HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter Two: Footsteps Part 3

He didn't argue with me, that evening. He sat with me at the kitchen table while I made dinner late, again, and didn't mention the hour, and when the steps came, right on schedule, crossing the upstairs hall just as I reached for the salt. I watched him hear it too. I watched his face change, very slightly, in a way he tried to smooth over before I could read it clearly.

"You heard that," I said.

"I heard something."

"Charles."

"I heard something," he said again, more carefully this time, "that could be a lot of things. I'm not going to pretend I know what it is. But I heard it."

It wasn't much. It wasn't the wholesale belief I think some smaller, more frightened part of me had wanted from him in that moment. An arm around my shoulders, a promise that he believed every strange thing I'd been carrying since we crossed onto Birchwood that first morning. But it was something. It was a man who loved me agreeing, at considerable cost to his own sense of how the world was supposed to work, not to call me a liar.

Sammy, for his part, never once admitted to hearing anything at all, that whole autumn, no matter how I asked him. No matter how carefully I tried to phrase the question so it wouldn't sound like an accusation. Did you hear that. Does the house ever sound strange to you. Do you ever feel like someone's walking around when no one's supposed to be home. He'd look at me each time with the same blank, faintly puzzled patience. The look of a child being asked about a movie he hasn't seen, and shake his head, and go back to whatever he'd been doing, dinosaurs or juice box or homework, entirely unbothered.

I told myself, for a long time, that this was simply the resilience of children. They slept through what adults stayed awake worrying over. That a seven-year-old's whole attention was built for the immediate and the present and had no spare capacity left for haunted hallways. I believed that explanation more easily than almost any other I gave myself that autumn, because it was kind, and because it let me go on thinking of my son as simply, blessedly unaware.

It would be a long while yet before I let myself notice the other possibility sitting quietly underneath that one. Sammy wasn't unaware at all. That he had simply, for reasons of his own, learned not to say so.

I didn't know that yet, that week. I only knew that the footsteps had found my rhythm and begun walking it beside me. A half-step behind, patient as something that has all the time in the world and intends to use every bit of it.

There is one more thing from that period I want to set down honestly, though it embarrasses me more than almost anything else. Because it shows so plainly how far I had already traveled from the woman who would have laughed, a year earlier, at the idea of a haunted house. Late one night, after Charles had gone to sleep, I went back through my grocery-notebook ledger by lamplight and did something I have no good explanation for beyond a kind of desperate, half-superstitious hope. I added a line of my own, in the blank space at the bottom of the page, not a record of what had happened but a question addressed to whatever had been keeping pace with me through my own kitchen and hallway and bath.

What do you want, I wrote, and underneath it, smaller, almost too embarrassed to commit it fully to paper, I won't be afraid of you if you tell me.

Nothing answered, of course. Nothing ever did, not in words, not that autumn. But I left the notebook open on the kitchen table that night instead of putting it away in its drawer. But in the morning, when I came down to start the coffee, I found it closed. Not where I'd left it, not at the page I'd left it open to. But shut entirely, sitting square in the center of the table the way you'd leave a book you'd finished reading and meant to return to its owner.

I told myself I'd closed it myself, distracted, half-asleep. I have told myself a great many things since, that I no longer entirely believe. But I remember, with a clarity I trust more than I trust almost any other memory from that whole strange autumn. The particular chill of standing in my own kitchen at seven in the morning, coffee not yet started, looking at a closed notebook. I was almost certain...almost. That I had left that book open the night before. And understanding, for the first time since we'd crossed onto Birchwood. That whatever was sharing this house with us might not simply be following my rhythms. It might be listening for my voice as well, somewhere underneath the floorboards, the woodwork, the rooms my own thirteen-year-old hands had once gone cold inside without permission. And it might, for the first time since I'd come home to it, have finally found a way to answer.

I didn't tell Charles about the notebook. That, I think, was the real beginning of something I wouldn't have a name for until much later. Not the footsteps themselves, which were strange enough on their own. But it was the quiet decision I made, standing in the kitchen that morning with the closed notebook in my hands. I was to keep one part of what was happening entirely to myself. I told him about the steps because I couldn't carry that alone anymore, and because some weak, hopeful part of me believed that naming a thing out loud to someone who loved me might shrink it down to a size we could manage together. But the notebook, the question I'd written and the way it had been answered. I folded it back into my coat pocket and said nothing.

I see now, looking back on it so many years later, how that small private silence was the first thread in a much longer rope. That a marriage, even a good one, even one built on the kind of patient faith Charles had shown me from the very start. Can survive a great many strange noises in the night as long as both people agree to be afraid of them together. What it survives less easily, though it took me years to understand this, is one person deciding, quietly, to keep a portion of the haunting for herself.

That night, lying beside Charles in the dark, listening to his breathing go slow. And even the way it always did within minutes of his head touching the pillow. I thought about the notebook sitting closed in the kitchen below us. The footsteps that had learned the shape of my days well enough to walk them a half-step behind me. The drawing folded into Sammy's school folder with its small faceless shape in a window that didn't exist. Three different witnesses, I thought. Three different records of the same thing, kept in three different rooms of the same house, none of us yet brave enough to set them down side by side and ask what they made, together, when no one was pretending anymore that any of it was nothing.

I fell asleep before I could answer myself. I have wondered, since, whether the house took that as an answer of its own.