Step Closer

by Scott Cawthon

  As Kasey stood on the walkway in front of the house, working up the courage to go and ring the doorbell, the fall leaves swirled around her. She didn’t put on the glasses, but she felt Ballora behind her, sharing the space in the eye of the tiny tornado. Ballora was close enough to touch, waiting for Kasey to lose her nerve.

  Kasey took a deep breath, walked up to the door, and rang the bell. The leaves blew past her with a giant whoosh, and Kasey felt a sudden, unfamiliar sense of calm and peace.

  A small woman with brown hair opened the door. She was wearing track pants and a T-shirt from a 5K run for charity. “Hello?” she said, sounding a little puzzled.

  “Hi.” Kasey’s voice quavered. “You don’t know me, and this is really awkward. Uh … do you remember that time a couple of months ago when your purse got stolen outside of Circus Baby’s Pizza World?”

  “Sure. It was terrible. Nobody forgets something like that.” She knitted her brow and looked at Kasey. “Are you … the police?”

  She was so far off track that Kasey couldn’t help but smile. “No, actually, I’m the thief who stole your purse. Ex-thief, that is.”

  The woman’s jaw dropped. “You? But you look so nice.… Why did you come here?”

  “I came because I wanted to give you this.” She pulled Sarah’s wallet from her backpack. “I’m sure you’ve replaced your license by now, but your old one is in there. There’s twenty dollars in there, too—my first installment of paying back what I took from you. I have a job now. I start on Monday. I’ll send you more money after I get my first paycheck.”

  Sarah took the wallet. “This is amazing. What made you decide to do this?”

  Kasey thought of Ballora spinning wildly. “I guess somebody finally scared me into doing the right thing. I’ve changed. I mean, I’m still changing. And I wanted to say I’m sorry and ask if you can ever forgive me.”

  “Of course I can,” Sarah said. “So few people admit they’ve done wrong. It’s refreshing to get a real apology. Consider yourself forgiven. As a matter of fact, I was just making some tea. Would you like to come in and have a cup with me?”

  “Me?” Kasey said, as though there were somebody else Sarah could be talking to. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll rob your house or something?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not. Come in.”

  Sarah held the door open, and Kasey walked into the bright, sunny house. A big brown dog greeted her, wagging its tail.

  In the kitchen, the little girl Kasey remembered from that night was sitting at the table coloring a picture with crayons. She looked first at Kasey, then at her mom. “Mommy, do we know this lady?” she asked.

  “No, sweetie, but we’re getting to know her,” Sarah said, pouring hot water in mugs for tea.

  Kasey smiled. In some ways, she felt like she was just getting to know herself. “I’m Kasey,” she said to the little girl.

  “I’m Isabella,” the little girl said. Her eyes were big and blue, but they were bright and lively, not blank like Ballora’s.

  “Isabella, I think I have something that belongs to you,” Kasey said.

  Isabella hopped down from her chair. “What is it?”

  Kasey reached into her bag, pulled out the cardboard glasses, and held them out to Isabella.

  Isabella’s wide blue eyes grew even wider. “It’s my Ballora glasses! It’s my Ballora glasses that got stoled, Mommy!”

  Sarah set two mugs of tea and one cup of juice on the table. “Stolen, not stoled. But you’re right. Tell Kasey thank you for returning them.”

  “Thank you for returning my glasses, Kasey,” Isabella said, smiling up at her.

  Kasey smiled back. “You’re welcome.” Kasey knew she didn’t need them anymore. And besides, they had always really belonged to Isabella.

  Isabella put on the glasses and let out a little gasp of surprise. “There she is!” Isabella said. The little girl stood still for a moment, glasses on, her mouth agape in wonder. And then she started to dance.

  Susie listened to gravel crackling under the tires of her family’s old minivan as her mom maneuvered it past Oliver, the big oak tree in front of their house. Susie was the one who named Oliver. Her sister, Samantha, thought naming a tree was stupid. Her parents said it wasn’t usually done, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do it. So she did.

  Oliver was really, really big. Susie’s dad said Oliver was older than their house, and that was really old. Susie’s mom’s great-great-great-grandma had been born in this house over 150 years ago, and Oliver was already there.

