by Abe Moss
“There it is. What’s yours.”
There it was. What was his. In a box of random junk—a couple broken action figures, a half-full jar of coins, an old pair of sneakers, a collection of ordinary rocks which could have been picked up just outside in the yard—one thing in particular caught Emmett’s eye. And how could it not? After all, it was glowing…
“Keep me safe…”
His mother’s trinket was in Tobie’s box of junk. Its music, like the light emitting from its white stone, was all-encompassing now, a roar in his ears. He lifted it by its chain, mesmerized as the pendant twirled near his face, and pooled it into the palm of his hand. The white ball was lit like a tiny lightbulb. Bright, creamy, opaque. He touched his finger to it and found it warm. He closed his fingers over the pendant and the music quieted, smothered.
He returned the box beneath Tobie’s bed.
For weeks he’d had it, Emmett thought, pretending not to know a thing. Perhaps taking it was his revenge. Revenge for having hit him with that branch all that time ago. It’d been missing for about that long, he supposed.
Standing, Emmett turned to the window. It was empty now. He studied the trinket some more, its music fading fast until at last it was like a whine in his ear, a humming flea. The soft glow of the white stone was dimming as well, becoming dull in the dark. He returned to his own bed and knelt on ground beside his bag and unzipped it.
“Thank you, little Emmett.”
It was in his hand. The voice. He opened his fingers, watched the trinket closely, determined to see something though it was a sound he waited for.
“Goodnight, little Emmett.”
Sure enough, upon each word the trinket illuminated. Then dim again. He held it to his face, turned it around in his hand, bewildered. He waited a minute longer, but it offered nothing more.
Doubtful, he finally placed it into his bag. He made sure to bury it this time, hiding it amongst the rest of his belongings. Then he zipped it back up and shoved it under his bed for the night.
He climbed back under the covers, exhausted.
Over the rolling hills of his own blanket, he eyed Tobie across the bedroom, sleeping soundly. He wondered how long it would be before he noticed his theft had been stolen back. Maybe he never would.
Emmett fell asleep imagining the most satisfying ways to alert Tobie of his failure.
✽ ✽ ✽
It was later than normal when they got out of their beds the following morning. They headed downstairs as a group—even Jackie and Bailey left their room at the sound of the boys leaving theirs—coughing and sniffling in a choir of congestion. In the kitchen they found Eileen already awake, doing dishes from the previous night. They filed in, standing idly behind her, waiting for direction.
Jackie said with a raspy voice, “Hey, you’re not Eileen.”
Upon closer observation, the rest of them realized it was true. It was not Eileen. The young woman at the kitchen sink looked over her shoulder at them, a fleeting glance, a shy smile on her busy face.
“That’s right, I’m not Eileen…”
“Who are you?” Tobie asked, then broke into a fit of coughing.
“Eileen isn’t feeling well this morning, so I’m here to help with some things. Just cleaning a bit…” She rubbed her face against her shoulder, as her hands were soapy and wet and occupied. “I’m Sarah.”
“Eileen’s girlfriend,” Tyler said.
She gave that same shy smile.
Speaking then for everyone, Tyler said, “How can we help?”
✽ ✽ ✽
There was an unspoken agreement between them all, that no matter how sick they might still be, they’d help as much as they could to give Eileen an ounce of relief. She’d done so much the last few weeks for them, it was only fair…
“Things aren’t ever going to be the same,” Clark muttered, organizing books back onto their shelves. Emmett, collecting art utensils off the floor, paused to hear him. “I don’t think Mrs. Holmes will be herself again for a long, long time.”
✽ ✽ ✽
They were wrapping up lunch when Eileen’s door across the hall opened. The children quieted at the table. Footsteps shuffled. The bathroom door shut.
They continued waiting, not saying a word. Sarah went from chair to chair, taking plates from those who were finished eating.
“You guys don’t need to be so quiet,” she said.
“When did you meet Eileen?” Jackie asked, handing Sarah her plate.
