Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  “But I’m not there!” she wanted to yell. “Wherever it is you think I am! I’m hardly even here!”

  It was Brody’s fault, and it was her fault for letting him in, for inviting him back and being weak, for forgetting who she had become.

  “You’re ill,” Odin said.

  I know.

  “That boy might be able to help.”

  Don’t care.

  Someone walked directly above them through the living room and paused in front of the television. Shifted weight between his feet, making the same floorboard creak again and again. Mr. Nick.

  “Still on track for us,” he called out for the house to hear. He’d been doing it for a day and a half as he watched the hurricane’s projected path, regular as the chiming of the bird clock above. He called out, sometimes a voice responded to his own, then he moved on. The world had changed above her, was changing.

  “You need to get up,” the god told her. “You need water. There’s that poison down here still, I think. Lingering around. You need to get up. To move.”

  Part of the reason Elise wouldn’t climb up was that, even when she was alone, when the Masons were asleep upstairs, she worried that the windows themselves had turned against her. That, out there beneath the calls of tree frogs, there was the revving of his engine. Whenever she bent to wash her face in the sink, she swore she could feel a hand once again wrapping around the tail of her hair. Elise worried that she was shrinking. The house growing beyond her reach. Before, she’d been strong and quiet enough to stretch out to its every corner and hold it, like the invisible force she learned in school that holds atoms together. Hold herself and her family there in it, retain them in its house’s body, retain herself. Did she now? Elise raised her hands and laid her palms against the graying insulation above her.

  I’m still here, Mom and Dad. I still remember you.

  Elise had been having a hard time picturing what a future with her in it would look like. Wondering if she made a mistake becoming who she was now. If a girl in the walls loses her walls, she has nothing else.

  “Do you wonder now, if Brody’s family will evacuate?” the god asked, even though he knew Elise wouldn’t answer.

  Too tired, now. Arms and legs felt rotted.

  Elise lay for some time, hunger pangs in her stomach aching, then going numb. She dozed off. But before she slept, she thought of a storm she had stayed through with her parents. How when the power went out, they’d had a cookout on the front porch while the rain streamed and the lawn turned dark with water. Sure, they lived by the levee, her mom had said, but the levee wouldn’t break, and it wouldn’t be easy for the river to top. The wind, even in its gusts, was more sound than danger, when they were inside.

  And Elise’s mom had been right. At the storm’s end, the damage had been small: a broken porch window, overturned yard furniture, a layer of branches throughout the yard. In the last few hours before the clouds broke, Elise and her mom had scaled the levee in their raincoats. They had stood, with their arms outstretched, polyester rippling against them, and leaned into the wind, letting it support their bodies as they bent over the edge. Finally, the wind gave out, and they fell on their bellies into the dense, wet grass.

  When this storm came, Elise would climb back into her home and watch through the upstairs windows. One storm is almost any other. Day turned to night, the rest of the world wiped away. One storm might be the same storm, circled back from the past. Why couldn’t it? Spending years out at sea, degrading, and growing strong again. Returning. Now, more than she ever had before, Elise needed it to be.

  A Father

  EDDIE’S ROOM. THE PAINT-SPECKLED RADIO MUMBLING FROM THE hallway. Nick, standing on the desk, and the afternoon sun bright through the window outside. Cutting the holes in the plaster to shape them into neat rectangles, and replacing them with drywall. Nick knew he should have the boys here with him. He didn’t need the help, but this was a process they should see. See how much, what kind of work goes into fixing damage. See, so they could do it one day themselves. A way to make something out of a disaster.

  But instead, Nick wanted nothing more than to stay, working here, alone. This way it was easier to trick himself. To think he was making something better, healing more than a physical hole in the wall. Easier to think this way when he did the work by himself.

