity is an unattractive emotion in a woman. And then I go ahead and feel it anyway.

I take the last curve squinting into the sun as it drops behind the low rooftops perched along the canyon ridge. Smoggy circus peanut orange melts into the line of ocean visible in the distance. As the road bends right, the sun’s glare moves over my left shoulder. I brake in front of our house, leaving the car in the middle of the street. The first stirrings of an offshore breeze bring sage and seaweed to my nose.

Despite my brother’s harping anxiety, I see our house hasn’t burned down. The windows aren’t broken. It looks, in fact, well-tended, bathed in a rosy glow like some real estate ad. “Mid-century modern with lots of potential.” John must have paid landscapers to do the curb appeal thing because there’s a border of new flowers and too-red mulch. I smirk at the irony of the sun setting right over the house. A bit overdone, the reviews would say. If it were a movie.

The smile falls off my face when I see the curtains part. My hand shoots up to shield my eyes, to decipher the movement in the front bedroom window. My bedroom.

Here’s what I see: a hand pressed to the window, a child-sized figure, too shadowed to see clearly. The hand withdraws, the curtain falls closed.

“Shit!” says the breath I let out.

Neighbor kids messing around in the house? The cleaning crew must have left a door unlocked.

I feel the breeze blow ice up my sleeve and realize I am drenched in sweat.

“Hey, doll!” shouts a gravelly voice up the road behind me.

I look back and see Mr. Clay coming down the sidewalk, still wearing his dark gray suit from the memorial service, silver tie folded up in his hand.

Even though L.A. is now a majority of ethnic minorities, our little suburban enclave of it – San Pedro -- is mostly white. With the port and fishing industry, plenty of Italian, Greek and Portuguese first-generation types live here, a few Mexican families too. But not a lot of African Americans, so I gather Mr. Clay had to deal with some serious crap over the decades he’s been here.

Truth be told, I’d sort of forgotten about Mr. Clay. Not literally, but I left him behind like I left everything else when I went off to school last year. I had no intention of looking back at any of it, even the good parts. And Mr. Clay was definitely a good part. I feel bad that all I want to do is get the hell out of here as fast as I can with as little conversation as possible. I veer the car over to the curb and reverse back to the front of our house. No motion in the bedroom window.

Did I really just see someone in there?

I get out to greet Mr. Clay, shirt sticking to my sides.

“I’m sorry, Fran. Hell of a way to spend your spring break,” he says, like he’s even a little mad about it. He comes up and hugs me around the shoulders with one thick arm.

I have to remind myself to keep breathing.

Here’s the thing: I have what certain professionals call a “sensory modulation disorder” or “neurological hypersensitivity” or some other equally useless names. Apparently the left side of my brain didn’t develop quite like it should have so the right side had to take over and it’s been running the show ever since. That’s the theory anyway. The MRIs of my brain are published in some medical journals. I’m a genetic fluke, too many connections between the hemispheres, the wrong areas lighting up at the wrong times. Whatever.

I think of it as a boundary problem, not enough screens, too many open windows. The volume on the world is turned way up all the time.

Mr. Clay knows this about me though. Which is why he only hugs me with one arm and lets me go pretty quick. He steps back, leans one hand on the roof of the rental and gives me an easy smile. He doesn’t bombard me with questions and conversation-starters like most grownups would do in this situation. He’s waiting for me to say something.

“John asked me to drive by and check on the place,” I say lamely, parroting my brother’s exact instructions. “You haven’t seen anyone over there have you?”

“Nah,” Mr. Clay says. “Just got home myself. Something not look right?”

“Not really. I just thought I saw the curtains moving. I guess I should make sure the back doors are closed.”

“You want me to come with you?” he asks pushing off my car and starting towards our front steps.

“No, that’s okay, I’ll just run around and check the locks.”

He looks at me brow-furrowed like he’s trying to decide whether to insist.

“Well, come on over and have a glass of tea if you’ve got time.”

“I will,” I say, figuring I won’t. I realize something more is called for so I add, “Thank you. You know. For all that. Before.”

Oh, well done. But it was all I could manage under the circumstances.

