THE BOY FROM THE PAINTING calls to me by name, invading my sleep with uninvited familiarity. At the end of my first exhale, I’m in the room at the end of the hall, standing before the mural. I spot the swing in the corner on the tree, the muddy hand of the boy before me, and I know I don’t want to be here.
But the boy doesn’t care. The paint that holds him to the wall cracks and crumbles to fine dust, leaving snowy peaks of debris atop the discarded wallpaper below. He’s sitting in the grass painted below his brushstroked feet, legs crossed over each other, kneecaps jutting to each end of the room.
“How are you talking to me?” I ask him, my pajamas too thin to block the night air passing through the open window I can’t believe April or I didn’t shut.
“I have to show you something.”
“I want to sleep,” I tell the boy.
“Maybe you are sleeping. Do you know the difference anymore?” he asks me, challenging. He’s younger than me, but authoritative. Dominant. His emerald eyes bury me under their weight.
“Well, what does the difference feel like to you?” I ask him.
He looks toward the open window, silent for a moment before muttering, “It all feels like I’m walking through mud.”
I look at his hand again, and as though he sees me noticing, he curls it into a fist, concealing the evidence he already left behind.
I continue to stand there, growing less aware of the chill creeping beneath my pajamas and more aware of the blades of painted grass on the wall that bend and sway impossibly under the breeze sliding through the open window.
“I have to show you,” he insists, and something about his eyes, wide and familiar, make me walk toward the wall, my legs like lead, my own eyes lazily searching the wall for what he wants to show me.
The brushstrokes bend backward and swirl in opposing directions, reconstituting to create an entirely new picture, one that I can see because I’m a part of it now, witnessing the moving painting beside the boy who recedes to a corner just out of sight. But he’s there, watching. Showing me.
We’re in a house I’ve never seen before.
“It’s time, Doris.”
A small woman nods in response, hardly hearing the tall man behind her, but flinching at his touch when he approaches. She’s clutching a wool coat, wringing the scratchy thing in her hands.
“He’ll need a jacket. There was a cold snap.”
“It’s time to go,” the man says again, a response they both seem to think is inadequate, their bodies sloped away from each other.
The man walks out the door without another word, and I hear the car start somewhere outside.
She turns, her eyes searching even though there’s a small boy not more than eight years old right in front of her. A boy with burnt red hair. Then she crouches, but she doesn’t reach out to the boy.
“Uncle Dom is on his way over. Don’t open the door for anyone else, okay? Mommy needs to go lie down for a while.”
“Why can’t we go with Dad?” the boy asks.
“Only Uncle Dom, okay, sweetie? Mommy just needs to lie down.”
She shuffles to the bedroom, her feet never quite leaving the floor.
Her bedroom door hangs on its hinge, refusing to close all the way, and I follow as the little boy slips down to the basement as soon as the bedsprings from her bedroom sigh.
In the basement, the boy slides a box aside marked “Jack, 1993–1995” and another marked “Taxes” until he finds the one he’s looking for. From the box marked “Xmas,” he pulls Matchbox cars and University of Washington pennants, a plastic bronze trophy of a pitcher on the mound twisted in perpetual freeze. He shoves those and the actual Christmas decorations aside in favor of the real prize—a Huskies hat that he slides over his head, folding the bill until it fits.
Upstairs, a knock at the door. The boy piles the trophy and the cars and the pennants back into the box, then pushes the other boxes back into place, the only evidence of his presence a tiny drag mark in the dust on the floor. He runs up the stairs two at a time and opens the door to a man I recognize from a framed newspaper clipping, the smell of coffee now strong in my nose.
“What’s this?” the man asks, flicking the bill of the boy’s hat.
The boy takes it off quickly, hiding his face from his uncle, but not fast enough.
The man stays in the doorway for a second, and the boy twists the hat in his hand before shoving it into a bookcase and closing the front door behind his uncle, who eyes the bookcase now too.
“She’s asleep,” the boy tells him, even though the man never asked.
He walks past the boy and knocks softly on the open bedroom door anyway. He waits for a muffled answer, then goes inside and closes the door behind him.
