Dan and Derek were removing drywall as Heidi walked past them on her way to the mailbox at the front of the house. She flipped through two or three offers for credit cards and the usual pizza coupons and was left with only two letters of any importance. The first was from her father and the second had the logo of the Sacramento Medical Clinic. By the time she had stepped back in from the front porch, her husband and his friend had made it to the plaster and lath and were cutting through them with the Sawzall.
“Anything for me, honey?” Dan said, looking at her while wiping bits of dust from his forehead. Heidi tossed him the coupons and kept going. She carefully negotiated the stairs to the second story, favoring her good knee. At the top, she sat in the folding chair in the unfinished nursery. The flat pan still held the blue paint that she had been applying to the south wall when she had seen the mailman arrive.
She opened her father’s letter first to get it out of the way. There were the usual niceties, stories about his Maltese puppies and the new recipes that he had tried over the last couple of months. Only at the end of the second page did he broach the subject she was dreading. Once again, the drug regimen that the doctors at the home had suggested had only worked for a short period of time. Heidi knew that the optimism that her father faked in the letter was unfounded. After all, mere recognition of him by the woman that had been married to him for thirty years was to be expected, wasn’t it?
When her mother first began to act strangely, Heidi had been only five. Rita claimed to hear voices talking only to her. She suddenly would have the urge at three in the morning to rearrange the cans of vegetables in the cupboards in alphabetical order. Within three years, Heidi had come home one day from school to find that the living room couch was covered with the locks of the older woman’s hair and madness was in her eyes as she turned to greet the third-grader. The doctors called it schizophrenia, and a year later, her mother went away for good. Her father tried to provide the love of two, she knew, but their house was large, and echoed with cold loneliness.
Her school years passed with her always an outsider. She applied to colleges far from home, so that she had an excuse not to visit the shell of a woman that gave birth to her. She was accepted at one in the Midwest, packed, and never looked back. When she arrived there, she took on a new identity. She would not talk about her home life to anyone if she could help it. She would gravitate toward parties, drank a bit too much and studied just enough to get by with middling grades.
At one of these parties in her junior year, she saw a tall fellow in a t-shirt with Maxwell’s equations printed on the front. The hostess introduced him as Dan DuShane, a computer science major from California. They struck up a conversation, and, aided by a bit too much Captain Morgan rum, woke up in each other’s arms.
For Heidi, it was what she hadn’t realized that she needed. From that moment on, they were inseparable. They were engaged within a month and married a year later. Dan was from a family of ten, and Heidi would often find it hard to tell all of his brothers and sisters apart. She did her best, though, to be sociable, and was accepted quickly. Almost immediately, though, Dan’s parents began agitating for grandchildren. They decided to wait until they were settled in a job somewhere, but Heidi knew that this was the purpose for which she was created. She watched Dan’s nieces and nephews at play and vowed to herself that her house would never be quiet.
Dan landed a good job only about two hundred miles from his parents’ house. The California State Senate was in the process of modernizing their computer infrastructure and was willing to pay through the nose for innovative experts. Despite the high cost of living in the Central Valley, it might just be possible for him to bring in enough money for Heidi to stay home. They spent several wonderful months making a baby with the enthusiasm of which only a newly-married couple was capable. In due time, they succeeded. It was an uneventful pregnancy. Dan was shaping up to be an ideal father—Heidi watched the baby swim around on the ultrasound’s screen and began to think about names.
Even though it was only four in the afternoon, the driver of the other car was too drunk to even stand when the police arrested him. Dan and Heidi’s Hyundai had had the green light for a full ten seconds when they entered the intersection. She had just enough time to scream, “CAR!” and then was thrown against the deploying airbags. The two cars collided at forty miles per hour and moved across the intersection side-by-side. She thought to herself, “This isn’t so bad,” then realized that their car was about to hit a stoplight. She watched the light’s pole shear off and flip up into the air. It flattened at the top of its trajectory and began falling towards her. She remembered thinking, “it’s going to be very, very bad,” then nothing until the beeps and buzzes of the hospital intensive care unit.
The doctors didn’t tell her that she had lost the baby for a full two days after she regained consciousness. In addition to that, she had a severely damaged knee, three broken ribs and a serious concussion. The car’s airbag had saved her life during the collision, but had done nothing to help when the stoplight had come crashing through the front windshield. Dan had emerged from the wreckage without even a bruise. He slept in her hospital room all through that first week, holding her hand when she would begin to cry at her loss.
