I stood on my hands and walked in circles around her. She pretended not to notice. I finally tumbled down into the sand and sat beside her. She went on digging.
“You have to be really strong to do that, you know,” I said.
“I know,” she said as if it didn’t matter to her one bit how strong I was.
“I’m really fast too. I win, like, every race.”
“I know,” she said again.
“You ever see me racing?”
“Maybe sometimes. I’m here, after all. You shouldn’t brag, you know.”
“I’m not bragging. Why are you always building sand castles?”
“I just do, that’s all.”
“You do it, like, all the time.”
“They’re part of my stories, that’s why.”
“What stories?”
“Just stories I tell.”
“Tell to who?”
“Just to myself.”
“Well, like what?” There was a silver knight figure mounted on a white horse—it lay on its side in the sand under the castle. I picked the figure up and made it charge around. “Like about knights and dragons?”
“Not dragons exactly,” said Samantha. “But a terrible beast. At night, the handsome knight was climbing in the princess’s window to visit her. Because he loved her. But the king, her father, caught him and put him in the dungeon and in the morning he was going to feed him to the beast.”
“Well, that’s stupid—wasn’t the knight strong enough to break out?”
“He was in chains. No one is strong enough to break chains.”
“Well, what did the king do that for?”
“Because he wanted his daughter to marry a prince from another country.”
“Oh.”
“But the princess loved the knight, so when everyone was asleep, she snuck down past the guards into the dungeon. She had to be very careful because if the king caught her, he would put her in the dungeon too, even though she was his own daughter. You see, the princess knew a magic spell that would help the knight fight the beast . . .”
I sat cross-legged on the sand beside her, mesmerized—by the story and by her voice and by the sight of her white, white hands working on the castle.
“In the morning, the guards brought the knight up into the castle courtyard . . .” she said.
I watched her hands. I could picture the knight and I could picture the beast waiting to devour him and I could picture the pink princess fretting in the bleachers. I was so wrapped up in it that a long moment passed before I realized Samantha had stopped talking.
Then I did realize. I looked up. Samantha had gone straight and stiff and still. She was gazing over my shoulder into the distance. Her calm, ethereal face was taut and alert.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“There she is again.”
“Who?”
But even as I asked, I twisted around to follow Samantha’s gaze. I looked to the edge of the playground, to the diamond link fence that bordered the parking lot, to the figure on the other side of it.
“That fat woman,” Samantha said. “Over there.”
“Oh, yeah. I see her. What about her?”
“She keeps coming back. She keeps watching us. She’s been watching us for days.”
I sat at a carrel with a big old relic of a reading machine hovering vulturelike above its partitions. I pressed the button, scrolling the microfilm through, watching the editions of The Washington Falls Recorder flash past. Now and then I had to pause to wipe the sweat off the side of my face. My stomach was queasy. I felt the mist gathering around me as the memories flooded my mind . . .
She keeps coming back. She keeps watching us . . .
My God. How had I forgotten? All this time. More than thirty years.
I scrolled through the Recorder. It was quick work. It was a small paper without much news in it. Anything that happened out of the ordinary made the front page. Inside, it was all pancake breakfasts and charity picnics and weddings.
The library door came bursting open. Lost in my search, I was startled by the suddenness of it. I nearly jumped out of my chair, twisting toward the door, my hand slipping inside my windbreaker to my holstered gun. But it was just kids—a bunch of kids just out of school. They came barging in, shouting. Their babysitter—a cheerful pie-faced brunette teen—followed behind them, telling them to hush. The brunette gave a wave to Mrs. Bell behind her desk. But the librarian sat frozen, staring at me, aghast. Her stern, widened eyes were trained on the bulge of my hand inside the windbreaker . . .
I let out a long breath and brought my hand out of my jacket and settled down again behind the microfilm machine. I tried to ignore Mrs. Bell’s stare. I pressed the button again and scrolled through the Recorder.
And there, all at once, it was.
Even though I had been searching for it, the sight hit me hard. I felt the library telescope in and out around me. I felt the mist grow so thick it nearly blotted out the world. I stared dully at the paper’s headline:
“One Dead in House Fire.”
Thirty years ago. But I could still smell the smoke.
“Daniel, wake up now. Wake up and get dressed. You have to come with me.”
What time was it? Too early to wake up. Still dark—but with some faint gray sense of dawn bleeding into the blackness. Night, just before morning.
“Wake up now, Daniel. You have to get dressed. Come on, hurry up.”
What was the woman’s name—the one who woke me? The Night Monitor—that’s what we called her. A sullen woman with very dark brown skin and a baleful yellowish glare. Rubbing my eyes sleepily, I followed her gray slacks down the dormitory hallway.
“Where are we going?”
“You’re getting a new home. Isn’t that nice?”
That woke me up all right. My gut was suddenly churning with all kinds of emotions—hopes and anxieties.
“What about my stuff?”
“It’s gonna be sent on to you. Don’t worry. Everything will be taken care of.”
“But how will you know where to send it?”
