Swaim (Seriously)

“What you do all day,” Neil said to his wife, “you can’t teach her some fucking respect?”

Brenda stood at the end of the hall, one hand bunching up the material of her black skirt, the other at her mouth. She was perfectly still, a deer in headlights.

“Huh?” Neil shouted, “I’m asking a simple goddamn question. Can’t anybody in this house talk?” He grinned and raised his arms, the shoes dangling.

Brenda still said nothing; she had bruises to teach her when to stay silent.

A moment of stillness, of infinite possible opportunity, wandered blindly by.

Neil sagged, looked around. A breath leaked out of him like a deflating balloon.

The little girl in the pink footie pajamas toddled to her mother, reaching up towards her insistently and balancing on her tip-toes. Brenda slowly bent down and scooped Samantha up, keeping her eyes on Neil and her head lowered reverently.

Watching Samantha walk away from him, Neil tightened again, instantly, like a snare. He sprang forward, dropping the shoes to the hardwood floor. A rage he had thought was gone surged up stronger than ever, propelling his actions. The momentum of it was terrible. They would answer him. They would pay attention to him. He would have respect, dammit, in his own damned house.

Neil’s right hand gripped Brenda around the windpipe, her jawline fitting snugly against the top of his thumb and forefinger. He slammed into her with enough momentum to lift her off of her feet, and she struggled to keep Samantha in her arms. Brenda started to make choking noises, eyes wide, but Samantha had gone away again.

“Oh, now you can talk?” said Neil. “Now you want to fucking talk?”

With a shove, he sent her sprawling backwards through the doorframe and into the bedroom. He had thrown her harder than he meant to. Her head hit the floor with an audible crack. She still clutched Samantha, whose halo of silky hair sifted and fell into place again. Brenda kept her eyes closed, but she was awake, Neil decided. She was breathing, and she was making crying noises. She was all right.

“Fuck,” Neil said. He scratched the back of his head with one hand and turned around to face away from the mess. A few steps down the hall, he hit the plaster wall with his fist. “Fuck,” he yelled again. His feet wouldn’t keep still. He heard Brenda rising behind him, and felt like he would either fall on his knees to apologize or else kill them both, then and there.

Instead, he said “I’m going out. “

He turned back one last time, stood rooted and jabbed a finger at them. “This shithole better be fucking ship shape when I get back, or there’s going to be hell to pay.” Then his eyelids drooped, his tense shoulders unknotted and slumped. He wandered out of the hallway, and Brenda waited to hear the front door slam and the F-150 turn over and roar down their gravel driveway.

“Shh,” she whispered to Samantha, who was not crying.

 ***

Brenda stood in front of the medicine cabinet, examining the bruises on her neck in the spotted mirror. Purplish stains bloomed like flowers on each side of her throat where Neil had gripped her. The violet coronas surrounded cores of sickly yellow and green, just the size of Neil’s thumb and forefinger. She opened the medicine cabinet, sending the reflection of her face sliding off of the surface into oblivion.

Her eyes scanned over the cornucopia of pill bottles, the tubes of ointment and paste, but there was nothing that she could take. There wasn’t anything for what she had.

Neil had medicine, lots of it. Neil had little white triangles for anxiety, and beige and green capsules for depression, and red dots that helped his nightmares. Since he’d come home from the war, the number of pill bottles in the cabinet had multiplied steadily, until it was like a carnival of medication, colorful and loud.

Samantha’s footstep on the white tile was barely audible, but Brenda whirled on her, shutting the cabinet forcefully, embarrassed for a reason she couldn’t comprehend.

“Baby?” Brenda smiled and squatted down to Samantha, who took a few more steps into the florescent room. Samantha did her “up” dance again, strained towards the ceiling and stretched her little arms towards Brenda so that it looked like they would pop out of their sockets. Children know what they want, thought Brenda, hefting the little girl and squeezing her to her breast.

“Come on,” she said. She rose and took Samantha out of the bathroom, careful to shut the door securely behind her. She left the light on; it oozed out from under the door. She had been doing that a lot lately.

Samantha lay quiet against Brenda’s shoulder while she tugged on the handle of their ancient fridge. It was a Seventies transplant, the color of avocado when you leave it out too long. The seal broke with a plastic sound and light bathed Brenda and Samantha. She could hear cars passing outside. It was getting late, but Neil had only been gone for half an hour. That meant he wouldn’t be back for a few hours more. She reminded herself of this, to keep from jumping with every car that passed. The glare of their headlights throbbed through the tiny window above the sink, and mingled with the same white glare of the refrigerator.

Brenda chose a piece of wheat bread from a half-empty bag, shut the fridge door with her butt, and shoved the bread into a toaster. She was used to doing things one handed by now. Samantha almost always wanted to be carried these days, a fact that Neil hated. He said Brenda was spoiling her, but she just didn’t know how to turn the girl down when she strained like that.

Before that, Brenda had needed to wear a brace for six weeks because of a sprained wrist she got when Neil twisted her hand after she spilled his dinner all over the living room floor. The marinara sauce stain was still there, but Brenda hid it with a little rug she’d taken out of the bathroom. She bleached the spot almost every day, but it didn’t come out, just got paler and more orangeish. So she was used to working one handed.

The toast popped up and Brenda whisked it onto a white plate, crumbs falling away onto the countertop. She swept the crumbs into the sink and washed them down the drain, then returned to the fridge for the butter. The whole time, Samantha barely moved. She just laid against Brenda getting warmer and warmer, a little feral living thing, as if she were feeding off of Brenda’s heartbeat.

Brenda buttered the toast and returned the tub of spread to the fridge. Then she carried Samantha and the plate over to the low, weathered couch and worn coffee table that served as the family room. There was nothing that differentiated the room from the kitchen other than the change from linoleum flooring to off-white carpet. On the table there was a tiny black television. The cable snaked all the way back to an outlet in the wall next to the front door. Brenda switched it on, hit mute, and settled back into the couch.