Sarah thought for a bit, setting their dishes in the sink. “A little over two years ago, I think?”
“How did you know both of you were lesbians?” Tobie asked bluntly. His face rested on the knuckles of both hands, elbows propped on the table. Jackie frowned at him but he didn’t notice.
Sarah laughed. “Sometimes you just know.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“Tobie,” Jackie said.
“What? I’m just wondering. Most people aren’t lesbians, so…”
“Very true,” Sarah said. “Most people aren’t lesbians.”
Their conversation was interrupted as Eileen suddenly entered the kitchen. Her eyes were baggy and tired. Her voice was just a whisper.
“Wow, you guys really cleaned up…”
“The kids did most of it,” Sarah told her. “I think they wanted to impress you.”
“Well, I’m impressed. How is everyone feeling today?”
The children unanimously agreed they were feeling better each day.
“You hungry?” Sarah asked Eileen.
“Oh, no. I’m okay. Have you seen my mom yet this morning?”
“She hasn’t come out all day, either,” Tyler said.
Eileen nodded.
“I think she’s hibernating for the winter,” Tobie added.
This got a laugh from most of the table. Eileen let out a heavy, thoughtful sigh.
“I’m ready for winter to be over.”
✽ ✽ ✽
They had chicken noodle soup that night, with much thicker broth than before as their stomachs were almost back to normal. Eileen filled a bowl and put it on a wooden cutting board, which she carried upstairs for Mrs. Holmes.
“Is Irene still sick?” Jackie asked Sarah as Eileen left the room.
“Sort of,” she said. “A different kind of sick.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Clark asked.
Sarah took a seat with them at the table.
“I think all we can do is give her space.”
✽ ✽ ✽
That night, Emmett awoke with an urgent need to use the bathroom. He crept down the hallway as briskly as possible. When he was finished, he paused at the door and listened, checking for noises in the hall. Hearing nothing, he opened the door and slipped out, and immediately his insides turned cold with surprise. Light spilled from a doorway down the hall. A head leaned out, looking in his direction.
“Who’s there?” Mrs. Holmes asked.
He hesitated. “Me.”
“Who?”
“Emmett.”
“Oh.”
She continued peering down the hall, unable to see him in the dark like he saw her but peering all the same.
“I thought maybe you were Tyler. Or… someone else.” More silence ensued. “On second thought… would you mind coming here for a moment, anyway?”
Strangely, his insides caught another icy chill. He looked in the other direction, toward their bedroom doors, considering. With heavy feet—always worrying, always worrying—he made his way toward her bedroom door. She opened it wider as he came closer, revealing himself in the light. She waited, dressed in her billowy nightgown. Emmett felt strange seeing her so undressed, comparatively speaking.
“Yes?” he asked politely.
“It’s fine, Emmett. Come in. I just want to ask you something.”
He did as she said. Mrs. Holmes left the door barely open behind him. It had been a while since he’d seen the inside of her room. Last h
e’d seen it, Lionel had still been alive. It was cleaner then. Now clothes were strewn everywhere. They draped off the edge of the bed, off the chair in the corner, piled on top of the desk and her dresser. There were more clothes than floor. Olive and Bo lay carelessly on top of them. They perked up as Emmett entered, and then promptly lost interest when they saw who he was, and set their large heads down with disappointed sighs.
“You can pet them if you like,” Mrs. Holmes said.
Emmett remained standing, holding his arm gawkily.
“I know it’s well past your bedtime. It’s just…” She went to the balcony door, where the frozen woods leered in at them from the dark. Her tall, narrow frame seemed frailer than usual, more bare and vulnerable in her nightgown—emaciated, almost. “I heard someone using the bathroom, and I just… I’m just…”
He wondered what would happen if he ran—if he scurried back into the hall and fled for their bedroom. Would she follow after him? Would he hurt her feelings?
“I’m not myself lately,” she said. “I’m sure you all know this.”
Emmett could agree with that. “Eileen worries about you.”
