In the next room, the baby was crying. It was always the next room, the baby was always crying. If she left the room to fetch it, the crying was in the next room. If she went to the next room, it was in the next room. The crying shifted up and down, from a whimper to a wail, but she could never reach it. The layout of her new house was ever-changing, from an old Victorian with narrow hallways and splintered floorboards to a mansion with rooms taking her from one end of the house to the other.
And then she would wake up, alone in her bed, with no child in the next room.
Slowly, Mara unpacked. She had been living in her new house for a week, and every day she would find a new thing to put away. She knew eventually she would run out, but tried not to think about it. Blocked it out.
The floor plan of the house was simply and intuitive. Enter in the front door and the kitchen was on the right, the parlor on the left. Ten feet forward, past the stairs, and you would be facing the back door, a straight shot from the front, with the dining room on the right and the living room on the left, with the TV.
Go up the stairs and find the master bedroom bedroom on the left. Her bedroom. Turn right, and it was the closet, then the bathroom, then the extra bedroom. She had only ever spent much time in her bedroom, and most of it was sleep -- haunted by dreams of her new house.
At night she had her blankets and pillows around her in bed, lacking the comfortable heat of her husband next to her. She fell asleep, and had another dream of chasing the baby. She woke up crying.
The next morning Jann, with her big hips and long hair and red lipstick, saw her state and invited herself over after work.
"I think it will help if your house feels more like a . . . a home, you know?" Jann said, leaning against Mara's desk. "There are still boxes and things all over, right?"
"Yeah. Some," Mara said. The woman's presence frayed on her already-reduced patience. Jann was not a fool Mara wished to suffer.
"I'll come over, bring some takeout, and help you unpack. I think it'll make you feel better."
"Fine," Mara said, surprising herself and the other woman with her lack of resistance. "Let me work." Jann left her alone, and at night Mara sat waiting for her arrival.
The time she had promised came and went. She kept waiting. The house's silence pressed down on her. Mara wondered if even the rats made noise. Finally Jann knocked on the front door.
"I'm sorry I took so long," the woman said when Mara let her in. "Traffic was a mess . . . the line at the chicken place was gigantic . . . everything went wrong." Mara turned away and strode into the kitchen. "Oh, Mara, I didn't . . . I'm sorry."
"Just get the food in here."
They ate in silence. Jann looked around the kitchen while they sat at the table. "This place isn't so bad. It's cozy. It's got charm." She looked across the table as Mara picked at her chicken. "I'm sure you'll start to feel comfortable soon."
"Yeah," Mara breathed, letting her unfinished food drop on her plate. "Soon."
Jann sighed. "I'm sorry hun."
"It's not your fault," Mara said. She wondered if she would be able to cry.
"It looks like we're both done eating. Why don't we get to work and get our minds off things."
They found a few boxes yet to be unpacked and cracked them open, revealing things for around the house. Mara's had a number of small rugs to set off the corners of rooms, while Jann's contained what she assumed were hundreds of assorted utensils. She clanked through them noisily, filling the small kitchen with the sounds of work. Mara was left with the small rugs, to try and figure out where to place them. One of them used to go under the couch, but she needed another person to place it correctly. A few of the smaller ones she placed under the ends of tables and in the center of the room.
She helped Jann separate the knives, serving spoons, and all the miscellaneous devices used to prepare food, finding drawers and cabinets to hide them until they might become useful once more. Jann helped Mara put the carpet under the couch, and then they found two more boxes. Mara's contained a number of books and magazines.
"Shampoo bottles?" Jann asked, opening her box. "What -- socks? Medication? Mara."
"Leave that one alone."
"Absolutely not!" Jann dug in further. "A to-do list? CDs? I guess this is a . . . an old cell phone?"
"He was going to try and fix it! Just put it back and leave that box alone!" Mara said, dropping the things she had and going to Jann.
"Mara! No! You can't just leave this stuff here, you need to get rid of it!"
"Get rid of it?!" Mara nearly shrieked. She reached for the box, but Jann's larger form stopped her short.
"It's just going to keep hurting you. You don't need these things . . . I don't think Drew even needed these things!" Mara backed away, deciding between furious and heartbroken. Jann stood, holding the box. "You know I won't try to imagine what you're going through but I'm not going to let you torture yourself! I'm making sure there's nothing else in here, and I'm going to throw it away, for your own good! Having these things around will only keep you trapped in your grief."
Mara knocked the box out of Jann's hands and pointed at the door. "Maybe I want to! Maybe it's finally become comfortable! Maybe you should get out, and just leave me to my grief!" The other woman looked hurt, but gathered her things and left.
Mara found herself scooping her husband's old items back into the box. The house was silent again. Eventually everything had been cleaned up, and the box replaced in the corner with the other boxes of Drew's things, big and small.
Skin hot, eyebrows bent and cutting across her forehead, she found another box and split it open. She found piles of small outfits, wrapped around each other with care, in light pinks and blues, with stars and balloons and stripes fit to help a newborn baby look less like the wrinkled and shriveled creature she was.
She closed the box and threw it across the room; it struck a wall and spilled its contents across the floor, the small outfits scattering. She pushed herself away. The box laid on its side, its opening pointing at her, inviting her to crawl inside and shut herself away, trapped among the memories. She shut her eyes and put her head against the wall behind her.
In her dreams, as always, she heard the crying, and she rose from the bed. She went to the next room, the closet across from her bedroom from which the crying came, and found nothing. The crying had moved.
She followed it, floating back into the hallway and down the short hallway to the bathroom. The crying echoed against the tiles, but when she pushed open the door, watching it swing with the stuttering speed of sleep, she only saw herself, bent over the counter with a bottle of pills in her hands. The two copies of Mara laid eyes on each other, and neither could determine who was more the monster.
Next she knew she was pushing open the door to the bedroom next to the bathroom, and saw the crib. Crying issued forth from it ceaselessly, and she could not but stand and listen to it.
It would stop after a while.
On Saturday Mara sat at her kitchen table, weary from the dreams, nursing a cup of coffee. It was already almost noon – on weekends she rarely woke at what many would call a proper time.
So what if she didn't. She didn't have anything else to take up her time, she might as well sleep. It was too hot out, and she found herself wandering the tiny confines of her house, until something stopped her.
She stood looking at it, confused. She'd never seen it before. Looking back at her, as if taunting her, a small door sat in the middle of the wall on the lower floor, situated directly between the parlor and the living room across from the stairs. It was small, as if made for a dwarf, out of old dark wood, with a clear glass handle shaped like a crystal.
Mara took a step back. If she'd been down this hallway once, she'd been down it a hundred times since moving in. This small door hadn't been there before. It hadn't been there when she toured the house, it hadn't been there when she moved her things in, and it hadn't been there earlier in the week when she'd screamed Jann out the front door. It was here now.
She turned the crystal handle and pulled it open, and for a moment she couldn't see in, so thick was the darkness. Then the noontime light entered, and the place on the other side of the door revealed itself to be nothing more than some sort of shrunken crawlspace. Spiderwebs trailed from corners, and dust covered the old wood floor.
Still, she couldn't figure out why she'd been so confused by it. It had been there before, hadn't it? She'd just forgotten about it. It isn't like I've been in the soundest of mind lately, she thought, crouching down to get a good look inside the crawlspace. I just ignored it or something.
She found a flashlight and pointed it inside, scanning the corners and sides. It was entirely empty save the spiders.
Finding the few boxes containing Drew's old things, and the baby's, she stuffed them into the space, pushing them as far as she could reach without actually touching the ancient floor. The heavy boxes scraped as they slid, and after she shut the door she ran to the kitchen to scrub her hands repeatedly. Out of sight, out of mind, she thought, with her hands under the water.
With the water running, she couldn't hear her cell phone, but eventually she noticed the added noise and found it rattling on the kitchen table.
"Thank goodness!" her sister Annie said when she answered. "I've been calling for half an hour!"
"Why?" Mara asked.
"To check up on you, of course! So tell me, how's the new house? I'd like to get down there and see it this weekend, but . . ."
It would mean bringing your family. "It's fine," Mara said. She frantically dried her hands. Her skin was wrinkled from the water. "It's tiny. The tour would take five minutes. There's barely enough space for everything I have." Go on, say something about how I don't need much space anymore.
Her sister was wise enough to avoid it. "Well, don't spend your entire weekend inside! Go out and do something! The unpacking can wait. You know, I just heard about-"
Mara's sister went on, telling her about a new art gallery, a wine-and-cheese shop with monthly tastings, a bookstore with open readings, and a pedal pub making the rounds in the city. She ignored all of it and let her sister ramble through the phone call until running out of steam.
"Well, I should let you go. Go have a busy day, okay? And . . . if you ever want to come over and have dinner sometime, or-"
"I know. Thanks." Mara hung up and dropped her phone on the table. She gathered a bottle of vodka and sat on the small brick patio outside her back door, trying for a little while to read a book, but eventually just found herself drunk in the setting sun.
She had her group Sunday night. She hadn't been going recently, but decided she at least needed a reason to shower and put on clean clothes. After finally getting out of the house, she drove into the city, steeling herself for the questioning. She didn't like the grief counseling, but she could at least understand it was something she needed. Like taking a medicine with side effects.
Sitting in the circle, with a cup of dirt-brown coffee and a flaky danish in either hand, sitting on a hard, metal folding chair in the basement of a Catholic church, and she still felt comfortable. Here she could let herself be a little more true. The people around her either suffered from grief themselves, or were equipped to help. Eventually everyone took their seats. There were a few people Mara didn't recognize, but no one new to the group.
One of the women she knew, Caitlyn, sat down next to her. "Hello Mara. It's good to see you again."
Mara tried a smile in return, but found it impossible. "Hi Caitlyn. How're you?"
Caitlyn shrugged. One of the perks of being in grief counseling, Mara thought. No one has to pretend to be happy.
"Excuse me everyone, let's get started," the counselor, Mrs. Forks, said. "A big group tonight. I'm glad to see a few old faces back to get the help they need." The woman smiled at a few in attendance, including Mara. The session began, and Mrs. Forks asked a few people to speak about the changes their grief made in their lives. Mara listened with what she hoped was an attentive look.
The stories were all the same, but they started in different places. "Children so young shouldn't get cancer." "I still see him clutching the wound when I close my eyes." "I wish I had never gotten pregnant."
Mara sat with the group's eyes on her. One of the woman had gasped.
"Mara, there's no reason you should feel something like that," Mrs. Forks said calmly. "We all understand your situation is more complicated than us. Why don't you explain why you feel that way?"
Mara shrunk away from the group, risking a glance at Caitlyn, who nodded slightly. The group waited as she gathered her strength.
"If I had never gotten pregnant, Drew and I . . ." She stopped, aghast at the stupidity of what she was about to say. "We wouldn't have gotten postpartum depression. Who even heard of such a thing?" She shouted, louder than she should have. Several members of the group jumped.
Mrs. Forks remained smiling. "Studies have shown one in ten new fathers have forms of PPD."
"If we hadn't gotten postpartum depression, then-" Mara told herself not to think about the words coming from her mouth "-Drew wouldn't have killed Regina, and he wouldn't have killed himself."
Eyebrows of a few of the newer attendees rose. "If I had never gotten pregnant, he would still be alive."
Mrs. Forks looked around the room. "Does anyone have something to say about that?"
After a moment, one of the members cleared her throat. "You meant to get pregnant? You . . . wanted to start a family?" She asked. Mara nodded. She knew what was coming. "Then how could you have known?"
Mara squeezed her hands between her thighs. She felt Caitlyn's hand on her shoulder. "Twenty-twenty hindsight is a powerful thing, Mara," Mrs. Forks said. "But the point was for Mara to tell us why she felt the way she did. Does anyone else have something to say."
"It isn't your fault," another woman said. "Not what you want to hear, I know . . . but it's true for all of us. I'm sure if any of us could go back to why we're here, we'd never let it happen."
"Very well said, Tina." Mrs. Forks looked back at Mara. "Do you believe you're at fault, Mara?"
Mara said nothing. She sat breathing in and out until the silence had gone on too long. Mrs. Forks waited patiently, but several of the attendees started fidgeting. "Maybe. We both tried to get help, but neither of us knew how bad it was for the other. If maybe I'd paid more attention to him, or tried to help Regina more . . ."
Nobody spoke. She could feel the tears growing. "Yes. I blame myself," She whimpered, and could just feel Caitlyn's hand squeeze her shoulder. "There were so many times I could have done something differently, but I didn't, and now they're dead. They're both dead!" she wailed, finally beginning to sob.