Samantha didn’t care for the sound, but she always loved to watch television. There was an infomercial on. A guy with a ridiculous tan was cutting through the hood of a car while people looked on and grinned. Brenda bounced Samantha on her knee and broke off a piece of toast to hand to her.

“Do you want to watch, Sammy?” Samantha stayed turned towards her mother’s chest. She looked up at Brenda to where the bruises were. Brenda shoved the bit of toast into her tiny hands. “Hungy?”

Samantha took the toast and began to slowly dissolve it by holding just inside her mouth. Meanwhile, her eyes never strayed from Brenda’s neck. Brenda felt herself starting to blush. The man on the TV kept sawing, and the people started to clap. Brenda felt a throbbing in her ears and neck, where Samantha kept watching her, a thrumming that made her jaw tingle. She felt as if a spotlight were burning on her. Samantha’s silent judgement shattered her at the same time that she refused to acknowledge it. Samantha finished her toast.

Brenda broke off another piece and handed it to Samantha. Then she leaned forward and turned the television off. Then she sat very still for a long time, while her daughter eyed her bruises curiously and thoughtfully.

 ***

It was night; it was raining.

A violent rainfall. Sheets. Fat drops hurled themselves against Neil’s windshield as if trying to blind him and run him off of the road. The truck stayed right on track though, as if by traveling this exact route four nights a week for six years, Neil had worn a groove in the asphalt that his Ford could follow on its own. The truck knew the way.

Neil had the wipers on slow because he liked the way the lights of town looked through the rain, all blurred out and spreading into the air. He drove with his left arm at twelve o’clock on the wheel, his right one—the one he had grabbed Brenda with—lay limp, palm upwards on the seat next to him.

The truck turned the corner onto the main drag, and Neil could suddenly see it, just where it had always been. Down the length of his arm, past his tattoo, and the black hair on his forearm, and the strong hand, right smack dab in front of him. Fannie’s bar, where he had been a million times, and where there was still no one who knew his name. The same faded plywood cancan dancers stared down at him from the bar’s façade, the same promising smiles on their flat faces. Neil parked, stepped up onto the old-west style planked porch and pushed through the swinging saloon doors into the smoke. The same grooves that had led his truck here led him first to his stool at the end of the bar, then to his booth in the back, then to the bathroom for a piss, then back again. He drank whiskey and beer until the dim lights in the bar were as blurred and spread out as those outside the one tiny window.

It was crowded that night. A rodeo at the high school had just let out, and the din of milling cowboys, truckers, and tourists intruded on Neil’s haze. Some college kids in hooded sweatshirts played a drinking game at the table next to his corner booth, and every time some token was won or lost, they would cheer and one of them would drink. Neil hated them, but there were no other open tables in the place.

When the stranger slumped down, slid heavily into the red plastic booth across from him, he thought at first that it was Smithy. The man’s big stubby hands and sweet cornmeal smell were not Smithy’s, though. This man wore a faded cap that shaded his eyes; a thick bib of fat made a pillow for his chin.

“Fuck out of my booth,” Neil said. He was talking to Brenda now.

“No other tables, pardn’ner.” He said it like that: pard’ner. Like some fat, greasy descendant of John Wayne. Neil’s hand clenched involuntarily on his heavy beer bottle.

“This is my table,” Neil said, “I was here when you came in.”

The man shifted his mountainous body, but not to get up. In fact, he seemed to settle more firmly into the plush booth, the plastic squeaking as he ground an impression into it.

“Now, don’t be inhospitable, friend.” The man took off his cap and itched a nest of tawny hair. His eyes were fixed on Neil. “I’m gonna go ahead and order, have a drink or two, and I’ll be out of your hair. That sound okay, pard’ner?”

“My booth, you fucking hick.”

“No need for language, son.”

“I’m not your son.”

The fat man’s eyes squinted, his chin drooped as he leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “What’s eatin’ you, army boy?”

Neil shrunk back for a moment. He reached up to his shoulder and touched the tattoo there. He could smell the hick’s rank breath. He said nothing while the other man flagged down a harried-looking waitress. In the middle of the man’s order, he slammed his fist down on the table.

“I wasn’t in the army,” Neil slurred. The point seemed very important to him. “I was in the Marines, you fucking fat hick. The Marines.”

The waitress paused, pencil poised above a small white pad. Her white apron was smeared with bits of food. She was chewing gum.

“Hey, there a problem here?” she asked.

“No problem, honey,” said the hick, “my buddy’s just a little drunk s’all. You go ahead and grab those drinks.” He patted her on the ass as she turned around; she snorted but did not look back.

“I ain’t your buddy,” said Neil.

“Hey, what the fuck is your problem?” The hick demanded. He leaned in so that his rotten breath enveloped Neil like a fog.

“I was in the Marines,” said Neil, “not the army.” He grasped his beer bottle again, and the reflection of his whole arm extended into it. Up his hand, his forearm, to the tattoo on his shoulder. “Now get the fuck outta my booth.”

The hick grinned and settled back into the seat, yet another roll of fat sprouting from beneath his jaw.

“I hadda brother in the Marines,” he said. “Shit work, way he told it.”

Neil smashed the Rolling Rock bottle on the edge of the table. It was only half empty; beer suds slid across the table and wet the stranger’s lap. Neil’s head pounded. He brandished the green and jagged neck of the bottle and the light in the room spiraled and fuzzed off of it. When the beer splashed him, the fat man made a sound like a hen drowning, half choke half exclamation. Everything surrounding the booth had become dark to Neil, everything except the pebble eyes of the hick and the lazy light trapped in his shattered bottle.

“The Marines saved my life,” said Neil. Every inch of the hick’s visible flesh was tomato red. Neil was aware of the fact that the bar had become silenced only because his own isolation was no longer being threatened. Except by him.

“The Marines make it so you can be here,” Neil continued, “jawing and annoying everyone and sitting on your fat fucking ass.”

The fat man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re getting yourself into something you might be better off not getting into, friend.”

