HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter Two: Footsteps Part 2

The strangest part was... and I have turned this over more times than almost anything else from that autumn. Still trying to find a frame for it that doesn't sound like the ravings of a woman who has decided to believe in ghosts. That the steps seemed, as the weeks went on, to be learning me.

I don't say that lightly. I say it because I noticed, the way you notice a song you didn't realize you'd memorized until you catch yourself humming it in the shower. That the pattern of when the steps came had started to align, with an accuracy too consistent to dismiss as coincidence, with the pattern of where I was and what I was about to do.

It came in the kitchen, almost always, in the ten minutes before I started dinner. Not during, not after, but in that particular window when I'd be standing at the counter taking stock of what needed doing, mentally rehearsing the order of pots and pans. The precise quiet stretch of time when my body was still but my mind had already moved into the next room of the evening. It came in the hallway outside Sammy's door at almost exactly the hour I'd go in to check on him before bed, sometimes a few minutes before I'd even decided to go check on him, as though it knew the decision before I did. It came, twice, in the bathroom, while I was running a bath, not loud, not close, just a presence somewhere on the other side of the wall, patient, attentive, the particular quality of someone standing very still and listening to you exist.

It followed my routine, is what I'm trying to say. And somehow, in some way I could not and still cannot fully account for, it seemed to know my routine better than I sometimes knew it myself. The unconscious rhythms of a life, the small repeated gestures a person makes without noticing she's making them, the order in which a body moves through its own house when no one is watching. I have read, since, that the brain runs largely on pattern, that most of what we call a self is simply a long accumulation of habit dressed up as choice. If that's true, then whatever was in that house with us hadn't learned my schedule. It had learned me . The underlying shape of me. The grooves worn into a life by thirty years of small repeated motions and it was walking those grooves alongside me. A half-step behind, the way water follows the lowest path in a landscape without needing to be told where the landscape leads.

I tested it once, deliberately, in a way that embarrasses me a little to say. Because it required admitting to myself, in a very concrete way, that I had stopped treating this as an ordinary household mystery and started treating it as a thing with intention. A thing that could be provoked.

I broke my routine on purpose, one Wednesday. Instead of starting dinner at five the way I always did, I sat down in the den at four thirty with a book I had no intention of reading and waited. Nothing came. I sat there until nearly six, the light going long and gold through the window, Charles's car eventually crunching up the driveway, and the house stayed entirely, perfectly silent the whole time. No footsteps, no settling, nothing at all, as if it too were waiting to see what I would do, refusing to perform until I gave it something familiar to follow.

Then, at six fifteen, later than I'd ever started dinner before, I finally got up, went into the kitchen, and began, out of pure habit. The same motions I always made, pulling out the cutting board, reaching for the onions, setting the pan on the burner I always used though either burner would have done as well. And not two minutes into it, there they were. Upstairs. Crossing the hall. Right on schedule, except the schedule had moved with me.

I stood at the stove with an onion half-peeled in my hand and felt something I find difficult to describe even now. With all the time I've had since to find better words for it. Not fear, exactly, though fear was certainly present. Something closer to being known. The particular vertigo of realizing that you are not alone in a way that has nothing to do with other people being present. That something has been paying very close attention to the architecture of your days, and has decided, for reasons it has not shared with you, to walk alongside it.

I tried, that week, to talk to Walt about it, not directly, not at first, because I still hadn't found a way to ask the question that didn't sound unhinged out loud. I caught him at the fence one evening while he was doing something unhurried to a rosebush that didn't, as far as I could tell, need doing.

"How old is this house, do you know?" I asked, in the tone of a woman making idle conversation rather than building toward something.

"Older than mine," Walt said, not looking up from the rosebush. "Built sometime around the twenties, I always heard. Changed hands a fair number of times over the years."

"You'd know, living next door so long."

"I'd know some of it." He straightened up then, finally, and looked at me with that same expression I'd seen on the first day. Not quite alarm, not quite pity, the look of a man deciding how much of a true thing to hand over to someone who hasn't asked for the whole of it yet. "Why do you ask?"

I almost told him, right there at the fence, with the rosebush between us and the evening going soft and orange behind him. I had the words half-assembled, I keep hearing footsteps, Walt, in the afternoons, and I think they might be following me. And I could feel, even before I said them, how they would land, how his face would do the kind, careful thing that people's faces do when they're deciding not to worry you out loud while worrying about you privately.