It was the kind of lawsuit that trial lawyers dream of on hot summer nights. The drunk driver was the CEO of a successful start up company in Silicon Valley. He had had two prior arrests and was driving on a suspended license at the time of the accident. The out-of-court lump-sum settlement was so large that the two of them had to hire an accountant to advise them on their next step. They decided that they would buy a house large enough for a family and spend some time fixing it up, little by little, while Heidi healed. By the time they were finished, it would be time to try again.
It was a year now since they had begun preparing the house for occupancy. Valley View was an old house with a lot of what the locals called character. When it had been first constructed in the 1890s, the view from its second-floor east windows was of farm fields. It had begun as the farm owner’s house, a long, one-story utilitarian structure. As the farm became more prosperous, an ell was added with a second set of front rooms and a porch. During the 1920s, the owners had built up, adding a second story. The Depression took its toll, however—the taxes on the property went into arrears and it was seized by Sacramento County officials. It had remained vacant until the latter part of the 1930s, after which it went through a half-dozen owners over the next seventy years. The last to live here were a pair of aging baby boomers who decided that keeping the place up was too expensive for them as they headed for retirement.
Heidi held the second letter, now, in her hand and turned it over and over. She had delayed seeing the doctors at the Clinic for more than a few months. They surely wouldn’t send bad news in a letter, would they? The message was neutral—Dr. Brazleton would like to see the two of them in her office on the 15th of August at 9:30 a.m. She fretted at the thought of waiting a full two weeks to find out why she had had irregular periods for the last three months. Up until the accident, she could almost turn the calendar pages over at the end of her 30-day cycle, it was like clockwork.
The couple used the ensuing fortnight to finish most of the inside work on the house. Their friends would stop by from time to time to visit or to help her and Dan move something heavy. She surprised him with a laser-equipped table saw (complete with blue bow) that was the envy of handymen for six blocks around. The last of the brush was cleared from the vacant half of the lot. They gave a party for everyone who had contributed time and effort and talked long into the night in the front porch swing. There were a few things left to do, mostly outside between the house and the garage, but their house was now a home—one that would hopefully be for three, soon.
The Clinic’s waiting room was crowded when the two of them arrived a half-hour early for their appointment. The seats were filled with women in various stages of pregnancy. Heidi tried to distract herself, playing with the two little girls who came in with their mother, who appeared ready to give birth at any moment. Dan smiled as his wife ran her fingers around the braids in the older child’s hair. One by one, the other patients were called in. By a quarter to ten, Heidi had lost patience and sent Dan to the receptionists’ station. They had, indeed, been forgotten and passed over in the queue. The freckled young woman behind the counter apologized one too many times and dialed back to the doctor. Finally, at ten, Dr. Brazleton’s nurse called their name and led them back to the doctor’s examination room. Heidi fussed a bit, not seeing the need to have her blood pressure checked, but was assured that it had to be done every time for the clinic’s records.
The doctor was in her late sixties, and looked to be a veteran of the wars over women’s medicine during the last forty years. She pressed a few keys on her computer, looked at the chart that had been in the sleeve next to the door and made a humming sound as she stopped, searching for words. “Ms. DuShane, you have been having trouble with almost constant spotting for the last ninety days, correct? And your regular periods have not arrived?”
“Right, yes. Now, you took an ultrasound last time I was here, what did it say? Am I pregnant? Is there something wrong with the baby?”
“No dear, you’re not pregnant. It looks like there was more internal damage to your abdomen from the accident than we originally thought. The blood supply to your uterus is insufficient for it to maintain its functions for more than another year at most. It would reject the implantation of any eggs and, it is very likely that it will have to be removed soon. I would recommend you waiting no more than six months to schedule an operation. I can give you the names of several excellent surgeons that work in tandem with the clinic. I am very, very sorry to be the one to tell you this.”
“Are you sure? Can we get a second opinion about this? Dan, do you know of any other doctors in this area?”
“Doctor,” Dan’s voice had a plea hiding just below the surface, “isn’t there something that you can do to fix this, to make it better, to give her a chance to carry to term?”
