I set everything else aside except for the tax returns. My eyes go straight to the exemptions, the spot where someone would list their dependents and their dependents’ social security numbers, meaning me and my social security number. Except that when I come to it, I find the line blank. Mom didn’t list me as a dependent and, though I double-check the year of the form to be sure I was alive at the time, I see that I was. That I was eleven years old at the time the form was completed.
And though I don’t know much about income taxes, I do know it would have saved Mom a buck or two if she had thought to use me as a tax deduction. A baby gift from Uncle Sam.
I wonder why Mom, who was frugal to a fault, didn’t claim me as a dependent that year.
It was a mistake, I think. An oversight only. I dig through to find another 1040 in the tower of paperwork—this one older, when I was four years old—and search there for my name and social security number, finding it nowhere. Another year that Mom didn’t claim me.
I sift through them all, six tax return forms that I can find—my movements becoming faster, more frantic as I dig—and discover that never once did Mom claim me as a dependent. Not one single time.
I turn off the light and get back into bed. I lie there, wondering why Mom didn’t claim me as a dependent. What did she know about the IRS that I don’t know? Probably a lot, I reason. I don’t pay taxes. I’ve never once been sent a check from them. My only knowledge comes from hearsay, from eavesdropping on clients like Mr. and Mrs. Ricci, discussing whether they could claim Mrs. Ricci’s shopping binges as exemptions, all those fancy clothes she toted home in the trunks of cabs.
Mom must’ve had a good reason for what she did.
I listen to the clock, tick, tock. I don’t bother closing my eyes except to blink, because I know that I won’t sleep. I pull the blanket up clear to my neck because it’s cold in the room. Though the thermostat downstairs is set to sixty-eight degrees, I have yet to hear the heat kick on.
Fall is here and winter is coming soon.
I’m rubbing my hands together for friction, to try and create heat. To make myself warm. I rub them together and then press them to my cheeks. Rub and then press, rub and then press. And that’s when I hear a noise.
It’s sudden, the kind of noise that makes me sit up straighter in bed, that makes me hold my breath to listen.
The only way to describe it is a ping. A ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. It’s a piercing noise when it comes, like some sort of mechanical bleep or chime, the second or two between each ping a welcome reprieve. I rub at my ears, certain at first that the noise originates there, in my own eardrums. That it’s merely tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, something only I can hear.
But then I realize it’s not coming from my ears.
It’s coming from somewhere on the other side of the room.
I stare though the blackness but see nothing. It’s too dark to see much of anything, aside from my own hand when it’s pressed all the way up to my face. And so I push the blanket from me and rise, following the noise. I move blindly, feet guiding me, my steps small because I don’t know what’s in front of me. Where the bedroom ends and the stairs begin. I have to be careful so that I don’t fall.
I skirt around the edge of the bed, where I find myself on the other side of the room, hunched at the shoulders because the squat ceiling doesn’t allow me to stand upright. From there, the noise rises up from the floor to greet me.
I drop to my knees, running my hands over a metal grate by accident. There I discover a floor register, one of those metal contraptions that attaches to the end of an air duct and leads somewhere under the floor, to some other room in the home. That’s where the ping is coming from, from some other room in the home. In my imagination, I see a mallet being tapped against the slats of another register in another room, because that’s what it sounds like to me. Like metal on metal, rhythmic and fixed.
I lie on the floor, pressing an ear to the grate so I can hear it more clearly. The ping. Which makes me think only of sonar emitting pulses underwater and then waiting for them to return, to see if there’s anything out there, anything like whales or submarines. Except the only thing here is me.
I’m overcome with the strangest thought then. An irrational thought but one that somehow makes sense.
Someone is trying to speak to me. To communicate with me.
I press my lips again to the cold metal grate and call out, “Hello?”
At first there’s no reply. The ping disappears, and as I sit there, waiting foolishly for someone to respond to me through the floor register, I realize this is ridiculous. Of course there’s no one at the other end of the floor register speaking to me.
Because if there was, that would mean they’re in the carriage home with me.
A chill rises up my spine, one vertebra at a time.
Is there someone in the carriage home with me?
I rise to my feet and scurry across the room—quicker this time, forgetting altogether about falling down stairs. I reach out to flip on the bedroom light. A yellow glare spreads over the room, obliterating the darkness. I stand at the top of the steps, staring down over the rest of the carriage home, listening for sounds, watching for movement. But there are none.
“Is anyone there?” I call over the stairwell, my voice timid and afraid. My heart beats hard; my hands begin to sweat. For three or four minutes, no one appears and in time, logic begins to watch over me. I shake my head, feeling stupid.
Of course no one is here.
It’s the newness of the home that’s to blame. That’s what has me on edge. Because for the first time in my entire life, I’m alone and somewhere new. I feel lost without Mom, not knowing who I am or where I belong. If I belong anywhere.
I turn off the bedroom light, and the room is once again plunged into darkness. It’s darker now than it was before because my eyes have adjusted to the light. I creep across the room and back toward the bed, reminding myself that this house is old. Old homes come with all sorts of strange but innocuous noises. Rats living in the insulation, the settling of the home, water moving through the pipes. That’s all that it is.
As I reach for the bed, I almost have myself convinced.
Until seconds later when the voices come. Female voices by the pitch of it, higher than that of a man. I suck in a gulp of air and hold it in, not believing my own ears.
Someone is there.
The voices are hard to hear, as if they’re a million miles away, the sound dampened by distance and the network of aluminum tubes that make up the ductwork. At first it’s only sounds, the cadence of women speaking, but no words that I can make out.
Until I do.
“It won’t be long now,” I hear, and at first I’m scared. My knees buckle. My throat constricts. My hands go to my throat without meaning to, pressing hard against my vocal cords. My tongue turns to sandpaper and though I’m cold, sweat breeds on my skin.
I see women in some sort of insulated room, by the sound of it. Patients in a psych ward, the walls covered with plastic and foam; a door, padded on the inside, but reinforced with steel. No knob on the door. No way to leave. That’s where I imagine the women are.
I stagger back to the floor register, setting myself down over it. I press my ear to the grate, willing the voices to return again, but at the same time hoping they won’t. Because I pray that no one is here.
I call into the floor register, my voice mousy at first, scared, “What? What won’t be long now?” Though my words are a whisper only, and if they were standing in the very same room as me, two feet away, they wouldn’t hear.
I cup my hands around my lips, pressing them flush to the floor register this time, so close I taste the bitter metal in my mouth. I call out, voice louder and more emphatic than it was before, “Can you hear me? Is anyone there?”
The only words I hear are low and plaintive. “She’s dead to the world.” But to my question there is no reply. Whoever is there can’t hear me.
The voices are hollow at first before they go silent. They disappear completely as I sit there, pressing my ear to the floor register in vain. But the only sound that I hear now is the tick, tock of the wall clock.