“Does she?” Mrs. Holmes turned to face him, nibbling on the tips of her fingers. “I know I’ve been a burden to her. She doesn’t want to be here. She feels obligated to handle things while I… while I… well, I don’t know what I’m doing. I think she hopes I’ll snap out of this fog I’m in, but… to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I will.”
“Jackie says…” He paused, remembering. “She says nobody else gets to choose when you’re supposed to feel better… because no one knows what you’re feeling in the first place.”
“Jackie said that?” Mrs. Holmes laughed. “Such a clever girl for her age, isn’t she…”
“Clark’s afraid you’ll never be the same.”
The smile on her lips smoothed to nothing. She stared thoughtfully into the cold night.
“I’m a little afraid of that, too.”
Emmett tried to think of something upbeat to say.
“Eileen’s doing a good job, though. She makes good food, and she reads to us sometimes, too.” That faraway expression sagged even further. Emmett’s mind raced. “Not the same books, though. We haven’t read any of the ones you were reading to us…”
Tears were rolling down Mrs. Holmes’ face.
“I’m being incredibly selfish, aren’t I?” she said. “I wish things were so different. She couldn’t wait to leave, you know. When she was old enough. She was still here when I took in Tyler, however many years ago that was. She was only… fourteen? I think maybe I wasn’t good enough to her. It must have been hard, watching me care for these other children like they were my own, when… oh, I don’t know. And yet here she is, when I need her most…”
She looked at Emmett through her brimming eyes, and spoke to him as though he wasn’t a child at all, but an equal, someone who must understand everything she confessed, as though he’d lived it himself. In reality he understood little, though he gave her his undivided attention.
“He wasn’t just my husband. He was her father, too. Yet here I am, letting her care for me as though she doesn’t need to be cared for. How long have I been up here thinking only of myself? Who does she have?”
Emmett scrunched his lips, thinking. “She’s got Sarah?”
Apparently, this wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Or maybe no answer was good enough because she simply wanted to cry. She sat on her bed with her face in her hands and did just that. Emmett waited patiently. Two minutes. Four. Her weeping only got worse. Her body hitched violently with sobs. Emmett wanted to cry himself soon, her pain becoming his own.
He moved toward her, cautiously concerned, and placed his hand upon her shoulder. She tensed at his touch, but his hand remained. She released a long, shuddery sigh. Beneath his hand, he felt the muscles of her body relax, and a calm, cathartic hush fell over the room in the absence of her tears. She took one more deep breath, lowered her hands, and turned to see him next to her. She searched his eyes with her own—a look of curiosity, perplexity.
“You understand, don’t you…” She regarded his hand upon her shoulder, that same appreciation in her eyes. After a moment’s consideration, she shook her head embarrassedly. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry I dragged you in here like this. What is wrong with me…”
“You’re just sad,” he said, and as he said it he thought of his mother again, and felt that deep, gouging pang of longing. “I still feel sad when I miss my mom.”
He hunched his shoulders when her eyes grabbed onto him again. Expectant. She looked at him as though she needed the rest of his thoughts, because his words were just what she wanted to hear.
“I do miss him,” she said. “I’ve missed him for a long time. Before he was gone. Really gone.” She looked to the balcony, into the snow-swept, uncaring world outside. “Just look at it out there.” She sighed. She looked upon Emmett fondly. Then she gave an abrupt, sharp laugh, surprised by her own amusement with something. “You’re just a boy! My heavens. Have I lost my head as well?”
“No,” he answered, afraid of the very notion.
“You’re very sweet.” She stood from her bed, moving toward the bedroom door. “I’ll let you get to bed, now. Before I drive you crazy.”
More than eager to sleep, he followed close behind.
As she let him into the hallway, she stopped him one last time.
“Emmett?” she said. Even in the dark hallway, he recognized that peculiar, mystified expression she observed him with. “Your company was… unexpectedly comforting. Thank you.”
