Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Fourteen — Eyes

Kendra POV

By the third day the house had started to feel less like a place I was visiting and more like a place that was deciding whether to keep me.

That was the best way I could describe the process of settling into somewhere new — not that you settled into it, exactly, but that you and the space went through a mutual evaluation period where both parties made small adjustments until the fit was acceptable. I'd learned where the kitchen light switch was without looking. I'd learned that the third stair from the top had a specific creak that announced your arrival to anyone on the upper floor, which I'd filed as useful information. I'd learned that my floor-to-ceiling bedroom window caught the sunrise if the clouds broke at the right angle, which they had exactly once in three days, and it had been worth it.

I'd also learned that the guest house across the pool looked different when it was empty.

Not bad different. Just — present in its absence, if that made any sense. Bryan and my dad had left Friday evening for their camping trip and by Saturday morning the property had rearranged itself around the gap of them, the way a room rearranged itself when furniture was moved. The guest house windows were dark across the water. The stone path alongside the pool had no foot traffic on it. Kyle was somewhere in the house doing whatever Kyle did, and my mom and I had been existing in the specific warm quiet of two people who didn't need to fill space between them.

It was peaceful.

It was fine.

I was fine about the guest house being dark and I had confirmed this multiple times and was fully at peace with it.

"Kendra." My mother appeared in my bedroom doorway at ten in the morning with her car keys already in her hand and the expression of a woman who had been mentally composing a grocery list since approximately six a.m. "Get dressed. I need you."

"For?"

"Thanksgiving is Monday and I haven't bought a single thing." She said this with the calm of someone describing a minor logistical situation rather than a family-scale emergency. "We're going to the store."

"Now?"

"Ideally five minutes ago, yes."

Seattle from the outside was something I'd absorbed through a windshield on the way in, the outskirts of it — the suburbs bleeding into the wooded transition zone that led to the property — giving me exactly enough to know it was large and grey and surrounded by water that appeared at unexpected angles between the buildings when the road climbed high enough.

From inside it was something else entirely.

We'd taken the highway in from the wooded outskirts, and the city had assembled itself around us in stages — the neighborhoods first, then the density picking up, then the skyline suddenly just there across the water as we came over a rise that the map had not adequately warned me about. I pressed my face against the passenger window like I was fourteen and didn't care about it.

It was massive.

Not massive like Phoenix was massive — Phoenix spread outward, horizontal, the kind of city that expanded into the desert because it could. Seattle was vertical in the way cities were vertical when geography said you couldn't keep going sideways — hills, actual hills, the kind you drove up at angles that seemed structurally ambitious, and at the top of them the water on multiple sides and the mountains behind that, real ones, the snow-capped kind that sat at the edge of the horizon and looked like something out of a screensaver.

"Mom," I said. "It's beautiful."

She glanced over with the small smile of someone who'd already done this assessment and agreed. "I know, baby."

We drove for a while without any real destination — she took us through a few neighborhoods, the older residential streets where the houses sat close together on narrow lots and the trees were enormous and the coffee shops had lines out the door at ten-thirty on a Saturday. The Pike Place Market area where the street was cobbled and the tourists were present despite November and the whole thing smelled like fish and flowers in an oddly pleasant combination. The waterfront, where the Sound sat dark and cold and the ferries crossed it with steady purpose.

I was reaching for my phone to take a picture when I felt it.

The first time it was almost nothing — barely a sensation, barely even registerable as a thing that had happened versus a thing I'd imagined. The slight prickling awareness of the back of my neck. The small animal certainty, arriving without any supporting evidence, that something was paying attention to me specifically.

I looked around.

The street was busy. A Saturday crowd doing Saturday things — the coffee line, the tourist groups, a couple with a stroller, two older men in heavy coats having a conversation outside a bookshop. Nothing looking at me. Nobody whose attention I could point to.

I looked back at the waterfront.

You're tired, I told myself. You've been unpacking for three days in a city you don't know yet. You're just adjusting.

The feeling didn't entirely agree.

My mother was pointing out something across the water — the ferry terminal, the Olympic Mountains behind it — and I let the conversation come back and held the feeling at arm's length and mostly succeeded.

The grocery store was a large Pacific Northwest chain that took up enough square footage to contain several of the apartment buildings we'd driven past, and my mother walked through its automatic doors with the focused energy of a woman who had fed a household of six for twenty years and was not intimidated by the scale of what she was about to do.

I pushed the first cart.

She pushed the second one.

This was established in the first aisle as a logistical necessity rather than an affectation, which I understood better with every subsequent aisle.

The turkey was first. It was in the refrigerated section at the back of the store, in the way that turkeys always were, arranged in a kind of cold case hierarchy. My mother considered the options with the particular focus of an expert making a technical decision and selected the largest available bird — forty pounds, which she lifted from the case with the practiced ease of a woman who had been lifting large turkeys for many years — and placed it in my cart where it took up approximately forty percent of the available space.

