Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

Extended family—a grandfather in Minnesota, an aunt in Wisconsin, a second cousin in Illinois—hear that their granddaughter, their niece has been lost. They learn in one call about the accident, both parents dead, and that she’s run away from the foster home where she’d spent the night as custody was sought. A bedroom window found open to the cold, and no other sign.

  They are shocked, panicked. They are grief-stricken and overwhelmed by worry. What can they do? They drive all the way down to Louisiana; they take flights delayed by winter weather. When they arrive, they talk to police and the foster woman, who is apologetic but useless. They get in their cars and drive back and forth through neighborhoods they don’t know. They take roads they imagine her parents drove with her in their car. They go to her home and search it. There, they find lamps left on, still awaiting that family’s return. When they’re done there, they turn them off and go back outside, into the humid cold, and search ditches and alleyways, following impulse and awful gut feelings. They look at the windows of houses along her street, seeing the gray frames glinting back at them, expecting somehow that her face will appear, grinning at them through the glare.

  And, in time, their feet are numb and lifeless beneath them, their thighs and calves ache. They’re tired. There’s a life for them back home, still going, and she is nowhere to be found. They know the officer in charge of her case, whose number they call for updates. They can continue calling, from home. They tell each other, when they leave, that they haven’t stopped looking.

  But on the long drive north up I-55 to home, with the interstate stretching out in their rearview, gradually they fix it in their minds, immutable and unforgiving, what they believe to have happened: three lives gone.

  Two adults deceased, and a girl missing. Two adults and a girl gone.

  An awful thought. That a family—all at once—can be erased. Even though it’s wrong.

  Two adults gone, and a little girl hidden away.

  Making It Home

  NOT THE ONE SHE AND HER PARENTS HAD MOVED INTO MONTHS before, but the old house, the one that had always been her home. The too-big house, with all its rooms, jumbled like a maze on paper. The house that was falling apart. The one with mysteries that had to be solved. The one with memories.

  Other houses were brick, and wood, and glass, and tile. This house was more. Each day the house woke her, held her, cradled her. It responded to her, felt each touch of her fingertips, and pressed back against the bare soles of her feet.

  That morning in December, she found her way in through the library door with the loose knob that popped when wrenched, and then opened as if it hadn’t been locked at all. Inside, winter winds rattled the house’s storm windows. The new owners were away for the holidays. She knew it because their lamps were on automatic timers, and the thermostat had been lowered to a chilled sixty-five degrees. Their Christmas tree had all but dried up, its ornaments threatening to fall under its drooping branches. But the girl went to the kitchen, took an old carton of orange juice she found in the recycling bin beside the trash, filled it in the sink, and watered the tree. She lay on her belly as she poured into the tree’s base to avoid the prick of the pine needles, the way her father would have.

  It was a time of preparation: of returning to the old entrances into the walls, seeing which ones still existed—like the laundry chute her dad had shown her, the crevice in the boards she’d seen when her parents redid the attic floor, or the removable access panel in the pantry installed when the old pipes above wouldn’t stop leaking.

  She pushed herself, deeper into the spaces between the walls, farther than she ever would have gone before when she had been her most adventurous, when her parents had been distracted across the house, too far away to tell her to stop, come back. She saw how far she could go.

  She learned practical things: which door hinges complained, how far the flush of a toilet sounded and how long it took its tank to refill, how to stifle a sneeze into something swallowed and suffocated. She learned about the family by the things they kept in their drawers, the size of their clothes, the types of soaps and shampoos, deodorants and toothpastes they used. With each hour that passed, the house became larger. It stretched out until the rooms were no longer rooms. They were each their own houses. The hallway was a road curling between them. The attic might as well be the sky itself.

  Elise wrapped herself in the house as if it were a winter coat. One she didn’t plan to take off.

