Second Chance at Five

The ceiling fan clicked. That was the first thing I noticed. A steady click, click, click, like a metronome counting down something I could not name. I lay on the plaid couch in our living room with my cheek pressed against a cushion that smelled of laundry detergent and my mother's hand lotion, and I knew, before I opened my eyes, that something was wrong. I was twenty-five years old. I had a lease in a city three hundred miles away. I had a phone with forty-seven unread emails and a dentist appointment I kept postponing. And yet the cushion beneath my cheek was the same one from the house on Cedar Lane, the one my mother sold when I was nineteen, and the fan above me was the same fan that used to rattle in the summer heat. I sat up too fast. My body moved differently than it should have. My legs were short. My hands were small, the fingers stubby and soft, the nails bitten down to the quick. I looked at them for a long moment before I understood what I was seeing. The living room was exactly as I remembered it. The brass floor lamp with the crooked shade. The bookshelf where my mother kept paperback mysteries and a single framed photograph of her parents. The window unit humming in the kitchen, struggling against a July afternoon that pressed against the glass like something alive. And outside, the sound of tires on gravel. I knew that sound. I had heard it in dreams for twenty years. A work van, older, with a loose belt that squealed when the driver turned the wheel. It pulled into our driveway at two fifteen in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and a man got out carrying a toolbox, and he rang the doorbell, and my aunt let him in. "Ellie? You awake, sweetheart?" My mother's voice came from the kitchen. I turned toward it and there she was, thirty-four years old, hair pulled back in a knot, wearing the blue sundress with the small tear at the hem. She looked tired but whole. She looked like she had not yet spent twenty years carrying a grief that had bent her spine. "I'm awake," I said. My voice came out high and thin. A child's voice. "Good. Aunt Dana's coming over, remember? She's going to stay with you while I run to the pharmacy. The air conditioner's been making that noise again, so I called someone to look at it." The doorbell rang. Everything in me went cold. I remembered this moment. I had lived it once already. I had been five years old and groggy from a nap, and I had watched my aunt walk to the door, and I had gone back to sleep on the couch, and when I woke the second time the living room was full of police and my aunt was wrapped in a blanket and she never smiled again. "Mom," I said. "Don't." She was already moving toward the door. "Don't what?" "Don't let him in." She paused, one hand on the knob, and looked back at me with a small frown. "Who?" The doorbell rang again. I slid off the couch. My feet hit the floor and the impact traveled up through legs that were too short to feel like mine. I crossed the room and grabbed the hem of her dress with both hands. "Please," I said. "Please don't." My mother knelt down. She put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face, and I saw in her eyes the beginning of the worry that would live there for the rest of her life. "Ellie, what's wrong? Did you have a bad dream?" The doorbell rang a third time. "I don't like him," I said. "You haven't met him." "I don't like him." She studied me for a moment. Then she stood up and opened the door. He was standing on the porch with a toolbox in one hand and a clipboard in the other. He wore a work shirt with a name patch sewn above the pocket, and he smiled when he saw my mother, a wide easy smile that showed his teeth. "Ma'am, I'm here for the air conditioner call. Dispatch said two fifteen." My mother stepped back to let him in. I watched his eyes move past her, into the house, and land on me. He looked at me for one second. Then he looked away. "That's my daughter," my mother said. "Her aunt will be here any minute. Ellie, go sit on the couch." I did not move. The man stepped inside. He set his toolbox down by the wall and looked around the living room the way people do when they are pretending not to look at anything in particular. His gaze went to the hallway that led to the bedrooms. It went to the window. It went back to my mother. "The unit's in the kitchen, right? Let me take a look." I followed him. My mother tried to stop me, but I walked past her into the kitchen and stood by the refrigerator with my arms crossed while he crouched in front of the window unit and unscrewed the front panel. He worked slowly. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the hallway. Five minutes later, the front door opened and my aunt Dana walked in. She was twenty-eight then. She had long dark hair she wore in a braid, and she always brought me a candy bar from the drugstore where she worked, and when she walked into a room she made it feel warmer. