“I’ll be right back, Sylvie. Just close your eyes and try to rest some more.”
After she stepped outside, I reached over the seats and adjusted the switch so the wipers would stay on and I could keep an eye out for her. All alone, listening to the patter of wet snow, I braved the book at last. The darkness made it difficult to read, and though I could have turned on the interior light, instead I made my way to the photo section wedged like an intermission in the middle of the text. One picture in particular, a blurred image of a farmhouse kitchen, caused my breath to catch: the chairs and table were toppled, the window over the sink shattered, the toaster, teapot, percolator scattered on the floor, the walls smeared with what looked to be blood.
It was enough to make me shut the book and let it slip to the floor. For a long while, I did nothing but stare at the church, thinking how my father’s and sister’s faces contorted at the height of their arguments until they resembled those horses on my shelf. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed; still none of them emerged. At last, I grew tired and allowed myself to lie back once more. The cocooned feeling of the car led me to think again of those tents Rose and I used to make over the chairs. Some nights Rose convinced our mother to let us sleep in them, though the blankets always collapsed. I used to drift off imagining endless stars twinkling in the vast sky overhead; I woke with nothing covering us, and only the blank white ceiling above.
Those were my last thoughts as my eyes fell shut in the backseat.
All my life until that night, I’d never heard such a horrible and unforgettable sound. When I did, I woke with a start, sitting up in the backseat. The car had grown cold, all the windows except the front covered with a thick layer of snow. Staring out at that church, it appeared as peaceful and sleepy as one inside a snow globe, and I wondered if I had dreamed the noise, if the images from that book had slipped into my sleep. But, no. I heard it again, the second time more ferocious than the first, so loud it seemed to vibrate against my chest, causing my heart to beat faster, my hands to shake.
I don’t know why, but the first thing I did was reach forward and turn off the car. The wiper blades halted in their path across the window. Except for the wind and the scuttling branches, the air was quiet when I pushed open the door and stepped outside. I hadn’t thought to turn off the headlights and they lit the footprints before me, the first set almost completely dusted over with snow. How long had I been asleep? I wondered as I left the Datsun behind.
The next time you feel afraid, I want you to pray . . .
I tried. I really did try. In my nervousness, however, too many prayers clashed in my mind and tangled on my tongue so what came out was a mangled version of them all: “Our Father who art in heaven, the Lord is with thee, I believe in his only Son, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified and buried. He rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, from thence he shall judge the living and the dead. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen. Amen. Am—”
At the bottom of the cement steps, I fell silent. For a long moment, I stood listening for some sound of them inside the church. But none came.
Chapter 2
Things in the Basement
How would you describe yourself now?
Arnold Boshoff asked a lot of questions each time we met in his windowless office decorated with Just Say No posters, but he returned to that one again and again. Boshoff gave a taffy stretch to the word nooow while resting his hands on his mountainous belly and steepling his fingers. Always, I looked up at his puffy pink face and watery blue eyes and fed him the obvious. I was an Advanced Honors student at the top of my class. My long, black hair was too stringy to stay in a ponytail. My skin was pale. Eyes, hazel. Sometimes, I informed him, I thought my head was too big for my body, my fingers and feet too small. I doled out those sorts of details before moving on to more minor things, like the flea-sized freckles on the inside of my right wrist. God kisses, my father used to call them. Hold them to the wind and they might blow away. By the time I started talking about how I used to make a triangle with those freckles by drawing on my skin with a marker, Boshoff unsteepled his hands and moved onto a new topic.
“I have something for you, Sylvie,” he said, after we finished that routine one chilly October afternoon. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a present, wrapped in polka-dot paper.
“What is it?” I asked as he placed the gift in my hands.
“You have to open it to find out, Sylvie. That’s the way it works with presents.”