They gathered around her to touch her, saying it wasn't her fault, she couldn't have known, there was no way for her to anticipate such things. She slowly calmed herself down, weeping unabashedly, until she could open her eyes and look at the faces of the women around her. Eventually Mrs. Forks asked another woman to discuss her feelings.
Two hours after it began the session ended, and after hollow small talk with Caitlyn and a few other women, Mara drove home in the warm summer night. She sat in her dark garage silently, thinking about as little as possible.
Finally crossing the alley into the house, she opened the door and froze. The sound of crying had come from upstairs for a brief moment. She shut the door and ran upstairs, checking each of the rooms and being met with the same thing each time: emptiness. Unlike in her dreams, the sound did not reappear. Mara sniffed and rubbed her eyes, and got ready for work the next day.
An hour later she was lying in bed, unable or unwilling to fall asleep. The lights from the city came in her inadequately curtained window until she finally drifted off at some unknown time after midnight.
The small door, where she had stuffed Drew and the baby's things, opened before her. The crawlspace seemed larger. Sitting on her knees, feeling the hard wooden floor through her pants, Mara dragged one of the boxes toward her. It scraped forward until she had it next to her. She leaned forward and snagged another box, pulling it until it was out of the way. Silently, without pause, she removed box after box.
As she emptied the crawlspace the crying grew louder.
She pulled box after box out, far, far more than she had put in, but she didn't notice. They were big and small, heavy and light, and in all manner of unnatural shapes. The crawlspace had become a lengthy passage, many times longer than the end of her house. She would have tunneled through into the next house, and then the house after it. She spent hours pulling each box out and leaving it in the small hallway, which of course never filled -- any box she turned her back on to go back into the crawlspace disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind.
Days passed. The crying grew in intensity until she reached the final box. It rocked, as if a small form inside beat tiny clenched fists against the sides. Taking it carefully back into the hallway, through the endless cobweb crawlspace, she longed to pry it open and make the crying stop.
In the hallway finally, the crying tore through the box and bounced off the walls. Her head bent down until her nose was inches from the box's opening. She could just see inside.
But when she opened the box the crying was gone; it had never been there, and the box was empty.
The gasp Mara let out turned into a cry of pain and sorrow, lying in bed with the sheets tangled around her legs. The silence pressed on her lungs, and a sob escaped.
It was five-thirty Wednesday morning, too early to get up and do anything useful. She couldn't imagine trying to go back to sleep. The dream had been an elongated path of pulling boxes through a tight hallway, Regina's crying reaching her in waves.
At about six o'clock she sat across from the small door in the hallway. Early light was just caressing the curtains on the east side of the house. Summoning her will, she opened the crawlspace door quickly, imagining if she opened it slowly something would dart out before she could see it. The few boxes she had tucked away were barely visible, but she could clearly see the back of the space. She shut the door again and wandered upstairs to take a shower.
After the shower she felt better, more in control. She was still dragging the weight of the dream behind her, but the load was lighter. She stood in front of her bedroom closet until deciding she wanted to get a few more clothes, and went into the storage closet across from her bedroom, finding a few boxes she hadn't unpacked. After shuffling a few around, she found the one she was looking for, picked it up, stood, turned around, and felt something strike her forehead.
It was light, like someone blowing on her from a foot away, but she felt it and, when she refocused, she found something dangling in front of her nose. A string, knotted slightly at the end, trailed down from the ceiling. Frowning, she dropped the box of clothes in the hallway and went back in, taking the string between two fingers. She followed it up and found it connected to a panel in the ceiling which, she imagined, led to an attic.
An attic her house shouldn't have. She checked her watch but knew she had plenty of time. She pulled on the string hard enough to dislodge the panel and make the ladder swing down, nearly striking her and crushing one of the boxes in the closet.
After she removed the smashed box, she took a look. The space above the ladder was pitch-black. She climbed up, waving a hand through first and then sticking her head in. She couldn't detect anything around her, and found enough space to climb up. She tested the area above her head, and to her surprise found the roof high enough for her to stand. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but there wasn't much to look at. Beams, touches of insulation, more spiderwebs. She heard the wind whistling above her.
Climbing back down, she wondered why she hadn't noticed the attic before, and why she'd thought there hadn't been one. "I must have not given the place a very thorough look," she said to herself, letting the ladder and ceiling piece glide back up and slam shut. "What else is it hiding?" She asked as she buffed out the box the ladder had smashed, full of winter clothes. "More storage space is always better, I suppose." She brushed out her additional clothes and got dressed for work. She thought about the attic during her commute, stuck on it for some reason.
The glow of the computer in front of her gave her a push to forget her troubles, even if just for a few hours.
The thoughts of the attic only resurfaced while she rode the bus home, and there, surrounded by similar travelers, she couldn't help but think there was something else in the attic, something she had passed over when she looked, unnoticed because of the low light or her scattered brain or for some other reason.
When she got home she ate dinner quickly and went back into the closet on the upper level. The cord still hung, motionless, in the center of the dark room, ready for her to hold and pull. She fetched a flashlight from one of the boxes and drew its beam in a circle around the panel in the ceiling, waiting for something.
In time she grasped the end of the cord and pulled, moving aside to let the ladder clunk on the floor. She climbed it like a dog going up the steps, using her hands and feet. Halfway in, she moved the flashlight around her, finally seeing the attic in more than darkness. It wasn't as empty as she thought.
There was enough room to stand, but just barely, and she crouched more out of habit than necessity. Standing in the center, viewing the entire length and width of her house in one place, she turned in a circle, starting and finishing at the hole to the second floor. The light had caught a number of items, and she began to hunt them down, slowly gathering them in a small pile, her heartbeat speeding up and her skin prickling.
A ring, small and gold, as might be slipped onto a husband's finger after saying "I do," but prior to their first wedded kiss, unadorned and simple, yet bearing strength and simple complexity, like a husband might, lying on the floor of the attic, appearing heavy and strong. In reality, it was light and weak.
A plastic cup, somewhere between completely transparent and foggy white coloring, allowing someone to view a distorted and cloudy vision of whatever was on the other side, wondering why it was not filled with a cool drink or a hot liquid to perk oneself up in the morning. It stood upright next to the ring.
A bottle for medication, lacking a label, small and orange, as they all seemed to be. The pills it might have contained were all gone, consumed before the bottle was forgotten, or dragged away by pests after the attic had been sealed with the bottle inside. It sat on its side next to the plastic glass.
A small, pink blanket, with stars and balloons and frolicking animals stitched into its surface. It was large and expansive, big enough to cover the surface of a drab crib, or be wrapped around the child within the crib against the cold air. It was piled in a heap.
A pillow, not too big, with stripes. It would have looked perfectly in place against the inner side of the crib, there so the baby didn't hit her head if she rolled too energetically, as she was prone to doing when she cried. It was on its side, lying against the blanket.
A stuffed bear, like any child might have. It had soft brown fur on the outside, and a smiling animal face with two black glass eyes, looking ahead and watching everything occurring in front of it. It had seen a tragedy, unable to turn its head away, unable to close its eyes, unable to stop it. It sat next to the blanket and pillow with its legs out in front and its arms at its sides.
Mara's mind was white. She wanted to back away from the items back to haunt her, back to remind her of her tragedy, but her body was struck stiff. The items were divided into the dual camps: the ring, cup, and bottle, and the blanket, pillow, and bear. Both tried to reach out to her and have her pick them up and replace them downstairs in the bathroom, in the crib, on her husband's finger, next to her baby daughter.
Mara shook her head and shut her eyes against them, and tried to think critically. How had the items gotten into the attic? How had the attic appeared when she was certain one did not exist? How had she known there was something here she could not see, but would later find? Why had the unknown prospect of finding these items stuck in her head the entire day?
"Why?" Mara breathed out, face clenched, trying not to cry or scream. "Why are you here?" she asked the items, as if they could answer. "Tell me! TELL ME!" she gasped, kicking the items over into one big pile; they mingled but did not let up their silent, unheard, yet entirely perceived accusations. The kick had shoved them alongside one wall, and Mara took a step backwards away from them, stomach dropping away when she felt nothing under her heel.
A moment later she lay with a box under her back at the bottom of the ladder, head, hip, and both knees blaring in pain. The pain in her right knee rose over the rest, and she moved her vision down to find it twisted painfully, her foot caught on one of the ladder's bottom steps.
Whimpering, into the hallway, she was able to pull herself out. She lay on the floor, body screaming. She felt a bump growing on the back of her head, and the joints of her legs sinking under the pain from it. She stayed there, trying to catch her breath. She could see part of the flashlight's beam against the sloped roof of the attic through the hole in the closet's ceiling. She used her hands to drag herself to the railing next to the stairs, and tried to pull herself up without the use of one of her legs, but failed and fell again, facedown.
For an unknown amount of time she stayed there, lacking the energy to try again, feeling the floorboard's unborn splinters on her face. She risked a glance at her knee again, and felt the visceral reaction of seeing part of her body destroyed. She knew she'd torn something and couldn't put pressure on it. She had no idea what to do next.
She needed help; she needed to call someone. Her phone was on the kitchen table. Down the stairs, through the hard hallway, and in the center of the kitchen, each foot laden with potential agony.
She levered herself onto her better hip and spun slowly, pointing her head toward the stairs. When she let herself down her knee struck the floor and pain ran up her back, making her cry and bite her lip. Short, painful gasps escaped her, but she managed to get up to her hands and one knee, trying to keep the other off the ground. She pulled herself above the stairs and backed onto them, able to rise to one foot carefully on the first step, back to the drop.
Feeling the pain rise in her hip and ankle, she spun carefully, both hands on the railing. The change in elevation made the stairs wobble as dizziness overtook her, and her hands went white trying to keep her from tumbling forward to her death. Eventually the world righted itself, and she panted, telling herself not to look down at her knee. After a minute she let herself drop a step, and the shock up and down her body almost made her fall.
After another minute she dropped another step, and the cycle repeated itself for all eleven additional steps until she reached the ground floor. She didn't know if she had been unconscious, or had just taken her precious time on the stairs, but the sun had set and streetlamp light came in the open windows. With each slow motion her head felt like bursting, but she got into the kitchen on one leg, leaning against the wall.
She picked up her phone and fumbled her way into the dial pad, calling 911.
"I need an ambulance," she said to the operator. "I fell and twisted my knee." She paused. "I think I might have a concussion, too." Her injured brain prompted her to go on. "I wouldn't have called but I live alone . . . I . . . I think I was unconscious but I don't know-"
"Tell me your address, ma'am," the operator interrupted.
After giving the address, the operator told her an ambulance was on its way. He asked her for her phone number, and the nature of her injuries.
She woke up, still sitting in the chair at her kitchen table, knee bellowing with pain and all her other injuries adding their voices. It was after nine in the evening, and she'd missed a text message from Caitlyn. There was no ambulance; she heard no sirens, saw no lights. The house was dark, and the only sound was her groaning in pain.
She almost called 911 again, but then decided to call Caitlyn and beg her for help.
"Hello?"
"Caitlyn-"
The other woman heard the pain in her voice. "Mara? What happened?"
"Fell," she said, eyes shut, head throbbing, knee overpowering. "I twisted my knee and hit my head. I tried calling 911 and they said they sent an ambulance but that was over an hour ago, and I fell asleep while on the phone and I don't know if they just didn't do anything or they tried to get in . . ." she began crying. ". . . I can't move my leg, and my whole body hurts, I fell from the attic and I hurt my ankle and hips too, and-"
"Mara!" Caitlyn yelled, knocking Mara out of her trance. "Okay! I'll be there as fast as I can! Tell me your address!"
Mara gave her address for the second time, and let the rest of what Caitlyn said wash over her. She tried not to fall asleep.
The shaking hurt her, but she was too weak to stop it. When she finally opened her eyes she saw Caitlyn standing in front of her, frantic.
"Good God, Mara, your knee!" Caitlyn said when she helped the woman up. "My car's right out front. I'm so sorry I took so long; I was driving so fast I must have missed a dozen turns!"
"What time is it?" Mara said, through thick lips.
"After ten-thirty. When did you fall?"
"I don't know," Mara said, her words slurring. "After dinner."
"Okay, come on," Caitlyn said, helping her into the passenger seat of her car, careful of her leg. "Let's just get you to the hospital. I want you to stay awake for me, okay? Talk about something. Talk about . . ." Caitlyn paused. "How did you fall?"
She risked a glance at Mara when she didn't answer. The memory of screaming and kicking the six items in the attic had come crashing back to Mara, and she wasn't sure if she could tell the truth.
"Attic above the closet upstairs," she said finally. "Putting some stuff up there . . . didn't look where I was going, fell down the ladder."