  Eddie’s Room

  IN THE EVENING HOURS, AFTER HIS FAMILY HAD CONCLUDED THEIR day’s work on the guest room floor, Eddie built a castle in his room without any help from the instructions. He squatted barefoot on the carpet, still wearing the fraying jean shorts he’d put on for the work that day, muttering to himself so quietly that anyone near might hear only the light smack of his parting lips. He separated his Legos into different bins around him, all laboriously organized by color and size. Then he laid the castle’s foundation.

  A couple weeks back, Eddie had come home from school and Elise had seen him through the dormer, alone and sobbing in the backyard, cradling his face in his hands. She’d been thinking of it since: how strange, seeing a boy cry alone. She never had a brother. Sure, Elise had seen little boys cry on playgrounds and in grocery stores. And the one night she spent at the foster home, she had thought she heard an older boy snuffling in another room. But to watch Eddie then had been odd, kind of fascinating, like seeing a dog eat its dinner with a fork and knife. It had felt nice to see someone else break down.

  Elise shifted her weight. She squinted through the hanging shirts in Eddie’s closet at the crack of light between the door and its jamb.

  That voice of hers: You shouldn’t be this close.

  Elise would never have guessed Eddie was older than her if she didn’t already know. The boy’s limbs were so frail they could belong to a bird. So quiet and, when he spoke, it sounded funny, like he was trying to make fun of the way someone else spoke, except he wasn’t. One night, inside the intake vent by Mr. and Mrs. Mason’s bedroom, she’d heard his parents talk about whether he would be better suited to a different school, an expensive one that started an hour later, with special activities that lasted into the evening. The conversation hadn’t surprised Elise. If Eddie had friends now, he wasn’t leaving on weekends to hang out with them. Though, to be fair, Elise had been the same way, when she still had a choice about that kind of thing.

  Before, when Elise went to school, she knew of strange boys like him. So often they sat in the back corner of class, ignored, until those times during presentations when they were required to stand before the chalkboard and show, fully, how different they really were. Those boys had never bothered Elise. Like anyone else, she rarely gave them the chance. Classmates, in her experience, were a waste of time. Elise had preferred family.

  Her favorite classmate had been a big, sleepy-eyed boy who sat beside her and had kept his mouth shut the times he’d seen her slip out the back door before class, during the commotion of students entering and dropping their heavy book bags to the floor. The boy had been awkward, like Eddie, had once even peed himself in homeroom as the teacher ignored his quivering, raised hand. Elise had never talked to the boy, that she could recall. But she liked him. Once, when she tucked herself in the supply cabinet, he’d pivoted in his desk, rotated completely the other way. When Ms. Robicheaux asked him whether he knew if she had gone home sick that day, he had muttered, stumbling over the words, that he didn’t know.

  Eddie wasn’t so different. Weird, to most anyone. But, here in his room, she could tell this was where he was at his best. Alone. Away from school, and from his brother, and his parents. Elise understood that. Eddie wasn’t weird, quiet, or sensitive here. Here, he was good at building.

  When Mrs. Laura’s voice called up from downstairs to tell Eddie it was time to get ready for bed, he stood with his hands on his hips and looked down on the work he had done. He nodded and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

 
; Eddie closed the bathroom door behind him, even if it didn’t make much sense, since his own bedroom door was shut and no one would see in. Peculiar, but a trait Elise appreciated. It allowed her the chance to creak open the closet door, to step out. For a couple minutes, she moved through the room as freely as if it were hers, and looked over his bookshelf, through the window, and at the beginnings of the castle. She could do this during the day when no one else was home, but there was a feeling to a room that someone had just left that was different, a little more alive. The carpet was still warm from where he had sat. She dropped to her haunches to study what he had built of his castle: the impressions of walls and antechambers, columns without walls between them, what she imagined would grow to be a ballroom, a throne room.

  Over the next few days, the towers would grow tall, and the characters—knights in armor, blond princes, and bandits lurking in the recesses—would populate each of the separate rooms of the castle. She’d watch it grow.

  Things Kept

  IN HER NOOK BENEATH THE ATTIC’S FLOOR WAS WHERE SHE KEPT them. Under the loose board of plywood, there was a space just large enough for a small girl to lie on her back between the rafters and extend her legs. Looking down, it might seem tight as a coffin. At night as she slept, they surrounded her on all sides.