The snap of bubble gum announced the arrival of the waitress.

“Listen,” she said, “maybe you fellas better head out.”

Without hesitating, Neil rounded on her with the bottle and jabbed at her stomach. His stomach churned. He could feel the unstoppable momentum, the terrible finality of his choice. It was partly relief that washed over him when he felt the meaty arm on the back of his head.

Leaning over, the hick had grabbed Neil by the back of hit shirt and was pulling him down, hard. Neil’s head hit the table with an audible crack. He felt wetness and the sting of flesh splitting. Glass worked its way into his cheek as the hick ground his head into the table.

He struggled, of course. He remembered all of his hand-to-hand combat training, recalled a hundred throws and pressure points. None of them, however, were very effective when one was drunk, bleeding, and had two stubby paws forcing them down with the weight of a tank.

Neil thought his skull would crack, when suddenly the pressure was released and his head was lifted off of the table, dripping beer and blood. A few pieces of glass fell out of his face and bounced off of the tabletop. He flailed, hearing his own muffled groans and the heavy breathing of his assailant. Behind that, the sound of the waitress’ screams. Behind that, the sound of the bar erupting in shouts and gasps. Then, far behind all of it, behind everything that existed in the present, Neil heard the sounds of machine gun fire, the sounds of Iraqi sand blowing hard and of men telling dirty jokes. Men like Smithy. Men like Jones and Shake.

The hick smashed Neil’s face into the oak tabletop and his nose splintered inside of him. Again, and he could feel two teeth jammed back into his mouth.

The sounds faded, and lovely darkness reigned.

 ***

Brenda pulled the puffy blue coat down over Samantha’s head and upstretched arms. On the bed were three floral print suitcases, two filled with her own things—clothes, photographs, a toothbrush—and the last one with Samantha’s clothes and some toys. The pink sneakers sat on top of the pile.

Brenda spoke in a manic whisper, her vision going blurry with tears. “We’re going to stay with Aunt Judy in Nashville for awhile, honey, won’t that be fun?” Samantha nodded, sticking her thumb in her mouth as soon as the coat was on and her arms were free. The dim lamplight gathered around her as she watched Brenda packing.

“Daddy?” the little girl muttered around her thumb.

“No,” said Brenda quietly, “Daddy’s not coming.” She continued to pack. Some bras. A hairbrush, lipstick. A slip cover Judy had crocheted for her. Everything got piled on, clothes shoved to the back unfolded.

Brenda stopped when she opened the jewelry box. It was the old wooden one she had kept in her room as a child. It was dark and worn, with flowery carvings skating across its surfaces. Inside, couched in their little velvet nests, were all of the pieces of jewelry Neil had gotten her.

The jade brooch was hers. That she had owned. But the rest—the golden turtle earrings, the wrought silver necklace, the elegant alabaster bracelet—Neil had brought them all home for her.

“It just seemed so empty,” he had said. It was true that she didn’t really wear jewelry; she kept the box for other reasons. But he’d come home with a new one every month or so, until every little space was filled with a glittering treasure. “I want you to shine like the stars,” he’d always said at times like that. Though Brenda had not really worn jewelry before, she wore it when Neil gave it to her. She wanted him to know she appreciated what he’d given her.

Samantha tugged at Brenda’s skirt. She still had her thumb in her mouth.

“What is it, honey?”

Samantha made a little noise around her thumb and toddled over to the bed. She started pulling her own open suitcase off. Rushing over, Brenda grabbed it from her before it could fall. The lid of the jewelry box fell closed with a soft click.

“Be careful, baby,” Brenda said, “you almost spilled.”

Samantha made a little noise around her thumb, then took it out of her mouth.

“Aunt Judy,” she said. “Natville.”

The bigger suitcase still lay open on the bed like a mouth half-full. Brenda glanced at the bedside table clock; green neon numbers told her that Neil would likely be home in an hour or so. She put her daughter’s suitcase back on the bed and opened it wide.

“Maybe next weekend,” she said. “We’ll go see her next weekend.”

She started unpacking quickly, her hands animated by a fear that bordered on excitement. It was as if she were unwrapping Christmas presents in the dark, before her parents or sister had awoken.

Samantha tugged on Brenda again, her face screwing up.

“I wanna go Natville,” she said. She elongated the “a” sound and stomped her little foot in defiance. Then she made the tiny choking and whining noises that always proceeded a tantrum. Tears welled up and the high-pitched cry filled the close room. Without hesitating, without ceasing her rhythm, Brenda’s gathered up her daughter and started to shake.

“Stop,” Brenda said, lifting Samantha up to meet her eyes. “Sam, stop crying!”

Samantha cried louder, harder. Brenda shook harder.

“Samantha Kelly, you stop crying this instant!”

The way she said it, the anger that flashed into her voice, desperate, disgusted her. Samantha seemed to stop crying as if her eyes were faucets. All in pink, the child sniffled, but faintly, and stared back at her. Brenda realized her heart was beating wildly. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. Frightened of being caught, frightened of being judged.

And all the while Samantha stared at her. A new, half-understanding bloomed on her wet face and she became completely quiet again. Because she could think of nothing else to do, Brenda let her down, sent her to her room to bed, and continued to unpack.

 ***

Neil knew that he shouldn’t shoot up. He was slumped in the seat of his truck, doing nothing but feeling. Feeling the holes in his cheek, the pulp where his nose had been, and the two bleeding pits where his teeth had been smashed from their sockets.

His jeans and muscle shirt were soaking wet, plastered to his body, his army boots waterlogged. He didn’t know what time it was, but it was late. Fannie’s had been closed when he’d woken up, sitting up against the rubber wheel of his truck with his legs sprawled out in the mud in front of him. They’d left him there, he thought, to die. No fucking respect. No one gave two shits if a man risked his life, risked it so that they could sit and drink, so they could hoot like idiots while some hick fucker tried to stay on a goddamn horse.