“I was glad I could be there,” he says, wrapping his hand all the way around my upper arm and giving it a squeeze before letting me go.

“I’m here if you need anything,” he adds, turning and waving back over his shoulder. I watch him take the steps up to his door gingerly, one at a time. Six months since I’d been home and Mr. Clay looks old.

Southern California is delivering another perfect 75-degree spring evening and I’m standing in front of my home shivering.

Chapter 2

I hear a car alarm going off in the distance, the river rush of traffic from Western Avenue down the hill. A child shrieks from a backyard nearby, I can’t tell if it’s pain or pleasure, but it cuts right through my chest. I count to sixteen automatically as I climb the cement steps to our front door. Counting is always a good way to shut down some of the incoming noise. I plop down on the stoop and do that relax-all-my-parts thing from yoga class.

As much as I tried to prepare for this moment, there’s just no way to feel okay about your first visit home from college being to an empty house. Goosebumps rise along my arm where it touches the cool metal railing. It hits me I’m sitting in the exact spot where Mr. Clay found Mom when she had the stroke, just a couple of weeks after I graduated from high school last June.

I sit at the top of the steps trying to muster the energy to get up and check the doors around the back of the house. I am fried to a crisp after the night train to Boston, the early morning flight, and the hours on LA freeways since then. No surprise I doze off, my arms wrapped loosely around the railing.

My head bangs against the metal and I startle awake. Adrenaline shoots through me leaving the soles of my feet tingling. I look up and down the street to see if anyone is staring at me like I just screamed out loud, but no one is out.

The Nightmare again. I think of it as a proper noun, too ghastly for ordinary nightmare status. It’s always a variation on the same plot: I’m inside a dark building, panic rising, I look back and he’s there, face indecipherable in the shadows. And then the chase, down narrow hallways, through trash-filled basements, up endless stairwells, knocking past curtains and doors, but never getting out.

I can’t always see the knife but I know it’s there.

And the sour tarry gunk in my mouth. I pull it out in handfuls as I run. There’s always more. Sometimes it’s pink, sometimes grey or black, always bitter. It sticks to my tongue, hides in back behind my molars. I never manage to get it all out. And the man with the knife never catches me. Not yet anyway.

For three months, some version of it has come nearly every night. The days that follow are like a long trudge up hot sand dunes, never getting to the downhill part, to the water on the other side. I was hoping the Nightmare wouldn’t follow me back across the country.

I’ve been over it in my mind a thousand times. Is this my weird way of dealing with my mom’s death? Is it anxiety about my first year at college? Is the guy someone I met in passing on campus and he got lodged in the back of my brain somehow as threatening? And what’s with the wad of sour stretchy stuff in my mouth? I thought maybe it was something foul I’ve been eating in the dining hall giving me indigestion, but apparently not if it happens here too.

The sun is down now, the sky fading from pinky-orange to gray. My eyes burn and my butt is numb from the cement stoop. I yank myself up to check the front door. Locked. I go down the steps and around the side of the house half expecting to find the kitchen door wide open and a pack of eight year-olds having Pop Tarts and Pepsi on the floor.

My brother didn’t worry about someone breaking in all those months after Mom died when the house was jam-packed with our stuff. I moved in with Nell’s family right afterwards, went back in there in August just long enough to pack a few things for Maine. But now that the movers have come and the realtor is showing up first thing tomorrow to do the for-sale-sign thing, he’s all edgy about something getting screwed up at the last minute. It’d be just my luck to show up in the morning and find graffiti spray-painted all over the walls because I couldn’t be bothered to check the damn locks.

I follow the cement path around the left side of the house, past the garbage cans, to the kitchen door. Locked. I continue to the back gate – latched -- and let myself through.

Must be the sliding glass doors off the deck they left unlocked. I slog up the deck stairs, twelve of them, and head first to the railing. The deck aims itself triangularly out to sea like the prow of a ship. Dad built it before I was born, when they’d first moved in as bright and shiny newlyweds. That view off the deck, over our sloping yard to the grassy hill on the other side of the canyon, across the flat expanse of the old military base, to the ocean beyond, Mom always said that view was the entire reason for the house. You can see whitecaps out there on a windy day, impressionist landscape of sailboat races on the weekends.