“We’ll know. Don’t worry. Hurry up now. There’s a very nice lady waiting for you outside. She’s gonna take you to your new mommy and daddy.”
In the confusion of my thoughts and worries, I wondered about Samantha. Would she and I still go to the same school? Would I still be able to see her? But before I could ask, we reached a door—a side door down a side hallway—one of those doors that I knew, that all the children knew, were always locked, were never to be used.
But the Night Monitor had the key. She unlocked the door and pushed it open. The cold night air washed over me.
There was an alley outside. A car sat in the darkness, the engine running. Its headlights beamed at me, making me squint and recoil. Holding up my hand to shield my eyes, I peered through the glare.
The Fat Woman stepped out of the white glow. She was holding Samantha by the hand.
I don’t know what I was about to ask, but the sight of them shut me up. The look on Samantha’s face—the stark, deadpan terror there—that more than anything made me clamp my lips closed tight to keep all my questions in. I could tell right away that something was horribly wrong.
The Night Monitor put her hand on the small of my back and gently pushed me forward.
“Come on, Daniel. Hurry up. This is the lady who’s going to take you to your new home.”
The Fat Woman leaned down toward me. Her broad, bland face with its ballooning cheeks blocked out everything, every other sight and every thought I had.
“Hello, Daniel. You can call me Aunt Jane.”
She extended her free hand to me. I stared helplessly at Samantha, who stared helplessly back. My hand lifted as if under its own power and I watched as if from a distance as the Fat Woman’s hand engulfed it. Her skin felt cool, dry, taut: reptilelike.
“Now then. Off we go.”
She turned and walked the two of us to her c
ar.
She drove us a long way, a long time, hours and hours. The sun came up on fields and forests. Light and the shadows of branches intermingled on the windshield. I could see through the windshield because she made me sit up front while Samantha sat in the back. Samantha and I couldn’t talk to each other without the Fat Woman hearing us, so we didn’t talk at all. And the Fat Woman didn’t talk. She played classical music on the radio. Other than that, we traveled in silence.
I daydreamed. It was a way to escape my feeling of helplessness and my fear. I daydreamed about meeting my new parents, about having a house with a lawn and a dog and my own baseball glove. Deep down, I did not believe that this was going to happen, but in my helplessness, what else could I do but daydream and try to believe my daydreams would come true.
On we drove.
At some point, the Fat Woman gave us sandwiches—peanut butter and jelly—and a small carton of milk. At some other point, she stopped at a gas station and let us use the restrooms, first me, then Samantha. Once, as we were driving, I turned from looking out the window and caught her studying me. She smiled. It chilled my blood.
The car finally turned into the driveway of a house and stopped. I bent forward and craned my neck to look up through the windshield. The house was a weird, looming gray Victorian with a conical-roofed turret that blocked out the sky.
The sight of it made me weak with terror . . .
One Dead In House Fire.
Five-year Washington Falls resident Sadie Trader died Wednesday when her three-story house burned to the ground, Washington Falls Police reported. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Oswald Packer, spokesman for the Washington Falls Fire Department, said neighbors reported the blaze shortly before 10:30 Wednesday night. When firefighters arrived at the residence on the corner of Franklin Avenue and Hawthorne Street, he said, the house was already engulfed in flames. Efforts to enter the house were impeded by thick smoke. Firefighters worked for nearly half an hour before they were able to reach the upstairs room and recover Mrs. Trader’s body. She was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Mary’s Hospital in nearby Sawnee.
The 34-year-old Mrs. Trader was the widow of financier Jonathan Trader. Locals described her as a quiet resident known for her charitable activities.
“She wasn’t what you would call a social butterfly,” said neighbor Paula Ardmore. “But she was extremely generous to all the charities and causes in town and I know she did a lot of giving on the national level too.”
As of press time, the exact cause of Mrs. Trader’s death had not yet been determined, according to Washington Falls medical examiner Adam Longstreet . . .
I stared down at the microfilmed story. At the photograph of the house. That looming gray Victorian with its conical-roofed turret. I remembered.
This is the lady who’s going to take you to your new home.
Seeing that house again—that photograph of the house—I felt the same helpless weakness of fear I had felt all those years ago. There was fresh sweat suddenly on my neck and temples. A curling green mist of nausea spread inside me, making my skin go cold. The mist seemed to flow out of me and wind around me through the room.
I stood up quickly—unsteadily. My chair scraped, the sound shockingly loud in the quiet library. I could feel Mrs. Bell staring at me as I charged past the shelves toward the men’s room in back. I didn’t care. I had to get away.
I slammed through the bathroom’s red door. I pushed quickly into one of the stalls. It took me three tries to get the stall door closed and latched shut. Then I dropped the lid of the toilet with a bang and sat down heavily on top of it. I leaned forward and brought my trembling hands up to cover my face.
You don’t know who you are. You don’t want to know.
They were Bethany’s words.
It really is a joke from God. You’re the detective but you can’t see the answer. Because the answer is you.
All these years. All those memories. Not only had I shut them out, I’d somehow shut out even the fact that I’d shut them out. Until Bethany spoke those words to me, I had not even noticed how much of my childhood I had forgotten.