  “As soon as we get the groceries put away,” Susie’s mom said, “I’ll start dinner.” She spoke slowly, with weird spaces between some of her words. Susie thought it sounded like someone was trying to stop her mom from talking and her mom was working really hard to talk anyway.

  Susie thought of voices as colors. Her mom’s used to be bright orange. Now it was dull brown. It had been this new color for a long time. Susie missed the old color.

  “Does spaghetti sound okay?” Susie’s mom asked in the same disturbing voice.

  Susie didn’t respond to the question because she didn’t care about dinner, and she knew Samantha would care. Samantha cared about everything; she liked to be the boss.

  “I think we should have those curlicue noodles instead,” Samantha said.

  Susie smirked. See?

  Samantha’s voice had changed colors, too. It had never been bright—her voice used to be kind of a pale blue, but now it was gray.

  Susie turned and pressed her nose against the minivan’s side window so she could see Oliver more clearly. She frowned. Oliver looked sad, even more than he usually did this time of year. Scattered in a ragged wreath around the base of his thick, knobby trunk, pale yellow and dull red leaves flittered over his exposed roots in the afternoon breeze. More than half of Oliver’s branches were bare, including the thick branch that suspended Susie’s tire swing. The rest of the branches held leaves the same color as those lying on the ground.

  Oliver always lost all his leaves in the fall. Three years before, when Susie was four and Samantha was three, Susie got very upset about the leaves falling from the oak tree. She told her mom the tree was crying. And if the tree was crying, it was feeling bad, and if it was feeling, it needed a name. That’s when she named him Oliver. Samantha, though a year younger, said naming a tree was “frivolous.” Frivolous was a word she learned from Jeanie, their godmother. Samantha liked learning words. She liked learning, period. She didn’t like frivolous things the way Susie did.

  Susie’s mom explained that Oliver wasn’t crying when he lost his leaves. He was preparing himself for the winter. He had to let go of the leaves so he could keep his trunk fed through the cold months. Then after the cold months, he’d grow new leaves. “He has to let go before he can regrow,” she said. “We all have to do that sometimes.”

  Susie sort of understood this, but she still thought Oliver was sad. The only thing that made her feel okay about the falling leaves was their beautiful colors. Normally, Oliver’s falling leaves were golden yellow and bright red.

  As Susie’s mom pulled the minivan around the side of the house, Susie turned to look back at Oliver. His leaves looked different this year. Duller and dryer.

  Susie wondered if it had something to do with the elves that lived in his trunk. She grinned. She knew Oliver didn’t have elves in his trunk; she was just being silly. But she once told Samantha he did, just to bug her.

  As soon as the minivan stopped at the stairs to the left of the wraparound porch, Samantha unbuckled her seat belt and threw open her door. Samantha was always in a hurry.

  Susie’s mom didn’t move, even after she turned off the engine. She did this a lot, Susie had noticed. Her mom would kind of get stuck, like she was a windup toy that didn’t get wound up enough. She’d just stop in the middle of doing something and stare off into the distance. It scared Susie, because she wasn’t sure if her mom was still there. It looked like she was, bu
t it felt like she’d left her body behind, a sort of bookmark to hold her place while her thoughts took the rest of her someplace else.

  The car engine ticked a few times before going silent. Susie smelled the onions in one of the shopping bags in the back of the minivan. She smelled something else, too. No, not smelled. It wasn’t her nose that told her something was in the air. It was … what? Her other senses? What senses?

  Jeanie once told Susie that she was special, that Susie had an ability most others didn’t have. She was “plugged in,” Jeanie said. Susie had no idea what that meant, but she liked the sound of it. Jeanie said it was the reason why Susie felt things other people didn’t feel. Right now Susie felt like something was wrong. That something was like a smell, like the smell of something … rotting? Going stale? Susie wasn’t sure.

  Susie wanted to say something to get her mom moving again, but then she noticed Samantha was standing next to the minivan, looking through Susie’s window. Samantha had that look on her face, the look she often wore lately. Susie didn’t understand the look. It was part angry, part sad, and part scared.

  Susie’s mom finally moved. Sighing, she shook her head and pulled the keys from the ignition. She picked up her purse and opened her door. “We need to get these groceries inside. It could rain.”

