“She’s there.” But when I looked again, she was gone.
Spencer studied the lightless house. “You’re seeing things, Mattie.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. But I wasn’t completely sure. I listened to the snow and the barely there wind through the leafless trees and peopleless yards. And suddenly I knew—just knew—that if I didn’t do something today, it would be too late. Spencer turned back toward the street, but I grabbed his arm again, only harder. “Wait,” I said.
“Mattie, what do you want to do, put your face through the window, Mr. Fox-style?”
I shrugged. If I’d thought it would do any good, I would have gone to the front door and banged until my hands bled. I would have pitched a screaming fit on the Doctor’s front porch until he had no choice but to let me into his sanctuary of masks. It terrified me and made no sense, how much I missed his bow-mouthed girl.
Finally, I let Spencer lead me straight down the center of my street. The mud-soaked ground under the snow sucked at our shoes. I thought about mud running down Theresa’s leg into Cider Lake like the hair dye on my mother’s cheek. I thought about skating during her last birthday party, when she disappeared among the reeds. I thought about her face floating in the porthole window, and Mrs. Cory with her arm raised, saying, “Goodbye, boys,” and about how dearly I’d loved this year, in spite of everything. Or maybe because of everything.
All at once, as though every one of my cells had been asleep for months and now awoke simultaneously, the tingling feeling exploded all over my skin. I was crying a little and stomping my feet. I think Spencer thought the tears were from the wind. Two houses from mine, I stopped dead.
Spencer stopped with me and sighed. “Mattie, I’m cold. And your mom’s going to murder us if she comes home and we’re not there.”
“My mom isn’t home yet. I have an idea,” I said, and pointed to the Fox house.
Spencer looked at the long red-brick ranch-style house. All the rain and snow had caused the gutters under the roof to sag. There were no lights on, of course, no cars in the mud and drift-caked driveway.
“Who lives there?”
“No one. It’s empty.”
“So why are we going in?”
“Practice,” I said, feeling a brighter, wilder version of my sidecar-ring smile spread over my face.
“Practice for what?” Spencer said, but his voice had changed, and he wasn’t hopping up and down anymore.
“Operation Theresa.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“Just come with me,” I said, and stepped off into the Foxes’ yard.
“What the fuck,” I heard Spencer mumble, but his boots came stomping behind me. I couldn’t stop tingling, and I couldn’t stand still, and I didn’t know quite what I was doing except that Mr. Fox was dead, and this house was yet another place I used to go that was now forbidden to me.
I stalked around back and found the key to the back-porch door taped under the picnic-table bench, right where it had been all my life. I pulled it loose and held it up to Spencer.
“How’d you know that was there?”
“This is Barbara’s house. I used to come here all the time when she baby-sat me.”
“Mattie, your mom’s gotta be home by now.”
“She’s not. Stop being a baby.”
The lock was old and half frozen, and it took several tries before the key turned. Then the door swung open, and Spencer and I stepped out of the twilight into a thicker, mustier air. When I shut the door I saw the nearest curtain ripple, but nothing else moved. Even the shadows seemed still. I was tingling so hard I had to sway back and forth to keep from crying out.
“Creepy,” said Spencer. “We could play Murder in the Dark, if Theresa was here.” The spirit of the moment had caught him a little. He edged toward the kitchen.
I stayed by the door. I wasn’t afraid, but I couldn’t catch my breath. I was thinking of Barbara laughing at me in the grass, Ms. Eyre’s bruised eye sockets and caged jaw, blue Gremlins prowling through the snow like escaped lions, having a best friend for the first time in my life. Then I was thinking of Theresa’s hair ribbon, and her open mouth as she knelt over Mr. Fox’s crushed body, and everything else disintegrated.
Theresa needed my help. Her father was too proud; Barbara was too angry, Ms. Eyre was too bitter, and Mrs. Jupp too blinded by Theresa’s brain to even see the cliff edge she had wandered toward, let alone yank her back.
“Spencer,” I called, feeling almost deliriously calm, “what if a blue Gremlin pulled up in this driveway right now?”