“I know,” I hear the boy’s uncle say. “Shhh, I know. You have to be strong. You have one son in there who can’t understand—”
“How could he understand? I can’t even understand! We’re monsters, Dominic.”
“If you really feel that way, then it’s not too late.”
“No, Dom. No. I’m not having this conversation again. I can’t.”
“I could leave right now. I could get to Burt in enough time.”
“Don’t you see? It’s already too late. Once we made the decision . . . there’s no turning back from that.”
“The price for that decision was too high. The Doris I know would never have paid it. Why didn’t you let me keep trying? He needed help, not—”
“You didn’t live with him, Dominic. You didn’t see what we saw. And the Doris you knew? She died a long time ago. Now let me sleep this day away. Please, just let me sleep it away.”
The boy’s mother doesn’t move from bed all day. She doesn’t turn over. She doesn’t shift. She lies in her room and stares at the far wall, visible from the hallway by the crack in the door the boy’s uncle left when he finally succumbed to her wish to be left alone. Her face reflects on the vanity mirror.
The boy’s uncle walks from the living room to the kitchen, then back to the living room, then back to the kitchen. He paces all day. The boy stays in his room, absently moving his toy cars from surface to surface, lining them up, lifting his head of embers at each crack and click from somewhere in the house.
By the time the day bleeds into night, the boy puts himself to bed. He scratches at his arms nervously until little trickles of blood smear his skin and crust underneath his fingernails. He stares at the ceiling, moonlight turning his face a sickly green.
A key finally rattles the lock.
“Doris,” the boy’s uncle says.
Bedsprings creak to life.
“Doris!” he says louder, but his voice shakes.
The bedroom door at the end of the hall opens, and the little boy leaves his bed too, hovering inside his own doorway. The woman leans against the boy’s uncle as the front door opens and her husband comes in, looking past her. Past them all.
A stooped figure enters behind the husband, a head bowed, a form so caked in earth it looks more like a root than a person. The only clue that it’s human lies in the whites of two wide eyes.
The woman goes limp against the boy’s uncle. Her hand flies to her mouth, her words hiding behind it.
“My baby.” The woman pulls out of the uncle’s support and folds herself around the muddied thing. She breathes words muffled under dirt-clotted hair. She strokes the cheeks of a face barely visible, clutches a body that stiffens against her, kisses hands that release small piles of soil on the floor before uncurling.
The small boy in the bedroom doorway looks at his own empty hands and digs the dried blood from underneath his fingernails, eyes traveling back to the figure in his mother’s arms with reluctance.
Then he looks at his uncle, but his uncle is staring at the filthy figure in front of him too.
And though the uncle opens his mouth to say something first, the little boy robs him of his words, blurting a confession that saps the room of its last remaining sound.
“That’s not him.”
Sleep launches me from unconsciousness like a ball from its cannon. But even though I’m not in the dream anymore, I still feel somehow like I’m flying, the bed under my legs a million miles away.
I find the floor, still not trusting my feet, but with each step, the house around me feels a tiny bit more real. I make my way to the room at the end of the hall and stand before the boy in the mural, painted face locked in far-off wonder, just as it was the last time I saw it. The last time I saw it while I was awake, that is.
It should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. Whatever happened while I was sleeping wasn’t a dream. Not like any dream I’ve ever had. I look down at my hands and there, just visible under the moon’s invading light, is the thinnest layer of dried paint tracing the ridges of my fingerprints. I examine one of my fingernails a little closer and dig a tiny clump of dried paint from underneath it.
I look at the boy in the painting.
“What the hell did you just show me?”
I dare him to lure me back in so I can tell him to go to hell this time, but a sound from the middle bedroom draws me back.
“Jesus, no wonder I can’t sleep in this place.”
I’m not even back in the room before I conclude that it’s tapping.
I’ve heard the sound enough. More than enough.
“I’m not going outside,” I tell Rae. I’m tired of her. I’m just plain tired. After her last visit to me the other night. After that weirdness with the mattresses. After my epic confession of my overall horribleness to Miller. After this bizarre mural I’ve already vowed to paint over first thing in the morning, even if it takes five gallons of primer and ruins all of April’s “charm.”
Tap. Taptaptap.