“No, it is quite simply impossible. Even if the two of you managed to conceive a child, it would never come to term and could very possibly incite internal bleeding that could result in Heidi dying before you even realized that there was a problem. You should use birth control up until the time that she has her hysterectomy.”
Heidi’s mouth got very, very small. She sat, quietly for the entire drive home, then, upon arrival, left the car, slamming the door so hard that the windows rattled. She wrenched the front door of the house open in fury, leaving Dan open-mouthed on the porch. She marched up the stairs and by the time he had followed to the top of the landing, she had begun shredding the curtains of the nursery with her bare hands, banging her head against the wall slowly and repeating “no” over and over again, tears streaming from her eyes. Dan moved closer to her, in an attempt to comfort her. She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time and collapsed into his arms. They held each other, rocking back and forth, until they had exhausted themselves with weeping.
In the days following, Dan noticed that Heidi would do virtually anything to avoid talking about the subject. He took the prescription for her pills to the pharmacy, but they remained untouched in the bathroom medicine cabinet. He filled the time that they spent together with small talk, telling funny stories about stupid Senator tricks and clueless secretaries who put their passwords on Post-it notes. Heidi would nod and form a weak smile with the corners of her mouth, but he could tell that she was only going through the motions. It became a chore to get her to eat. He would pick her up after work and take her to a restaurant that had been their favorite since they had come to town. She would stare at the menu, deferring any decision about food to him. She stopped working on the house at all—not even completing the little things left to do like putting up rods in the walk-in closets for clothing.
Worst of all, Heidi was no longer sleeping. Dan would wake at three or four in the morning and she would be sitting up in bed, staring off into the darkness. He would hold her at these times, and, after a little time had passed, she would acknowledge that he was there and drift off.
She found herself listening to a series of tapes in her head, repeating what-ifs to her, weeping silently at her fate. This continued for the better part of a month until one night when she suddenly noticed a noise coming from outside their bedroom window. Since Heidi’s injuries had weakened her for much of the time that they had been working on the house, they had decided to keep their bedroom on the ground floor so that she didn’t have to go upstairs as often. Now, with the empty nursery at the top of the stairs, moving their bed to the second floor was unthinkable.
She sat straight up in bed and listened closely. A child was crying outside her window, near the bottom of the steps going up to the kitchen door. She slid out of bed, watching carefully to make sure Dan was not disturbed. She walked into the kitchen and pulled a small flashlight out of the drawer. She tried to turn it on, then cursed and scrambled for D cells in the other drawers when she discovered it was empty. All the while, the crying continued. Occasionally Heidi could almost make out a word or two. She stepped out of the kitchen door and gingerly moved down the concrete steps to the sidewalk between the side of the house and the garage. She flicked the beam of the flashlight from side to side—no child in sight, no tomcat singing, nothing that could possibly cause the noise that pulled her from sleep. She dismissed it as a dream and fell into a fitful slumber.
Over the next few days, the events of that night repeated themselves. She would hear the crying in the small hours before dawn. After a few days, she began to make out words, as spoken by a five-year old: “Kitty, kitty, where did you go? Mommy, it’s dark, where are you? Oh, so cold, so wet and cold….Help me, please help me.” When she heard the last, she decided that keeping this a secret was no longer an option. She returned to the bedroom and shook Dan to consciousness. He, startled, thrashed for a moment or two and then realized that his wife was close to fully dressed.
“Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”
“Dan, there’s something going on here and it’s scaring me to death. Somebody’s got a child trapped or imprisoned or something—you know, like that guy in Florida who buried the little girl alive? We’ve got to find her and save her, call the cops or something.”
She led him outside, near the front of the garage. It was silent, except for the sound of the crickets in the grass. A car drove by with its bass thumping a few streets over. They stood in the starlight next to their house for ten minutes before either one of them spoke.
“Dan, I heard it. Don’t you think that we should call the police?”
“Sure, darling. Let me call them, I’ll put on pants and a shirt before they arrive.”
The officers who reported were more patient than the couple expected. They, evidently, were not the first people who had ever reported strange noises in the middle of the night. The four of them combed the yard and the adjacent lot, looked in the rafters of the garage and, by first light, admitted that all of this was in vain. After giving Heidi and Dan their cards and telling them to call them back if anything else occurred, they drove off into the dawn’s light.