And at the same time, it was always there inside me. I knew it now. The terrible truth was all always there.
The Fat Woman labored up the winding stairs. Samantha and I followed—followed the massive and tremulous expanse of her backside in her shapeless brown dress. We heard the wheeze of her breathing as she took step after slow step—such slow steps that we children had to wait behind her until she recovered from the effort and moved again. We looked at each other. I knew that the blank terror on Samantha’s face was on my face too. I wished I was a superhero who could do something, but I couldn’t think of anything to do. The Fat Woman kept climbing and we just kept climbing after her. She didn’t have to hold our hands or push us or threaten us. Where could we run? Who would we run to? There was no place, no one. We were powerless. We just climbed the stairs.
We reached a small landing. A wooden door. There was a heavy metal bolt above the knob. I stared up at that bolt and understood: This was the door to a prison cell.
I looked on helplessly as the Fat Woman lifted the bolt with her fat fingers and slid it back. She pulled open the door and smiled down at us.
“This will be your room until your new parents come for you.”
As she stood over us, watching, Samantha and I walked into our prison as if we were asleep, as if our bodies were operating on their own power and we had no wills of our own. We stood side by side as the door shut behind us. We heard the heavy bolt slide back into its slot.
We were in a small, dark, room with curving walls, more oval than circular. The conical roof was above us, open to the high rafters. It gave the place an oppressive vastness.
A boy about our age was standing directly before us. He was small and pale in his white shirt and dirty brown corduroy pants. His eyes were as wide as ours and as frightened. He was breathing hard, as if we’d startled him. He let out an extravagant sigh of relief, his shoulders sagging.
“Whew! I thought she was coming for me that time!”
My eyes traveled around the place. There were six beds, three on one side, three on the other with an aisle between. There were three or four ragtag stuffed animals lying abandoned in various places on the board floor. A one-armed GI Joe lay curled around a bed leg. There was a bathroom at the far end on the right. And there were two windows high on the wall—just where the roof began. The windows were too high to reach. There were grates over the glass.
It’s like a cage, I thought.
I could see tree branches and the blue sky through the wires: the free world, the lost world out there.
“I’m Alexander,” said the boy in the white shirt.
“I’m Samantha.”
“I’m Dan. What happens when she comes for you?”
“Isn’t she going to take us to our new homes?” Samantha asked. I could tell she didn’t really believe that any more than I did.
Alexander gave a slow shake of his head, full of misery and self-pity. He shivered and hugged himself as if an icy breeze had blown through the place. But there was no breeze. The air in the room was old and warm and sour.
“They pretend to be mommies and daddies. But they’re not real.”
I stuck my chin out at him, aggressive. “Who? What do you mean?”
“The people who come for us. They’re not real. They take you away. But not to real homes.”
“Where do they take you then?” I challenged him.
He shrugged miserably.
“Well, then how do you know they’re not real?”
“I can tell, that’s all,” Alexander said sadly.
He went over to one of the beds and sat down on it, forlorn. There was a stuffed puppy atop the thin blanket. The toy’s fabric was torn and the stuffing was bleeding out of it. Alexander pulled it close to his leg and fiddled with it, as if he wanted to hug it tightly but was to
o embarrassed to do it in front of us.
“There were five of us before,” he said. “Then there were three more: Alan and Billy and Sarah. They came later. Every day the grown-ups would come for us and take one of us away. Sometimes two of us. I’m all that’s left from the last group. So I guess I’m next.”
I saw Samantha’s lips trembling. She made a little noise and began to cry. “Danny, I’m afraid. I’m so afraid.”
I’d never seen her cry before. It burned in me like acid. I stepped toward Alexander with my fists clenched.
“This is stupid. You’re stupid. You don’t know anything. How do you know?”
He toyed with the puppy, plucking at its stuffing. “When Jody was still here, I stood on his shoulders. Jody was tall. He could boost me up and I could see out the windows. I could see them.”
“See who?”
“The grown-ups. The ones who took Linda away and the ones who took Craig and Alan. Then Billy. Sarah and Charlotte were last but I couldn’t see who took them because . . . they took Jody before that . . . So I couldn’t stand on his shoulders anymore. I couldn’t reach the window.”
Samantha sobbed, covering her mouth with her hand.
I bore down angrily on Alexander. “Yeah, but how do you know they weren’t real parents? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
Alexander shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I just know, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
Crying, Samantha’s voice was terrible. “It’s not stupid, Danny! He’s right! I know he’s right!”
I turned to stare at her. My balled fists began to come undone. It went through my mind that she couldn’t know either—she had less reason to know than this Alexander character did. But Samantha’s word had such authority with me that my objections died before I could even speak them.
“That woman, Danny,” she said now. “You just have to look at her. She’s so horrible. You can see she’s not really nice.”
I stared at her another second, hoping to find some argument, some answer. But I knew Samantha had simply had the courage to say out loud what I didn’t even want to think. I knew I just couldn’t face the truth the way she had.