“Go away!” I tell Rae, thinking my voice must be pretty loud, loud enough to wake April, but no longer caring. She can hear me lose my last marble if she wants to.
Taptaptaptaptap.
“Would you just leave me—” I stop, because I see something I shouldn’t when I reach the room and look to the window. Impossibly, I see the briefest outline of a hand leaving the pane. But the smudge where it was is unmistakable. A handprint, smaller than mine, in the lower corner, right where I found one in the room across the hall on our first day in the Carver House.
I sneak to the window, expecting to see the same branch tickling the glass I saw the other night. Needing to see the same purple curls on the other end of that branch. But what I see when I look out the window is not Rae. It’s the shadowed figure of a little girl, long dark hair obscuring her face. She wears a white summer dress, her bare feet and hands and arms and legs making me cold just knowing they’re exposed in the chilly night air.
I open the window and consider calling out to her. But once I’ve pushed the window open, I can’t think of what I should say.
She doesn’t give me an opportunity. Instead, she turns on her bare heel and darts into the woods behind her.
“Hey!” I yell without thinking.
I pull my jeans over my nightshirt and grab the nearest sweater, locating my boots by the back kitchen door where I left them after Miller dropped me off.
I slam the door behind me and stumble outside, finding myself once again at the base of the tree below my bedroom window. I peer into the darkness in the direction I saw the girl go and have just about convinced myself she was never there when I see the slim impression of two feet, sunken deep into the mud by the tree. Sunken as though a heavy weight had pushed the girl, rooted her to that spot.
“Hey, are you out there?” I call. I take a few steps into the woods.
A twig snaps in response. I take another step forward.
“It’s okay,” I say, hoping I’m not terrifying this kid more than she might already be.
After the longest silence yet, a scream slices the air. I back into one of the trunks and feel the cool bark catch the balance I’ve lost. My heart knocks against my ribs.
I scan the darkness before me, my eye seeking out the movement of each swaying branch. The night breeze reaches beneath my sweater.
“I’m here!” I call stupidly. Is that supposed to make her feel better? I try to make my brain rest on a reason for the little girl being out in the woods, and though I can conjure several possibilities, all of which are horrifying, I push myself from the tree and launch into the forest, using my hands as guides, the needles snagging whatever clothing they can reach.
I will April to hear what’s going on, but I don’t dare go back into the house to get her and risk losing this poor girl.
I train my ears and wait for another clue as to the direction she might have gone. Another breeze finds its way through my clothes.
“Call out if you can hear me!” I yell to the girl—and maybe a little to April—then watch my breath form in front of my face. I silently beg the moon to cut through the tree line and give me at least a glimpse of the path in front of me.
I stop for a moment to find my bearings, wondering for the first time how I might find my way back, if in fact I do find this girl. And suddenly, the memory of the rest stop floods over me.
“It was just Rae that time,” I remind myself. My voice sounds so assured, so certain, I almost believe it.
“Can you hear me?” I try again.
And then I hear breathing.
The short puffs, the gulps in between that try to dampen a throat dried by panting. I hold so still, I think my pulse might reverberate through my feet and vibrate the forest floor. I scan the darkness, and my vision—finally beginning to adapt to the inky night—traces the outline of a small structure that looks from this distance like a large wooden shed.
The trees around me groan, and though I know it’s not possible, they feel closer to me now, their cold bark suddenly visible in my periphery.
Then, from the side of one of the dark edges of the structure, I see silver clouds of air, formed at the ends of the smallest set of lips.
“Hey, it’s okay! I’m not going to hurt you!” I call. But before I can take another step forward, the breath dissipates, the mouth retreats, and I hear a door creak on a set of rusted hinges and slam shut.
“Hey!” I call, plowing forward and finding a chipped green door on its splintered frame. I look down and see the vaguest impressions of two small feet left in the mud.
“If you disappeared tonight, do you think anyone would notice?”
I whirl around, my hand slamming against the knob of the splintering green door. Rae’s breath is still warm against my ear. Now she stands several paces away, giggling in a way that’s far too immature for her.
Another memory attacks, this one the grotesque laughter coming from beneath the mattresses in the room at the end of the hall.
“Where is she?” I demand, brushing off the memory and taking a step toward Rae.