Finally she let him go, and he hurried through the dark hall back to the safety of his own bed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE STRANGER
Mrs. Holmes didn’t return to her usual self right away, but in the next couple weeks she began venturing out from her room more and more. Eileen remained at the Holmes house, helping as much as she could, though her growing impatience with her mother was clear.
Winter was winding down, at least. The last snowfall was hard and crunchy under their feet. Soon enough, the days would warm up and melt it down at last.
✽ ✽ ✽
Clark and Jackie became closer friends as the days went on. Tobie supposed they were likely more than that, and to his credit didn’t seem too bothered by the possibility.
“Why should I care?” he told Emmett in the yard one day, watching as Clark and Jackie strolled casually through the nearby trees just the two of them, laughing and speaking low to one another. “It’s not like I paid much attention to them before.”
Such remarks never stopped him from keeping a close eye, anyway.
Just in case.
✽ ✽ ✽
The children played in the yard with less and less clothes beneath their coats as winter retreated with a warm, wounded breath. The snow steadily melted. Spring was on its way.
“Oh, Bailey…” Clark said one mild afternoon, watching in disgust as she braved eating a handful of the thawing snow. “That’s old snow. It’s dirty.”
“Yeah,” Tobie joined in. “The dogs probably peed in that snow.”
She paused her chewing. “Doesn’t taste like pee.”
Away from the others, Emmett wandered the yard’s perimeter, weaving through the trees, picking up sticks and dragging them through the blinding, sunshiny snow. After being cooped up inside all winter, the simplest were more than entertaining enough when done outdoors.
Movement ahead caught his attention. It was a squirrel. A fat one. It scurried down the side of a tree, paused a couple feet above the snow. Emmett marveled at its ability to hang like it did, its little claws somehow enough to suspend it sideways on the thawing bark. Its tiny mouth nibbled on nothing he could see. When he stepped closer, it chased around the circumference of the tree, back to the same side but slightly higher. They both paused. From the corner of one eye, it watched him.
Was it afraid, he wondered?
>
After a minute of standing patiently, Emmett watched as it crawled down the tree onto the snow. It took a few deliberate hops, testing whether or not he’d pursue. Then it took several hops toward the house. Its fat, bushy tail flounced behind it. Emmett stepped gently out from the trees, following. It skipped along the tree line, pausing every few seconds with his body erected. It hopped nearer to the house, closer to it than the trees now.
It was then Emmett noticed where it was headed. Not just hopping aimlessly after all, but approaching one thing in particular. A small object on the ground. In the snow. Stepping quietly after it, Emmett stopped in his tracks as his eyes absorbed the scene. The squirrel lowered its twitchy head to the ground as it got nearer, sniffing. It came upon the object in the snow, dared to extend its curious nose to it. Getting a scent of it, the squirrel turned around and skittered back into the trees, already searching for new distractions.
Unlike the squirrel, Emmett was very interested in what lay in the snow. Old and frozen. Although he hadn’t yet fully realized what it was—the smooth sheen across its pale surface, or the wispy threads attached to it catching the sunlight like cobwebs—in the back of his mind he knew. Because it was familiar. The skin across his shoulders and arms raised in a wave of shivery bumps. He took a step closer, and then another. It became clearer to him. Something else stuck out from the snow as well, five or so feet from the first object.
Laughter in the yard behind him. He hardly heard it.
Deciding he was close enough, he stopped. He saw it just fine where he was…
There was half a face in the snow. It protruded like a hidden artifact, revealed only because the sun allowed it. Thin, white, delicate hair. A smooth, receded hairline. Snow melting off a thick brow, and a sleeping eye underneath. The rest was buried. All except for the end of a bare foot, whose toes sprang up from the snow like tiny buds ready to bloom.
Not again.
Emmett didn’t run screaming like the others might have. Though his heart thundered secretly inside his chest, he returned to the yard as calm and collected as ever. He stood there a moment at the sidelines, watching the others play without really watching at all. His mind was somewhere else, somewhere far away.
