20. Below

The cabin feels quarantined. Midnight is there on the couch, but Mom is nowhere to be found. It takes a while to find the note.

Hey Chris.

Will be home late. Helping out at work.

Mom

I look at the note for a while, find a pen and doodle little happy faces all over it. It soon resembles a crowd of people laughing. I can’t tell if they’re laughing at me or at my mom.

I find some lunch and eat it while I watch television. But I don’t really pay attention. I’m staring at moving pictures and hearing noise and voices, but I’m really somewhere far away.

My eyes move to the windows. I can see the sky and the mountains in the distance. I scan the room, feel the hard couch, move the cushion to get more comfortable, flip through forty channels.

I wonder about this restlessness. The way I feel. Trapped. Wounded. Hurt. Imprisoned.

God wouldn’t do this to someone, Jocelyn. He couldn’t.

If this were a postcard sent to heaven, I’d add a third rhyming line.

He shouldn’t.

But I don’t know anything. I look at the walls and wonder if somehow my life is getting smaller, duller. Most definitely sadder.

I close my eyes and picture Jocelyn.

Love doesn’t go away. It’s always there, like the sun and the moon and the stars. It’s always there even if it’s cloudy or if it’s daytime or if you’re inside and you can’t look up to the heavens. It’s always there, hovering and beaming and brilliant.

It’s there, and it won’t go away.

The pounding wakes me up.

At first I think I’m back home, hearing my father in the garage working on something. But my father never worked on stuff in the garage. Not when he was a lawyer and worked on so many other things that made him stay away from the family. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a hammer in my father’s hand. Even after becoming born again and quitting his job to go into “ministry.”

In the darkness I think and worry about Mom. I can’t see my clock, but I know it’s gotta be twelve or later. I realize that the noise is coming from above me, on the roof. Hail.

But part of me doesn’t believe it—can’t, in fact—because it sounds so loud and so violent. I’ve been in a few hailstorms back home, but never have any of them sounded so …

Dangerous.

I leave Midnight tucked in the corner of my bed and go downstairs. I see the opened door to Mom’s bedroom and know she isn’t there, though I still call out her name and turn on the light. Or try to turn on her light.

No power. Once again.

I look outside the front window and can see the blurry motion outside. I open the front door, but when I do, the hail tries to force its way inside. I hear things cracking, the icy bits flailing against tree limbs and anything else they can find. I cringe as I hear the sound of the cracks on my deck, like baseballs being ripped against the wood and the railing and the rooftop.

I wonder how Mom is going to get home.

I shut the door and really, truly feel imprisoned now.

The wind howls as if it knows, as if it can feel my tension inside. The hail mocks and surges into an avalanche of racket and wreck.

I move to the middle of the room and then I drop to the floor.

The pelting continues. Pounding, banging, beating away.

I start to shake, putting my hands over my ears.

The whole house seems to be rumbling. I wonder if there’s a chance that it could slide off the mountain like those houses in California mudslides.

That’s crazy stop it Chris.

But my imagination is the only thing to occupy my thoughts and hold my hand. The lawyer-turned-quasi-pastor is gone. The mother-turned-quasi-barfly is gone. The girl-turned-quasi-love-of-my-life is gone. Everybody is gone.

With my hands now holding my head, not my ears, but my head as if some part of it is cut and bleeding and leaking, I hear it.

Laughter.

It’s loud—it’s gotta be loud—because I can hear it amidst the blaring storm outside.

Then I realize something.

It’s not from outside.

I hold my breath and move my hands and listen. It’s not from upstairs or from somewhere in this room. It’s beneath me.

I look at the dark carpet underneath me, so worn it no longer feels like anything resembling carpet, and I try and think what’s under it. What’s beneath this floor.

There’s nothing but dirt there, and that laughter is all in your mind.

But I think of the house on the sloping hill.

I suddenly realize something fascinating and terrifying.

This house does in fact have a basement.

The laughter I’m hearing is coming from it.

And suddenly I get up and sprint upstairs, biffing it on the third step and landing hard on my chest and arms, then getting up in stride and moving and getting in my room and locking the door.

Then waiting.

Waiting for the storm to go away and the sun to come back.

Waiting for the noise to let me be.

Waiting for silence.