The next week was very quiet. Heidi was sleeping better and Dan began making plans for the next round of refurbishment on their house. The outside steps leading to the kitchen were crumbling, so, for safety sake, new concrete would have to be poured. The first step would have to be demolition. He penciled in the work on their planning calendar in the kitchen. Heidi could build the concrete forms while he knocked the steps apart with the sledgehammer.
Saturday was almost like old times. It was a cool, light sweater kind of day, hinting at months following when you’d be able to see your breath in the air and the snow would creep down the mountains. The two of them smiled at each other, drinking coffee and joking about Dan’s muscles aching after a full day’s work. He removed two of the three steps, working from the top down. The concrete was very old—he figured sixty, seventy years at the least. Suddenly, as he struck the side of the last step, his hammer no longer had resistance at the end of his arc. It flew from his hand and impacted the side of the house. The sand that the steps had rested upon was slipping away. “Dan,” said Heidi loudly, “you should move away from there, NOW!” The ground crumbled in front of his feet and slumped into an ever-widening hole. Eventually, it stopped sliding and blackness was visible below the pile of rubble from the upper steps.
“What the hell is that?” he asked her. “It looks like someone built the steps on some kind of cave.” “
“No, it’s not a cave, silly,” his wife replied. “This is a kitchen, right? No running water? Farmhouse? The idiots put the steps on top of a cistern! Quick, go around through the front door and get the flashlight from the drawer. Let’s see how deep it is.”
Dan was chuckling as he brought it over. They were never going to believe this at work—he had never heard of such a thing. He handed the flashlight to his wife and stepped back. She lowered her head and peered through the hole. The old construction was made for rainwater, she figured. She could see where the drainpipe from the roof had come down against the house. It’s dry now, she saw and about eight feet deep. Something white was over in the corner. She directed the beam, then screamed and dropped the light into the hole as she scrambled backwards. A skull had been staring back at her from the far side of the cistern—a very small skull.
The yard was completely full three hours later. Camera crews from the local news channel, police with yellow tape, the country coroner’s office and all of their friends were milling around the area. Heidi was sitting in the porch swing rocking gently back and forth, not saying anything. Dan handled the curious, the official and the annoying. It took a while, but eventually everyone but the coroner left.
“Heidi, this is Eddie Vasquez. He’s going to be doing the investigation for the county. Is there anything that you need us to do?”
“We’ll have to get an excavation team in here to widen the hole enough for one of our people to get down there to recover the bones. It looks like they’ve been there a long time—definitely years. You’re not under any suspicion, of course—every few years we get a case like this. Most of the time it’s not foul play. A lot of families had plots near the houses where they’d bury relatives. Records get lost, some company from out of state buys a large tract of land and begins digging for a subdivision—we find coffins.”
Heidi’s eyes were bright, but seemed to move randomly of their own accord, “Was it some kind of murder? Is it just a skull? How old was the person?”
Eddie thought for a moment. “From what I can tell, it’s a whole skeleton. Very small, it’s either a tiny person or child, most likely. I’d bet it was some kind of accident. Once we get the work done, we’ll do a search of the old newspaper records and see if we can connect it with a missing person case.”
The backhoe made a mess of the sidewalk. It was clear to Dan that he was going to have to start from scratch and replace the squares that were crushed. He considered himself lucky that they didn’t hit the side of the garage or the wall of the house. He had to say, though, that they were considerate. They didn’t have to fill the hole when they were finished, but did, once Dan bought the fill dirt.
About a week later, the phone rang. Eddie had found what he believed to be the identity of the remains. Meeting the couple at the Tower Café, he slid a photocopy of a newspaper story:
Sacramento Bee June 10, 1933– “The search continues for the five-year old daughter of migrant workers from Oklahoma. The little girl was reported missing two days ago from the camp near the Rudger Fruit Company’s warehouse. The sheriff’s office is offering a one-hundred dollar reward for any information leading to the return of the child, or the arrest of her kidnapper.”
“I’m pretty certain that that’s it,” he said. There’s no record of her ever having been found. The house here was vacant during that time—my guess is that she saw a hole, crawled into it and fell into the cistern. All the time that they were combing the area for her, she was no more than a half-mile from the camp. If you look to the east from your upstairs windows, you can just make out where the warehouse was—it’s right below the water tower.”