"No reason," I said instead. "Just curious. Old houses have stories, don't they."

"They do," Walt agreed, and something in the way he said it, too quick, too smooth, the agreement of a man relieved not to have to say more told me that he had a story about this particular house and had decided, that evening at least, that it wasn't his to tell.

I went back inside without pressing him. I have wondered, many times since, what would have changed if I had.

There was a school conference that week, a routine one. The kind scheduled at the start of every term for every child regardless of how he was actually doing. I went to it half-distracted, the ledger still folded in my coat pocket out of some superstitious habit I couldn't quite explain even to myself. Ss though carrying the record of the footsteps with me might keep them contained to the house, unable to follow me out the door and into ordinary daylight places like a classroom with its construction-paper leaves taped along the windows.

Ms. Esti had Sammy's folder open on the desk between us, a few drawings clipped to the inside cover, and she turned it toward me with the particular gentleness of someone about to point at something she suspects you'd rather not look at too closely.

"He's settling in well enough academically," she said. "Reading's ahead, actually, which doesn't surprise me with you for a mother." A small smile, meant kindly. "But I wanted to show you this."

The drawing was the kind any seven-year-old produces by the dozen. A house, square and gabled, a tree beside it, a sun in the corner with lines radiating off it like a child's idea of warmth. Ordinary, except for the second window on the second floor, the one that didn't belong to any room our actual house had. And the small dark shape standing in it, faceless, just a smudge of crayon.

"Did he say who that was?" I asked, keeping my voice as light as I could manage.

"He said it was a friend," Ms. Esti said. "I asked if it was a friend from school, and he said no, a house friend. Children do this," she added, before I could ask the question gathering in my chest. "Imaginary companions, especially around a move, a new sibling, any kind of disruption to routine. It's developmentally very normal. I only wanted you to see it, in case it told you something I wouldn't know to ask about."

I thanked her. I took the drawing home folded in with the ledger, two records of the same house kept by two different members of the same family. And neither of us yet willing to say to the other what we suspected they might have in common.

Charles found out the way most truths get found out in a marriage. Not through confession, but through accident, the kind of evidence a person doesn't manage to hide quite as well as they meant to.

He came home early one afternoon, something rescheduled at work, and found me standing at the bottom of the stairs in my coat, having just come in from the yard, frozen in the particular posture of a woman listening to something she doesn't want to admit she's listening to. The steps were going overhead, slow and even, crossing from the hall toward Sammy's room, and I hadn't heard the car, hadn't heard the front door, and so when Charles said my name from directly behind me I nearly came out of my own skin.

"El. What is it?"

I could have lied. I had, by then, gotten rather practiced at the small domestic lies that keep a household running smoothly. I'm fine, it's nothing, just tired. But something about being caught mid-listen, with my whole body angled toward the ceiling like a woman straining to hear a radio station coming in poorly, made the lie feel suddenly, exhaustingly heavy to carry.

"Footsteps," I said. "Upstairs. I keep hearing footsteps."

I watched his face do several things in quick succession. Concern, then a kind of relief, then concern again, layered differently. "Since when?"

"The first week. Maybe before."

"You didn't say anything."

"I didn't want it to be nothing," I said, which wasn't quite the truth and wasn't quite a lie either, and Charles, to his enormous credit, didn't push past it the way a less generous man might have. He simply went upstairs himself, right then, taking the steps two at a time with the particular determined energy of a man who has decided that whatever this is, he is going to solve it through sheer competent action. He came back down ten minutes later having checked every room, every window latch, the attic access, even the crawlspace. His expression carefully neutral in the way I'd come to recognize as the face he wore when he was withholding a worry rather than not having one.

"Nothing," he said. "Windows are sealed. No signs of anyone getting in."

"I know."

"Old houses settle, El. Especially ones that have been empty as long as this one was, between owners. Wood expands and contracts. Pipes.."

"I know, Charles."

"I'm not saying you didn't hear something."

"I know what you're saying." I said it more sharply than I meant to, and watched him absorb it. The particular flinch of a man who has done nothing wrong and still feels, somehow, responsible for the room going cold. "I'm sorry," I added, more gently. "I just... I don't think it's the pipes."