I wasn’t even looking as I strode past the yellow couch, the glass coffee table that reflected nothing but accumulated dust. I stopped briefly by a picture of Barbara and me on the wall, part of a framed collage of childhood photographs. She looked gawky and gangly, a teenager, and I looked like Brent had looked when he was five, only smaller. We were both in bathing suits on the shore of Cider Lake on a gray day. Barbara was watching the water. I was watching Barbara. Neither of us was smiling.
“Why do you say things like that?” Spencer said, and flopped into a nearby brown vinyl recliner. Dust puffed out like smoke and obscured him. I was grinning again, tingling madly.
“What if the Snowman got you?”
He wasn’t paying attention. He drummed his hands on the arms of the recliner, and more dust billowed into the air. “Poof,” he said.
“I mean, what if you were gone? What if I went home right now and told my mother the Snowman got you?”
Spencer kept beating the arms of the chair. He waited for the dust to settle. Then he looked at me and said, “Mattie, what the hell are you talking about?”
“She’s your friend too, you know.”
“She? What she?”
“Theresa. Listen. What if I told my mother we were having a snowball fight by the bus stop, and you ran into the Daughretys’ yard, and when I looked up I saw Theresa waving in the window but I couldn’t see you, and there was only this rusty blue car pulling away down Cider Lake Road. And you were gone.”
Spencer stared, opened his mouth. “Are you cra—“
“Someone would have to talk to Theresa. She would have seen something, and I could say I thought she’d talk to me, maybe. They’d have to let me in then, see? They’d have no choice. The Doctor couldn’t stop them.”
“Let me think about this for a sec.” Spencer closed his eyes, opened them. “Okay. Done. I’m hungry. Let’s go.”
He stood up and started for the front door. I grabbed him hard around the arm and pulled him back.
“Ow,” said Spencer, jerking his arm away. “Stop doing that.”
It was already happening, though. I’d lost control of everything in my world. Very possibly, I’d never had it. But I knew I could make this happen. I could get to Theresa by using the Snowman.
“We have to help her. She’s in huge trouble, Spencer.”
“So you figure we can help her by getting into even bigger trouble ourselves.”
“You saw her kneeling by Mr. Fox. In Mr. Fox. I’m telling you, Theresa’s really screwed up. Something’s really wrong.”
“I know that, Mattie. Everyone knows that.”
“You’ve seen her dad. You’ve seen how much he wants her to win everything. You see how she is at school. Everyone else in our class treats her like a freak.”
“She is a freak.”
I shook Spencer’s arm, thinking it through, tingling. “Just tonight. After I get in to see Theresa, I’ll come and get you. A couple of hours, Spencer. Overnight, tops.”
“What about my mother?”
“Your mother doesn’t come back until Sunday.”
With a grunt, Spencer wrenched his arm out of my grasp and stepped back, and we both looked out the window. Through the snow, the houses and trees of my neighborhood were dissolving into dots of color. No dream I’d ever had felt any less real than my current waking world, with its dead neighbors and singing snow and monst
ers and lost girls.
“How about we both stay,” said Spencer, and I realized with a shiver, part pleasure and part knee-buckling excitement, that he was starting to give in. I wanted this to happen more than anything I’d ever wanted before. I knew it was going to get me in big trouble. But it also might get me in to see Theresa. It had to.
“When it’s over, I’ll explain to my parents. They’ll understand. They’re afraid for her too.” We stood awhile longer, feeling the undertow of our intentions sucking us into an all-new and much larger netherworld. Finally, I grinned. “Maybe I can even bring Theresa here. Then we can really play Murder in the Dark.”
The thought made me tremble. I could already see Theresa and me in the snow, on the run, racing to where Spencer would be waiting for us. It could happen. I could make it happen. It would be the first brave thing I’d ever done. “Come on, Spencer.”
“I’ll do it if the TV works,” he said.
It did.
I left him sitting cross-legged in front of a Brady Bunch rerun. We’d found canned food in the kitchen and the stove worked too, so he was having cream of mushroom soup and corn for dinner. In the backyard, I taped the key back under the picnic bench and saw Spencer’s shadow-rise up in the glass. I thought he was going to chase after me, yell for me to stop, but he just waved.