"Mom," I said, looking at it.

"We have a full table this year," she said, already moving.

The ham appeared in the next cold case. It was, proportionally, enormous. I watched her evaluate it and select accordingly.

"Who is coming?" I asked, doing the math between the turkey, the ham, and the number of people I was aware of in our household.

"Friends," she said pleasantly. "Get two bags of those."

The those in question was a large bag of russet potatoes. I put two in the cart and kept moving.

The sides accumulated with the efficiency of a military operation. Sweet potatoes — two bags. Green beans — four cans, then a reconsideration, six cans. Cream of mushroom soup in quantities that suggested she was preparing for a cream of mushroom shortage. Stuffing, cornbread mix, cranberry sauce in both whole-berry and jellied because apparently some people had opinions about this that needed to be accommodated. Gravy. Rolls — the kind that came in the tube and the kind that came fresh-baked from the bakery section, and also a separate bag of dinner rolls for reasons that weren't fully explained.

By the time we reached the dessert aisle I had personally lost track of how much food was in these two carts.

Pies. Three pumpkins, three apple, one pecan, and a sweet potato pie that my mother said was non-negotiable. A cheesecake. Whipped cream in two cans. A bag of something called a dessert bar that my mother put in the cart and I didn't question because at this point the volume had moved past the category of things I was going to have opinions about.

I stood back and looked at the two carts at the end of the dessert aisle and felt the particular feeling of someone who was about to check out with a quantity of food that might prompt a conversation from the cashier.

"Mom," I said. "This is — a lot."

"It's Thanksgiving," she said.

"It's Thanksgiving for like five people who live with us and however many friends are coming."

"It's fine, Kendra."

I looked at the cart with the forty pound turkey.

I looked at the other cart, which had the ham and the structural foundations of six different side dishes.

I was about to say something else when I noticed the couple two aisles over.

They had three carts.

I looked past them — a family group at the end of the row had two carts of their own, equally loaded. I did a slow survey of the store from where I was standing, doing a rough count of the quantities in the carts around me, and arrived at a conclusion that genuinely surprised me: we were not unusual. Not by the standard of this store, this weekend, this city. People here apparently shopped for Thanksgiving at a scale that was in a completely different category from the holiday shopping I'd grown up around.

I raised my eyebrows.

Big families, I thought. There must be a lot of very big families in Seattle.

"Okay," I said. "Fine."

My mother smiled. We headed for the registers.

The feeling came back in the parking lot.

We'd checked out — the cashier had not batted an eye, had in fact made a comment about it being a good haul, which suggested this was within normal parameters for her shift — and we were loading bags into the SUV when it started again. The prickling. The specific not-quite-verifiable certainty that the back of my neck was doing something intentional.

I straightened up from loading a bag and looked at the parking lot.

Cars. People loading groceries. A family with a cart, a man on his phone, a couple walking toward the store. The grey November sky pressing down over everything, the kind of cloud cover that didn't suggest rain so much as permanent ambient dimness. Normal. A completely normal parking lot doing completely normal parking lot things.

Nothing looking at me.

Nothing I could point to.

I turned back to the car. Picked up another bag. Told my nervous system to stand down and receive a neutral response from it.

We drove back through Seattle — my mother took a slightly different route back, through the university district where Crestwood University sat, and I looked at it through the window without particularly wanting to feel anything about it and felt things about it anyway. Large campus. Stone buildings and newer glass ones existing in close proximity. Students on the walkways despite the cold, the particular uniform of college students in November — big coats, coffee cups, the specific combination of exhausted and young that only existed in that window of life.

I was going to be one of those people on those walkways in a week.

I was going to be at the same school as Bryan, and apparently a significant portion of this city's population given the shopping habits I'd observed today, and I was going to have to build something new from scratch again.

I looked at the campus until we passed it.

The wooded road back to the property was a different atmosphere entirely — the trees closing back around the lane, the reinforced gate responding to my mother's transmitter, the house appearing at the end of the driveway with its amber windows lit against the dark grey afternoon. The feeling that had been sitting at the edge of my awareness all day dissolved somewhere in the tree-lined corridor, like it had been cut off at the source.

I noticed that. I didn't know what to do with it, so I put it in the file where I kept things I wasn't ready to examine yet and carried grocery bags into the house.

The guest house across the pool was still dark.

Bryan and dad wouldn't be back until Sunday.

I set the groceries on the kitchen counter and helped my mother organize the refrigerator to accommodate a forty pound turkey and the full contents of a medium-sized grocery store, and tried to remember exactly what the back of my neck had been doing in that parking lot and whether it had felt like anything I'd felt before.

It hadn't.

That was the thing that stayed with me, quietly, through the whole evening.

It hadn't felt like anything I could name. It had just felt like eyes.