He’d been wet and shivering and wracked with pain when he’d awoken. He’d vomited. It was still on his clothes, soaked in and starting to stink in the heat of the cab. There was nothing for it though; without the heat turned on he would freeze.

Nothing for it. Nothing for the excruciating pain, except…Neil’s hand shook violently as he reached for the glove box. He knew he shouldn’t shoot up. He had to drive home.

But the truck had gotten him here, hadn’t it? The truck would get him back.

Neil fumbled in the box for the needle and the little silver-topped vial.

The truck knew the way.

And ten minutes later when it roared into life, and the rain poured, and it pulled out of Fannie’s parking lot and onto the main road, it was only habit that kept the truck on course. Neil drove with the wipers off this time, despite the heavy rain that hammered at the windshield. Each drop made a pellet gun noise, snipers firing wave after wave of rounds at Neil’s truck. Swerving did nothing to help avoid the onslaught, but the truck swerved nevertheless.

Three more miles.

No other cars had passed Neil on the road. He drove hunched over the wheel, both hands kneading the rubber until his palms were raw. The double yellow line ran beneath him, sometimes to his left, sometimes to his right, but mostly right between his wheels. A yellow brick road to nowhere. The headlights followed it, searched it out while Neil’s brain spun and sank and sizzled with the drugs.

The headlights alit on a green road sign, illuminating it for a split second with the white glare of a muzzle flash. In the white heat of that flash Neil could see men and sand and blood. He could see worlds that no longer existed for him.

Words and images crowded his mind and fought for Neil’s attention. Each one threatened to shatter the euphoria of the drug coursing through his veins, to turn his blood sour and curdle it, bring him back to his broken nose, his shattered mouth. Neil screwed his eyes shut, let the truck drive, but the hallucinations or memories or whatever they were clawed their way to the top of his reeling consciousness.

There were the men. The many faceless at boot camp—slog, climb, sleep, wake up, eat, repeat, do it, climb it, shoot it, go go gogogo. The massive black drill sergeant and the olive green that pervaded everything. The cold bunks and body-sized trunks at the foot of them. There were the other men, the buddies, the brothers, the real corps. Smithy’s deck of battered playing cards. Jones’ crooked teeth; Shake’s little square glasses and jumping adam’s apple. Getting tattooed together during R&R, Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful, hoo-rah. The jokes, the talking. The waiting. The sand.

Neil pulled to the right as hard as he could on the steering wheel, trying to avoid the first oncoming car he’d seen. The honking and the headlights filled his cab, and he was gone again.

Smithy was dead. Jones, Shake and he had attended the “funeral,” had watched as the medics packed him away. Unable to cover up the disgrace of his death, they’d left the back of his head open and shattered, the front marred by a little puckered entry wound above the right eyebrow. When Neil and the others watched them slip him into his body bag, they all looked at him in the face anyway, and pretended they didn’t see that embarrassment. It was the least they could do. The parson said some words, and Jones threw Smithy’s pack of cards in with him. They’d regretted that, when they’d had nothing to do for the fourteen hours of patrol through bombed streets and shadowed buildings.

Words forced their way into the front of Neil’s memory. Phrases learned in the war, and since.

TBI—Traumatic Brain Injury. A concussion grenade exploding to his left, some suicidal native making a point. Being blown aside, ears ringing so loud he couldn’t hear his own gunfire as he shot the man down.

PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Launching a daisy cutter into a group of them, not knowing what they were doing, not sure if they were threatening, but scared. Taking precautions. Going into the sun-bleached building afterwards, from pure brightness to pure darkness, blistering heat to cave-like cool. Seeing them all with legs and feet hacked off, all bleeding and all moaning. All faces, all questioning eyes.

The sniper. Hot, choking hot and been waiting for hours, for years, when the sniper tags him right on the head, right on the goddamn helmet like ringing a bell. Moving, changing position. Examining the ash gray helmet, the streak of still warm metal where the bullet rubbed against his head at the speed of sound. One millimeter saving him from instant death. Saving him miraculously.

Saving him for what?

The truck came to rest a good distance away from the house, gravel crunching beneath its tires as Neil pulled up and killed the engine. The car door gave all too willingly, spilling him out onto the driveway to flounder and drag himself upright. The pain was with him again, all of it. He stomped heavily to the thick front door and fumbled for his keys, ignoring the rain that slanted in under the green eaves.

When he came in, it was four in the morning by the antique clock on the kitchen wall. The house was dark and quiet, the rain sounding against the walls like a soft drumming. The green army boots he wore made puddles and sloshed with each step. He rounded the corner into the hallway, and saw a dim glow of lamplight emanating from the bedroom. When he got there, Brenda was waiting for him.

She was sitting on the made bed, doing nothing but sitting with her hands folded on her lap. As soon as he stalked in, her body went tense and she shot up.

“Oh my God, Neil, what happened?” she said. Neil said nothing. He just stood grinding his teeth and listing back and forth.

Brenda went to the closet where the three floral print suitcases were. They sat empty and open at the back, each item they had contained meticulously put back in its proper place. She pushed them aside and found the first aid kit, pulled out some gauze and bandages. When she tried to touch his bloody and crooked nose, Neil pulled back suddenly and pushed her away. She landed back on the corner of the bed again, her hands in her lap cradling the bandages and gauze.

“What happened?” she asked again. “Did you get in a fight?” Anxiousness made her voice high and tight. Her cheeks scrunched up and squeezed soft teardrops from her. And as her husband kneeled to lay his bloodied head in her lap, Brenda’s eyes went wide and glassy, an expression so practiced it could have been a tattoo.

***

One thing she would say for him now that he was six is, the Brat didn’t like people to see him cry, especially two bullies like Michael and Andy. The Brat blinked back tears, promised to tattle, then finally decided to come with her, of course, refusing even to relinquish his grip on her hand.