That was almost enough to send me racing back inside. I didn’t want to leave Spencer there. But I wanted Theresa beside me in the snow. I wanted her sitting next to me in school at her regular desk. I wanted to wipe that blank expression from her face like condensation from window glass, so I could see what was underneath it at last.
I looked at Spencer, felt sick, waved back. Then I made myself walk around to the front yard. When I was out of sight of the Foxes’ front window, I grabbed a handful of snow from a bush and drove it into my face. That’s when I started laughing uncontrollably. I couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t stop. I was laughing so hard it felt like crying. I was crying, in fact, which is probably why it worked.
My mother was already on the driveway, of course, shivering in the dark and snow. When she saw me coming, she closed her eyes and yelled, “Goddammit, Mattie, do you think you can just disappear whenever you want?”
But I still couldn’t control my laughter, and the street seemed to be sliding beneath me like a roller coaster track, propelling me toward the inevitable drop. Through the tears in my eyes, I saw my mother’s face freeze.
“Mattie?” She grabbed me around the shoulders as soon as I was close enough, but I just laughed harder. “Mattie, what? Jesus, what? Where’s Spencer? Mattie, where is he?”
Down the street, I tried to say. At the Foxes’. But I couldn’t get my mouth to work. I couldn’t get the air down my lungs. And in the end, all I got out—so quietly that I couldn’t even hear it myself—was “Blue Gremlin.”
But my mother heard me. And before I could stop her, she was screaming into the house, dragging me behind her as she lunged for the phone.
Chapter 21 – 1994
Spencer doesn’t lay off the horn as I approach the car, though he appears to be looking right at me. He’s wearing his black Detroit Tigers baseball hat pulled down over his forehead. I bang on the hood of the Buick, and the horn goes silent.
“You trying to get someone to call the police?” I say. Spencer rolls down the window and tilts his face up to me. The sunlight illuminates him. He looks exhausted. “Morning, Devil,” he says. “Just wanted to make sure I got your attention.”
“Surprised to see you, Shep.” “Not as surprised as I am.”
The driver’s-side door has hollows and welts all over it, as if it were left out during a meteor shower.
“Weren’t you in a Caddy last night?” I say.
“Church car,” says Spencer. “And we are not in church now, brother. Get in.”
Spencer twists the ignition key twice. On the third try, black exhaust billows from the back, filling the parking lot with fumes. I drop my knapsack on the floor and lean back in the seat as Spencer pulls out of the lot.
“Sometime around dawn,” Spencer says, “for absolutely no reason, I got sort of excited about you being here.”
“I’m glad,” I tell him. “Going through this without you doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”
“As opposed to going through it with me. Which makes all kinds of sense.”
“What do you think we should do?” I say.
“I have no thoughts, Mattie. I am a walking iceball of sleep deprivation and temporarily repressed panic.”
“Then let’s go to the Daughrety house.”
“The Daughrety house,” says Spencer, too brightly, as if I’ve suggested Boblo Island Amusement Park. “Righty-o.”
He slides the car backward, and in seconds we’re shooting up Maple toward the outskirts of Birmingham, where the trees get older and the houses larger and the lakes lonelier and deeper. We pass Shane Park and that second smaller park I never knew the name of, with the creek and the little waterfall in the middle, then the shopping courts of low wooden buildings where there used to be a take-out place called Jiggly’s, the only place in town that sold red packets of Pizza Dust, which jumped on your tongue like pop rocks but tasted sort of like pizza. I don’t think I ever went there with Spencer, and I didn’t like Pizza Dust much. But I remember it. Jiggly’s is long gone, of course, a casualty of the Domino’s-Little Caesar’s firefight for pizza supremacy in the Motor City.
“You sleep?” Spencer asks.
“A little, in an IHOP this morning.” I’m thinking how relieved I am that Laura isn’t here and how terrified that she may be gone for good.
“I didn’t. Not one wink. I sat up talking to myself all night. Turn here?”