Caitlyn gasped. Mara felt drowsy against the cushion of the seat, safe under the pressure of the seat belt.
"No Mara, no! Don't fall asleep! It could be bad for you!" After a moment of silence Caitlyn reached over and shook Mara. "I told you to stay awake!"
"Okay, okay," Mara said, pain in her knee pushing out any thought of sleep. "Okay. Thank you."
"Don't think about, just concentrate on staying awake. Tell me about your new house."
"It's small." Mara's eyes were closed, and she began to accept they would stay closed no matter what she did. "Little kitchen, little bedrooms. There's a crawlspace in between the kitchen and the dining room I didn't notice until last week . . . put some of Drew's and the baby's stuff in there so I would have to look at it. I found the attic this morning. Didn't know it was there either. I don't know how I missed seeing it. It's pretty small but it's not like I need a lot of space anyway, right?"
Caitlyn gasped again. The hospital grew closer.
"I miss them," Mara continued, now almost verbalizing every thought she had. "I want my family back. I found things in the attic that reminded me of them, like a wedding ring and a stuffed bear, just like the one my mother got Regina." Caitlyn said nothing, trying to navigate her way into the parking lot. "I think it was the same one. I think somehow all of those things were put up there for me to find. To punish me."
The next morning Caitlyn helped Mara into her bed. Painkillers flooded Mara's system, a brace was on her knee after being diagnosed with a torn MCL, and she was exhausted after a night of monitoring. The hospital let her sleep after determining she wasn't at danger, but still sleep came slowly. She heard Caitlyn call Mara's boss and let him know what happen and then let herself out of the house, and fell asleep, back somewhere she could call comfortable.
The first dream introduced something new. Her legs -- both of them -- felt locked in place, unable to bend at the knee or even the ankle, sometimes limiting her movement to just turning at the waist and moving her arms, as if she became a statue from the hips down. The black plastic brace had twisted and grown in her mind until it seemed like it was going to cover her entire body.
The dreams took place in the attic. It was much bigger than real life, just as the crawlspace had been. The crying came from one corner.
When she could, she limped toward it, dragging her leg behind her. The crying went from a tired whimper to a shocked shriek, to a hungry wail, and back again, rising and falling in intensity. She stumbled forward, the sensation of pain given to her by the dream but not actually felt, until she reached the corner, where she found only an empty crib. They crying had moved.
Over and over she chased it around the ever-growing interior of the stuffy attic, never able to catch it. It never differed. She could never get it to stop, no matter how hard she tried.
A few hours after noon she woke up with her knee and head hurting, condensation from an ice pack on her knee soaking the sheets.
She saw Caitlyn had poured her a tall glass of water. A bottle of Vicodin stood next to it, with instructions to take no more than four a day. She almost knocked the glass, and the bottle of pills, off her nightstand before getting herself under control. Instead of taking any drugs she tried to rise and go downstairs for something to eat, but the pain in her knee was too great. Sitting on the edge of her bed, gazing at the swollen spot on her knee and the brace cutting into it, she knew it was only a matter of time before she gave in, so she put a few pills in her mouth and dry-swallowed them before taking the glass and drinking a few sips.
She fell asleep again, and woke up without remembering the dreams for once. It was almost night, and now her stomach disturbed her the most.
Pushing herself up again, she took her crutches and carefully made her way to the stairs. She glared at them from the top for a few seconds, trying to recall Caitlyn's instructions. She got down faster than the day before and with considerably less pain, with one hand on the railing and both crutches under her other arm and one foot in front of the other. She rested on the landing.
She made herself a meal consisting of mostly comfort food and put herself in front of the television with a new ice pack on her knee, aware watching wheel of fortune would be one of the most painless choices among the things she could do. After eating she felt like taking a shower but didn't have the energy to get back up the stairs yet, so she let herself sink into the couch as primetime came on.
Halfway into a droning, formulaic police procedural she glanced around the living room and was shocked to find a door on the wall next to her.
She looked at it as she felt a band tighten around her stomach. The crawlspace maybe. The attic she wasn't sure about. This door was new to its wall.
She managed to get herself up and look at it straight-on as the TV blared. She had never seen it before, she knew. Her house was changing. There was no way this door had existed before, she would have seen it. In fact, there's nowhere this door could lead -- the wall it was attached to was part of the exterior. It could only lead to a hot summer night and allow the bugs to enter, but Mara could tell it didn't. What would she find? Would it reveal a skeleton, glaring out at her? Would her husband's empty body tumble out and knock her over, dead eyes taking her in? Would she begin to hear crying in a moment, and open the door to find an empty crib?
After balancing, she reached a hand to the cut-glass knob, and rattled it. It wasn't locked. She hadn't really expected it to be, but she had hoped. Now she knew she would have to open it.
She pulled it open, and the person inside looked just as surprised as she did. She stumbled backwards, losing her crutches and falling on her tailbone. She started to push herself away, and then realized it wasn't another person but a mirror attached to the back wall of the small closet. A rung for coats was under a small shelf, and inside there was nothing but dust.
Groaning, grumbling at the new pain in her butt, she gathered her crutches and rose to standing, sticking her tongue out at the mirror. She hadn't seen her reflection since the morning before.
She saw dark circles under her eyes and pallid, sagging skin, not to mention the brace. There was a crack on the mirror, and it cut through the reflection of her forehead. She tried brushing it away and immediately felt silly.
After gazing into the mirror for another minute and resolving to get a little cleaned up, she gripped the edge of the door and slammed it shut with all the energy she could muster; the wall shook. She turned the television off and dragged herself upstairs, going into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face, at the very least. Her knee was beginning to hurt again, so she took more drugs and fell backwards onto her bed. She still heard the sound of the new closet slamming shut. She called her sister to check in and reassure Annie she was doing fine, but the call went unanswered.
Early the next morning, after breakfast, she looked out the window and found a pleasant view of blue skies, puffy clouds, and gently blowing trees. It was stuffy inside the house, so she braced herself and tried to push up a window in the parlor.
It had been a night of dreams in strange colors, frequent awakenings, and a sore knee. After waking up she downed her drugs, and forced herself into the shower, carefully removing the knee brace before turning it on. The warm water calmed her considerably, and by the time she slowly levered herself out she felt her best since falling from the attic. She managed to make herself a cup of coffee and toast, and now she was trying to haul open the window.
She took a step back, confused. It was stuck fast. She inspected the lock, trying to open it in both directions, tried rattling the frame to get it unstuck, and looked for anything jammed in its way, but there was nothing. She hooked her fingers under the windowpane and strained, clenching her teeth, not even able to move it an inch. She pulled and pulled, and only stopped when she heard crying behind her.
The sound made her gasp, and tear out a fingernail. Cursing, she looked around her in the parlor, and through to the living room. It sounded as if the noise had come from directly behind her; exactly where the new door had appeared in the wall the night before. She covered her eyes. All the looseness and relaxation from her hot shower and simple breakfast were gone; replaced by the old feelings.
She watched the door to the closet, wondering if she would hear the sound again. It was just a trick of the mind, she thought. Something from outside that sounded like a baby.
Of course, just then the door to the closet shook, hit from the other side by a strong force.
She jumped, startled, unable to understand. She watched it from across the span of her house, the distance stretching, ranging from mere inches to hundreds of miles in her vision at the same time. She blinked her eyes and looked away, trying to draw blood back into her face, and the door was struck again, this time startling Mara enough to make her wobble on her crutches. She righted herself and darted her gaze at the door.
It hadn't moved, at least. Still, even in the cheery morning light it appeared shadowed. She went toward it, taking careful motions in her crutches, and stopped halfway. She'd seen the glass handle jiggle.
It continued rattling in the frame, shaking and turning slightly, and Mara's vision narrowed until it was all she could see, cutting out the rest of her surroundings and the light in them, making it all dark. The jiggling stopped, and for a few seconds she thought it was over.
The knob snapped to the side and the door swung open, catching Mara just as she was relaxing.
Like last night, she saw only herself, reflected in the mirror hung at the back of the closet. The door bumped the wall, fully open, and halted there.
She inched her shaking crutches forward slowly. Her entire body felt compressed, smaller, trapped in place; something she could not see drew her into the closet.
She got herself to stop and let out a breath, unaware she had been holding it in. She heard a sharp splitting sound, and saw a new line had appeared on the mirror. More cracks sounded, splitting the mirror into tiny pieces, still attached to each other somehow, until finally they turned to dust and ran across the floor at her, ending just at the edge of her feet. She hadn't noticed this, all of her attention instead on the words written on the wall behind the mirror.
"MOTHER," and under it "WIFE." She did not dare get herself any closer, but she would bet her life the words were written in dark, dried blood.
A fierce suction pulled the glass shards on the floor into the closet in a blurring, shimmering vortex, pulling her hair forward and putting her off-balance, knocking her forward to her stomach a few feet from the closet. The air rushing past her, more and more, roared. The closet's hungry mouth yearned to taste her, but she gripped the carpet with her hands, unable to take her eyes away. The glass shards assembled themselves into thousands of glittering teeth around the edge and inside of the closet, ready for her to tumble in, ready to slice her to pieces and paint the closet with more blood.
She put her face against the carpet and wondered if she should let go, if she should let it devour her.
Before she had the chance to decide the closet's door swung shut faster and harder than she had slammed it the night before, cutting off the rushing air and furious sound.
Mara kept her place, prostrate before it, for a long time, hair tangled around her like a net, face pressed into the carpet.
She needed air. She pushed herself up with her hands, keeping her eyes shut and away from the closet. Searching with her hands, she picked up the crutches and slowly brought herself to standing. Her knee hurt but she decided not to do anything about it. Shaking, standing in the center of the living room, she could almost imagine the silence ending at the slow whimper of a baby's cry, slowly building until it got her to move.
The silence continued. She couldn't get the window to open so she went to the back door, out to the patio. From the window she could see a growth on the back side of the house, where the new closet led, perfectly in place and appearing as if it had always been there. It was faded just like the light blue siding around it, and the tar shingles looked pounded by the rain and sun.
Desiring to take a closer look at it from the outside, Mara pushed the door open only to run into it. The door, like the window, was stuck. She jiggled the handle, confused. She tried the lock a few times and tried opening it in both positions. Shaking it back and forth, Mara felt herself tense up, curling forward, pulling and pushing on the handle with more and more energy, rattling it in its frame and making a picture on the wall nearby shake, until she gave up and backed away. Without thinking she turned and walked past the stairs to the front door, trying to pull it open. It, like the back door, and the window, refused to move.
The windows, the doors. She'd tried everything. Even the small window in the bathroom, too small for her to even try to fit through, and too high up on the wall besides. They would not open.
Sitting on the couch, crutches leaning next to her, Mara could do nothing but look through the dirty glass of the parlor window. She saw someone pass on the street and wondered -- should she scream -- if the person would even be able to hear her.
Coming up with an idea, she pulled herself into the kitchen and snatched up her cell phone. She quickly dialed her sister, and listened to it ring.
And ring, and ring, and ring. The noise became background to Mara's thoughts.
Somehow her house had trapped her inside. She could no longer dance around the idea: something was happening to her and it had to do with this house. She may have been able to ignore everything else, but the closet's show removed all doubt from her mind. She wondered if she was hallucinating.
Shaking her head, she knew she could not have hallucinated such a thing. If she was hallucinating the closet, then she must have also been hallucinating the crawlspace, and the attic, and her injuries, and everything else since then. For a moment she touched her head and her arms, wondering if she was really locked in a padded room somewhere. Despite herself, she scoffed at the idea.
Then what? she asked herself. How could this be happening? She tried to recall science classes, or any natural reasoning for why there was suddenly no way out of her house. A pressure imbalance, wood expanding until there was no way for doors or windows to move. Bugs, somehow. And the new additions to the house? she asked. What scientific explanation is there for them? Has there ever been a study on closets that try to suck you in and eat you?
She glanced at the closet door. It had remained closed since the event over an hour ago.
And the items in the attic. The attic that shouldn't be there with items that shouldn't be there.
She came to realize the phone, still in her hand and pressed against her ear, was silent. Her sister hadn't answered and the phone had hung itself up. She could have called Caitlyn, but didn't want to bother her again after her injury, even though she knew Caitlyn would have heard no protestations. She could have also called Jann, but the memory of the night a little over a week ago was still too fresh. She had apologized, yes, but healing needed time. So she let her phone drop next to her on the couch and went to the front door again.
She could see out the small window in the middle, and could turn and rattle the handle to her heart's content, but the door refused to move. She couldn't tell if the latch wasn't retracting, or if the door's entire frame was fused together, but it seemed like the latter. It was as if she pulled on the entire wall when she pulled on the door's handle.