  Susie glanced through the windshield toward the low-hanging gray clouds beyond the steep green roof of the old house. The clouds were heavy and dark.

  The big house had a lot of space, so Susie and Samantha each had their own room. Susie, though, liked hanging out in Samantha’s room. She thought Samantha would rather she didn’t, but even though Samantha liked to boss people around, she wasn’t mean. She and Susie both liked people to be happy. So because Susie liked playing in Samantha’s room, Samantha let her.

  Samantha wasn’t as good at sharing other things, though. Like toys. She insisted she and Susie play with their own toys.

  Susie always wished she and Samantha could do things together, not just side by side. When Susie got her cool baking set for Christmas a couple years back, the one with all the fun plastic foods and the pots and pans and the hot pink apron, she wanted to play restaurant with Samantha. But Samantha wouldn’t do it. She insisted on playing instead with her own construction kit. Even if they were both playing with dolls, Samantha wanted to keep her dolls apart.

  Like right now.

  Susie sat on the thick blue rug that lay on the floor next to Samantha’s big bed. The rug matched the crisp curtains on the window that looked out at Oliver. Susie glanced at him. He looked like he’d dropped a few more leaves. His remaining ones hung limply in the muted gray evening light.

  In front of her, Susie’s dolls were arranged on blocks set up in a semicircle. It was a choir, and she was going to direct them, but first she had to be sure they were all in their right spots. She moved the dolls around, deciding who would sing what part of the song, humming while she did it. She didn’t normally hum—her mother did. But she hadn’t heard her mother hum in a long time.

  On the opposite side of the rug, Samantha had her own dolls perched in front of boxes. The boxes were “working stations,” Samantha said. Susie wasn’t sure if the dolls were in school or at a job. Either way, it was pretty clear Samantha’s dolls weren’t going to have as much fun as Susie’s. Did Samantha see that, too? Maybe that was why she kept looking over at Susie’s dolls and blocks.

  Susie crossed her legs and looked around. Samantha’s room was so organized, with light-blue canvas bins stacked up neatly on white shelves, a big white desk with a super-bright metal desk lamp, the big bed with its simple metal frame and its perfectly made blue-and-white checked bedspread, the two tidy white nightstands with their small blue lamps, and the window seat covered with its simple thin blue cushion. Susie’s room, which she could just see through a connecting door, was filled with color and chaos. She had a window seat, too, thick and tufted and covered in purple velour. It was piled with flowery pillows. Her purple shelves had no bins. Susie hated bins. She liked to see her toys and books and plush animals because they made her feel happy. They all hung out in the open on the shelves, like they were having a big party.

  Samantha looked over at Susie’s dolls again. She pressed her lips together so tightly it made the skin around her mouth pucker. The expression made her look like an angry Pekinese dog. One of those dogs used to live next door, and the first time Susie saw it, she laughed because it reminded her of Samantha.

  Susie wondered if she ever looked like a dog. She didn’t think so. Even though she and Samantha had similar hair and basically the same eyes, they didn’t look the same on the two girls. Susie’s light-brown hair flowed around her face; Samantha’s was caught tight in a ponytail. Susie looked wild and mischievous, and Samantha looked like a good girl. Susie’s brown eyes were usually wide open, while Samantha’s were often squinting, so Susie looked eager and Samantha looked cautious. Susie had a smaller nose and mouth and was usually called cute. Samantha had their dad’s larger nose and mouth, and Susie once heard her grandma say about Samantha, “She’ll grow into her looks and turn into a handsome woman.”

  Samantha glanced again at Susie’s dolls before rearranging her own dolls to stand at their “stations.” Poor things. When Samantha was done with her dolls, they’d have to go back in their bins.

  “Do your dolls want to be in my choir?” Susie asked.

  Samantha didn’t answer.

  Susie sniffed. She wrinkled her nose. The air smelled like spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. It also still had that other smell, the one she didn’t understand.

  Well, fine. She didn’t need Samantha’s dolls to have a good choir. Making one final adjustment, Susie picked up a ruler and tapped it on the block she had set up in front of her dolls. Then she began waving the ruler back and forth the way she’d seen directors do it.