“You know when I stopped wondering if anyone would miss me if I left?” she asks. “After my mom disappeared for three days. She drove to Flagstaff with some guy she barely knew so they could see the snow fall under the moonlight. She told me all about it when she got back, how it looked like fairies dropping little soapsuds from the highest treetops. I was eleven years old. I didn’t think she was ever coming back. I ate cereal nine meals in a row.”
I want to tell her she told me that story years ago. I want to tell her I’m not even sure I believe her. I watched her lie about so many things to so many other people just so they would see her as damaged. But right now, all I can think about is that girl.
“Where is she, Rae?”
“My mom? Taos. At least at last check. I think she had me cremated just so she could have an excuse to scatter my ashes in a place she’d always wanted to go.”
“The girl!” I yell at her.
“I don’t know, and I don’t really give a shit,” Rae says, suddenly serious.
I turn back to the shed and try the door, which resists my attempt so strongly I wonder how it could be rusted shut if I just heard it open a second ago.
I walk around the perimeter searching for any sign of the girl, but all I find when I come back is Rae.
“Did you hear the one about the coyote?” she says, her eyes smiling but her mouth turned to a solemn frown.
“It’s been you this whole time,” I accuse, not fully believing it. But she’s standing right here, and the memory of the little girl is already growing cloudy in my mind.
“They said all they found was my shoe. Gross, right? The shit people come up with. You know it was that chick with the tacky dolphin tattoo that found me. Screaming her head off like she was the one who had something to be afraid of.”
I look once more over Rae’s shoulder. The woods only get deeper after that, and I know I won’t be able to see a thing in there. Not with that thick tree cover. I pull my sweater closer to my body and hunch my shoulders against the latest chill to find its way under my clothes.
“They talk about how serial killers lack empathy, but teenagers, I think they’re the real sociopaths,” Rae says.
This is when I give up. I take step after step back toward the house, the trees crossing their branches the way I cross my arms over my stomach. I must have cut a different path through the woods when I was chasing the imaginary girl. This path feels thicker, the trees reluctant to let me through.
“I saw what you did to that poor girl’s face, by the way,” Rae says from behind me. “In the girls’ room. Respectable.”
I stop walking and almost turn. But this is what she wants, and I will not say another word to her.
“I mean it, Penny. Really, really commendable. She was probably already on her way to rhinoplasty anyway, but you sped things along for her, I’m guessing.”
I start walking again, and her steps are just out of sync with mine, an inconsistent rhythm that grates on my nerves enough to make me clamp my hands over my ears and tug.
“But it doesn’t really make up for it. You know that, right?”
The air feels thicker around me. I suddenly think I know how the ground feels with all those pine needles choking up the surface, blocking the air above.
“See, here’s the thing. When I couldn’t feel my hands. When I couldn’t hear anything but the blood pushing through my veins, crowding out all the rest of the noise from the bonfire off in the distance. When I thought my head was going to lift off of my neck and my heart pressed against the inside of my chest and wouldn’t back away. When I heard you laughing at someone’s stupid joke because you thought you were so fucking right and I was so fucking wrong, and you’d won, and good for you for being the person more deserving of a life outside of me. When all that happened, you were exactly where you told me you were going to be from now on. Without me. And I was exactly where you wanted to leave me. Alone.”
I can see the silver outline of the Carver House’s rooftop searching above the tree line, but I can’t feel my feet on the ground. I can barely feel the icy chill beneath my sweater anymore, either. All I can hear is Rae’s voice.
“So I don’t know why you’re so unhappy, Penny. You got everything you asked for in those letters. You got every single thing you wanted.”
She spins me by my shoulder to face her, with her iridescent skin and her perfectly pinned curls. “So why am I still here?” she asks me.
My face is wet with the same undeserved tears from Miller’s car. The same tears I thought I was done crying. The same tears I don’t want to cry anymore.
“Go home, Penny,” she says, then walks backward into the shadows of the woods, the place she lives now.
“And Penny,” she says just before I’ve broken free of the trees. I can’t see her anymore. I can only hear her voice. “These kids, they aren’t playing around, you know. They have something to say. But you know what my dear old mom always used to say: Not all voices deserve to be heard.”