All the walking and worrying and pressure had left her tired, and her knee hurting more. She took herself up the stairs, still going carefully but getting more used to the motion, took Vicodin, and fell asleep on her bed with the mid-afternoon sun coming in one of the immovable windows.
Pounding on the door with all her might, unable to even budge it the smallest amount, shouting with all of her slow and pointless energy, Mara could not let the outside world know of her existence. As she railed against the hard stone of the door, the crying began again, from down the hall. Turning, she found the hallway so much longer than it should be.
Dragging dead legs behind her, she sought the source of the sound. As it always did, it moved, making her chase it around the house unendingly, until, after hours, she found it. It was in no room, but instead behind the wall under the stairs, as if the thing making the sound had been buried alive during the house's construction, and lived still.
With her hands she beat on it until the paneling gave way, revealing a dark hole leading her down under the house. The sound had moved, and now came from somewhere below her. She stepped in and fell, suddenly waking up in bed. Her heart and head pounded, and she tried to sit up too quickly, bothering her leg and only succeeding in making her dizzy. She took a pill and sat back in bed. It was Saturday now, and she wondered if she would be able to make it to work on Monday. She wasn't able to drive, but she took the bus anyway, and the effects of the concussion were all but gone; it was really only her knee still bothering her. It would take a bit of concentration, but with my crutches it would be fine, she thought, until the events of the day before returned.
She got up slowly, swinging her leg to the floor and barely missing the wall. She imagined the pain from hitting the wall with her foot and grimaced. She forced herself to shower, just to try and regain some semblance of a natural state. She could barely look herself in the mirror, and just wished it wouldn't fall to pieces. She tried not to think about the windows or doors, and go about her day as if nothing was the matter, as if nothing had trapped her inside her own home. It worked until she went down the stairs and stopped by the back door.
After inspecting it, slowly, trying to take in every detail, she steadied herself and reached a hand to the doorknob, turning it smoothly, and pushing it. It didn't move, and she pushed harder and harder until her whole body strained, and she cried out in agony at the thought of something keeping her inside. Backing away, she planted her crutches behind her and kicked with her good leg, not expecting anything to happen, and getting exactly nothing.
She almost wished it would tear open and begin to suck her in, as the closet had done. Then, at least, she would be free.
How? she asked herself, again. She would have asked why, but she couldn't deny she knew. She was being punished.
She tried to clear her mind and turn around, heading to the kitchen for coffee and some food. She wondered if there was any way for her to contact the outside world, any at all. The windows and doors wouldn't open, and the single call she'd attempted hadn't gone through. Internet? she wondered, passing the stairs. Her body stopped moving.
At first she didn't know why, until she felt her hands shake and her mouth dry out. Her neck felt stiff and wooden, unable to turn. It felt like something was dragging her eyeballs out, and she tried to lick her lips.
Under the stairs, in the wall, there was a new door, across the small hallway from the crawlspace. She looked at it out of the corner of her eyes, unable to turn and face it straight-on, should it decide to gobble her up before she had a chance to run. Like the crawlspace, and the closet door, it was made of old wood and had a clear glass knob in the shape of a crystal. Like the crawlspace and closet, it looked like it belonged just as much as anything else, and like the crawlspace and the closet, she had never seen it before.
Her crutches took her into the kitchen automatically, and she sat at the table, letting them drop to the floor with a clatter. She gripped the sides of the table, straining.
I'm going crazy.
She put her head on the table and stayed there until the fear and terror and panic started to die. As her body relaxed, piece by piece, her stomach spoke up. She rose to prepare herself breakfast, morning light coming in the window and making it look like nothing at all was the matter.
She stood in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal in her hands, unable to eat. Her mouth was too dry; her stomach squeezed itself into a ball.
Abandoning the bowl and snatching up crutches with stiff, unyielding fingers, she went back to the hallway and took another look at the door. It should not have been there, but it fit like a puzzle piece one did not realize was missing.
She wondered if she dared reach and take the handle. She wondered, if she did dare, if the handle would even turn, or the door would even open, or if it did, it would just be another closet bearing words written in blood.
Instead, she went to the front door and tried pulling it open once more, getting the same result as the day before. She briefly rested her head against the window, wondering if anybody could even see her.
After resigning herself, and taking a long breath, she clumped to the new door under the stairs and, after steadying her hand, turned the handle, pulling the door open.
It wasn't a closet, but for a moment she thought it was nothing at all but a little stump of a hallway, until she saw steps leading down in the same direction as the stairs, into a dark basement. There was a bare bulb in the ceiling, with a chain leading to it, and she pulled it. The harsh light revealed wooden steps taking her down to a cement basement, devoid of any other light and covered in sharp shadows.
She stood leaning on her crutches at the top of the staircase, looking down them. She knew she had to go down; she knew she had to find out what the basement hid, but she waited and tried to find some semblance of strength.
The creak came through the wall, and her head turned just as the door slammed shut, blowing air at her and making her push herself away against the wall to avoid a strike, and she lost one of her crutches. Her frantic grab missed, and she watched it bounce and slide down the steps through her squinted eyes. It's easier with just one anyway, she told herself, yet felt her jaw set when she looked at the crutch at the bottom of the steps, half in shadow.
Her heart pounded and her first step was shaky. The step creaked, and even though it was a perfectly natural sound it made Mara stop and collect herself.
Halfway down the bulb started to flicker. She shut her eyes against the possibility of being plunged into darkness as it leapt on her, muttering under her breath a prayer or a plea to the bulb. She reached the bottom and it stopped flickering, throwing its meek, meager illumination onto the concrete.
She stooped to pick up her crutch and froze when the sound came.
It washed over her as she stood, waves of sensation going up and down her back and through her entire body, eyes clenched shut. The baby screamed at the top of her lungs without pausing for breath, so long Mara began to feel dizzy and out of breath herself.
It continued on and on, and Mara let her crutches slam to the ground, putting her hands over her ears, trying to get it to stop. She sat back against the wall with her knees pulled up, whimpering as the crying continued, digging her nails into the skin of her skull and gritting her teeth, but still the crying continued. It even seemed to grow louder.
"Stop! Stop!" She cried, trying to raise her voice over the screaming. "Stop!" She finally wrenched her eyes open and saw a crib at the other end of the basement. It rocked, buffeted by a force residing inside. Shutting her eyes again, feeling forward, relying on only one leg, she closed the distance between her and the crib; the crying grew louder still. Drawing her nails forward across the hard cement, feeling the crying grind her down like it had before, hands and good knee hurting on the floor, she finally reached the crib and climbed up its padded side to look in.
The crying came from inside though it was empty. The force moving it had vanished or stopped but the sound emitting continued unabated. She gripped the edge of the crib and pulled on it, imagining her daughter inside, wailing ceaselessly, no matter what she or her husband did, no matter what their medicated and diseased minds tried, no matter what time of day, the girl cried and cried. Until Mara had enough. Until she placed the pillow over her daughter's face. Until the crying stopped.
"Please," Mara gasped, the crying assaulting her from the empty crib. "I'm sorry." She could not even hear her own voice. "I'm sorry." Tears fell onto the padded surface. The crib was missing a blanket, and a pillow, and a brown teddy bear, and a girl inside. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!" Mara shouted, screamed, trying to beat the crying with her own volume. "Please stop! Stop! Stop!"
Her frantic shouting and crazed energy tipped the crib forward onto her, and the crying died.
Though light, the crib made her knee blaze with pain. She was on her back, the crib on her legs, in the now quiet and desolate basement. Her dead -- murdered -- daughter's crying came from inside her own head. Weeks of it, in their old home, never a moment of peace or silence.
She sobbed, an arm over her eyes. She had once thought she could not cry, a few weeks ago. After moving into the house. The sadness had been a part of her, but it all burned into irreplaceable sorrow and madness and guilt.
"Why?" She wondered, voice like a shard of glass, tears soaking her cheeks. "Why did I do it? How could I have done it?"
But it was over and done, now. The girl was gone. The crying in her mind was ending, dwindling away. Her breathing calmed. She felt herself returning to the state of mind she'd existed for weeks. The bulb, out-of-sight, flickered, drawing her attention up toward the stairs.
Under the stairs, shoved into a corner, was a cot, and on the cot was a body, mostly covered by a sheet. One single white arm had fallen, brushing its knuckles on the concrete. A gold ring on its finger.
Mara shut her eyes, mind blank. She opened them again to confirm what she saw. Her entire body had come under the spell of the form resting on the cot, covered over like it had been taken into a hospital after she had tried to wake him, and his heart had failed, and a nurse had taken the sheet and drawn it up over his head, leaving Mara alone twice.
A clatter made her jerk her head up, unprepared for what she would see. A rain of small white specks came from under the sheet, funneling onto the floor, a pile rising and overflowing, spreading a white tide over the floor toward her. She struggled under the crib, thinking she would drown, and after a moment kicked the crib away and heard it strike the wall. She wasn't fast enough to get herself up before the objects reached her. White pills flowed over her hands, rising over the swell of her knuckles and bouncing off her wrist, growing more and more numerous until she could not see the gray floor. They flowed from under the sheet covering her husband without ceasing.
She tried to get up from her hands and knees but stumbled, hitting the ground on her shoulder and crushing the pills flowing under her. She scrambled to rise again, ignoring the extra pain, trying to brush the pills away. They never stopped. She remembered pouring similar pills into the glass of water she had brought her husband, just enough or so she thought to keep him from waking when she enacted a final solution to silence the crying, only to come back into the bedroom to find froth coming from his mouth, his body jerking erratically. Only to watch the ambulance arrive and ferry him to the hospital. Only to watch the nurse cover his slack face.
She swept her arms in arcs, trying to clear the pills away and let her gain her ground, but there were too many. She crawled toward the steps, sliding over the weapon she had used to kill her husband, unable to think for the sound of the pills rolling.
She reached her crutches, pulling them up from the turmoil of the flowing pills, and began to get her footing despite them, and the bulb at the top of the stairs died.
The sound of the pills ceased. She could see nothing, but she wondered if the pills had all disappeared as well. Trying to calm her pounding heart, swallowing with a dry throat and moving with shaking limbs, she took the first step.
The unmistakable sound of a body rising from a bed froze her. Feet slid across the cold stone floor, rounding the stairs, mere feet away.
Panic shoved all other thoughts from her, and she surged up the steps, all of her concentration guiding her bad leg and the crutches, missing steps and stumbling and hearing the bottom step creak with old, cold weight. A crutch fell from her grip and she let it go, forgetting it as soon as it left her hand, using the free hand to claw her way up the staircase -- it had grown longer, extending up forever, and now she heard the crying as well, and her brace changed shape, tangling her legs and making them stiff. Images in red and black flashed in front of her, showing her preparing her husband's final drink, and finally getting the crying to end, and agreeing with the police investigator when he suggested her husband had killed her child, her daughter, and then killed himself, and getting the insurance check in the mail, and moving into the smaller, cheaper house she was now trapped inside.
She hit the landing; silence. She pushed the door open, half expecting it to remain shut and leave her in the darkness forever, but it rotated with a creak. As she stepped into the sunlight of her hallway she heard the steps continue on the stairs behind her, and the panic returned.
She limped to the back door and pounded on it, banging with all of her might, using all of her weight and fear to batter on it, but it would not move. She turned and used her crutch to slam the basement door shut before turning back to the sealed exit. Her breath came fast and ragged, and she braced the crutch behind her, rising onto only her bad leg and kicking with frantic might. The door, the wall, the entire house shook, and she kicked again and again, shouting, crying, screaming, until the door snapped open and she fell through it, losing her final crutch behind her.
Free. She sobbed, facedown, energy seeping out of her. She thought she felt the warmth of the sun, and the cool stones of the patio, until she looked up.
Her face sagged, but the truth did not strike her. She looked through her hallway, from the front door to the back, and forever more, an endless path running only through her house. She slowly turned and looked behind her, at the crutch, and the endless path through the open doors, from the back to the front.
"How?" She asked out loud. Still the true realization of what she saw eluded her. "I opened the door. I opened it!"
The truth was just beginning to appear when, in all versions of the house behind and in front of her, the door to the basement flowed open without sound, and, just before shutting her eyes, she saw a form step out.
"I'm sorry!" She screamed at the floor. "I'm sorry! It was me! It was all me! I did it! I'm guilty! I killed you! Both of you! I killed you! I'm guilty! It's my fault! I'm guilty! I'm guilty!"
She waited. Waited for a cold hand on her neck, or a blow on her head, or to be turned over and have pills poured down her throat until she choked. They did not come.