I turn and cross the deck to the sliding glass doors and pull on the handle. It doesn’t budge. So the cleaners didn’t forget to lock up the house.

The sun was in my face when I drove up and I’m so tired my eyes are on their last legs, if you’ll excuse the mangled metaphor. Maybe there was no hand in the window, no moving curtain. Just my over-active brain on extreme sleep deprivation.

I dig in my jeans for the house keys but all I come up with is the double-chunky remote for the rental car. I left the house keys in my pack back in the car. My stomach growls as I stand on the deck and weigh my options. I haven’t eaten anything since the rubber breakfast burrito at the airport in Boston early this morning. I can hear the iced maple scones at the neighborhood Starbucks calling me. Can’t I just get in the car and drive off, come back and face it all in the daylight with a perky realtor and a tidy check-off list?

It’s not that I’m afraid of catching some kids screwing around in there. But I am sick-to-my-stomach afraid of going back in the house now that it’s empty, of seeing the only home I’ve ever known erased right down to the bare surfaces.

I turn to leave and get knocked back by a massive head rush like when you stand up too fast, especially if you haven’t eaten in a while, or are really tired. Or all of the above. My hand shoots out to the glass door to steady myself until the dizziness passes and this image rears up in my face. My eyes are open, but instead of seeing out across the deck, I see flames all around me. I gasp and yank my hand back from the glass. As soon as I get air into my lungs, my vision clears and I am just standing there on the deck like before.

Aside from the dizzy spell, this hallucination isn’t necessarily so weird for me because I’m always coming up with disaster scenarios in my mind. That whole right-brain-in-charge problem I have means the images my head creates sometimes get mixed up with the real stuff coming in from the outside world. Don’t get me wrong, I can tell the difference. I know there wasn’t actually any fire. It’s just that I could see it outside my head, kind of like how some people see colors in response to words

Somewhere in the back of my mind I’ve started to worry that if I don’t inspect every room in the house, it’ll burn down before the realtor gets here in the morning. Like maybe the movers left the toaster oven plugged in. Our old toaster oven can’t shut itself off anymore; you have to yank the plug out of the wall to turn it off. Of course all this is irrational since the movers would have packed the toaster oven. But once that seed of doubt gets planted, there’s no uprooting it. Just like Mom always had to check the knobs on the stove two and three times if we were leaving the house for the day.

I like to think my capacity to imagine the worst thing that can happen in every situation is what keeps the worst thing from happening. I’d really messed that one up big-time last summer when I went on that rafting trip and forgot to worry about Mom up and dying on me.

The night my mom had the stroke, I was tucked into a sleeping bag on a sandy pull-out deep in a river gulch with Nell and some other friends, a post-graduation trip we’d planned for months. Mr. Clay was coming back late from dinner with friends and saw her sitting here on our stoop. When he waved, apparently she didn’t wave back, just stared at him blankly. Mom and Mr. Clay have always been friendly, so he knew something was up. He went over to see if she needed anything and it turned out she was slumped against the railing at the top step and wasn’t able to speak or move. He said it’s a lucky thing she didn’t just fall all the way down the steps. Of course now it doesn’t seem so lucky since either way, she’s dead.

John flew down from Seattle after Mr. Clay called him from the hospital. I’d left my phone turned off in Nell’s car, so I didn’t find out until she dropped me off at home Sunday night and I saw my brother’s shiny red hybrid in the driveway. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he opened the door to let me in.

Mom died at 3:42 pm, Sunday June 12, a few hours after John got to the hospital and a few hours before I got back.

While I don’t really believe it’s my fault she died because I forgot to worry about it, I still sort of do. Just like I think it’s my constant anxiety about the plane falling out of the sky that kept it aloft all the way across the country. And something about having the same bad dream night after night for months, it’s not just the lack of sleep that makes reality a little wobbly, but the creeping feeling that maybe there is some reason I should be afraid. What I’m trying to say is, this doesn’t seem like the moment to tempt fate.

