EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS
Halloween
When Ellie was little, she hated the dark. This was after Paul left. A night-light wasn’t good enough. She needed the overhead light left on. After Paul left, she was scared of the night sky in the backyard and of the night wind when I drove with my window down. She wanted the night turned off and the day turned brighter.
So the idea of Halloween was completely out, I thought. Trick-or-treating, sure. We could go while it was still light, before sunset, when the other gangs of sweet princesses and scallywag pirates were out marauding. But the haunted houses? They were a no-go, obviously. They were too scary for a little girl who saw bogeymen in the back of the closet at four in the afternoon.
The problem was that the biggest haunted house in Tiburon was right up the hill from us. It was so close we could hear the terrified screams from inside my kitchen. At five years old, Ellie was finally starting to get over her fear of the dark. Listening to the sound that made her cringe like a startled kitten, I wanted to march up the hill and murder all the screamers myself.
Ellie whispered, “Screaming is awful.”
“I know, Ellie-belly.” I fixed her tiara. “We’ll go down the hill. We won’t go there.”
“I want to go to the haunted house,” said my sister, Mariana.
I straightened. Stared. “You what?”
“I want to go. I love haunted houses. They’re hilarious.”
I felt like covering Ellie’s ears with my hands, as if Mariana were swearing. “No, thank you. I don’t want to terrify my poor daughter.”
Mariana shrugged dismissively. “Nah, I can go by myself. I’ll catch up with you on Robbins Street, how’s that?”
“I wanna go with Auntie.”
“Come on, Ellie, Auntie’s being ridiculous.”
Ellie dug the backs of her tiny wedge heels into the grass of our front lawn. “No. Haunted house. With Auntie.”
“No,” I said.
“She can come with me if she wants to, Nora.” Mariana’s voice held an edge, and I wanted her to stop talking. Mariana wasn’t a mother. She didn’t know. Not the way I did.
“No.” It was the only word I felt sure of, anyway.
“So maybe what’s going on here is you’re the one who’s scared?”
“No!”
But it was true. My daughter got her fear of the dark from me. Her fear of monsters under the bed was mine. Back then I still checked behind the shower curtain when I got home (what I would do if a serial killer jumped out at me, I had no idea—I just hoped one wouldn’t). I was frightened of the inky blue shadows in the laundry room after dusk. I didn’t even like going to the movies because when they dropped the lights, anything could happen.
“Mama, I want to go house haunting.”
Mariana lifted Ellie, her light blue dress sparkling in the falling twilight. She put her on her shoulders, and we all looked down the hill toward the edge of the sunset. Red swaths of low cloud dressed the marina. I thought it looked ominous. Mariana said, “Man, that’s beautiful.”
I sighed.
“Okay,” my sister said. “We’ll go do this and come straight back.”
“Stay here,” shouted Ellie. “Stay here. I’ll take care of you when I come back.”
I sat on the front porch and smiled at mini Yodas and crooked-hatted witches. I gave each trick-or-treater three mini–candy bars, listening to them exclaim in joy as the weight hit their plastic buckets or pillowcases. Tortured screams filtered down the hill from the haunted house. Did Mariana really not care that she was scarring her niece for life? It really didn’t matter to her at all?
Of course, I was wrong. When it comes to how I think about my daughter, I so often am. I’m at the age now when I can look back and see that just as a child doesn’t know where the divide from their parent is until they hit the developmental separation phase, I didn’t really know until that moment that Ellie wasn’t actually an extension of myself.
When she came tearing up the lawn, she slipped. She almost went down in her ridiculous kiddie heels, but she righted herself at the last second, and she launched herself at my knees and held on tightly. I bent at the waist to comfort her. I went to dry her tears, and it wasn’t until then that I realized she wasn’t crying. She was laughing and hiccuping so hard it took a full five minutes before she calmed down enough to tell me that she loved it.
“There was a guy all wrapped in bandages, and—hic—he came out and ran at me—”
Mariana grinned back at me, unrepentant.
“An’ I was supposed to scream, because that’s what all the other little kids were doing, and some of the grown-ups, too, but I—hic—just laughed because it was actually the guy from the bank, Mama, and he had black and red stuff on his face under the bandage, and he was so silly.”
I hugged her hard. “You liked it, chipmunk?”
She wriggled out of my arms and fell backward on the lawn. She made grass angels with her arms and legs, and I knew I’d never get the green out of the blue sateen, but I didn’t care.
“No, I loved it.”
“Huh,” I said, handing the bowl of candy to Mariana so she could fend off the next herd of wee Harry Potters. “I think I would have been really scared.” I threw myself on the lawn next to her and looked up at the stars. “You weren’t frightened?”
“No,” she said and kicked harder, poofs of her dress floating up into the air. I wished for my own fairy dress.
“Why not?”
“Because Auntie was there. Hic.”
That night when she went to bed, screams still trickling down the hill like the cries of uncanny birds, Ellie said, “Turn it out.”
“Your light?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to sleep all right without it?” I asked. (This is the worst part of all: When Paul left and Ellie slept with the light on again, a small, secret part of me was glad. I was glad that I wasn’t the only one afraid to be alone. We both slept with the full wattages burning above us, burying our faces in our pillows only as the night went on and darkness became a greater need than courage.)
“Yeah,” she said, turning on her side and tucking her hands under her banana-covered pillowcase. I wanted to know how she was ready. (How did you do that, Ellie? How did you reach that point? How did you know you were there?)
“You just want the light off tonight? On Halloween?” I couldn’t help pushing.
“It’s time.”
That was all she had to say.
Ellie always gets where she’s going at the exact right time. Me, I’m always a little bit behind the curve.
When I went to bed that night, I snapped off my own light. All I could hear was my own terrified heartbeat. Alone. So alone in the dark.
Then I slept harder and sweeter than I had in years.