  Before Susie got through three waves, Samantha suddenly stood up and kicked Susie’s dolls off their blocks. Then she kicked the blocks, too. All the dolls and blocks tumbled over the fluffy rug and clattered onto the dark wood floor beyond. Susie winced. Now she’d have to set up a hospital with the blocks and heal her dolls.

  Samantha glared at Susie before running out of the room. Susie thought about yelling after her, but fighting with Samantha never accomplished anything. She’d learned it was better to be quiet and let things blow over.

  Even so …

  Susie’s mom appeared in the doorway. Tall and skinny with dark-brown hair, Susie’s mom used to look like she could be a model. Susie remembered when her mom’s hair was really shiny and bouncy, when her mom’s big eyes were always made up with long fake lashes and her wide mouth was always painted with sassy red lipstick. Now, her mom wore no makeup, and she looked tired. Dressed in faded jeans and a wrinkled blue T-shirt, Susie’s mom gazed at the toys on the rug.

  Susie got up and walked over to her.

  “Mom?”

  Her mom kept staring at the toys.

  “Are you okay?”

  Tears filled her mom’s eyes, and Susie felt like someone was squeezing her heart. “I feel like something is wrong,” she told her mom. “Something bad has happened, but I don’t know what it is.”

  Susie really wanted her mom to tell her everything was okay, but her mom just covered her mouth with her hand and let the tears spill from her eyes. Susie knew her mom wouldn’t answer now. She never liked talking when she cried. And weren’t the tears an answer anyway?

  Normally, after dinner, her mom would go to the third floor and work. She had a big studio up there because she was a textiles artist, making big modern quilts and woven blankets that people never used on their beds. Her mom’s blankets were hung on walls, which Susie thought was weird, but her mom liked making them, and according to her mom, the pretty blankets “paid the bills.”

  Which was a good thing, because Dad wasn’t here anymore. Susie didn’t understand why he left. But he was gone. Was that the bad thing?

  Susie wrapped her ar
ms around her knees. No. She didn’t think so. She thought it was something else.

  She wondered if she should try to hug her mom. Probably not. Her mom didn’t like to be hugged when she cried.

  Susie just stood there, hoping her mom would stop so they could talk. But her mom didn’t stop crying. She just pushed away from the doorjamb and walked down the silent hallway.

  Samantha was outside, wandering around the front yard and blowing bubbles. Anyone watching her would think she was having fun, but Susie knew Samantha didn’t blow bubbles for fun. She did it to study air currents. Susie knew better than to ask if she could blow bubbles, too. Samantha would say no; it would mess up her “research.”

  But Susie wanted to be near her sister, so she wandered to Oliver, patted him on his rough moist trunk, and ducked inside the faded black tire swing. Pushing off from the ground, she got the swing going, then she threw her head back to look up at the gloomy sky as the swing spun in a lazy circle.

  The evening air was cold, but not too cold, and it had that fall scent that Susie had heard others describe as crisp. She didn’t know what “crisp” smelled like. She thought fall air was a two-sided smell—tart and musky at the same time. And of course the fall air around her house still had that other smell that she didn’t like.

  Susie closed her eyes and refreshed her spin. She could hear Samantha trotting around the yard; Oliver’s dry leaves crackled under her feet.

  Then Susie heard voices. She opened her eyes and turned so she could see the sidewalk.

  Long ago, their house was a farmhouse that sat in the middle of lots of land. But as the years went by and all those great-grandmas grew from little girls to old women, the family had to sell part of the land—so said Susie’s mom. Eventually, Susie’s grandma had sold the last of the land, to someone called a “developer,” and the developer built a big subdivision that surrounded the house. The new houses were built to look a little like the old farmhouse—Susie’s mom said they were all Victorian. But the new houses didn’t have the personality of the old house. The new ones were all in serious colors like gray and tan and cream. Susie’s house had lots of fun colors. Mainly it was yellow, but the trim—and there was a lot of trim—was purple, blue, pink, grey, orange, and white. Susie’s mom called the trim “gingerbread,” which made no sense to Susie because the trim wasn’t made of cookies … although she wished it was. Susie always thought it looked like her house was dressed up to go out, and the other houses wore everyday work clothes all the time.