So I stomp down the steps and go back around the house to fetch the keys. When I reach into my jeans for the car keys, I notice that my hand is sore. I pull it out and look at it. Looks normal. But it feels raw. Then I remember that’s why I’d pulled it off the glass so fast, because it was searing hot.

WTF? My anxiety-induced visions never come with actual physical sensations.

I get the house keys out of my pack and go back around the side of the house and up the deck stairs to the sliding glass door. I put my hand up to the glass. The surface is cool, like you’d expect. I press my face to the tinted glass so I can see our living room. Big and empty.

I fumble getting the right key between my thumb and fingers, drop the key ring, pick it up. It takes three tries to get the key in the lock of the sliding door. I pull it open.

The smell just about knocks me down. The mingled odors of an entire lifetime cut loose like the movers took gravity with them as well. Book dust, mildew, old cooking oil, something woody – what is it? – the bags of cedar chips that used to hang in the closets. I think I can even smell the lavender-scented Epsom salts Mom always took a bath in. The faint tang of Raid from years of killing cockroaches. And laid over all this, the lemony scent of the cleaning crew’s air freshener.

I yank the sliding door all the way back to let the heated smells escape like steam out of a pressure cooker. And wait for the sting in the back of my throat to subside.

I step through the doorway, reach to the wall and flip the switches. There are no more floor lamps to come on in the living room, but one of the switches turns on the deck spotlights. That harsh outdoor lighting seemed festive when the house was full and lit-up, but now it just casts long stark shadows. No humming refrigerator, no whirring A/C; nothing but the intermittent sound of a car passing out on the street. I venture out across the beige wall-to-wall.

Empty houses sound different than full ones. I clear my throat and can almost see the sound bouncing off the bare surfaces. I feel like an actress standing on stage after the audience has gone home, the props all put away. The back of my neck is prickling. I turn around and see my own half-ghosty reflection in the darkening windows.

It’s unbelievable really how one minute we’re all buttoned-up-put-together-in-our-rational-heads people and the next minute all that’s gone and we’re just animals, only with duller senses and no night vision, mistaking indigestion for insight.

I turn away from the sliding glass door and walk to the near corner of the living room where the built-in bookshelves stop and the window goes all the way to the ground. A rivulet of sweat trickles down my sternum. I kick off my flip flops and sit down to feel one of the four tiny crop-circle indentations marking the perimeter of where the couch used to be.

I used to lie back there baking in the sun, between the back of the couch and the big window. I could almost shut out the racket going on around me – John watching TV, Mom slamming cupboard doors in the kitchen (she was always mad when she cooked), Dad banging on something down in the garage – and cast my mind through the window, across the canyon and out to sea.

I get up and go into the kitchen, flipping on the track lights. The cream cloud-formation Formica and the dinged-up white refrigerator are somehow reassuring when they’d always just been depressing.

I have to pee.

Down the hallway towards the front door, the carpet yields to black slate in the entryway. An old marble-topped bureau there used to welcome us with heaps of junk mail, dirty socks, bent sunglasses, dead-battery flashlights, half-unpacked bags of stuff from the drug store, and a sprinkling of mouse turds from their midnight feasts on open bags of chips abandoned on the way into the house. I wonder what the movers labeled that box when they packed it.

Memories jump out at me now with no furniture for them to hide behind.

I close my eyes and feel the wet wind pounding into my chest. I couldn’t have been much more than five because Dad was still living with us. The thunder startled me awake in the middle of the night and some strange longing took me to the front door. It was before Mom added the deadbolt, so all I had to do was turn the lock on the doorknob, reach up to slide off the chain, and open the door. I stood barefoot in a thin pink polyester nightgown on the ridged slate floor. The wind was so strong I leaned into it while rain hammered into my face. I stayed there until my skin went numb.

Now, I head to the little bathroom off the entryway, the one just outside my bedroom. I flick on the light as I’ve done thousands of times before.

And there she is.

Chapter 3

I jerk my head back from the doorway so hard my eyeballs water

“Hi,” she says.