Though Michael was a year younger than Erin and only an inch taller, he was otherwise humongous, and mean. They knew each other, had been playmates long ago, but had chosen different paths of evolution, or had those chosen for them. Now Michael’s freckled pudge was contorted in a grin, obscenely crimson in the sunset and framed by sweaty pats of hair extruding from the edges of a lycra cowl. He was dressed as a Storm Trooper, one of the real plastic ones, but had his helmet tucked under an arm. His rich parents probably overfeed him, she thought.

“What do I have to do?”

“Get inside and bring something back.”

“Give me something to take,” she said, “so we know you won’t ditch us.”

Michael snorted. “Do you want the bike or not?”

Erin glanced over at the house. It wasn’t that creepy, and it wasn’t that big. The only unsettling thing about it, really, was the vast expanse of weed-lots that surrounded it, as if no other house dared come close. That and the fact that no kid had ever seen anyone leave or enter the house, yet it stayed maintained, and no one’s parents (of the kids who’d ever asked) seemed to know who lived there or owned the place. In fact, if she climbed out of the drainage ditch and up onto the ridge behind the house, Erin could spot her neighborhood. Michael said inbred cannibals lived there.

“Fine,” she said. Andy said “ooh,” again. Erin clambered out of the trough, pulling the Brat with her, and slung her empty pillowcase over her shoulder. She stopped briefly to turn back to the two boys squatting in the ditch, enjoying the height differential. “But you can’t take it back,” she said. “Two months, and I get it to keep in my garage.”

“Deal,” said Michael. “But you have to bring me an artifact from inside. To trade.”

“Deal.”

Soon they were moving into the pale yellow void of the affronting vacant lot. The Brat dug in his heels, but didn’t impede progress overly. Erin could hear Michael and Andy snickering and making oogie-boogie noises at them. She looked at the house again.

She had thought it looked very old-fashioned, like one of the big plantation houses from her US History textbook, only smaller. As they got closer, though, she realized every piece of it seemed new and clean, as if it had been built very recently to mimic that style on a more affordable plot. Even the big dark windows, each filled with warped old-fashioned glass that distorted the interior, gleamed back against the slanting sun, immune to the wind and the dust. If she had been a bit older, she might have called it “faux vintage.”

There was no walkway leading to the porch. No stones peeking from overgrown straw, no tiles, no faint indentations or chalk marks where a walk had once been planned but never finished. The porch just started, bluntly, as if the weed lot were the inviolable border of an enemy country. On one side, Erin and the Brat stood on dirt, one step later, and they had wood under their sneakers. The overhang’s shadow enveloped their heads and Erin felt a little cooler.

“We’ll just knock,” she said, to calm either or both of them. “If someone answers, say ‘Trick or treat—‘”

“It’s not even six yet.”

“Just do it! If no one answers, we’ll go around back and maybe we can find something to say it’s from inside the house.”

“Let’s just do that,” the Brat said.

“No!” said Erin, frustration in her voice. “They have to at least see us knock.” Little brother craned his neck back toward the two bullies. Tense glee was apparent on their faces even at fifty yards, and through the shimmering waves of heat coming off the Earth as it turned lavender. The sound of Erin’s small hand knocking on the front door brought him snapping back. He instinctively grabbed his sister’s hand tighter, and rocked back on his heels, feeling a little of the sun on him again.

The door swung open.

It hadn’t been opened—there had been no delay, no sound of footsteps, no click of a mechanism—it just opened. What looked like a heavy oak door creaklessly yawned open five or six inches and stopped, as if the force of Erin’s thirteen-year-old fist could have been the cause. But, she thought, that was impossible. Who leaves their front door unlocked? Not just unlocked, open? This was not an abandoned house. It didn’t look abandoned. And she had knocked so tenderly, already imagining their walk around to the back of the property and what creepy trowel-handle or doll-part they might have found there to win their bet.

But the door stood open, undeniably, a vertical shaft of pitch black standing there in the opening, a beacon for all to see.

“Well?” came the shout from across the lot. “Go in!” So, Michael could see too. Erin didn’t turn around.

“Yeah, what’cha waitin’ for?!” yelled Andy, his piping voice carrying shrill on the breeze. This time she turned, and made an exaggerated and angry “shh!” motion, so they would get it. After all, was this about braving a creepy haunted house, or a young witch’s first breaking and entering attempt?

Erin got the Bad Feeling. Not the feeling that she would get in trouble—she had already weighed the Brat’s inevitable tattling and her ensuing punishment versus Dusty the Purple in her calculations—but the feeling that she might be doing a “bad kid” thing. More than just a little rule-breaking, but a real “bad kid” thing. She hated that feeling, like Moms and Dads inside her head, punishing her before she’d even done anything wrong. Yet, behind her, across a field of gold, the bike. And more than that, the walk of shame back to kids who would not be kind about her failure, and who would, she was sure, be even crueler at school on Monday if she did the unthinkable and ran for home. She barely registered the Brat’s sweaty hand in hers as she pushed the door all the way open and took a step inside.

Inside was a small foyer, identical doors to the left and right, a hallway corner ahead, and a set of shiny wood stairs up to a small landing and more doors. It wasn’t as dark as Erin had thought it would be, once her eyes adjusted, and the interior of the house resembled the outside: stately and old-fashioned, but spotless and new, as if they’d just missed the cleaning lady. No cobwebs, not even dust motes in the shaft of light coming in from outside. Still, Erin kept her body in the open doorway, hand on the door, not wanting to venture any further. The Brat made little whiney noises.

“We’ll take that.” She pointed to a wooden pedestal by the staircase. On it was a hand-thrown ceramic bowl, partially glazed with a thick blue gloopy glaze, filled to the brim with what looked like decorative stones. A number of white tapers were nestled in the rocks, unlit, all the same height and straight as a quiver of arrows.

“No,” said the Brat in a whisper. He tried to pull her back across the threshold.