Shaking, crying, hair in her eyes, she looked up, seeing blue sky and green trees, the stones of her patio. The guilt settled on her.
And then she would wake up, alone in her bed, with no child in the next room.
Slowly, Mara unpacked. She had been living in her new house for a week, and every day she would find a new thing to put away. She knew eventually she would run out, but tried not to think about it. Blocked it out.
The floor plan of the house was simply and intuitive. Enter in the front door and the kitchen was on the right, the parlor on the left. Ten feet forward, past the stairs, and you would be facing the back door, a straight shot from the front, with the dining room on the right and the living room on the left, with the TV.
Go up the stairs and find the master bedroom bedroom on the left. Her bedroom. Turn right, and it was the closet, then the bathroom, then the extra bedroom. She had only ever spent much time in her bedroom, and most of it was sleep -- haunted by dreams of her new house.
At night she had her blankets and pillows around her in bed, lacking the comfortable heat of her husband next to her. She fell asleep, and had another dream of chasing the baby. She woke up crying.
The next morning Jann, with her big hips and long hair and red lipstick, saw her state and invited herself over after work.
"I think it will help if your house feels more like a . . . a home, you know?" Jann said, leaning against Mara's desk. "There are still boxes and things all over, right?"
"Yeah. Some," Mara said. The woman's presence frayed on her already-reduced patience. Jann was not a fool Mara wished to suffer.
"I'll come over, bring some takeout, and help you unpack. I think it'll make you feel better."
"Fine," Mara said, surprising herself and the other woman with her lack of resistance. "Let me work." Jann left her alone, and at night Mara sat waiting for her arrival.
The time she had promised came and went. She kept waiting. The house's silence pressed down on her. Mara wondered if even the rats made noise. Finally Jann knocked on the front door.
"I'm sorry I took so long," the woman said when Mara let her in. "Traffic was a mess . . . the line at the chicken place was gigantic . . . everything went wrong." Mara turned away and strode into the kitchen. "Oh, Mara, I didn't . . . I'm sorry."
"Just get the food in here."
They ate in silence. Jann looked around the kitchen while they sat at the table. "This place isn't so bad. It's cozy. It's got charm." She looked across the table as Mara picked at her chicken. "I'm sure you'll start to feel comfortable soon."
"Yeah," Mara breathed, letting her unfinished food drop on her plate. "Soon."
Jann sighed. "I'm sorry hun."
"It's not your fault," Mara said. She wondered if she would be able to cry.
"It looks like we're both done eating. Why don't we get to work and get our minds off things."
They found a few boxes yet to be unpacked and cracked them open, revealing things for around the house. Mara's had a number of small rugs to set off the corners of rooms, while Jann's contained what she assumed were hundreds of assorted utensils. She clanked through them noisily, filling the small kitchen with the sounds of work. Mara was left with the small rugs, to try and figure out where to place them. One of them used to go under the couch, but she needed another person to place it correctly. A few of the smaller ones she placed under the ends of tables and in the center of the room.
She helped Jann separate the knives, serving spoons, and all the miscellaneous devices used to prepare food, finding drawers and cabinets to hide them until they might become useful once more. Jann helped Mara put the carpet under the couch, and then they found two more boxes. Mara's contained a number of books and magazines.
"Shampoo bottles?" Jann asked, opening her box. "What -- socks? Medication? Mara."
"Leave that one alone."
"Absolutely not!" Jann dug in further. "A to-do list? CDs? I guess this is a . . . an old cell phone?"
"He was going to try and fix it! Just put it back and leave that box alone!" Mara said, dropping the things she had and going to Jann.
"Mara! No! You can't just leave this stuff here, you need to get rid of it!"
"Get rid of it?!" Mara nearly shrieked. She reached for the box, but Jann's larger form stopped her short.
"It's just going to keep hurting you. You don't need these things . . . I don't think Drew even needed these things!" Mara backed away, deciding between furious and heartbroken. Jann stood, holding the box. "You know I won't try to imagine what you're going through but I'm not going to let you torture yourself! I'm making sure there's nothing else in here, and I'm going to throw it away, for your own good! Having these things around will only keep you trapped in your grief."
Mara knocked the box out of Jann's hands and pointed at the door. "Maybe I want to! Maybe it's finally become comfortable! Maybe you should get out, and just leave me to my grief!" The other woman looked hurt, but gathered her things and left.
Mara found herself scooping her husband's old items back into the box. The house was silent again. Eventually everything had been cleaned up, and the box replaced in the corner with the other boxes of Drew's things, big and small.
Skin hot, eyebrows bent and cutting across her forehead, she found another box and split it open. She found piles of small outfits, wrapped around each other with care, in light pinks and blues, with stars and balloons and stripes fit to help a newborn baby look less like the wrinkled and shriveled creature she was.
She closed the box and threw it across the room; it struck a wall and spilled its contents across the floor, the small outfits scattering. She pushed herself away. The box laid on its side, its opening pointing at her, inviting her to crawl inside and shut herself away, trapped among the memories. She shut her eyes and put her head against the wall behind her.
In her dreams, as always, she heard the crying, and she rose from the bed. She went to the next room, the closet across from her bedroom from which the crying came, and found nothing. The crying had moved.
She followed it, floating back into the hallway and down the short hallway to the bathroom. The crying echoed against the tiles, but when she pushed open the door, watching it swing with the stuttering speed of sleep, she only saw herself, bent over the counter with a bottle of pills in her hands. The two copies of Mara laid eyes on each other, and neither could determine who was more the monster.
Next she knew she was pushing open the door to the bedroom next to the bathroom, and saw the crib. Crying issued forth from it ceaselessly, and she could not but stand and listen to it.
It would stop after a while.
On Saturday Mara sat at her kitchen table, weary from the dreams, nursing a cup of coffee. It was already almost noon – on weekends she rarely woke at what many would call a proper time.
So what if she didn't. She didn't have anything else to take up her time, she might as well sleep. It was too hot out, and she found herself wandering the tiny confines of her house, until something stopped her.
She stood looking at it, confused. She'd never seen it before. Looking back at her, as if taunting her, a small door sat in the middle of the wall on the lower floor, situated directly between the parlor and the living room across from the stairs. It was small, as if made for a dwarf, out of old dark wood, with a clear glass handle shaped like a crystal.
Mara took a step back. If she'd been down this hallway once, she'd been down it a hundred times since moving in. This small door hadn't been there before. It hadn't been there when she toured the house, it hadn't been there when she moved her things in, and it hadn't been there earlier in the week when she'd screamed Jann out the front door. It was here now.
She turned the crystal handle and pulled it open, and for a moment she couldn't see in, so thick was the darkness. Then the noontime light entered, and the place on the other side of the door revealed itself to be nothing more than some sort of shrunken crawlspace. Spiderwebs trailed from corners, and dust covered the old wood floor.
Still, she couldn't figure out why she'd been so confused by it. It had been there before, hadn't it? She'd just forgotten about it. It isn't like I've been in the soundest of mind lately, she thought, crouching down to get a good look inside the crawlspace. I just ignored it or something.
She found a flashlight and pointed it inside, scanning the corners and sides. It was entirely empty save the spiders.
Finding the few boxes containing Drew's old things, and the baby's, she stuffed them into the space, pushing them as far as she could reach without actually touching the ancient floor. The heavy boxes scraped as they slid, and after she shut the door she ran to the kitchen to scrub her hands repeatedly. Out of sight, out of mind, she thought, with her hands under the water.
With the water running, she couldn't hear her cell phone, but eventually she noticed the added noise and found it rattling on the kitchen table.
"Thank goodness!" her sister Annie said when she answered. "I've been calling for half an hour!"
"Why?" Mara asked.
"To check up on you, of course! So tell me, how's the new house? I'd like to get down there and see it this weekend, but . . ."
It would mean bringing your family. "It's fine," Mara said. She frantically dried her hands. Her skin was wrinkled from the water. "It's tiny. The tour would take five minutes. There's barely enough space for everything I have." Go on, say something about how I don't need much space anymore.
Her sister was wise enough to avoid it. "Well, don't spend your entire weekend inside! Go out and do something! The unpacking can wait. You know, I just heard about-"
Mara's sister went on, telling her about a new art gallery, a wine-and-cheese shop with monthly tastings, a bookstore with open readings, and a pedal pub making the rounds in the city. She ignored all of it and let her sister ramble through the phone call until running out of steam.
"Well, I should let you go. Go have a busy day, okay? And . . . if you ever want to come over and have dinner sometime, or-"
"I know. Thanks." Mara hung up and dropped her phone on the table. She gathered a bottle of vodka and sat on the small brick patio outside her back door, trying for a little while to read a book, but eventually just found herself drunk in the setting sun.
She had her group Sunday night. She hadn't been going recently, but decided she at least needed a reason to shower and put on clean clothes. After finally getting out of the house, she drove into the city, steeling herself for the questioning. She didn't like the grief counseling, but she could at least understand it was something she needed. Like taking a medicine with side effects.
Sitting in the circle, with a cup of dirt-brown coffee and a flaky danish in either hand, sitting on a hard, metal folding chair in the basement of a Catholic church, and she still felt comfortable. Here she could let herself be a little more true. The people around her either suffered from grief themselves, or were equipped to help. Eventually everyone took their seats. There were a few people Mara didn't recognize, but no one new to the group.
One of the women she knew, Caitlyn, sat down next to her. "Hello Mara. It's good to see you again."
Mara tried a smile in return, but found it impossible. "Hi Caitlyn. How're you?"
Caitlyn shrugged. One of the perks of being in grief counseling, Mara thought. No one has to pretend to be happy.
"Excuse me everyone, let's get started," the counselor, Mrs. Forks, said. "A big group tonight. I'm glad to see a few old faces back to get the help they need." The woman smiled at a few in attendance, including Mara. The session began, and Mrs. Forks asked a few people to speak about the changes their grief made in their lives. Mara listened with what she hoped was an attentive look.
The stories were all the same, but they started in different places. "Children so young shouldn't get cancer." "I still see him clutching the wound when I close my eyes." "I wish I had never gotten pregnant."
Mara sat with the group's eyes on her. One of the woman had gasped.
"Mara, there's no reason you should feel something like that," Mrs. Forks said calmly. "We all understand your situation is more complicated than us. Why don't you explain why you feel that way?"
Mara shrunk away from the group, risking a glance at Caitlyn, who nodded slightly. The group waited as she gathered her strength.
"If I had never gotten pregnant, Drew and I . . ." She stopped, aghast at the stupidity of what she was about to say. "We wouldn't have gotten postpartum depression. Who even heard of such a thing?" She shouted, louder than she should have. Several members of the group jumped.
Mrs. Forks remained smiling. "Studies have shown one in ten new fathers have forms of PPD."
"If we hadn't gotten postpartum depression, then-" Mara told herself not to think about the words coming from her mouth "-Drew wouldn't have killed Regina, and he wouldn't have killed himself."
Eyebrows of a few of the newer attendees rose. "If I had never gotten pregnant, he would still be alive."
Mrs. Forks looked around the room. "Does anyone have something to say about that?"
After a moment, one of the members cleared her throat. "You meant to get pregnant? You . . . wanted to start a family?" She asked. Mara nodded. She knew what was coming. "Then how could you have known?"
Mara squeezed her hands between her thighs. She felt Caitlyn's hand on her shoulder. "Twenty-twenty hindsight is a powerful thing, Mara," Mrs. Forks said. "But the point was for Mara to tell us why she felt the way she did. Does anyone else have something to say."
"It isn't your fault," another woman said. "Not what you want to hear, I know . . . but it's true for all of us. I'm sure if any of us could go back to why we're here, we'd never let it happen."
"Very well said, Tina." Mrs. Forks looked back at Mara. "Do you believe you're at fault, Mara?"
Mara said nothing. She sat breathing in and out until the silence had gone on too long. Mrs. Forks waited patiently, but several of the attendees started fidgeting. "Maybe. We both tried to get help, but neither of us knew how bad it was for the other. If maybe I'd paid more attention to him, or tried to help Regina more . . ."
Nobody spoke. She could feel the tears growing. "Yes. I blame myself," She whimpered, and could just feel Caitlyn's hand squeeze her shoulder. "There were so many times I could have done something differently, but I didn't, and now they're dead. They're both dead!" she wailed, finally beginning to sob.
They gathered around her to touch her, saying it wasn't her fault, she couldn't have known, there was no way for her to anticipate such things. She slowly calmed herself down, weeping unabashedly, until she could open her eyes and look at the faces of the women around her. Eventually Mrs. Forks asked another woman to discuss her feelings.