“What are you...,” I choke out, but I'm gagging on the saliva that suddenly appears at the back of my throat.

“What?” she looks up, eyes steady.

I cough, swallow.

No point in asking who she is. I remember my first-grade class photo well enough. Straight sandy brown hair parted down the middle and hanging like a half-closed curtain across my freckled face, grey-green eyes. Damned if she isn’t wearing that same pink polyester nightgown.

The ocean roars in my ears, only it’s the sound of my pulse. I reach out and clutch the door frame. I know this is not some neurological imagining spilling out of my head. Those don’t talk back.

“You look so real,” I say, stalling for time. Maybe saying it aloud will make her go away.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, cocking her head slightly and reaching an arm out to lean on the sink. She crosses one bare leg across the other, big toe resting on the avocado-green floor tile.

There is something off about her. Not the tightly-wound ball I remember myself to be at that age. A strange calm. I wonder if she has a heartbeat.

“What happened to your hair?” she asks when I don’t answer her last question.

My hand shoots up to my short red thatch. It’s the hair I’ve always wanted, not the mousy brown straw she has. “Scissors and dye,” I say.

I look down at my black jeans, white button-down shirt, bare feet. I wonder if she is disappointed to see what she grew into.

“So. Why now?” says the high-pitched version of my own voice.

I am gaping at her. Words won’t come. She stares back unblinking.

What the heck are you? I’m not about to call her my inner child, not to mention the fact she is clearly outer.

“Why did you come back now?” she repeats.

It doesn’t seem like the moment to mention we’re selling the house. I’m not sure how she’d receive that bit of news, so I dodge.

“I saw you in the window. I thought someone broke in.”

“You look tired,” she says, an observation, not an offer of sympathy.

“I haven’t been sleeping much.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you were just old.”

“Thanks,” I say, reflexively in a snide tone.

Did I just exchange a joke with this thing that is not supposed to exist outside of my head? I’m so fucked.

“So now what?” she says like I’m wasting her time.

"I don’t know exactly.”

“Exactly or at all?” she says with a snotty smirk.

“Look, you’re not exactly what I expected to find when I came in here,” I say.

“Disappointed then?” she says cocking her head at me like a dog trying to decipher human intention.

I find I can’t get a full breath. The bathroom is claustrophobic city. I turn and go into my bedroom to see if there’s more air in there.

I hit the light switch by the door and the ceiling light comes on. For some reason with my room empty, I remember how it was with the matching set of Sears princess furniture Mom got me after Dad moved out. Pale blue canopy over the bed, everything painted white with frosted gold trim, nothing made out of real wood. I cringe to think how tacky it was. Then I realize for the first time it was probably no small expense on Mom’s school counselor salary.

Later, the room went from princess to pile: a futon on the floor, a desk made from a door and two sawhorses, an ironing table permanently set up to make presentable whatever I grabbed from the clothes heap.

It was in the princess room though that the tide pools rose up around my bed when Mom turned out the light at night, the shallow waters filling with sharp and slithery things. Turning the light back on was the only way to stop them, but I couldn’t get to the wall to do it. It took me until I was like fourteen to figure out I could just put a lamp by my bed.

I cross the room to the big window and part the curtains, put my hand up to the cool glass, just as she had done when I first drove up. Did she know I was coming?

The street exudes suburban stillness, darkness punctuated by two streetlights, the rising moon, passing headlights. She comes up and stands so close I feel the air stir across my forearm. So many nights spent in this room watching headlights swing shadows across the walls. If they happened to look this way now, tonight’s drivers would see two figures standing together at the window, mother and child saying goodnight to the moon.

Only no mom lives here anymore. And she wasn’t the bedtime ritual kind of mom anyway. A couple of crackers and a glass of water, a brisk kiss on the forehead.

I’m afraid to turn and look at her, like it would only reinforce her existence.

“You think walking away is going to make me disappear?”

“I came back, you know, just to wrap things up here, and…”

“And what?” she interrupts. “And then I’ll live happily ever after. The end,” she says in a mocking little-girl voice. No small feat given she already has a little girl voice.