“Come on, ‘fraidy cat. We’ll just take some rocks. They won’t even notice they’re missing.” With her superior bulk, it was easy enough to drag the tiny protesting mummy across the room with her, whether he wanted to come or not. And though she wouldn’t admit it, she wasn’t about to let go of her brother’s hand before they were back outside, so it was both of them who would have to do it. She yanked him across the room step by step, both staying quiet, the Brat muttering “no” again and again. It was only ten steps to the alcove with the pedestal in it, but it seemed to take a full minute to cover the expanse. Once there, Erin quickly scooped three of the smooth stones out of the bowl, careful not to disturb the candles, and dropped them into her pillowcase. They hung small and hard at the bottom, candy for someone with a taste for broken teeth. She held the pillowcase in one hand and the Brat in the other. The top of her head felt unbearably hot in her witch’s hat, and she thought she could feel her green face-paint running with sweat.

“Okay,” she said.

When they turned around, the door was closed.

Again, it hadn’t made a sound. Erin could not remember the light in the room having changed. But it was closed now, and, she saw for the first time, had no knob on the inside. Where the knob and a lock should be, there was just a blank brass faceplate, polished to a glow. She could see the swirl pattern where whomever had polished it had wiped the rag around in a circle.

The Brat started crying. Erin jerked at his hand, reminding him to keep quiet in a harsh whisper. He didn’t listen. “I want to goooooo!” he moaned, hot tears fudging his face-paint and soaking into the collar of his costume. Erin’s fear of getting in trouble, Serious Trouble, now greatly outweighed her Bad Feeling. Her heart pounded in her ears as she considered their options: she didn’t want to call her parents, not yet, she certainly didn’t want to go further into the house…Erin stared at the blank plate for a moment, trying to puzzle out how or why such a door had ever been built.

She reached out and pushed on it; the door didn’t budge an atom.

She felt around for a slot for a key card, like a hotel room door, or any kinds of buttons that weren’t immediately visible; all she did was add a patina of fingerprint smears to the bronze. She imagined police in this room, yellow tape over all the doors, one kneeling down to lift her fingerprints from the gleaming metal.

It was ten whole minutes before the Brat stopped his stifled sobbing, and Erin stopped caring about being quiet. They had already tried their emergency cell phone, which was completely dead. Erin had sworn she charged it, but there was no arguing with an empty screen. The only two windows in the foyer were tall vertical ones on either side of the front door, which were cut up into little sections by thick lead-work, and most of the panes were colored. It cast a beautiful multihued light into the room, but with the sun almost set now, Erin had no chance of spotting Michael and Andy across the dark front fields, or even verify they were still waiting for her.

They knocked on the inside of the door. Very quietly at first, then louder, then very loud, slamming their fists and kicking the baseboard, the both of them at once, yelling for Michael and Andy. It was this which made Erin certain there was no one in the house with them—they hadn’t heard so much as a creak, settle, or pin drop in response. Even the sound of the wind outside seemed to die at the front porch.

Erin didn’t think the rocks in the bowl were big or heavy enough to break a thick stained-glass window. Even if they did, she’d have to find a way to break the iron bits in between the glass, and of course deal with whatever capital punishment her parents would devise for Vandalism. She shuddered and stole a glance at the Brat, who was now lying in one corner spooning his pumpkin bucket and sucking his thumb. His eyes were vacant.

She swallowed a lump in her throat, turned to the center of the room, and managed a “Hello? Anyone?” loud enough to echo from the vaulted ceiling, but nowhere near confident. “We’re lost! We got locked in! Hello?!” Even louder. The silence in the room filled every null space available, like packing foam keeping them in place for shipment. In the vast emptiness of it, Erin imagined, for the first time, a monster in the next room. A killer clown through the wall. Up to this point, she had only imagined herself in mundane kinds of trouble, had only been thinking on the level plane of reality…it was now that the child in her assumed a measure of control, and projected the far worse fates that only the imagination can conjure.

She thought she heard something scrape against the floor in the room to the left of her. Her spatial brain told her the thing that made the sound was approaching, would be here in moments. She took three hurried steps to the relevant door and grabbed the knob, holding it shut with all her might.

“Did you hear that?”

It took the Brat a long time to answer. In that time, the door didn’t budge. There were no more crab-noises from the other side, even though Erin strained so hard to listen for them she thought she could hear her hair growing, the flow of her blood, the filling and collapse of the alveoli in her lungs.

“Hear what? No.”

Erin was quiet, still listening.

“Stop it! You’re trying to scare me.”

“No I’m not!”

More nothing. She let go of the knob. Even as the springs inside wiggled the handle back into perfect alignment, the mechanisms made no noise. She was embarrassed now as well as afraid. She hadn’t heard anything, of course.

Two deep breaths. Then:

“We need to look around,” she said. “For a way out.”

She had expected—maybe even hoped for—some argument from the Brat. Screaming, a tantrum, some token of babyishness so raw and primal that their Mother would have no choice but to come running. But the little six-year-old mummy gathered himself from the floor, gravitated over to his sister, wiped mucus on a gauze forearm, and nodded. She was the parent right now, Erin realized. She wouldn’t get any more arguments from the Brat (although she was positive he’d have no difficulty telling on her later), and it was her responsibility to save the day.

Somehow, though she would have thought such an epiphany would make things scarier, the realization comforted her. If the Brat thought she could get them out of trouble, then maybe she could. She could be, had to be, the adult right now. For both of them.

“I don’t think anyone is here,” she said, in the nice voice Mom used to use when they were younger. “Maybe we’ll find a butler or something. Or a back door.” The Brat nodded again, eyes wide, and she guided him gently back across the floor.

Together, holding hands, they opened one door, then the other, leaving the staircase for last. Erin opened the left-side door first, to prove to herself that no scuttling thing lurked on the other side. And there was nothing…just a warmly lit wood-paneled hallway with more doors on either side. These ones all had knobs. At the end of the hall, it looked to open up into some kind of larger den or living room.