Two hours after it began the session ended, and after hollow small talk with Caitlyn and a few other women, Mara drove home in the warm summer night. She sat in her dark garage silently, thinking about as little as possible.
Finally crossing the alley into the house, she opened the door and froze. The sound of crying had come from upstairs for a brief moment. She shut the door and ran upstairs, checking each of the rooms and being met with the same thing each time: emptiness. Unlike in her dreams, the sound did not reappear. Mara sniffed and rubbed her eyes, and got ready for work the next day.
An hour later she was lying in bed, unable or unwilling to fall asleep. The lights from the city came in her inadequately curtained window until she finally drifted off at some unknown time after midnight.
The small door, where she had stuffed Drew and the baby's things, opened before her. The crawlspace seemed larger. Sitting on her knees, feeling the hard wooden floor through her pants, Mara dragged one of the boxes toward her. It scraped forward until she had it next to her. She leaned forward and snagged another box, pulling it until it was out of the way. Silently, without pause, she removed box after box.
As she emptied the crawlspace the crying grew louder.
She pulled box after box out, far, far more than she had put in, but she didn't notice. They were big and small, heavy and light, and in all manner of unnatural shapes. The crawlspace had become a lengthy passage, many times longer than the end of her house. She would have tunneled through into the next house, and then the house after it. She spent hours pulling each box out and leaving it in the small hallway, which of course never filled -- any box she turned her back on to go back into the crawlspace disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind.
Days passed. The crying grew in intensity until she reached the final box. It rocked, as if a small form inside beat tiny clenched fists against the sides. Taking it carefully back into the hallway, through the endless cobweb crawlspace, she longed to pry it open and make the crying stop.
In the hallway finally, the crying tore through the box and bounced off the walls. Her head bent down until her nose was inches from the box's opening. She could just see inside.
But when she opened the box the crying was gone; it had never been there, and the box was empty.
The gasp Mara let out turned into a cry of pain and sorrow, lying in bed with the sheets tangled around her legs. The silence pressed on her lungs, and a sob escaped.
It was five-thirty Wednesday morning, too early to get up and do anything useful. She couldn't imagine trying to go back to sleep. The dream had been an elongated path of pulling boxes through a tight hallway, Regina's crying reaching her in waves.
At about six o'clock she sat across from the small door in the hallway. Early light was just caressing the curtains on the east side of the house. Summoning her will, she opened the crawlspace door quickly, imagining if she opened it slowly something would dart out before she could see it. The few boxes she had tucked away were barely visible, but she could clearly see the back of the space. She shut the door again and wandered upstairs to take a shower.
After the shower she felt better, more in control. She was still dragging the weight of the dream behind her, but the load was lighter. She stood in front of her bedroom closet until deciding she wanted to get a few more clothes, and went into the storage closet across from her bedroom, finding a few boxes she hadn't unpacked. After shuffling a few around, she found the one she was looking for, picked it up, stood, turned around, and felt something strike her forehead.
It was light, like someone blowing on her from a foot away, but she felt it and, when she refocused, she found something dangling in front of her nose. A string, knotted slightly at the end, trailed down from the ceiling. Frowning, she dropped the box of clothes in the hallway and went back in, taking the string between two fingers. She followed it up and found it connected to a panel in the ceiling which, she imagined, led to an attic.
An attic her house shouldn't have. She checked her watch but knew she had plenty of time. She pulled on the string hard enough to dislodge the panel and make the ladder swing down, nearly striking her and crushing one of the boxes in the closet.
After she removed the smashed box, she took a look. The space above the ladder was pitch-black. She climbed up, waving a hand through first and then sticking her head in. She couldn't detect anything around her, and found enough space to climb up. She tested the area above her head, and to her surprise found the roof high enough for her to stand. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but there wasn't much to look at. Beams, touches of insulation, more spiderwebs. She heard the wind whistling above her.
Climbing back down, she wondered why she hadn't noticed the attic before, and why she'd thought there hadn't been one. "I must have not given the place a very thorough look," she said to herself, letting the ladder and ceiling piece glide back up and slam shut. "What else is it hiding?" She asked as she buffed out the box the ladder had smashed, full of winter clothes. "More storage space is always better, I suppose." She brushed out her additional clothes and got dressed for work. She thought about the attic during her commute, stuck on it for some reason.
The glow of the computer in front of her gave her a push to forget her troubles, even if just for a few hours.
The thoughts of the attic only resurfaced while she rode the bus home, and there, surrounded by similar travelers, she couldn't help but think there was something else in the attic, something she had passed over when she looked, unnoticed because of the low light or her scattered brain or for some other reason.
When she got home she ate dinner quickly and went back into the closet on the upper level. The cord still hung, motionless, in the center of the dark room, ready for her to hold and pull. She fetched a flashlight from one of the boxes and drew its beam in a circle around the panel in the ceiling, waiting for something.
In time she grasped the end of the cord and pulled, moving aside to let the ladder clunk on the floor. She climbed it like a dog going up the steps, using her hands and feet. Halfway in, she moved the flashlight around her, finally seeing the attic in more than darkness. It wasn't as empty as she thought.
There was enough room to stand, but just barely, and she crouched more out of habit than necessity. Standing in the center, viewing the entire length and width of her house in one place, she turned in a circle, starting and finishing at the hole to the second floor. The light had caught a number of items, and she began to hunt them down, slowly gathering them in a small pile, her heartbeat speeding up and her skin prickling.
A ring, small and gold, as might be slipped onto a husband's finger after saying "I do," but prior to their first wedded kiss, unadorned and simple, yet bearing strength and simple complexity, like a husband might, lying on the floor of the attic, appearing heavy and strong. In reality, it was light and weak.
A plastic cup, somewhere between completely transparent and foggy white coloring, allowing someone to view a distorted and cloudy vision of whatever was on the other side, wondering why it was not filled with a cool drink or a hot liquid to perk oneself up in the morning. It stood upright next to the ring.
A bottle for medication, lacking a label, small and orange, as they all seemed to be. The pills it might have contained were all gone, consumed before the bottle was forgotten, or dragged away by pests after the attic had been sealed with the bottle inside. It sat on its side next to the plastic glass.
A small, pink blanket, with stars and balloons and frolicking animals stitched into its surface. It was large and expansive, big enough to cover the surface of a drab crib, or be wrapped around the child within the crib against the cold air. It was piled in a heap.
A pillow, not too big, with stripes. It would have looked perfectly in place against the inner side of the crib, there so the baby didn't hit her head if she rolled too energetically, as she was prone to doing when she cried. It was on its side, lying against the blanket.
A stuffed bear, like any child might have. It had soft brown fur on the outside, and a smiling animal face with two black glass eyes, looking ahead and watching everything occurring in front of it. It had seen a tragedy, unable to turn its head away, unable to close its eyes, unable to stop it. It sat next to the blanket and pillow with its legs out in front and its arms at its sides.
Mara's mind was white. She wanted to back away from the items back to haunt her, back to remind her of her tragedy, but her body was struck stiff. The items were divided into the dual camps: the ring, cup, and bottle, and the blanket, pillow, and bear. Both tried to reach out to her and have her pick them up and replace them downstairs in the bathroom, in the crib, on her husband's finger, next to her baby daughter.
Mara shook her head and shut her eyes against them, and tried to think critically. How had the items gotten into the attic? How had the attic appeared when she was certain one did not exist? How had she known there was something here she could not see, but would later find? Why had the unknown prospect of finding these items stuck in her head the entire day?
"Why?" Mara breathed out, face clenched, trying not to cry or scream. "Why are you here?" she asked the items, as if they could answer. "Tell me! TELL ME!" she gasped, kicking the items over into one big pile; they mingled but did not let up their silent, unheard, yet entirely perceived accusations. The kick had shoved them alongside one wall, and Mara took a step backwards away from them, stomach dropping away when she felt nothing under her heel.
A moment later she lay with a box under her back at the bottom of the ladder, head, hip, and both knees blaring in pain. The pain in her right knee rose over the rest, and she moved her vision down to find it twisted painfully, her foot caught on one of the ladder's bottom steps.
Whimpering, into the hallway, she was able to pull herself out. She lay on the floor, body screaming. She felt a bump growing on the back of her head, and the joints of her legs sinking under the pain from it. She stayed there, trying to catch her breath. She could see part of the flashlight's beam against the sloped roof of the attic through the hole in the closet's ceiling. She used her hands to drag herself to the railing next to the stairs, and tried to pull herself up without the use of one of her legs, but failed and fell again, facedown.
For an unknown amount of time she stayed there, lacking the energy to try again, feeling the floorboard's unborn splinters on her face. She risked a glance at her knee again, and felt the visceral reaction of seeing part of her body destroyed. She knew she'd torn something and couldn't put pressure on it. She had no idea what to do next.
She needed help; she needed to call someone. Her phone was on the kitchen table. Down the stairs, through the hard hallway, and in the center of the kitchen, each foot laden with potential agony.
She levered herself onto her better hip and spun slowly, pointing her head toward the stairs. When she let herself down her knee struck the floor and pain ran up her back, making her cry and bite her lip. Short, painful gasps escaped her, but she managed to get up to her hands and one knee, trying to keep the other off the ground. She pulled herself above the stairs and backed onto them, able to rise to one foot carefully on the first step, back to the drop.
Feeling the pain rise in her hip and ankle, she spun carefully, both hands on the railing. The change in elevation made the stairs wobble as dizziness overtook her, and her hands went white trying to keep her from tumbling forward to her death. Eventually the world righted itself, and she panted, telling herself not to look down at her knee. After a minute she let herself drop a step, and the shock up and down her body almost made her fall.
After another minute she dropped another step, and the cycle repeated itself for all eleven additional steps until she reached the ground floor. She didn't know if she had been unconscious, or had just taken her precious time on the stairs, but the sun had set and streetlamp light came in the open windows. With each slow motion her head felt like bursting, but she got into the kitchen on one leg, leaning against the wall.
She picked up her phone and fumbled her way into the dial pad, calling 911.
"I need an ambulance," she said to the operator. "I fell and twisted my knee." She paused. "I think I might have a concussion, too." Her injured brain prompted her to go on. "I wouldn't have called but I live alone . . . I . . . I think I was unconscious but I don't know-"
"Tell me your address, ma'am," the operator interrupted.
After giving the address, the operator told her an ambulance was on its way. He asked her for her phone number, and the nature of her injuries.
She woke up, still sitting in the chair at her kitchen table, knee bellowing with pain and all her other injuries adding their voices. It was after nine in the evening, and she'd missed a text message from Caitlyn. There was no ambulance; she heard no sirens, saw no lights. The house was dark, and the only sound was her groaning in pain.
She almost called 911 again, but then decided to call Caitlyn and beg her for help.
"Hello?"
"Caitlyn-"
The other woman heard the pain in her voice. "Mara? What happened?"
"Fell," she said, eyes shut, head throbbing, knee overpowering. "I twisted my knee and hit my head. I tried calling 911 and they said they sent an ambulance but that was over an hour ago, and I fell asleep while on the phone and I don't know if they just didn't do anything or they tried to get in . . ." she began crying. ". . . I can't move my leg, and my whole body hurts, I fell from the attic and I hurt my ankle and hips too, and-"
"Mara!" Caitlyn yelled, knocking Mara out of her trance. "Okay! I'll be there as fast as I can! Tell me your address!"
Mara gave her address for the second time, and let the rest of what Caitlyn said wash over her. She tried not to fall asleep.
The shaking hurt her, but she was too weak to stop it. When she finally opened her eyes she saw Caitlyn standing in front of her, frantic.
"Good God, Mara, your knee!" Caitlyn said when she helped the woman up. "My car's right out front. I'm so sorry I took so long; I was driving so fast I must have missed a dozen turns!"
"What time is it?" Mara said, through thick lips.
"After ten-thirty. When did you fall?"
"I don't know," Mara said, her words slurring. "After dinner."
"Okay, come on," Caitlyn said, helping her into the passenger seat of her car, careful of her leg. "Let's just get you to the hospital. I want you to stay awake for me, okay? Talk about something. Talk about . . ." Caitlyn paused. "How did you fall?"
She risked a glance at Mara when she didn't answer. The memory of screaming and kicking the six items in the attic had come crashing back to Mara, and she wasn't sure if she could tell the truth.
"Attic above the closet upstairs," she said finally. "Putting some stuff up there . . . didn't look where I was going, fell down the ladder."
Caitlyn gasped. Mara felt drowsy against the cushion of the seat, safe under the pressure of the seat belt.