We might look like sisters arguing over who used the last of the conditioner, each with one hand propped on the window, the other on a hip. We form mirror images, but the funhouse kind where you are reflected back at half or twice your size. Only we aren’t talking about conditioner and I am starting to panic, shivering and sweating at the same time.

On complete auto-pilot, I go out to the hallway to check the thermostat. Seventy-four degrees, it blinks. I turn back to my room and find her standing in the hallway watching me.

“Look, can we go somewhere else to talk, try to figure this out?” I ask.

I’m hoping she’s a figment that will dissolve as soon as the outside air hits her. I can imagine myself as not quite so crazy if she was just something I saw one time in my old childhood home in the hour after I buried my mom. Besides, I’ve barely slept in months. Extenuating circumstances.

“I don’t leave the house,” she says.

That sounds promising. I’ll come back in the morning and she’ll be gone.

This. Never. Happened.

“You don’t or you won’t?” I say.

“Both.”

“Well, you’ll have to figure that one out since it’s going on the market tomorrow,” I say, turning to go back down the hallway to the living room. “Unless you want to stay and freak out the next family that moves in.”

“You don’t want to do that,” she says after me, her tone ominous. I turn and see her leaning against the wall, arms crossed, staring at me with a disarming confidence.

“What? Sell the house? We have no choice,” I say, shriller than I mean to be.

Will she go away if I shout at her?

“Trust me, it’s not ready to sell,” she says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not empty yet.”

“Right,” I say. “That’s why we need to get you out of here.” What I really mean is get me out of here. I turn back to the living room and see my black flip flops where I ditched them over by the no-couch space. If I can just get back over to them, I’ll walk out the back door and never come back.

“That’s not it,” she says to my back. “It’s not me.”

Chills curl up my back to my scalp. I turn back to her.

“What’s not you?

“You want the Nightmare to stop, don’t you?” I hear the capitalization in how she says the word. Does she have access to the inside of my head?

“The…?” I can’t get another word out. How can she know about the Nightmare?

She looks at me for a moment, appraising. She shakes her head slightly.

“You don’t remember anything, do you?” she whines, slumping to the floor right there in the hallway, head in hands.

She looks devastated, crumpled. Whatever seemed threatening about her is gone. Just a disappointed little kid. I come back and squat down in front of her.

“I guess I need to know what we’re talking about here.”

“Haven’t your dreams told you enough?” She takes her hands off her face but is still looking down at the carpet between her knees.

“There really is a man with a knife?” I whisper like he might hear us otherwise.

She starts to pick at her cuticle with her front teeth. There’s something slightly bored about it that gives me the creeps. Her emotional outburst is gone as fast as it came. Is this all an act? It feels like the floor is about to fall out from under me. I stand back up, ready to run. If she’s here in the sort-of flesh, then he could be here too.

“No idea about him,” she says. Then she looks up toward the front door. The knock comes right on cue.

We look at each other wide-eyed like we are the ones about to be caught vandalizing the empty house. I’m crouched in the hallway in front of the girl, maybe ten feet from the front door. One word from either of us is likely to be heard on the other side of that hollow door. And I know it’s hollow because my brother kicked it in when he was sixteen and really pissed about something or other. Two sixteenths-of-an-inch boards sandwiching three inches of air. You can still see the oval of lighter brown paint on the outside of the door where it was patched.

The horrible possibilities of what else is on the outside of the door right now run through my head. Aside from the obvious man-with-a-knife image, there are others that seem equally bad.

It’s the realtor who was also driving by “to check on things” and saw my brother’s rental car out front. A few last minute details she wants to go over. Like the lurking ghost disclosure, the one that comes right after the lead paint disclosure. It’s Nell’s mom on her way back from Mom’s memorial service making sure I’m not moping around my old empty home when I could be helping her make supper in their extremely normal, extremely happy, did I mention normal, one. Or, and this one makes my breath catch, it’s Dad, who didn’t come to the service because “the group scene is not my thing” as John relayed to me from his duty call to invite him to the service. My father would love nothing more than standing around with his son reminiscing morbidly about what went on in the house he moved out of a dozen years ago. I curse my laziness for not turning in John’s rental car and getting my own anonymous one. And then I curse the rules that make it near impossible for an eighteen year-old to rent a car. I’m old enough to sell my mother’s house but not old enough to hire a car to drive to the sale.