The door on the right side yielded stairs descending into darkness. The stairs turned a cubic U after ten steps or so, and they didn’t venture to look around the corner, since they would have to pass over the door’s threshold to do so…Erin no longer trusted the doors in this house. They walked up the staircase in the main foyer, careful to hold the railing the whole way, and at the top found even more closed doors that, when peeked through, offered up perfectly-made guest beds and linen closets with fresh sheets folded crisply and waiting to be deployed. Off the upstairs landing, another hallway led left and right.

“The living room,” Erin decided. “Maybe there’s a phone we can use.”

The Brat nodded. They went back downstairs.

Erin held her brother’s tiny fist in hers, turned the knob on the left-hand door again (all the doors seemed to be weighted to close themselves when not in use), and opened it once more onto the hallway that terminated in a den. She stepped through, half-expecting to feel a static charge wash over them, but nothing happened. A few more steps down the hallway, and she felt her brother’s hand tighten into a rock-hard ball and go ice-cold. She looked back at him instinctively, wondering what could have frightened him so badly.

Where she had been holding his hand in hers, now she was grasping a cool bronze doorknob. Before she could stop herself, her inertia pulled the door to the foyer shut behind her.

This time, she heard the click.

 ***

The Brat’s shrieks were piercing, even through the thick wood of the door. Erin herself felt like screaming, weeping, shaking him, and kicking down the door all at once. Instead, she twisted the knob and wrenched the door open again—onto another featureless guest room. Small, perfectly-made bed, a footstool, a desk, a lamp, a little bookcase with inoffensive knick-knacks, even a half-empty water glass sitting on a silver tray on the desk. The glass had a transparent pitcher of fresh water next to it, with ice cubes bobbing in it.

“Erin? Eriiiiiiin!” The Brat was still sobbing and screaming for her, but he sounded a little quieter now. Maybe he had calmed down, she thought, even as her own panic mounted. How could this be happening? She had just come through this door, and now it led somewhere else. The world spun around her, everything she knew, her whole short collection of life experiences thrown into question.

“It’s okay, I’m here!” she yelled. “I’m right through the door! Can you open it?”

To her relief, she heard her brother stop shrieking, calm himself down, and yell back. “Yeah…it’s a hallway. It’s the same hallway. Where are you, Erin?”

“I’m in a bedroom,” she said. “One of the ones upstairs I think. It must be a secret passage or something.”

“Should I go in?” His voice was definitely quieter, but not just that—muffled too. Erin was sure he sounded more than a room a way, as if she were hearing him through more walls than she should be. She wondered what the walls were insulated with. She had seen her Dad open up their walls once, and there was a bunch of pink foam inside…”house guts” she had called them.

“No,” she said. “Did you hear me? Don’t. I’ll come to you.”

“Okay.” Another mumble through the door.

Only now, she was in a room with no windows and one door, and the door was open, and it was the one she had just come through. Almost numb through the haze of panic, she acquiesced to the rules the House seemed to be enforcing. Stepping fully into the room, she shut the door, waited a second, and opened it again. Thankfully, it hadn’t locked or magically vanished when she shut it, but again, it opened into a new area entirely.

This time it was a tall, cylindrical, red room, some kind of colonnade that would have to be on the second or top floor. The room was sparsely furnished and smelled musty, as if it were some secret hideaway that only the master of the house frequented. It featured a wooden chair with some old books stacked next to it and a number of big bay windows in the curved wall opposite the door; two other closed doors led out of the room in different directions. She stepped inside but didn’t let her door shut.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

This time her brother’s voice was much quieter. He said he could hear her. He was crying again, and when Erin shouted back to try and calm him down, she noticed that her voice, too, was cracked and broken with jagged sobs.

He was crying so hard and his voice so muffled, Erin had a hard time talking to him after that. She tried to explain to him about the doors, that they needed to stay put and figure out a plan to keep from getting further apart, but she wasn’t sure she heard him. She thought she heard him say something about coming to her, and was flooded with a fresh wave of terror.

“No!” she shouted to the empty room, so loud her chest ached with the effort. “No, you stay right there! Stay right there!” But he wouldn’t listen, or couldn’t hear her. As he screamed and sobbed and his footsteps squeaked from one room to the next, she could hear doors closing, and his cries get further away.

She strained at the knob she refused to let go of, looking compulsively back and forth from the guest room she had come from to the windowed colonnade she was half-into. “Casey!” she screamed. “Casey, don’t go! Stay where I can hear you! Please, don’t go!”

Her brother’s screams dwindled altogether then, their last decibels snapped off into silence by the shutting of some door in some other room of the House.

“Don’t leave me!” she screamed. “Don’t go!”

Erin was flushed with cold sweat. Her spine vibrated. Finally relinquishing her hold on the door, she crossed quickly to the windows, ready to smash them with her own fists and leap from the roof if need be.

They were warped, old-fashioned glass, like the windows in the foyer had been, but they weren’t bisected with lead, and they were big enough to grant a view of the outside world. Erin was shocked to find that she was facing the front lot of the house; that, in fact, she could just barely make out little smudges in the twilight that had to be Andy and Michael. For a moment, she was able to shut the impossibleness of it all out of her mind; she could imagine Mom and Dad explaining this all to her, some rational explanation, some horrible trick that had been played on her, and it would all be over.

And in a way, it was. Because as Erin looked down, just at that moment, she saw a white smudge and a black smudge blast out of the front door of the house and shoot across the yellow field. The Andy-and-Michael smudges moved to intercept the new smudges, and she knew for sure that it was her and Casey, coming out of the house. She tracked their path with her eyes. A pointy-headed witch and a little white mummy, coming back to claim triumph after a scary dare, no harm done. It had to be them.

She cried again then, for a very long time. She screamed and hurled the chair against the windows, too, but they seemed unbreakable, and the smudges outside paid no attention. They just wandered down the road fighting over the purple bike until all were invisible. The sun had set. It was dark. She had never felt so alone. Erin realized with shock that she must have only been in this house for half an hour, at most. Yet, she knew absolutely, no one would be coming in the morning. No tenants would arrive to fetch them, no landlord to admonish them and call their parents.