  Two spots in the house where that man had tried to break through—where the walls had been wrecked. Nick couldn’t help but wonder what made him try to get into the walls here in Eddie’s room, and again in the office. If he’d been searching, wouldn’t it have made more sense to knock holes, helter-skelter, throughout the entire house? “Pathological,” Nick muttered under his breath. Shouldn’t try to understand the reasoning. No point to try.

  But, even so, before Nick placed the piece of drywall into the space he’d cut, and sealed off the opening, he found himself craning his head into the dark. Tried to see as far as he could, the musty smell rising into his nostrils. He pictured himself as that man, looking down into the walls. Imagined what had been going through his mind. Before Nick leaned back and out, he spoke into the space. Felt his voice, bloated, bouncing around his head. He said, “Leave my family the fuck alone.”

  Nick turned and made sure no one was in the doorway who heard him. He’d left his glasses in the bathroom while he worked, and Eddie’s room was blurred at the edges, the details of objects indistinct. He squinted down at the drywall, drill, spackling, and lath laid out over his son’s carpet.

  What should he have done? No other father’s boys he knew acted out in a way like this. Boys in the classes he taught could be ridiculous, even strange. But this? Nick wasn’t sure what this was. His wife’s voice in his mind: Shouldn’t have left them alone. But you have to eventually. This was their home, too. Where else can you leave them?

  Nick told himself words his own father had never said. But he figured these were ones the old man would tell him if he were still alive. How, with boys, you shelter them as best you can, but there’s not much you can stop. Like too much liquid in too small of a glass, you can’t keep it all from brimming. You deal with the outcome, once it comes.

  You so sure about that? His wife’s voice again in his head.

  No. Nick wasn’t sure what he believed.

  He knew that it wasn’t fair how much they had to do, to maintain, just to live in this house. Nick was getting tired. Too many days stacking up. Yesterday’s fatigue weighed heavy on him, and that of the day before. In a few hours, it’d be time to get ready for bed, but there was still so much left to do. So much always left to do. The radio crackled from the hallway—another news report. He wondered if any of his family had noticed he’d begun leaving lamps on throughout the house at night.

  Nick stepped down from the desk. He thought to himself, get over it. Get over yourself.

  “Marshall,” he called out. “Marshall, you in your room?”

  His son murmured something he couldn’t make out.

  “Go find your brother,” Nick said. “And both of y’all come here. I want to show you two how you fix a hole in the wall.”

  How you make something out of it.

  Eddie and Marshall

  AFTER DARK, WHEN THE HEADLIGHTS OF CARS SWEPT SHADOWS across the ceilings, the family, drowsy, listened to the house around them. And when they were asleep, they dreamt of listening. Three hundred miles away, the eye of a mid-summer hurricane pivoted on its axis, directed by fingertips of wind, drinking strength from the warm Gulf water. Behind the levee, the river was already feeling the pull, the minor dips of barometric pressure—before even the birds and insects register the signs, it’s there in the water—the small siphon.

  Footsteps in the house, a door opening and shutting again, a body fumbling in the dark. Not her—she had always been more careful. The sounds coming from the boys’ shared bathroom. From his bed, Marshall watched through the dim as the door creaked open an inch to hold there. Hard to tell whether it opened farther, the sh
arp corner of the door muddied by the dark. Slowly, every passing second another centimeter. Or just his imagination. Marshall pulled the blankets off him and rolled over, away from the door, to face the wall.

  “Just get in here,” he said, as he had every night before, since the day the man had come.

  Eddie crawled into bed with his brother, pulled the blanket up around their necks. Squeezed beside one another on the twin-size mattress. Eddie’s eyes found patterns in the ceiling’s texture. Thirteen- and sixteen-year-old brothers, sharing a bed. They tried not to think of their ages. This wouldn’t have to last forever, they knew.

  “We’re going to be okay,” Marshall said. He said it to the wall, and for a second Eddie wondered whether he intended to say it for her as well.

  But it was late. And the younger brother was too tired to ask.

