CHAPTER 43
Lucy
I finished in the bathroom and walked into the dimly lit hallway. I was standing next to the screened front door when I heard laughter out on the road. I turned to look, but it had grown so dark that I could barely make out the group of small, giggling children as they ran down the street. I couldn’t have said how many there were or if they were boys or girls, but watching them, I began once again to remember the night Isabel died, and for a moment, Julie and her Nancy Drew box were forgotten.
I remembered waking up alone in the attic that night, determined not to scream. I remembered my frantic race down the pull-down stairs and the way they’d shivered under my light weight. But I had not gone immediately to my parents’ room and then to the couch to sleep, as I’d previously recalled. First, I’d gone to the back porch to find Julie. I’d looked in the direction of the bed at the end of the long porch, but it had been too dark to see if anyone was there.
“Julie?” I’d called.
There’d been no answer and the darkness had felt suffocating to me. I could hear the water lapping against the bulkhead, and the croaking of a frog joined the nighttime music of the crickets. I was aware of the woods outside the screens to my right, but I couldn’t see the trees for the darkness, and the thought of what might be lurking out there made me turn and run back into the living room and then down the hall.
That’s when I stood outside my parents’ door, listening to my mother’s breathing. I’d thought of pulling the cushions from the sofa, setting them on the floor outside her room to sleep there, as close as I could get to her. But before I could act on that idea, I realized I needed to use the bathroom. I walked quietly down the short hallway, comforted by the sound of my grandfather’s snoring from the front bedroom he shared with Grandma. The screen door leading to the front yard was in front of me, the main door held open by a heavy iron doorstop shaped like a Scottie dog. It was as dark on the other side of that door as it was in the hallway. I hated that we never locked the doors at night. Oh, the screen door was secured by one of those flimsy hook-and-eye locks, but that had offered me little peace of mind once I realized how easily it could be foiled.
I turned on the light in the small bathroom, glad to finally be able to see everything. I urinated, not bothering to flush because I didn’t want to awaken anyone and have to explain what I was doing downstairs at that hour. I turned off the light and quietly left the room. To my right, the hallway leading back to the living room looked dark and foreboding, so I stood by the screen door as I waited for my eyes to adjust again to the darkness.
Outside, I saw a flicker of light through the woods, somewhere near the road. I thought at first it was a firefly, but the tiny light burned bright orange and I quickly realized it was a cigarette. I watched the light arc and sway as the shadowy person carrying the cigarette walked along the dirt road in the direction of our house. I smiled in relief. Isabel. She was probably walking home from Pam’s or Mitzi’s, enjoying one last smoke before she had to come in. But how did she expect to get in with the lock on the door? I thought it was her good fortune that I happened to be there.
I lifted the lock with my finger and was about to push the door open when the shadowy image and its cigarette continued down the road, past our sidewalk, past our driveway. I slipped the lock back into the eye. It was not Isabel after all. I lost sight of the person, but the light of the cigarette continued to burn, making a sharp angle in the air as the smoker turned to walk up the Chapmans’ driveway.