  There were practical items kept here. Several half-filled water bottles that had been pulled from the recycling bin. Uneaten Nature Valley snack bars stacked in the shape of a small pyramid. A gallon-sized Ziploc bag of popcorn. Wrinkled, rolled-up boys’ T-shirts. A girl’s, with a unicorn graphic and the text, “I Believe in Humans.” A tube of men’s deodorant. An old, empty emergency car toilet. A pile of folded, unused tissues and balled-up ones beside them.

  There were pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a loose-leaf paper with drawn pictures of finches, wrens, and cardinals. A small flashlight and spare batteries. Peppermints.

  Also, other, stranger items—incongruous ones—that together resembled a seabird’s nest of collected colorful things found out in the ocean.

  An old Jazzercise VHS tape. A man’s black bow tie.

  A stuffed elephant. A woman’s earring. A single, pink sock.

  Books, fantasy and mythological ones, taken from a downstairs bedroom, their pages dog-eared, hard creases in the paper that remain no matter how hard someone were to rub them smooth. A sun-bleached photograph: two parents and their child.

  Game

  ONE WEEKEND AFTERNOON, WHEN NO ONE WAS UPSTAIRS, ELISE slipped down from the attic and saw both of the boys’ bedroom doors open. It startled her to find Marshall’s door ajar with its overhead lights on, the room as garish as a gaping, open eye. The older brother always kept it closed, even when he wasn’t home. Seeing, from the hallway, the sixteen-year-old’s clothes scattered across the floor, his bedsheet and comforter balled at the bottom of his bed, like the dried and wilted leaves of some flower, it felt like catching him coming out of the shower, even if she knew the room as well as any other. Already knew its secrets: the magazines stacked beneath the nightstand with long, skinny women in underwear; the pair of switchblade knives kept in a red pencil bag in the back of his computer desk’s drawer.

  She crept down the stairs, and she heard the boys in the dining room, speaking to one another in voices hard to make out. Plastic pattered across the dining room table—the contents of a checkers box dumped out. Their chairs squeaked against the wood floor as the boys scooted them closer and leaned their chests against the table’s edge.

  “All right,” Marshall said. “Like I said, I’ll play one game. Make it count.”

  Elise stepped into the living room. She heard the boys around the corner, in the dining room. Elise crouched behind the back of the sofa, then crawled, shimmying up the narrow length between the sofa and the wall.

  Too risky. That voice, exasperated, in her head.

  At the sofa’s far end, Elise peered around the corner, between the thick legs of the end table, through the dining room’s doorway.

  You’re making a mistake. Another one.

  But Elise had always liked checkers. She couldn’t play it on her own.

  Eddie sat barefoot and cross-legged in his chair. Marshall slouched with his chin on his fist, his posture a curving question mark. With the board set up and ready, the younger brother contemplated his first move.

  “Go ahead,” Marshall said.

  Eddie stared at the board. He got up on his knees and curled over, looked down on it, his bangs dangling loose from his forehead. He raised his slender arm, elbow high in the air, and pushed a piece forward with his pointer finger. In response, Marshall picked up his and dropped it to its new square. The piece rattled to a stop.

  Eddie took his time for the next move. While he thought, he scratched at what must be a mosquito bump on his thigh. His attention was on the game, but he scratched carefully, circling the bite, never letting his fingernail cross the puckered skin. Marshall raised an eyebrow at his younger brother, and investigated his own fingernails. Chewed on the thumbnail.

  “It’s checkers, not rocket science,” Marshall said.

  Eddie made his move. Then Marshall, his. As the game progressed, it was too difficult to see what was happening on the board. Expressions needed to be read, posture analyzed. How many jumps were they making? How far did their arms extend when they reached to move their pieces? Elise followed their game this way. Marshall reached behind his neck and felt the short bristles of hair of his newest buzz cut. Eddie’s brow furrowed. He leaned on his elbows.