After a night and a day, she left the room. She had awoken from a nap, her empty stomach churning, to find that one of the doors to her little colonnade was standing open, onto a breakfast nook with a bare bulb hanging over a yellow linoleum table. On the table was a bowl of stale hard candy. There was a glass with two fingers of old milk in it, too. Erin could swear the floorboards cackled at her as she crossed them to get to her meager meal.

***

By her best guess, Erin was seventeen when she heard Casey’s voice again. She didn’t think of him as “The Brat” anymore, just Casey. He would be ten now.

She had been camped out for five days or more in a well-stocked library, feeding off scraps she’d carried with her and using a wastebasket as a toilet and book pages as paper. The Whore—that’s how she thought of the House now—seemed to delight in cleaning up her waste while she slept, but rarely left her food and almost never water. Whatever invisible staff labored under the Whore’s command, they did good work.

Her Dad had said the word “whore” a couple times in front of her. She had been acutely uncomfortable at the time, feeding off of his angry vibe and her Mother’s outrage, but now she used it as a weapon, and a tie to her family. She wondered if the version of her she had seen leave the house was just like her, and how it could fool her own parents. She wondered if the windows had just shown her that, like a movie, to torment her. She wondered about ghosts. She wondered about Hell. She wondered about time loops and sin and Indian burial grounds, but the Whore never said a word.

The other thing about this room was, it had a skylight, big enough for Erin to fit through. She had not seen windows of any sort in any of the Whore’s chambers since the colonnade room four years earlier. She had been unable to think of a way to reach it so far, but liked to nap in the square of sunlight it let in, or watch the lit patch migrate across the floor. She imagined growing up in this library, learning everything she needed to from the books, until she was as strong and big as her Dad. She wondered, if he were here, if he would be able to break the glass. If they could reach it, that is. And of course, her lack of food and water would force her to move on soon, as it always did, deeper into the house. No matter what door she chose, no matter what room it spat her out into, she always thought of it as “deeper.”

Casey’s cries were a cruel joke. Just loud enough to make her sure it was her brother, far too muffled to attempt any communication. She tried anyway, screaming herself hoarse, knocking bookshelves over, exhausting her body pounding against the walls and doors. He only cried and called her name. Eventually she couldn’t take it anymore, and ran out of the library and through seven other doors before she collapsed, panting, into a just-cleared dining room, replete with the smells of a Thanksgiving meal lingering in the rafters.

She didn’t talk to Casey again for eleven years.

***

The Whore found other ways to torture Erin, of course. Four days after finally abandoning her cell phone as a worthless good luck charm, she came into a room stuffed with furniture that seemed right out of an antique store, but for the glaring anachronism of an iPhone 5s charger plugged into one wall.

There had been cellars, lofts, laundry rooms, drawing rooms, ballrooms, bedrooms, hallways that opened into hallways that opened into hallways, without end…but never, ever a bathroom.

And later—much later—she stumbled into a gleaming kitchen and found the fridge fully stocked. It was a big brushed steel number, the first reflective surface she had encountered since she knocked on the front door so long ago. Across it, she saw her own skeletal figure, her Halloween costume reduced to a shredded black toga stretched tight on her malnourished shoulders. Her face looked green, but she couldn’t imagine it was from face-paint applied more than a decade before.

She stayed in that kitchen for three weeks, sleeping on the center island and enjoying watching herself fatten up a little on the groceries and fresh water in the fridge. The day she had eaten the last of it, she filled a bunch of tupperware with water from the sink and moved on. She actually felt her stamina coming back, at least to some modest degree, and wondered again if she was up to the task yet of breaking through one of the Whore’s sturdy interior walls.

In the next room, she found Casey’s body.

The stench of rot was a like a wall. Casey was naked, in the middle of a dried puddle of blood and bodily fluids, head resting on the wadded remnants of his mummy costume. He was black with filth and light as a feather. He looked like a real mummy now, from out of a History channel show, face all dried skin and sunken eyes. It looked like he died some time in the midst of puberty—the clash of an unevenly growing young man’s body, now withered into desiccation, was grotesque. Around him, the room’s floor nearly sagged under the weight of his excrement, never cleaned, piled to the ceiling in every corner and against the walls. His fingernails were splintered and broken, his thumb in his mouth. On one bare patch of wall across from her, the wallpaper had been clawed off, and the name “Erin” carved into the plaster many times. His plastic pumpkin sat near him, overflowing with candy.

Erin collapsed, clutched the body to her.

“Oh Casey, oh Casey.”

She wept, she cooed to him, she screeched abuse at The Whore. Erin cursed the House to Hell from the deepest parts of her soul, but only silence answered back. It took her a long long time to recognize the room as the foyer she had left him in so many years ago. When she noticed the closed front door with no handle on it, she actually laughed.

Erin tried to hang herself three rooms later, with a rope made from sheets. The chandelier in the ceiling didn’t hold, of course, and neither did it crush her. She considered tying herself up somewhere to die of thirst, but kept that plan in her back pocket.

When she was older, in her middle age, she did manage to knock holes in some of the walls. Whenever she did, she always found the hole led to an exact copy of the room she had just come from. Except once. Once it had led back to the foyer. She stopped knocking holes in the walls.

It was on her fiftieth birthday (although she didn’t know it), that the Whore finally allowed Erin the Good Witch to die. She had indeed tied herself to something—a defunct water pipe in a cramped attic crawlspace—and waited, delirious from thirst and hunger, for her final triumph over her ancient enemy.

She had chosen the room because it had a small circular window in one end, which she could look out of from her perch. This was only the third window Erin had encountered, and she tried to stay very focused on the tiny circular world outside, even the vacant lots and summer ditches, as she slipped away little by little.

That was how she saw herself and Casey, full-grown now, walking side by side across the fields below. The smudge that had usurped Casey held a long column of blue paper under his arm, and a few men in hardhats followed behind the brother-and-sister team. They looked to be parceling off the lots for construction.