In the days following, Heidi found herself dreading the thought of Dan leaving for work. His presence kept the increasing noise in her head to a minimum, as well as insulated her from the urge to do the kinds of worrisome things that she would catch herself at, from time to time. It chilled her to look down and find that she had carefully arranged the bag of Skittles that she had picked up at the convenience store into pairs of the same color on a plate. When she realized that she was doing batches of laundry that had numbers of items divisible by six, it was time to do something about it, she figured. The earliest appointment she could get with a counselor was four weeks away, but it would have to do. She’d tell Dan when the date was closer and hope that he’d understand.
Worst of all were the fox squirrels. When Channel 13 had done their remote the previous week, their transmitter boom had crushed the animals’ nest in the tree on the far side of the garage. The entire family of them was running over the roof of the house, gathering sticks to rebuild a new haven. She would just barely be able to relax with mindless daytime television or a woman’s magazine when one would drop out of the tree onto the roof with a loud bang, startling her and beginning a new cycle of repetition of a phrase inside her skull. The fact that she was averaging two hours of sleep per night and had been for close to a month was not helping things either. She moved robotically through her days and dust began to collect in neglected corners of the first floor.
She awoke on a night in late October, startled by scratching and footsteps on the floor above their bedroom. She glanced over at the clock and saw that it was 2:37, the red numbers providing her with enough of a glow to see her husband clutching a pillow that he used now, rather than try to cuddle a bedmate who would jump unexpectedly at sounds or beat her pillow in an attempt to get some cold comfort from it. She held her breath, waiting for the noise to come again and was not disappointed. It was not outside, no mistake there—it was inside and in the nursery. Heidi cursed under her breath. She was certain that one of the squirrels had managed to get into the house and was tearing up the second floor. She would have to go up and open the windows, hoping that it would go back to wherever it came from at two in the damn morning.
She tried to be quiet as she moved across the living room and opened the doorway to the stairs leading up. She flicked the light switch on and the bulb in the nursery’s ceiling flashed once, gave an audible pop, and the room fell back into darkness. The squirrel, rat or whatever it was moved a chair a few inches, evidently startled by the sudden light. “This was just perfect,” Heidi thought.
The bulbs were kept in the kitchen utility drawer and there were more than enough sixties for her purpose. Her hand went into the tool drawer, moved around in search and then she realized that they had still not replaced the flashlight that had been broken when she dropped it into the cistern. She’d have to climb the stairs, replace the bulb and then hunt for the trapped animal. She put her slippers on so that their rubber soles would give a better grip in case she ran into something in the darkness.
Although the stairwell itself was dark, by the time she reached the nursery, it was comparatively bright, the moonlight streaming through the south windows and hitting the center of the floor. There were piles of building material that Dan had stored here over the last month. She didn’t see a squirrel, so she pulled over the chair to get it under the light fixture.
That was the moment that the little girl moved into the moonlight. She was disheveled and barefoot, dressed in a calico dress with a ribbon at the waist. The sleeves were puffed, but one of them had had broken threads in it long enough to become deflated. She looked about kindergarten age, as far as Heidi could tell. Dan could call the police once Heidi woke him up. If the girl was a missing person, they could get into all kinds of trouble if she was found there without any kind of explanation.
“Hello, ma’am,” the girl said, looking up at the older woman. “Did I wake you? I was lookin’ for my kitten and I fell asleep up here. It was warm, and the night’s been very, very cold.” Heidi couldn’t place her accent—it sounded like something from a Woody Guthrie song. She had been expecting something Hispanic, to tell the truth, not words that echoed the hills of Arkansas.
“How did you get up here, honey? We’ve been asleep downstairs and the door was supposed to be latched. Where was your kitty? What’s your name?”
“Rose,” the girl replied. “Rose Walters. My pa and ma are Jarrod and Emily Walters and they live down the road. My brother’s hound dog scared my calico kitty and it ran over to this house here. Evan, that’s my brother, says that it’s haunted, don’cha know? Fuzzy ran into a hole and wouldn’t come out and I fell down and it was cold so I came in here to get warm.”
