HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter One: Moving In

There is a particular kind of cold that comes from grass, not air. I am lying in it before I understand that I am lying down at all. Somewhere above me is a porch light. It's burning yellow through a screen of moving shapes, and one of the shapes has Walt's voice. Though it takes me longer than it should to fit the voice to the face it belongs to... longer, I think, than it needs to take a woman to recognize a man she has waved to across a fence for three years.

"Eleanor. Eleanor, look at me. Can you tell me what day it is?"

I want to tell him it's the day I am wearing my green dress, the one with the buttons shaped like little shells. To me it seems like the kind of thing a day would want to be called. A day need to have a dress the way it has a date. But my mouth isn't doing what I ask of it. And the grass is so cold that it has stopped feeling cold, and started feeling like something else entirely. Something closer to deep water, and somewhere behind Walt's shoulder. The house is watching the way it always watches, patient as a held breath holds, dark against a sky gone to the color of a bruise just starting to turn yellow at the edges.

There you are, I think, though I couldn't tell you if I mean the house or Walt or someone else. Someone whose face I can't quite assemble from this angle, on my back, in the wet grass, with the porch light doing its slow useless burn. I knew you'd come back for me.

There are other voices now. A second shape, younger and crouching, reaching my hand and holding it too tight. Holding it the way you hold it, something you're afraid might slip and float off if you don't anchor it hard enough. "Mom. Mom, it's Sammy, can you hear me?"

Sammy is forty-one years old. I know this in a way you know a fact you've read in a book. A book filed away somewhere reliable, but strange to the touch. Foreign almost... like picking up a coin from a country you've never visited. The boy crouching over me in the wet grass has his father's hands, square at the knuckle, but his own face, grown long and serious. Like that boy in the back seat of a car, eating snacks out of spite, never once promised it would become. I want to tell him I'm fine. I want to tell him it's just the day catching up with me. I want to tell him many things, actually. It's been collecting in me for longer than either of us would probably be comfortable naming out loud.

Instead, there is nothing, the particular nothing of a held breath finally letting go. Total and almost merciful, and when there is something again, it is three years earlier. And I am standing in front of a U-Haul truck with my whole life folded into cardboard behind me. This time I have not yet learned to be afraid of my own house.

Three years earlier

The drive in took longer than the map promised, just like a drive home does. It's as if the road itself were reluctant to let you arrive anywhere it had already said goodbye to you once. Charles drove with one hand loose on the wheel, the other on the radio tuned to something with too much brass for eight in the morning. I sat with the window cracked, watching the town assemble itself on the highway the way it always had. First we passed the water tower with the faded mascot nobody had repainted since I was a girl. The Baptist church with its marquee was perpetually one letter short of whatever it was trying to say. Then the long flat stretch of Route 11 where the speed limit dropped and every teenager in three counties had, at some point, learned to drive too fast on purpose.

Over thirty years of not living there, I'd built up an idea of how much a place could erode. New paint. New fences. A coffee shop where the hardware store used to be. A parking lot where the drive-in theater had stood until I was maybe nine. But one summer they tore it down, and nobody in town talked about it for a year. It felt like a death in the family rather than a zoning decision. I'd prepared myself for all of that, the ordinary erosions of thirty years, and found instead that the town had simply waited. The same low maples leaning onto French Street. The same chain-link sagging at the corner lot, though the Henderson’s themselves were long gone. Replaced twice over by families with trampolines and above-ground pools and the particular optimism of people who haven't yet lived anywhere long enough to be disappointed by it. And it unsettled me more than change would have. Places aren't supposed to wait for you. They're supposed to move on. And the fact that this one hadn't, that it sat there at the end of the highway looking almost exactly as it had the last time I'd seen it. The summer I left for good felt less like nostalgia and more like something holding its breath.

I was thirteen the first time I went past the front gate instead of just standing at it, and the truth is, I don't remember deciding to. I remember it was late September, the kind of afternoon where the light goes gold too early and makes you feel as though you've already missed something. I remember the birches were dropping their bark in long pale ribbons that caught against the porch steps. I remember standing at the gate, feeling the particular gravity that house had always exerted on me. What I don't remember is crossing the yard in the first place.

What I have, instead, is two facts laid side by side with no thread connecting them. First fact. I was at the gate, school bag still over one shoulder, telling myself the same thing I always told myself. Not today, just walk on, you have homework... And then I was standing inside the front hall. It's half-dark and smelled of dust and something sweeter underneath the dust, almost like cut flowers gone a week past their good days. With my school bag still over my shoulder and no memory at all, the porch steps, the door, the handle turning, any of it. The hallway had a runner rug, faded red going to brown. There was a mirror at the far end with a c***k running diagonal through the glass like a fault line. I remember looking at myself in that cracked mirror and thinking, with the strange flat clarity of a thought that doesn't feel entirely like your own, there, that wasn't so hard, was it?

I don't know how long I stood there. I don't know what I looked at, besides the mirror, or whether I went further than the front hall. Though some nights, lying awake decades later in that same house. I would remember that there had been a staircase, and that I had wanted, very badly, to climb it, and that something else in the house had wanted that too, badly enough that the wanting itself had a texture, like a hand at the small of my back.

The next thing I have, whole and ordinary, is my mother's voice asking where on earth I'd gotten the chill in my hands. And with dinner already on the table and the evening news murmuring from the next room, me telling her, with complete honesty, that I didn't know. She rubbed my hands between hers at the table until they were warm again and didn't ask twice. I never told her about the gap. I never told anyone, for years, not because I'd decided to keep a secret. But because there was no good shape to put it in. I went inside an empty house, and then I was somewhere else, and now I'm home and my hands are cold. It isn't a story. It's a list of facts that refuse to introduce themselves to one another.

"You've gone quiet," Charles said, glancing over.

"I'm just looking."

"You've just been looking since the water tower," he said lightly. Charles had a gift for that, for saying the heavy thing in a voice cut to the size of a joke, so you could choose, if you wanted, to laugh and let it pass. And I have let many things pass that way over the years. I'm not certain, looking back, that it did either of us any favors.

In the back seat, Sammy had wedged himself between two pillows with a comic book held an inch from his nose. Sammy is seven years old and already an expert in the art of disappearing from any conversation that threatened to become about feelings. "Are we there yet," he said, in the flat recitation of a boy who has asked the same question forty times, not because he wants an answer but because the asking itself has become a kind of song.

"Another twenty minutes."

"That's what you said twenty minutes ago."

"Then I suppose we've made excellent progress," Charles said, and Sammy, despite himself, escaped a laugh before he remembered he'd decided to be sulking about something.

I watched the two of them in the rearview mirror's reflection of itself, that strange doubled angle you only get from the passenger seat. There felt the particular ache of a mother who had asked her family to give something up for her without ever quite admitting that's what she was doing. Charles had a workbench in the old garage arranged exactly the way he liked it. Every tool hung on its outline in faded marker, the outline of a life built slowly and without complaint over nine years. He had a commute he'd stopped resenting around year four. He had, in short, made himself comfortable in a life I was now asking him to fold up and carry three hours north on the strength of very little besides a feeling I hadn't fully explained to him, because I hadn't fully explained it to myself.