HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter One: Moving In Part 3

I walked, most mornings, the same route I used to walk to school, partly to drop Sammy at his new classroom and partly. I'll admit this now, since I seem to be admitting things that I never admitted out loud. I wanted to see whether the walk still felt the way it used to feel. It did and it didn't. The school itself had a new wing bolted onto the old brick, gymnasium-bright and entirely unfamiliar. But the sidewalk leading up to it still had the same c***k near the crossing guard's post, shaped like a lightning bolt. I used to step over it without thinking as a girl and found myself, thirty years later, stepping over again without thinking. My body apparently having kept the memory in some drawer my mind had stopped checking.

Sammy's teacher that first week was a woman named Ms. Esti, a young, sharp-eyed, the kind of teacher who shakes a parent's hand like she's deciding something about you in the handshake itself. "He's quiet," she told me, on the third day, in the particular careful tone teachers use when they're delivering an observation rather than a complaint. "Doesn't volunteer much. Hangs back at recess."

"He's adjusting," I said. "New school. New town."

"Of course," she said, in a way that left the sentence open at both ends. Neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Just setting the observation down on the table between us for me to pick up whenever I was ready to.

I picked it up, eventually, though not that week. That week I told myself what every transplanted family tells itself in its first month. That the adjustment would smooth out, that children were more resilient than the literature gave them credit for. A little quiet at recess was nothing compared to what we'd have to recover from if I'd been wrong about all of it, the move, the house, the whole expensive bet I'd made on a feeling I couldn't fully explain even to my own husband.

In the evenings, after Sammy was down, Charles and I sat on the back porch steps, the good ones, not the crooked one out front. We watched the birches go from green to black against a sky that still surprised me, every night that first week, by being the exact same sky I remembered from childhood, stars in the exact same wrong-feeling places, as if the sky too had been waiting on us to come back and resume some old arrangement.

"You seem lighter," Charles said, one of those evenings, watching me rather than the trees.

"Do I?"

"Like you've put something down."

I didn't ask him what he thought I'd been carrying. By then I think we both already knew, even if neither of us had found a way to say it cleanly. That I had spent thirty years carrying a house the way other people carry grudges, or grief, quietly, without complaint, certain that one day the weight of it would simply have to be set down somewhere, and that I had finally found the place to set it.

I did not yet understand that some things, once you set them down, don't stay down. That some weights, once you've carried them long enough, have learned the shape of your hands too well to be put anywhere else for good.

That night, once Sammy was finally down. After three stories, two glasses of water, one dramatic reappearance to report a noise in the closet that turned out to be his own dinosaur shelf settling. Charles and I lay in the dark of our new bedroom, in a bed that had crossed three hours of highway that morning and still smelled, faintly, of the old house's cedar closet.

"It's a good house," Charles said, into the dark, in the tone of a man convincing himself as much as anyone else.

"It is."

"Doubts and all."

"I know you have them."

"I had them," he said, correcting himself, though I noticed but and didn't say anything. That he'd used the past tense the way you use it about a cold you're still getting over, more hopeful than accurate. I lay there a long while after his breathing had gone slow and even, looking at the unfamiliar ceiling, no water-stain rabbit on this one, nothing at all yet. Just smooth plaster waiting to collect its own thirty years of stains. The house around us had gone quiet in the particular way new houses do on their first night with new people in them. And then, somewhere down the hall, not loud, not dramatic, nothing that should have woken a woman as tired as I was that night. A single floorboard sound, the kind a house makes settling, except it didn't come once and stop the way settling does. It came once, and then a few seconds later, again, a few feet further down the hall. And then again. Patient. Almost polite. Like a host, walking the length of a room, waiting to be introduced.

I told myself it was the house adjusting to new weight. Houses do that. I had read that somewhere, or believed I had, the way you believe a great many things you've never actually checked.

I did not get up to look. That first night, I stayed exactly where I was. Told myself the sensible thing and went eventually to sleep. Charles stirred once, somewhere in the middle of it, just enough to mutter something half-formed into his pillow. "did you hear.." before sleep pulled him back under without waiting for an answer. I lay there a while longer with my eyes open. Listening to nothing at all, the particular nothing that comes after a sound has finished happening, and told myself that was the end of it. New house, new walls, new floorboards finding their new angles under our new weight. A perfectly ordinary nothing.

I have gone back over that night more times than any other night in my life, trying to locate the exact moment I stopped believing my own explanation and started simply repeating it. Like way you keep saying a prayer long after you've stopped expecting anyone to answer. I haven't found it. Maybe there wasn't a single moment. Maybe belief doesn't fail all at once, the way I always assumed it would. but instead it wears down, the way a porch step wears down, a little more each time something walks over it.

That was the first sound. It would not, by any means, be the last.