He’s already turning, though. He knows exactly where he’s going. Nothing in this part of town has changed. We pass the golf course under the arch of old pines and come to the signpost for my street, which is still crooked at the top like a beckoning finger. Two more turns, a scramble of tires on iced gravel, and we’re there.
The house sits in the back center of its cul-de-sac, almost entirely obscured by the overgrown pricker branches climbing the dark front windows. Needle-shaped shoots of frozen grass poke through the frost, rising to shin height, so that the yard resembles an enormous loom. One of the side gutters on the roof has split in half and dangles from a splint of old rope.
“Does that place look inhabited to you?” I ask.
Spencer shakes his head. “Not by anyone we want to know, cousin.” The giddiness is gone from him now.
“Bet the neighbors have filed complaints.”
Spencer glares at the neatly painted Christmas-light-strewn suburban homes around us, seated on their perfect snowy lawns like figurines atop a birthday cake.
A white-haired woman in a blue bathrobe and long overcoat has appeared on the driveway next door. She begins inching toward us. When she’s most of the way to the street, she picks up her newspaper, shivers in her slippers, and shuffles a little closer to my side of the car. After a few seconds of studying us, she motions for me to roll down my window.
“Please tell me that you’re thinking to buy,” she says. Her voice reminds me of a grade-school teacher’s.
“Are they selling?” I ask.
“They are if we can help it.”
“We?”
“Everyone on the block.” The woman takes a step closer. “You gay?”
Spencer bursts out laughing, and the woman waves her arm. “Just wanted to let you know, we don’t mind. We welcome anyone with a lawn mower.”
I almost smile at that, but the woman isn’t smiling, and it isn’t funny, and I miss my wife.
“And curtains. We prefer curtains to soap.”
I glance back at the Daughretys’ front windows. The house is dark, I realize, because the windows are caked with layers of streaky gray-black frozen soap, as though a thousand Devil’s Nighters have had a field day.
“Who owns this place?” Sp
encer asks, his voice low and unsteady.
“A doctor’s family owns it, but they don’t live here. They don’t even live in the state.”
“Family?” I snap, my eyes locking on the woman’s, and she takes a step back.
“The Doctor’s family.”
“You know them?”
The woman cringes, but she doesn’t retreat any farther. “No. I’ve only lived here three years. I hear he was a wonderful man, though. Sad. When he died, his wife deeded this place to relatives. They’re all in Cleveland and Milwaukee. But for some reason, they won’t sell. Won’t rent, either. When we tried to get them to rent it, we received all these ridiculous affidavits from a lawyer proclaiming that the house ‘was not meant for investment purposes’ and ‘has intrinsic value to the family and will not be occupied until the family sees fit.’ God, I can still quote those things, they were so insane. So there it sits, rotting, full of rats and spiders. Stray cats, too; you can hear them fighting sometimes.” The woman shudders, tightens her coat around her, and shuffles up her driveway without looking back.
Around us, icicles ring in the trees like wind chimes. If this is the end, the last trace I will find of Theresa Daughrety, at least it’s a quiet one. I could almost resign myself to it, I think, watching the sunlight, listening to the ice. Then I look at Spencer. His eyes are red, his mouth twisted.
“What?”
Spencer shakes his head but refuses to look at me. “Nothing,” he says, and starts the car.
The day has blossomed into one of those rare Michigan midwinter days, hard and icy and brilliant with sunlight.
Spencer asks, “Where to?” His face still hasn’t relaxed.
“My place. My old house, I mean.”
He seems relieved, almost pleased, as he spins us back up Theresa’s street and around to my own.
We pass the Fox house, bright red in the sun, sprouting twin miniature satellite dishes on the roof like little cat ears. The street seems only a little smaller than I remember. The lawns still stretch from house to house, and the birch trees still have most of their bark picked from them. Spencer coasts to a stop at the foot of my yard, and I feel a momentary flicker of deliciously uncomplicated nostalgia as I stare across the drainage ditch we once used as a moat, mock grave, end zone, and hiding place.
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