If I don’t answer the door, will they go away?

The knocking comes again, harder, more persistent.

This is not my day for willing things into non-existence. To say the least

I don’t feel like I can even beg her in a whisper to go hide somewhere while I see who’s there. And who’s to say she would oblige anyway.

I stand up and walk to the door, leaving the girl slumped behind me.

What the hell, maybe it’s better if she stays. Whoever it is might give her a dose of reality. I could be pretty sure she didn’t want to see Dad any more than I did. And the realtor would certainly drive home the fact that staying camped out in the house isn’t an option. Of course if it were Nell’s mom, Sooze, the girl might be just as likely to run into her arms and move in with her. Which I guess wouldn’t be all bad. Sooze is a kind, competent, crisp, all-put-together lawyer type that I hope to be one day. If I could just find some screens to put in the open windows in my brain so walking into a courtroom doesn’t make me faint or panic or forget all my arguments and the name of the person I’m supposed to be defending. I’d almost like to see what my freak-show split personality girl ghost would do for Sooze’s composure.

Nell gets to be an artist because her mom is a lawyer. I’m going to be a lawyer because my mom was, well, a little frayed around the edges.

I open the door.

A tall lanky guy with nearly-shaved head, deep brown skin and greeny-hazel eyes smiles at me. At least I know it’s not the man from my Nightmare. He’s white and balding and paunchy.

“Hey, I’m Clay’s nephew, Tread. Are you Fran?”

No words are forthcoming. Finally I manage: “Tread like the bottom of a shoe?”

“Not exactly,” he says. “But that’s close enough.”

More awkward pause from me.

“If you are indeed Fran,” he says, now smirking instead of smiling, “Uncle Clay wanted me to invite you to supper. It’ll be on in about a half hour.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

I have no idea what’s going on behind me but I am too embarrassed to turn and look. The front door is wide open. I know I’m cooked if he invites the little girl making goggly eyes behind me to come along.

But he doesn’t say anything. He’s just standing there. Right, he’s waiting for an actual “yes” or “no,” or maybe a “thank you for asking.”

“I’ll, uh,...” I say, having no idea where the rest of the sentence goes.

“No sweat either way,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he says and turns and trots down our steps.

I shut the door and turn to find the hallway empty.

I head back to the living room where I see the girl sitting across the room near my flip flops, knees pulled up to chin, looking out at the night. Damn.

The girl doesn’t turn as I walk up to her.

“Where were we?” I say.

“Your pathetic state of denial,” she enunciates with striking clarity for someone who supposedly learned to speak three years ago.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“That depends how you figure it. I could be six. Or eighteen. Or something else altogether,” she says, turning her eerily neutral gaze up to me.

“I’m betting on something else altogether,” I say.

“Kind of like the guy in your dream then,” she says. “Not entirely real, but problematic nonetheless.”

She got that right. A few more months of alternating night terror with insomnia and I’ll be strapped to a hospital bed on rhinoceros tranquilizers.

“So you think you know how to make the Nightmare stop?”

“Let’s say I have an operating theory,” These words coming through her little girl voice would be comical if it weren’t so creepy.

“What do you have to do with the guy in my dream anyway?” I ask, my arms folded across my chest, looking down at her. She may be intimidating but at least she has to crane her neck to meet my eyes.

“I don’t know exactly,” she says, perfect imitation of my same line to her.

“Exactly or at all?” I say, playing along. And then I sit down next to her. Not touching, mind you. Just close enough to demonstrate good faith.

“You want to hear my operating theory or not?”

Not.

“Let’s have it,” I say.

“I think you have to get what you left behind here for the Nightmare to stop.”

“Aren’t you what I left behind?”

“I’m only part of it.”

“So, tell me what else there is.”

Head shake. A tiny voice. “I can show you.”

Everything That Happened

Chapters 1-3

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

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About the Book