"No Mara, no! Don't fall asleep! It could be bad for you!" After a moment of silence Caitlyn reached over and shook Mara. "I told you to stay awake!"
"Okay, okay," Mara said, pain in her knee pushing out any thought of sleep. "Okay. Thank you."
"Don't think about, just concentrate on staying awake. Tell me about your new house."
"It's small." Mara's eyes were closed, and she began to accept they would stay closed no matter what she did. "Little kitchen, little bedrooms. There's a crawlspace in between the kitchen and the dining room I didn't notice until last week . . . put some of Drew's and the baby's stuff in there so I would have to look at it. I found the attic this morning. Didn't know it was there either. I don't know how I missed seeing it. It's pretty small but it's not like I need a lot of space anyway, right?"
Caitlyn gasped again. The hospital grew closer.
"I miss them," Mara continued, now almost verbalizing every thought she had. "I want my family back. I found things in the attic that reminded me of them, like a wedding ring and a stuffed bear, just like the one my mother got Regina." Caitlyn said nothing, trying to navigate her way into the parking lot. "I think it was the same one. I think somehow all of those things were put up there for me to find. To punish me."
The next morning Caitlyn helped Mara into her bed. Painkillers flooded Mara's system, a brace was on her knee after being diagnosed with a torn MCL, and she was exhausted after a night of monitoring. The hospital let her sleep after determining she wasn't at danger, but still sleep came slowly. She heard Caitlyn call Mara's boss and let him know what happen and then let herself out of the house, and fell asleep, back somewhere she could call comfortable.
The first dream introduced something new. Her legs -- both of them -- felt locked in place, unable to bend at the knee or even the ankle, sometimes limiting her movement to just turning at the waist and moving her arms, as if she became a statue from the hips down. The black plastic brace had twisted and grown in her mind until it seemed like it was going to cover her entire body.
The dreams took place in the attic. It was much bigger than real life, just as the crawlspace had been. The crying came from one corner.
When she could, she limped toward it, dragging her leg behind her. The crying went from a tired whimper to a shocked shriek, to a hungry wail, and back again, rising and falling in intensity. She stumbled forward, the sensation of pain given to her by the dream but not actually felt, until she reached the corner, where she found only an empty crib. They crying had moved.
Over and over she chased it around the ever-growing interior of the stuffy attic, never able to catch it. It never differed. She could never get it to stop, no matter how hard she tried.
A few hours after noon she woke up with her knee and head hurting, condensation from an ice pack on her knee soaking the sheets.
She saw Caitlyn had poured her a tall glass of water. A bottle of Vicodin stood next to it, with instructions to take no more than four a day. She almost knocked the glass, and the bottle of pills, off her nightstand before getting herself under control. Instead of taking any drugs she tried to rise and go downstairs for something to eat, but the pain in her knee was too great. Sitting on the edge of her bed, gazing at the swollen spot on her knee and the brace cutting into it, she knew it was only a matter of time before she gave in, so she put a few pills in her mouth and dry-swallowed them before taking the glass and drinking a few sips.
She fell asleep again, and woke up without remembering the dreams for once. It was almost night, and now her stomach disturbed her the most.
Pushing herself up again, she took her crutches and carefully made her way to the stairs. She glared at them from the top for a few seconds, trying to recall Caitlyn's instructions. She got down faster than the day before and with considerably less pain, with one hand on the railing and both crutches under her other arm and one foot in front of the other. She rested on the landing.
She made herself a meal consisting of mostly comfort food and put herself in front of the television with a new ice pack on her knee, aware watching wheel of fortune would be one of the most painless choices among the things she could do. After eating she felt like taking a shower but didn't have the energy to get back up the stairs yet, so she let herself sink into the couch as primetime came on.
Halfway into a droning, formulaic police procedural she glanced around the living room and was shocked to find a door on the wall next to her.
She looked at it as she felt a band tighten around her stomach. The crawlspace maybe. The attic she wasn't sure about. This door was new to its wall.
She managed to get herself up and look at it straight-on as the TV blared. She had never seen it before, she knew. Her house was changing. There was no way this door had existed before, she would have seen it. In fact, there's nowhere this door could lead -- the wall it was attached to was part of the exterior. It could only lead to a hot summer night and allow the bugs to enter, but Mara could tell it didn't. What would she find? Would it reveal a skeleton, glaring out at her? Would her husband's empty body tumble out and knock her over, dead eyes taking her in? Would she begin to hear crying in a moment, and open the door to find an empty crib?
After balancing, she reached a hand to the cut-glass knob, and rattled it. It wasn't locked. She hadn't really expected it to be, but she had hoped. Now she knew she would have to open it.
She pulled it open, and the person inside looked just as surprised as she did. She stumbled backwards, losing her crutches and falling on her tailbone. She started to push herself away, and then realized it wasn't another person but a mirror attached to the back wall of the small closet. A rung for coats was under a small shelf, and inside there was nothing but dust.
Groaning, grumbling at the new pain in her butt, she gathered her crutches and rose to standing, sticking her tongue out at the mirror. She hadn't seen her reflection since the morning before.
She saw dark circles under her eyes and pallid, sagging skin, not to mention the brace. There was a crack on the mirror, and it cut through the reflection of her forehead. She tried brushing it away and immediately felt silly.
After gazing into the mirror for another minute and resolving to get a little cleaned up, she gripped the edge of the door and slammed it shut with all the energy she could muster; the wall shook. She turned the television off and dragged herself upstairs, going into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face, at the very least. Her knee was beginning to hurt again, so she took more drugs and fell backwards onto her bed. She still heard the sound of the new closet slamming shut. She called her sister to check in and reassure Annie she was doing fine, but the call went unanswered.
Early the next morning, after breakfast, she looked out the window and found a pleasant view of blue skies, puffy clouds, and gently blowing trees. It was stuffy inside the house, so she braced herself and tried to push up a window in the parlor.
It had been a night of dreams in strange colors, frequent awakenings, and a sore knee. After waking up she downed her drugs, and forced herself into the shower, carefully removing the knee brace before turning it on. The warm water calmed her considerably, and by the time she slowly levered herself out she felt her best since falling from the attic. She managed to make herself a cup of coffee and toast, and now she was trying to haul open the window.
She took a step back, confused. It was stuck fast. She inspected the lock, trying to open it in both directions, tried rattling the frame to get it unstuck, and looked for anything jammed in its way, but there was nothing. She hooked her fingers under the windowpane and strained, clenching her teeth, not even able to move it an inch. She pulled and pulled, and only stopped when she heard crying behind her.
The sound made her gasp, and tear out a fingernail. Cursing, she looked around her in the parlor, and through to the living room. It sounded as if the noise had come from directly behind her; exactly where the new door had appeared in the wall the night before. She covered her eyes. All the looseness and relaxation from her hot shower and simple breakfast were gone; replaced by the old feelings.
She watched the door to the closet, wondering if she would hear the sound again. It was just a trick of the mind, she thought. Something from outside that sounded like a baby.
Of course, just then the door to the closet shook, hit from the other side by a strong force.
She jumped, startled, unable to understand. She watched it from across the span of her house, the distance stretching, ranging from mere inches to hundreds of miles in her vision at the same time. She blinked her eyes and looked away, trying to draw blood back into her face, and the door was struck again, this time startling Mara enough to make her wobble on her crutches. She righted herself and darted her gaze at the door.
It hadn't moved, at least. Still, even in the cheery morning light it appeared shadowed. She went toward it, taking careful motions in her crutches, and stopped halfway. She'd seen the glass handle jiggle.
It continued rattling in the frame, shaking and turning slightly, and Mara's vision narrowed until it was all she could see, cutting out the rest of her surroundings and the light in them, making it all dark. The jiggling stopped, and for a few seconds she thought it was over.
The knob snapped to the side and the door swung open, catching Mara just as she was relaxing.
Like last night, she saw only herself, reflected in the mirror hung at the back of the closet. The door bumped the wall, fully open, and halted there.
She inched her shaking crutches forward slowly. Her entire body felt compressed, smaller, trapped in place; something she could not see drew her into the closet.
She got herself to stop and let out a breath, unaware she had been holding it in. She heard a sharp splitting sound, and saw a new line had appeared on the mirror. More cracks sounded, splitting the mirror into tiny pieces, still attached to each other somehow, until finally they turned to dust and ran across the floor at her, ending just at the edge of her feet. She hadn't noticed this, all of her attention instead on the words written on the wall behind the mirror.
"MOTHER," and under it "WIFE." She did not dare get herself any closer, but she would bet her life the words were written in dark, dried blood.
A fierce suction pulled the glass shards on the floor into the closet in a blurring, shimmering vortex, pulling her hair forward and putting her off-balance, knocking her forward to her stomach a few feet from the closet. The air rushing past her, more and more, roared. The closet's hungry mouth yearned to taste her, but she gripped the carpet with her hands, unable to take her eyes away. The glass shards assembled themselves into thousands of glittering teeth around the edge and inside of the closet, ready for her to tumble in, ready to slice her to pieces and paint the closet with more blood.
She put her face against the carpet and wondered if she should let go, if she should let it devour her.
Before she had the chance to decide the closet's door swung shut faster and harder than she had slammed it the night before, cutting off the rushing air and furious sound.
Mara kept her place, prostrate before it, for a long time, hair tangled around her like a net, face pressed into the carpet.
She needed air. She pushed herself up with her hands, keeping her eyes shut and away from the closet. Searching with her hands, she picked up the crutches and slowly brought herself to standing. Her knee hurt but she decided not to do anything about it. Shaking, standing in the center of the living room, she could almost imagine the silence ending at the slow whimper of a baby's cry, slowly building until it got her to move.
The silence continued. She couldn't get the window to open so she went to the back door, out to the patio. From the window she could see a growth on the back side of the house, where the new closet led, perfectly in place and appearing as if it had always been there. It was faded just like the light blue siding around it, and the tar shingles looked pounded by the rain and sun.
Desiring to take a closer look at it from the outside, Mara pushed the door open only to run into it. The door, like the window, was stuck. She jiggled the handle, confused. She tried the lock a few times and tried opening it in both positions. Shaking it back and forth, Mara felt herself tense up, curling forward, pulling and pushing on the handle with more and more energy, rattling it in its frame and making a picture on the wall nearby shake, until she gave up and backed away. Without thinking she turned and walked past the stairs to the front door, trying to pull it open. It, like the back door, and the window, refused to move.
The windows, the doors. She'd tried everything. Even the small window in the bathroom, too small for her to even try to fit through, and too high up on the wall besides. They would not open.
Sitting on the couch, crutches leaning next to her, Mara could do nothing but look through the dirty glass of the parlor window. She saw someone pass on the street and wondered -- should she scream -- if the person would even be able to hear her.
Coming up with an idea, she pulled herself into the kitchen and snatched up her cell phone. She quickly dialed her sister, and listened to it ring.
And ring, and ring, and ring. The noise became background to Mara's thoughts.
Somehow her house had trapped her inside. She could no longer dance around the idea: something was happening to her and it had to do with this house. She may have been able to ignore everything else, but the closet's show removed all doubt from her mind. She wondered if she was hallucinating.
Shaking her head, she knew she could not have hallucinated such a thing. If she was hallucinating the closet, then she must have also been hallucinating the crawlspace, and the attic, and her injuries, and everything else since then. For a moment she touched her head and her arms, wondering if she was really locked in a padded room somewhere. Despite herself, she scoffed at the idea.
Then what? she asked herself. How could this be happening? She tried to recall science classes, or any natural reasoning for why there was suddenly no way out of her house. A pressure imbalance, wood expanding until there was no way for doors or windows to move. Bugs, somehow. And the new additions to the house? she asked. What scientific explanation is there for them? Has there ever been a study on closets that try to suck you in and eat you?
She glanced at the closet door. It had remained closed since the event over an hour ago.
And the items in the attic. The attic that shouldn't be there with items that shouldn't be there.
She came to realize the phone, still in her hand and pressed against her ear, was silent. Her sister hadn't answered and the phone had hung itself up. She could have called Caitlyn, but didn't want to bother her again after her injury, even though she knew Caitlyn would have heard no protestations. She could have also called Jann, but the memory of the night a little over a week ago was still too fresh. She had apologized, yes, but healing needed time. So she let her phone drop next to her on the couch and went to the front door again.
She could see out the small window in the middle, and could turn and rattle the handle to her heart's content, but the door refused to move. She couldn't tell if the latch wasn't retracting, or if the door's entire frame was fused together, but it seemed like the latter. It was as if she pulled on the entire wall when she pulled on the door's handle.