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans. She set her purse down on the counter and smiled at me. "Hey, bug. You look serious. What's going on?" "Nothing," my mother said. "He's just here for the AC. I have to run to the pharmacy. Are you good?" "Always." My mother kissed my head and left. The screen door banged shut behind her. And then it was just the three of us in the house on Cedar Lane, and I stood by the refrigerator and watched the man in the work shirt glance at my aunt, and I knew exactly what was going to happen if I did not do something. "Want a snack?" Aunt Dana asked me. She opened the cabinet and pulled out a box of crackers. "You want cheese on them?" "Yes," I said. I did not want crackers. I wanted to keep her in the kitchen. She made the crackers and set them on a plate and put it on the table. I climbed onto the chair and ate one slowly while the man worked. He finished with the unit and stood up and wiped his hands on a rag. "Ma'am, I need to check the airflow from the vents in the back rooms. It'll just take a second." My aunt nodded. "Sure. Ellie, stay here." "No," I said. They both looked at me. "Ellie, I'll be right back. Eat your crackers." "I want to come." My aunt laughed. "Bug, it's just the hallway." "Let me come." She looked at the man, then at me, and I saw her decide to humor me. "Okay, okay. Come on." We walked down the hallway together. My aunt first, then me, then the man. He was behind me and I could hear his footsteps heavy on the hardwood. The hallway had three doors: the bathroom, my bedroom, and the linen closet. He opened the bathroom door and looked at the vent. He opened my bedroom door and stepped inside. My aunt followed him in. I caught her hand. "I need to go potty," I said. She looked down at me and then at the man. "Okay. I'll be right outside." She walked me to the bathroom and stood by the door while I pretended. I could not actually use the toilet, of course. My body was five years old but my mind was not, and the mechanics of it were strange and unfamiliar. I stood there for a moment and then flushed and washed my hands and opened the door. The man was standing in the hallway. Not in my bedroom. In the hallway, two feet from the bathroom door. He had been waiting. "All done?" my aunt said. She was standing by my bedroom door. She had not left me. I took her hand and held it tight. "Let's go back to the kitchen." We walked back together. The man followed us. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his clipboard and wrote something down and then said he was finished and my aunt paid him with cash from her purse and he left. The screen door banged. The van started up in the driveway and pulled away, and I stood at the window and watched it go. That night I could not sleep. I lay in my bed with the hallway light on and listened to the house settle. My mother came in twice to check on me. The second time she sat on the edge of my bed and brushed the hair off my forehead. "You were upset today," she said. "About the repairman." "Yes." "Why?" I looked at her face in the dim light. She was young and tired and she did not know what I knew. And I understood, lying there, that the thing I had done today was only the first piece of something much larger. The man had seen my aunt. He had seen the house. He had seen me. And men like him did not forget. "I just had a bad feeling," I said. She kissed my forehead. "Okay. Go to sleep." She left the door open a c***k. I lay in the dark and counted the ceiling fan clicks in my head and thought about what I remembered from the first time around. The trial had taken nine months. He had a public defender who was overwhelmed and a judge who was impatient. The prosecutor had been young and nervous and had lost on a technicality. He had been released after eighteen months on a plea deal for a lesser charge. He had moved to another state. I knew this because my mother had tracked him, quietly, for years. She had kept a folder in her desk drawer with printouts and newspaper clippings and notes in her small precise handwriting. I had found it when I was twelve. I had never told her. Dana had lived for eleven more years. She had cut herself for most of them. She had married a man named Paul who loved her and could not save her. She had died in a hospital room in October when I was sixteen, and at her funeral my mother had held my hand and said, over and over, that it was not her sister's fault. She never said whose fault it was. She did not have to. But I knew. I lay in the dark and I thought about the man's face. I thought about the way he had looked at the hallway. And I understood that the only way to keep my aunt safe was to make sure he could never come back. I did not know yet how I would do it. I was five years old. I had no money, no phone, no access to anything except my mother's house and my aunt's smile and the memory of a future I had already lived once. But I had time. That was the one thing I had. I had twenty years of memory and I had a five-year-old's body and I had a Tuesday afternoon that I had just changed. The ceiling fan clicked. I closed my eyes. Tomorrow I would start figuring out the rest.