  The deeper into the game they played, the longer Eddie considered his moves. Elise imagined his thoughts sliding across his forehead like a child’s rotating lamp.

  Should the king on the back row hold its position or advance? How much was a piece that hasn’t moved worth? Should I fight to keep the pieces I haven’t moved yet?

  And he was taking too long to move. Marshall picked up the checkers he’d already captured, rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger, stacked them on top of each other, picked them up again. He jutted his lower jaw like a bull, then slumped to lay his head on one hand, toying at his pieces with the other.

  It became hard to tell who was winning at this point. She was fairly certain Eddie was, but she didn’t think anyone else would think so, with how seriously the younger brother seemed to take the board, how troubled he seemed, and how bored the older brother now acted.

  The game ended during one of Eddie’s longest moves. Marshall picked up the box top of the game, placed it beside the table and, with one fluid motion, swept all of the pieces from the board. Eddie, startled, yelped like a dog as the world on the board evaporated before him. Marshall sat unfazed. He folded the board up and tucked it into its box.

  Marshall stood, ready to take the checkers box back to the rest of the board games in the library. But he paused at the table, and said, “I really can’t play games with you. Goddamn, you know I wish I could. But you make it so hard.”

  He took a few steps more then paused in the doorway to the living room. With the box tucked under one arm, he gestured with his open palms. “Fuck, Eddie. You’re thirteen next week. A teenager! You’ll be in high school, with me—and you know, it’s hard enough as is without having you there to take care of, too.” Marshall took the checkers box in both hands, brought it to his face, and shook it so all the pieces rattled inside. “So, fuck, man! Why can’t you be a normal fucking brother?”

  Eddie stared down at the table, as if the board had never been pulled away at all. He didn’t have much of an expression. He put his hands in his lap. Breathed through his mouth.

  “I swear you make me weirder, just living with you. I wish you’d grow out of it. I wish you’d grow up. Just be normal? I wish you fucking could.”

  Marshall returned the board to the library, then went up to his bedroom.

  In the Evening

  EDDIE BUILT A CHECKERS BOARD ON HIS BEDROOM FLOOR OUT OF black and white Lego pieces. Knights aligned on one side and band
its on the other. He played against himself, jumping the characters over one another. He squinted between moves, as if trying to forget the other player’s strategy he’d been using only a moment ago.

  At one point, as he stood up to use the bathroom, he paused, standing in the middle of his room in a way that suggested something seemed strange to him. His gaze slid over the dresser, the overstuffed armchair, the closet in his room. He bent over a bit to see beneath his bed. From the look of him, it seemed a feeling had welled up in him, unsettling, some tingle along the back of his neck and shoulders, inspired perhaps by pretending for the past hour to be two separate people.

  Eddie opened the door to the boys’ shared bathroom and shut it gingerly behind him. He wasn’t in there long. The flush of the toilet meant there would be twelve to fifteen seconds of Eddie sudsing his hands with the lemon-scented hand soap, rinsing them in the sink. The rumble of the towel rack meant the bathroom door would soon be opening.

  Everything would look the same to him, at first. His bedsheets still made with the top folded back, the way his mother liked. The books on his bookshelf stacked horizontally and vertically the way he preferred. The pieces on his Lego checkerboard still in the same position: the bandits about to promote two kings, their waiting crowns and horses prepared beside the board.

  Eddie would play his game for a little while longer before he would notice. The biggest change was a small one, made to the castle he had finished the day before, to its single tower that extended up from the heart. “The Observatory” he had called it to the empty room, when finally it had been completed. Knights and wizards peered out through the various portcullises and windows, but the top of the tower, behind the long telescope with a pearled jewel lens, had been left empty.

  Eddie’s mouth tightened. In the empty space at the top of the tower, there now stood a single character, whose arm extended to brush the telescope’s side. Her torso bent back at the waist as if she were either belly-laughing or looking up to study the sky. Eddie hadn’t placed her there. She’d been left in the box. A little witch.