All the walking and worrying and pressure had left her tired, and her knee hurting more. She took herself up the stairs, still going carefully but getting more used to the motion, took Vicodin, and fell asleep on her bed with the mid-afternoon sun coming in one of the immovable windows.
Pounding on the door with all her might, unable to even budge it the smallest amount, shouting with all of her slow and pointless energy, Mara could not let the outside world know of her existence. As she railed against the hard stone of the door, the crying began again, from down the hall. Turning, she found the hallway so much longer than it should be.
Dragging dead legs behind her, she sought the source of the sound. As it always did, it moved, making her chase it around the house unendingly, until, after hours, she found it. It was in no room, but instead behind the wall under the stairs, as if the thing making the sound had been buried alive during the house's construction, and lived still.
With her hands she beat on it until the paneling gave way, revealing a dark hole leading her down under the house. The sound had moved, and now came from somewhere below her. She stepped in and fell, suddenly waking up in bed. Her heart and head pounded, and she tried to sit up too quickly, bothering her leg and only succeeding in making her dizzy. She took a pill and sat back in bed. It was Saturday now, and she wondered if she would be able to make it to work on Monday. She wasn't able to drive, but she took the bus anyway, and the effects of the concussion were all but gone; it was really only her knee still bothering her. It would take a bit of concentration, but with my crutches it would be fine, she thought, until the events of the day before returned.
She got up slowly, swinging her leg to the floor and barely missing the wall. She imagined the pain from hitting the wall with her foot and grimaced. She forced herself to shower, just to try and regain some semblance of a natural state. She could barely look herself in the mirror, and just wished it wouldn't fall to pieces. She tried not to think about the windows or doors, and go about her day as if nothing was the matter, as if nothing had trapped her inside her own home. It worked until she went down the stairs and stopped by the back door.
After inspecting it, slowly, trying to take in every detail, she steadied herself and reached a hand to the doorknob, turning it smoothly, and pushing it. It didn't move, and she pushed harder and harder until her whole body strained, and she cried out in agony at the thought of something keeping her inside. Backing away, she planted her crutches behind her and kicked with her good leg, not expecting anything to happen, and getting exactly nothing.
She almost wished it would tear open and begin to suck her in, as the closet had done. Then, at least, she would be free.
How? she asked herself, again. She would have asked why, but she couldn't deny she knew. She was being punished.
She tried to clear her mind and turn around, heading to the kitchen for coffee and some food. She wondered if there was any way for her to contact the outside world, any at all. The windows and doors wouldn't open, and the single call she'd attempted hadn't gone through. Internet? she wondered, passing the stairs. Her body stopped moving.
At first she didn't know why, until she felt her hands shake and her mouth dry out. Her neck felt stiff and wooden, unable to turn. It felt like something was dragging her eyeballs out, and she tried to lick her lips.
Under the stairs, in the wall, there was a new door, across the small hallway from the crawlspace. She looked at it out of the corner of her eyes, unable to turn and face it straight-on, should it decide to gobble her up before she had a chance to run. Like the crawlspace, and the closet door, it was made of old wood and had a clear glass knob in the shape of a crystal. Like the crawlspace and closet, it looked like it belonged just as much as anything else, and like the crawlspace and the closet, she had never seen it before.
Her crutches took her into the kitchen automatically, and she sat at the table, letting them drop to the floor with a clatter. She gripped the sides of the table, straining.
I'm going crazy.
She put her head on the table and stayed there until the fear and terror and panic started to die. As her body relaxed, piece by piece, her stomach spoke up. She rose to prepare herself breakfast, morning light coming in the window and making it look like nothing at all was the matter.
She stood in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal in her hands, unable to eat. Her mouth was too dry; her stomach squeezed itself into a ball.
Abandoning the bowl and snatching up crutches with stiff, unyielding fingers, she went back to the hallway and took another look at the door. It should not have been there, but it fit like a puzzle piece one did not realize was missing.
She wondered if she dared reach and take the handle. She wondered, if she did dare, if the handle would even turn, or the door would even open, or if it did, it would just be another closet bearing words written in blood.
Instead, she went to the front door and tried pulling it open once more, getting the same result as the day before. She briefly rested her head against the window, wondering if anybody could even see her.
After resigning herself, and taking a long breath, she clumped to the new door under the stairs and, after steadying her hand, turned the handle, pulling the door open.
It wasn't a closet, but for a moment she thought it was nothing at all but a little stump of a hallway, until she saw steps leading down in the same direction as the stairs, into a dark basement. There was a bare bulb in the ceiling, with a chain leading to it, and she pulled it. The harsh light revealed wooden steps taking her down to a cement basement, devoid of any other light and covered in sharp shadows.
She stood leaning on her crutches at the top of the staircase, looking down them. She knew she had to go down; she knew she had to find out what the basement hid, but she waited and tried to find some semblance of strength.
The creak came through the wall, and her head turned just as the door slammed shut, blowing air at her and making her push herself away against the wall to avoid a strike, and she lost one of her crutches. Her frantic grab missed, and she watched it bounce and slide down the steps through her squinted eyes. It's easier with just one anyway, she told herself, yet felt her jaw set when she looked at the crutch at the bottom of the steps, half in shadow.
Her heart pounded and her first step was shaky. The step creaked, and even though it was a perfectly natural sound it made Mara stop and collect herself.
Halfway down the bulb started to flicker. She shut her eyes against the possibility of being plunged into darkness as it leapt on her, muttering under her breath a prayer or a plea to the bulb. She reached the bottom and it stopped flickering, throwing its meek, meager illumination onto the concrete.
She stooped to pick up her crutch and froze when the sound came.
It washed over her as she stood, waves of sensation going up and down her back and through her entire body, eyes clenched shut. The baby screamed at the top of her lungs without pausing for breath, so long Mara began to feel dizzy and out of breath herself.
It continued on and on, and Mara let her crutches slam to the ground, putting her hands over her ears, trying to get it to stop. She sat back against the wall with her knees pulled up, whimpering as the crying continued, digging her nails into the skin of her skull and gritting her teeth, but still the crying continued. It even seemed to grow louder.
"Stop! Stop!" She cried, trying to raise her voice over the screaming. "Stop!" She finally wrenched her eyes open and saw a crib at the other end of the basement. It rocked, buffeted by a force residing inside. Shutting her eyes again, feeling forward, relying on only one leg, she closed the distance between her and the crib; the crying grew louder still. Drawing her nails forward across the hard cement, feeling the crying grind her down like it had before, hands and good knee hurting on the floor, she finally reached the crib and climbed up its padded side to look in.
The crying came from inside though it was empty. The force moving it had vanished or stopped but the sound emitting continued unabated. She gripped the edge of the crib and pulled on it, imagining her daughter inside, wailing ceaselessly, no matter what she or her husband did, no matter what their medicated and diseased minds tried, no matter what time of day, the girl cried and cried. Until Mara had enough. Until she placed the pillow over her daughter's face. Until the crying stopped.
"Please," Mara gasped, the crying assaulting her from the empty crib. "I'm sorry." She could not even hear her own voice. "I'm sorry." Tears fell onto the padded surface. The crib was missing a blanket, and a pillow, and a brown teddy bear, and a girl inside. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!" Mara shouted, screamed, trying to beat the crying with her own volume. "Please stop! Stop! Stop!"
Her frantic shouting and crazed energy tipped the crib forward onto her, and the crying died.
Though light, the crib made her knee blaze with pain. She was on her back, the crib on her legs, in the now quiet and desolate basement. Her dead -- murdered -- daughter's crying came from inside her own head. Weeks of it, in their old home, never a moment of peace or silence.
She sobbed, an arm over her eyes. She had once thought she could not cry, a few weeks ago. After moving into the house. The sadness had been a part of her, but it all burned into irreplaceable sorrow and madness and guilt.
"Why?" She wondered, voice like a shard of glass, tears soaking her cheeks. "Why did I do it? How could I have done it?"
But it was over and done, now. The girl was gone. The crying in her mind was ending, dwindling away. Her breathing calmed. She felt herself returning to the state of mind she'd existed for weeks. The bulb, out-of-sight, flickered, drawing her attention up toward the stairs.
Under the stairs, shoved into a corner, was a cot, and on the cot was a body, mostly covered by a sheet. One single white arm had fallen, brushing its knuckles on the concrete. A gold ring on its finger.
Mara shut her eyes, mind blank. She opened them again to confirm what she saw. Her entire body had come under the spell of the form resting on the cot, covered over like it had been taken into a hospital after she had tried to wake him, and his heart had failed, and a nurse had taken the sheet and drawn it up over his head, leaving Mara alone twice.
A clatter made her jerk her head up, unprepared for what she would see. A rain of small white specks came from under the sheet, funneling onto the floor, a pile rising and overflowing, spreading a white tide over the floor toward her. She struggled under the crib, thinking she would drown, and after a moment kicked the crib away and heard it strike the wall. She wasn't fast enough to get herself up before the objects reached her. White pills flowed over her hands, rising over the swell of her knuckles and bouncing off her wrist, growing more and more numerous until she could not see the gray floor. They flowed from under the sheet covering her husband without ceasing.
She tried to get up from her hands and knees but stumbled, hitting the ground on her shoulder and crushing the pills flowing under her. She scrambled to rise again, ignoring the extra pain, trying to brush the pills away. They never stopped. She remembered pouring similar pills into the glass of water she had brought her husband, just enough or so she thought to keep him from waking when she enacted a final solution to silence the crying, only to come back into the bedroom to find froth coming from his mouth, his body jerking erratically. Only to watch the ambulance arrive and ferry him to the hospital. Only to watch the nurse cover his slack face.
She swept her arms in arcs, trying to clear the pills away and let her gain her ground, but there were too many. She crawled toward the steps, sliding over the weapon she had used to kill her husband, unable to think for the sound of the pills rolling.
She reached her crutches, pulling them up from the turmoil of the flowing pills, and began to get her footing despite them, and the bulb at the top of the stairs died.
The sound of the pills ceased. She could see nothing, but she wondered if the pills had all disappeared as well. Trying to calm her pounding heart, swallowing with a dry throat and moving with shaking limbs, she took the first step.
The unmistakable sound of a body rising from a bed froze her. Feet slid across the cold stone floor, rounding the stairs, mere feet away.
Panic shoved all other thoughts from her, and she surged up the steps, all of her concentration guiding her bad leg and the crutches, missing steps and stumbling and hearing the bottom step creak with old, cold weight. A crutch fell from her grip and she let it go, forgetting it as soon as it left her hand, using the free hand to claw her way up the staircase -- it had grown longer, extending up forever, and now she heard the crying as well, and her brace changed shape, tangling her legs and making them stiff. Images in red and black flashed in front of her, showing her preparing her husband's final drink, and finally getting the crying to end, and agreeing with the police investigator when he suggested her husband had killed her child, her daughter, and then killed himself, and getting the insurance check in the mail, and moving into the smaller, cheaper house she was now trapped inside.
She hit the landing; silence. She pushed the door open, half expecting it to remain shut and leave her in the darkness forever, but it rotated with a creak. As she stepped into the sunlight of her hallway she heard the steps continue on the stairs behind her, and the panic returned.
She limped to the back door and pounded on it, banging with all of her might, using all of her weight and fear to batter on it, but it would not move. She turned and used her crutch to slam the basement door shut before turning back to the sealed exit. Her breath came fast and ragged, and she braced the crutch behind her, rising onto only her bad leg and kicking with frantic might. The door, the wall, the entire house shook, and she kicked again and again, shouting, crying, screaming, until the door snapped open and she fell through it, losing her final crutch behind her.
Free. She sobbed, facedown, energy seeping out of her. She thought she felt the warmth of the sun, and the cool stones of the patio, until she looked up.
Her face sagged, but the truth did not strike her. She looked through her hallway, from the front door to the back, and forever more, an endless path running only through her house. She slowly turned and looked behind her, at the crutch, and the endless path through the open doors, from the back to the front.
"How?" She asked out loud. Still the true realization of what she saw eluded her. "I opened the door. I opened it!"
The truth was just beginning to appear when, in all versions of the house behind and in front of her, the door to the basement flowed open without sound, and, just before shutting her eyes, she saw a form step out.
"I'm sorry!" She screamed at the floor. "I'm sorry! It was me! It was all me! I did it! I'm guilty! I killed you! Both of you! I killed you! I'm guilty! It's my fault! I'm guilty! I'm guilty!"
She waited. Waited for a cold hand on her neck, or a blow on her head, or to be turned over and have pills poured down her throat until she choked. They did not come.
Shaking, crying, hair in her eyes, she looked up, seeing blue sky and green trees, the stones of her patio. The guilt settled on her.