  Was it stupid to think of her that way? Beside him, the mountainline of his brother beneath the blankets. Even if the pressure of a body near him made Eddie tense, made him too aware of the veins in his neck and arms, of the other person’s skin just there, it was still good to have his brother near. In case some noise woke Eddie in the night, it was good to be able to look over, and hear him breathing, and know, without a doubt, he was okay.

  “Get some sleep,” Marshall said, and the world fell away to senselessness.

  What’s Most Important

  PHOTO ALBUMS OF THE BOYS. PICTURES OF MARSHALL BEFORE HE HAD HIS curls cut, of Eddie in cowboy boots, half-hidden behind a pine tree, refusing to come fully into view. Mr. and Mrs. Mason when they were only Nick and Laura at college, in cap and gown in front of the university’s oaks and parapets. Photos of their own parents as children, black-and-white, sleepy-eyed, with priceless resemblances in the point of a chin or squinting eyes to themselves and their boys.

  Documents in the lockbox in the parents’ bedroom closet, social security cards, birth certificates, tax forms, and flood and fire and life insurance policies. Other papers that are unclear whether they can be replaced or not, whether they are necessary or not.

  What else is important?

  Are old report cards? Old arts and crafts, macaroni glued to paper plates in the shape of the words, “I love you”? Old stuffed rabbits, bears, and penguins, tucked in attic boxes, whose soft, worn bodies still awaken some pang in an adult’s chest? Is the new knife set, the expensive one given last Christmas, important? A favorite, earmarked book? An antique quilt?

  Not enough space for everything. Each thing becomes a shackle. One thing in means another out.

  The need for practical things: duffel bags of a week’s clothes, toiletries, and a container of gas in the trunk in case stations run out along the way. How obscene it is to picture toothpaste, baby powder, and toilet paper taking space in a car when so much will need to be left inside. The cartop carrier was already full, and seats need to be empty to hold people. A long drive to Indiana, and hotels will be full throughout the South. Their bodies need space to stretch and shift. Their bodies are objects, too.

  Tell Marshall that an old catcher’s mitt will be okay to stay at home, and that it’s ridiculous to pack a computer tower. Tell Eddie that books can be replaced, as can an old Nintendo system—he doesn’t even play it anymore. Tell one another for old 45 rpm records, a potted plant gifted from a deceased friend, for the large framed series of wedding photos—there are duplicates in the albums, for sure.

  Tell yourself things that make you happy are not things you need to live. A shoebox of mementos that, over time, had crawled far beneath the bed. Letters from a grandmother. The house itself, with everything wrong with it, with all its hours of work. A house is a receptacle for everything else. It is only the container. It doesn’t leave.

  Which car—a mother’s or a father’s?

  Whose is worth more?

  Whose is worth more to us?

  Certain windows will need to be boarded. Electrical cords unplugged. Every interior door closed to create barriers within the barriers. What remains must be given every chance to survive, even though the packing, by its nature, says, “I will survive losing you.”

  The Whole World Waking

  EVENTUALLY, THE SKY’S BLUE BECAME MARRED BY THE FIRST bands of gray clouds. The trees shifted in their stances, and the birds had gone. Crickets leaped, unmolested, through the lawn like miniature bottle rockets, yet the throbbing hum of cicadas had evaporated. When exactly had they gone quiet? The calm before a storm is a falsehood, a fiction. Electricity already simmered in the air.

  The Masons’ home, like the other houses in the neighborhood, began to echo with the hammering of windows being boarded. The sound unified the houses even through and over trees, overgrown fields, small pastures of horses, goats, and cows. The house trailers farther down the road had already been abandoned. Their owners hadn’t bothered to take in their lawn chairs and potted plants—in their vulnerable homes, inside was as good as out. Stablemen loaded their horses into their trucks and drove down the rough, unpaved paths toward the levee road, while their animals looked placidly out, manes lifting in the breeze. No tugboats on the river. Their crewmen had docked the barges to the batture and had gone home to ready their families for the storm.