Heidi, startled looked a little closer at the girl’s face. There were streaks of dirt running along the cheekbones that were prominent, certainly due to hunger. The shocking thing, though, was that the edge of the windowsill was beginning to be visible through Rose’s hairline. Backing up slowly, Heidi hit the chair and fell back, still keeping her eyes on the apparition. Using the chair to lift herself, she moved up carefully until she had the seat under her. At that point, she realized that she had not taken a breath in close to a minute and a half.
Slowly, carefully, the woman reached her hand out toward Rose’s shoulder. It met the edge of the dress’s material, but she felt no cloth, only a slight chill. Inch by inch, she went forward with the tips of her fingers, now moving through the girl completely. It was as if she had dipped her hand in ice water. Rose shivered and seemed to waver slightly, fading in and out for a second.
“How long have you been here, honey?”
“A long time, ma’am. Don’t know how long, really. I should be gettin’ back to the place, really, I imagine my kinfolks’d be looking for me soon. Ma’ll whup me good, makin’ her worry like that. I lost track of time.”
Rose smiled at Heidi and it was like a bright star rising. “Sweetheart,” Heidi said, “stay a while and talk to me, please. We’ll go talk to your mother soon, and maybe look for your kitten.”
When the first light of dawn was beginning to tint the sky pink, Rose turned away from her new friend and stepped toward the wall. She didn’t slow even a bit as she walked through it and vanished from sight. Heidi tiptoed down the stairs, afraid of waking her husband and having to explain her secret. She didn’t know why this had happened, but she was sure now that it was a gift from God. To tell anyone might break the spell and end it—she couldn’t live with another disappointment like that, it would break her heart.
Dan was amazed at the sudden change in his wife’s demeanor. She was smiling now, for no other reason, seemingly than a blue sky. Her hair was as shiny as it was when they were first married and, more often than not, she had cooked a meal for the two of them when he arrived home. Her depression had obviously ended. Bedtime became an adventure once more, Heidi showering him with kisses and touching him gently while they made love. At last, he figured, we were going to get past all of this—it might even be time to talk about moving upstairs and making the front room into an office, as they had originally planned.
It was three weeks before he could find the time to explore that option. Heidi had gone to the store to pick up groceries, so he pulled the old plans for the upstairs bedroom out of the cabinet and headed up the steps. He was so wrapped up in his initial estimates of time and materials to replace the toilet in the upstairs bathroom that he had already stepped over a doll and the Pig in the Garden Game box before he stopped to look around himself in shock.
The nursery was filled with toys—not the ones that they had picked out for a baby so long ago and had put away in the closet, but ones meant for a little girl. A small mattress was pushed against the south window and it had a colorful print with mountains and wild horses on it. There was a pile of storybooks, not only the classics like the Blue Fairy Book, but adaptations of Disney movies and Judy Blume. Heidi had moved a table up next to the chair and there was one of those little book lights on it. In the trashcan, there were wrappers from potato chip bags and Starbucks cups. The room looked lived in—as a matter of fact it looked as if his wife had been spending every spare moment in it.
He walked down the stairs, not quite knowing what to do next. When he finally reached the living room, he began rifling through the desk there, looking for the phone number of Heidi’s father. The two of them were going to have to talk.
When Heidi arrived from the store, she unloaded the groceries into the refrigerator and the cabinets. She took the remaining bag into the bedroom and Dan watched carefully as she put it into the bottom drawer of her dresser, under her summer clothes. That night, Dan feigned sleep, even going so far as to let out a snore that he hoped sounded genuine. About four in the morning, Heidi left the bed, pulled out the dresser drawer and slipped out of their bedroom making as little sound as possible. Dan followed a few minutes later, stalking her and afraid of what he was going to find.
He heard the chair being pulled out from under the nursery desk. He opened the stairwell door, cringing when it made a slight squeak. He could see the reflection of the book light on the ceiling, but the stairs were dark as he moved up, step by step, pausing when he felt he was moving too fast. As he cleared the landing, he saw that she was reading aloud from a new book, pausing to carry on what was obviously half of a conversation. Not wanting to raise a fuss at this time of night, he retraced his steps down and back to the bedroom. A couple hours later, Heidi slipped in beside him and fell asleep within a few minutes.
Dan called in sick that Monday and spent the morning speaking to the intake personnel at the Clinic downtown. There was a hefty deductable even for observation, but he felt that no good would come of taking too much time to start treatment. Her father had been adamant about the symptoms, and they matched Heidi’s mother’s to the best that either one of them could determine. Now, it was just a matter of talking his wife into voluntarily committing herself.
