HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter Three: The Playhouse Part 2

The grass was cool under my bare feet, the evening just starting to lose its gold and go toward blue. As I crossed the yard I had the distinct, prickling sense of being watched from the small square window in the playhouse's side. Not by Sammy, whose attention was still entirely on the boy across from him. But by the other child himself, whose face, as I drew closer, I still could not quite resolve into anything specific. Dark hair, longer than I'd have let Sammy keep his. A gray shirt with some logo or band name across the front I didn't recognize. The kind of thing teenagers wear now but nothing that belonged to any particular decade I could place it in. Which struck me, even at the time, as its own kind of strange not old-fashioned at all. But somehow too current, too exactly of a style I hadn't seen yet on any boy in town. And there, gone again before I could hold onto it, that same nagging familiarity. Something in the line of his jaw, or the way he held his shoulders a little forward, that put me, absurdly, in mind of Charles. Though I couldn't have told you why a stranger's son would remind me of my husband. And then, as I came within a few yards of the door, the other boy simply was not there. I don't mean he ran. I want to be precise about this, because precision is the only thing I have to offer in place of an explanation. I have turned this moment over more times than almost any other from that whole strange season. He did not duck out the back of the playhouse, which had no back exit to duck out of. He did not slip past me, which would have required passing within a few feet of where I now stood. There was simply a moment when I was a few yards from the door, watching a boy with dark hair and a gray shirt I couldn't place sitting across from my son. And a moment, perhaps a second later. When I was standing in the doorway looking at Sammy alone, cross-legged, mid-sentence. Addressing the empty space in front of him with exactly the same attentive posture he'd been holding all along.

"Sammy."

He looked up, blinking, the particular slow blink of a child surfacing from somewhere deep inside his own imagination. "What?"

"Who were you talking to?"

He looked around the small interior of the playhouse like really looked. Swiveling his head to take in all four walls. And then back up at me with an expression I would come to know very well over the following months. An expression I would eventually learn to call, privately, his confused face. Distinct from his actually-confused face by some quality I could never quite articulate except to say that it felt, somehow, performed. Not badly performed. Performed well enough, by a seven-year-old, that I spent that first evening entirely talked out of my own eyes.

"Nobody," he said. "I was just playing."

"I saw someone in here with you. A boy. Older than you."

"There's nobody here, Mom." He said it with the particular patient exasperation children reserve for adults who have clearly misunderstood something simple. He looked past me, out the little window, as though checking the yard for the boy I'd described. The way you'd humor someone's mistaken claim by glancing around for it yourself. "See? Nobody."

I stood in that doorway a long moment, looking at my son's face. At the small dim room around him, at the fading gold light coming in through the window. I'd watched the other boy sitting beside, and felt the particular vertigo of being told, calmly and reasonably. That I had not seen what I knew, with absolute physical certainty, that I had seen.

"Okay," I said, finally, because there was nothing else to say that wouldn't have frightened him. Or honestly frightened me further, or both. "Come on in, it's getting dark. Dinner's almost ready."

He came without complaint, the easy compliance of a child whose afternoon had been, as far as he was concerned, entirely ordinary. I followed him across the darkening yard with my heart going harder than it had any reasonable cause to. Glancing back once, twice, at the small square window of the playhouse. Half-expecting and half-dreading to see a pale shirt and dark hair still sitting there in the gathering dark, watching us go. There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. There never was, by the time I looked. I told Charles that night, in bed, in a careful tone I'd developed for telling him things I half-expected him not to believe. I watched his face do the thing it had started doing more often that autumn. A concern look arriving first, then something more complicated underneath it. A weary kind of patience he was working hard not to let show.

"Could've been a kid from the neighborhood," he said. "Cutting through the yard. Kids do that."

"Through a fenced yard, into a closed playhouse, and out again in under a second, without me seeing him leave?"

"You said yourself it was getting dark. Light plays tricks."

"It wasn't dark yet, Charles. It was barely dusk."

He was quiet a moment, turned onto his side to look at me trying to find the version of an explanation that would actually land. "What did Sammy say?"

"He said there was nobody there. He said it like I was the one who'd gotten something wrong."

"Maybe he was embarrassed. Imaginary friends, kids that age get self-conscious about that sort of thing. Especially boys, especially around their parents."

"It wasn't an imaginary friend, Charles. I saw him. Dark hair. A gray shirt with some logo on it I didn't recognize. He was sitting right across from Sammy like they'd known each other for years."

"You said the same about the footsteps," Charles said, gently. I felt that land somewhere it shouldn't have. A small precise wound, because he wasn't wrong to say it. Because some part of me had already made the same connection and didn't want it confirmed out loud. "I'm not saying you imagined it. I believe you saw something. I just don't know what to do with seeing something, El, except worry. And I'm trying not to worry you by worrying out loud, which I realize doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's where I'm at."

I let that sit between us a while, in the dark. Both of us staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling that had still not collected enough years to grow its own water stains. "I don't think it's dangerous," I finally said. Though I wasn't at all certain that was true. Only that it felt important, in that moment, to offer him something to hold onto besides fear. "Whatever it is. I don't think it means Sammy harm."

"How do you know that?"

I didn't have an answer for him. I only had a feeling. The same gravity-feeling I'd carried since I was twelve years old standing at a gate I didn't yet have the courage to walk through. A feeling isn't evidence, isn't anything Charles could hold in his hands the way he could hold a hammer or a level. So I said nothing further, and after a while his breathing went slow and even. I lay awake a long time listening to the house settle around us. Waiting, without entirely admitting to myself that I was waiting, for footsteps that didn't come that particular night. Walt noticed the playhouse before he noticed much else about the new arrangement of our yard. Men of his generation tend to notice construction before they notice anything subtler going on around it. He leaned on the fence one morning while Charles was still touching up the trim with leftover paint. The two of them talked tools and lumber prices for a while in the easy shorthand men develop without needing to be formally introduced to it.

"Nice work," Walt said, when Charles had gone in for more coffee, and I came out to collect the morning paper. "Sturdy. Charles do that all himself?"

"Every board," I said, with more pride than I expected to feel, saying it.

Walt looked at the little structure a moment longer than the compliment required. His eyes moving along the roofline, the small square window, the door on its leather hinges. An expression I couldn't place, not quite memory, not quite unease, something adjacent to both. "There was one back there before, you know," he said. "Years back. Different shape than this one, but about the same spot. Came down before the place sold last. Always seemed a shame to me, tearing down a perfectly good playhouse."

"Whose was it?"

"Couldn't tell you," he said, in the particular vague way of a man who remembers a great deal more than he's offering. "Long time ago now. You'll want to ask the historical society if you're curious, they keep better records than my memory does." He said it lightly, the way he said most things he didn't want examined too closely. Then changed the subject to the trash schedule before I could find a way to ask the question more directly. I thought about that exchange in the weeks that followed. the idea that there had been another structure once, in roughly the same spot, before ours. I did not, at the time, let myself follow that thought any further than the simple fact of it. Though something about it sat with me uneasily all the same. The way an unfinished sentence sits with you, certain I hadn't been given the second half to it