He looks at me with a smirk I don’t recognize. I expect James to apologize or explain, but nothing of that sort emerges.
The nights like this start to line up like matchsticks, close together, hard to count.
34
I USUALLY LOVE the dark, but on this night, it is not my friend and it feels like a punishment to be forced to sit in the pitch and stare. The pages inserted into the journal talk about the death of a brother. I think of what James told me about Rolf’s family losing a son and decide I need to tell him what I’ve found. Why is the book in our house, though? James said they weren’t living in this house when Alban died, but had they lived here at some other point? These preoccupations twist themselves out of the darkness. I watch them tick by like seconds on a clock. I tell myself that all this night is, is a bunch of instants, and even when you add them up, it’s not that much, and finally I fall half-asleep, but James and I startle awake at the same moment, both listening for that growl we’d heard, but it’s not a sound. Something else has fussed us. James tells me he had a dream that a girl wouldn’t stop climbing on top of him, shouting in his face. I tell him that an identical dream woke me.
I huddle into James, still comforted by the way I can tuck perfectly into his big frame, and I breathe in the scent of his sleep-soaked neck and smell love and grief, like chicory.
James pounds his fist into the mattress and pulls away and shouts, “What the hell? It’s too much.” I feel comforted that at least he believes me, that he doesn’t think I’ve made up my duplicate version of his dream. I think about telling him about the book, too, but I don’t want to turn the light on. I don’t want to lose hours of sleep to paging through the journal together now; I want him to know what I know as soon as I know it. This dream is already too much and impatience sparks within me like a menace, threatening to catch. I tell myself, Tomorrow.
I can’t stop the tears that dash down my face quietly. I keep them secret until James kisses my cheek and tastes the briny gloss and squeezes tighter so that eventually I calm down, but I don’t hear our breaths fall into the pattern of sleep.
In the morning the birches all hunch at the edge of the yard, groggy, as if they, too, were up all night, and we are on the other side of half-awake, James looking dried out, a salted version of himself.
Every time a door in the house creaks, it says something a little different, and like those picture puzzles where you have to find the errors, we can’t pinpoint it, but we hear the something that is off.
In the cupboard, all the jars of pickled and jellied things are empty, but unclean, as though someone has been eating them and then shoving the hollowed vessels to the back, until the empties have nothing to hide behind. The clock on the wall of the kitchen stopped days ago, and I can’t reach it, but I wouldn’t know where to move the hands anyway.
Every time I look at the neighbor’s house, he’s staring back: Who’s checking up on whom?
35
IN THE MORNING, a fresh drawing of peacocks on the wall next to the last one. A new figure. “What is this?” I ask. Julie looks away. “Does it mean anything?” I can sense her nerves. I take more photos.
“Look at this.” Julie’s hand is stretched around a leatherbound book stuffed with paper. “I found it in the wall when I was stuck. It’s a journal, but look at the writing: it’s those layers people have been mentioning, that that girl wrote in. But then, back here, the handwriting’s different.”
She hands me the book and I flip through. The pages of plaited script aren’t readable, but the short excerpts written in a messier, more childlike hand are.
Mother is still beautiful, but her heart thumps, wet and heavy. I hear it in my ears. When I see her, my fingertips tingle. Last night, I watched her turn the lamps off, and her skin gripped some of that light, even in the dark.
At breakfast today, I watched Mother disappear. The sunlight shined around her and half of her face faded out. She stares at me. She thinks I pushed Alban from the tree.
Tonight, by the fire, mother could not keep herself awake. Her eyes look snuffed out. I tried to tell her about my time in the woods, but she responded only with taut nodding, drowsy. She asked the same question over and over, “How did you spend your day?” like I hadn’t already answered.
Mother may be an impostor. Perhaps she’s been replaced.
I read in my detectives’ book that no two ears shape themselves the same way, like fingerprints. I examined earlier photographs of my mother. I searched for one that showed the outline of her ear and memorized the curls. Sitting beside her, though, I’m disappointed to see her ears remain the same.
Mother keeps a copy of Alban’s birth certificate by her rocking chair in the front window and stares at it. The blue of her eyes seems clearer now, as if too much light has gotten in. I would like to tear that piece of paper apart.
Father has been gone for days. A week? The longest yet. Would it be better if I ran away, too?
“Is this Rolf, do you think? How did it get into our house?”
Julie looks as if she’s not yet woken up. Her eye makeup is smudged, her skin is slick with the oiled swell of morning. “I don’t know. Maybe they lived in this house first? Then moved next door? Or maybe they lived there and then moved here and Rolf moved back?”
“And the other writing? Have you been able to decipher any of it?”
“I haven’t tried.” Julie hoists herself up and exits the room. “I have to get to work.”
I follow her. She doesn’t stop in the kitchen. She opens the front door to let herself out. “Julie, are you going to shower? Change your clothes?”
She looks up at me, one hand on the knob. “I know what I look like,” she says, as if her appearance were an unchangeable fact. In that moment, I trust her expertise. She closes the door.
I make myself coffee. I tell myself that if I stick around here, I can hunt this book for answers. That’s more important than work. I pause and say, “This should be a big deal. Maybe reconsider.” Not calling in is grounds for immediate termination, but I take the chance.
I return upstairs.
Last night, I found Mother’s teeth in a dish on the bathroom sink. I went to their bedroom to ask about them, and their door was open. I heard only breath, like pistons firing. I saw the back of Father’s head. “Mother?” I said, and her head fell to the side to look at me, but what I saw can’t be true: she had no face. I recall the outline of her jaw and her mussed hair, but no features. When she said my name, I didn’t see her lips move. I ran back to the bathroom and cried. I wanted to dash her wretched teeth to the ground. This morning Mother scolded me for having gotten out of bed in the night.
The paper changed from a creamy stationery to a flimsier onionskin.