When he arrived home, the television was on, but no one was downstairs. He called out for Heidi and she called to him from above, saying, “just cleaning up in here, don’t come up, I’ll come down.” She opened the stairwell door and was surprised to see him, since it was two hours before he normally would have arrived.
“Sweetheart, we have to talk,” he began. “I followed you this weekend, when you went upstairs in the middle of the night. I saw you reading and talking to yourself. This can’t be a good thing—I know that everything that has happened has been hard on you. I know that your mother has been sick for years, but there are a lot of medicines now that delay the onset—that almost stop the kind of trouble that she’s had. I called the doctors and they’d like to talk to you about this.”
“What! Dan, you spied on me. You followed me—you didn’t ask what was going on, you assume I’m sick. I feel better than I have at any time since the accident.”
“Damn it honey, you’re talking to the air! We haven’t even talked about adoption. Why are those toys in the nursery? Why are you spending all this time up there? What is going on? You’ve got to see the doctor.”
“Dan, I will be goddamned if I am going to see any doctor. I am not going to spend every day sitting in a dayroom waiting to fucking die. If you don’t trust me, I don’t need to be here. You can have the house, I’m going to grab some things and go to Beth’s place. Do not come near me, don’t touch me. Do not speak to me—I have nothing more to say to you!”
She ran into the bedroom and began stuffing clothing haphazardly into a suitcase. Dan waited silently in the living room while she raved and cursed. Finally, she emerged and dialed a taxi. She waited on the front porch for it, shivering.
“Heidi, darling, we really have to work this out. You know this can’t go on.”
“You don’t trust me. You’ve been waiting for years now for me to go crazy like my old lady. You can’t wait to lock me up. It is over. I knew we were through when the baby died, but now I’m sure of it. You simply cannot trust me.” The cab arrived. She opened the door to the back, tossed her suitcase inside onto the seat and got in without looking back.
Dan went back inside, choking off his tears. He lost track of time, sitting with his head in his hands. When he finally stopped to look around, it was well after dark outside. His footsteps echoed in the empty house—it sounded more like a tomb than a home now. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t hear the first noise from the second story. The following one was loud enough that he couldn’t ignore it. Had Heidi gotten a dog or something? That sounded big, he thought to himself.
He walked up the stairs, but there was nothing in the nursery, nothing in the bathroom and the walk-in closet was empty. He could see the half-moon through the south windows shining while clouds moved past its face. He sat in Heidi’s chair and turned off first the overhead, then the reading lamp.
Dust motes played in the moonbeams shining through the windows. The panes were cool to his touch and perfectly clear, as if his wife had taken special pains to care for them. He sat for a while longer, trying to decide his next move. Suddenly, he heard a scrabbling noise from the corner of the room. He was startled when the kitten jumped into the moonbeam after the dust specks. It was small, about two months old, he figured. That’s what was going on! “I am such a fool!” he said out loud. “I’ve sent her away—I’ve broken us up because I didn’t take the time to stop and figure out what she was doing. Oh, I’ve got to call Beth’s—this can be saved, it has to be saved.”
The kitten was white with darker spots across her back. Not happy with the state of its target, it zig-zagged under the table and around the chair, diving under Dan’s legs. He waited for it to go back where he could see it and was reaching for it when the little girl picked it up and held it in her arms. She kissed it and put it over her shoulder. It purred and batted at a curl that had come loose from her nest of hair.
“Oh, mister,” she smiled at him. “You found her. You found Fuzzy for me. Thank you, so so much, I’ll never forget you. I’ve gotta tell ma now where I been, she’d be so worried about me.” Dan felt the slightest touch on his cheek as she came up, put her hands on the arm of the chair and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. It was as if a butterfly had landed on him for a moment and then lifted off. The little girl stepped back for a moment and blocked the light from the window. Then she and her pet began to fade from sight. First the frame was visible through the two of them. A second later, the moonlight was no longer impeded and fell silently to the floor.
Dan sat, stunned for a few moments. He looked through the panes at the sky and the clouds which were now beginning to crowd it. He flipped open his cell phone and began punching at the keys, his hands shaking. In the light from its screen, his face looked like a ghost.