  Commonplace for South Louisiana, as much as something like this could be. Ritualized. This storm was big, though, different in scale and wind speed—late-night satellite imaging showed a clear and defined eye that looked like it might as well belong to the entire world. Its path grew focused. Odin’s lost eyeball, returned, with a vengeance. The eye of the world coming to find her. It rolled across the Gulf, pivoting up to their river.

  Those who had lived here long knew their options. Same as those who’d moved south of the lake less than a year past. Stay or leave. There are risks either way. To leave meant there was no way to stop small damages from becoming larger catastrophes. A broken window wouldn’t be blocked off by spare wood or a table turned on its side, a small fire couldn’t be stifled. But to stay meant other risks. Meant you might not be found. There’s precedent for these things. The roof might cave in. The storm surge might buckle and carry a house’s walls wholly into the fields around it. Nothing to remain but the splinters of its foundation. Those who stayed inside: either escaped or lost.

  In Brody’s home, down the wooded road, his uncle returned home from his work to tell them they were hunkering down. Their house was short and small, but it was brick. The property was far—a half-mile—from the levee, which he said would be topped when the storm surge came. The woods all around them would drink the floodwaters. They’d bring the dogs inside, keep the mean one locked in the kitchen, and they’d stay and wait it through. And if the water still came, they all would climb into the small of their attic. Brody’s uncle had already placed an axe up there. If the water still came, he’d cut through the wood of their roof.

  Brody’s aunt went into town and stocked up on canned foods and bottled water, batteries for radio and flashlights. While his uncle boarded windows, Brody tried to leave, to walk around their neighborhood. But his aunt told him this was no normal day, and the last thing they needed to worry about was him coming home late, because this storm was coming to them, and she didn’t want him to disappear out there before the storm came. He might not find his way back.

  No Place Is Safe

  “ASSUMING A PLACE IS SAFE,” SAID ODIN, “IS TO BELIEVE THE WORLD doesn’t change, and that the people don’t change in it. To know a place is to know that it is dying. With each instant, it is slipping loose from your grip. Your hands will chafe to hold it.”

  My hands are callused. Elise looked them over in the gloom.

  “I’m telling you that you should get out now. I’m realizing you should have left long ago. I forgot who, and what, you are. Use the storm as an excuse for you now.”

  Elise snorted. Or, she imagined herself snorting. She dreamed it. She no longer made any noises now. She hardly breathed. The world she saw existed on the insides of her eyelids. Its sounds were ghosts through
the hair of her inner ears.

  “Look,” Odin said. “Once, a thousand years ago, when I was still a young man, I climbed the thick base of the World Tree and tore free one of its branches. I wanted to plant the branch in the soil for it to grow, to make my own World Tree, one that was safe and separate. For me, and under my rule alone. It didn’t work.”

  Trees don’t work that way. They don’t grow that way.

  “What do you know about magic trees?” he said. “It had nothing to do with how regular trees do and don’t work. It had to do with me.”

  Odin knelt down beside her, the striations of wrinkles in his cheeks like long scars. The hollow where his eye had been was its own eye now, only reversed, turned inward. “I planted the branch in the marsh, and the bark turned to plaster, glass, and brick. Its own branches soon sprouted and spread into a canopy so thick it stood impervious to the rain and wind. Its base was firm, and it would never bend or rot. It would never turn to mud within that marsh. It would never fall.”

  What was the problem?

  “I wasn’t ready. I was young. And I realized to build a home like that, as strong as it was, is to build a monolith to death. To build myself a grave. I was nowhere near ready for that. One night I broke the branches of my home to splinters. I buried it all in the soil, in a place that’s since been drowned and washed away.”

  Odin continued: “You know, you’ll never stop missing them. No matter where you are, how old you are. But hurt gets softer. Quieter, I think. You’ll be an old woman, and you’ll still hold them in you, in that hurt.”