HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter Three: The Playhouse Part 3

The boy came back twice more that week, by my count. Though I want to be honest that my count had, by then, become a thing I trusted less than I once would have. Once on Thursday, glimpsed only from the upstairs window while I was folding laundry. Two small shapes in the yard below, one of them sitting too still. Once on Friday, more briefly, just a flicker of pale shirt at the playhouse window as I crossed the kitchen. Gone by the time I'd turned my head fully toward it. I didn't go out either time. I told myself this was restraint, a decision not to alarm Sammy further by chasing his friend away again. I think, if I'm honest, it was closer to fear. A reluctance to cross that yard a second time and find, once again. Whatever I'd seen had simply ceased to exist by the time I drew close enough to ask it its name. I asked Sammy about it once more, that Saturday. Trying a gentler approach, sitting beside him at the kitchen table while he ate his cereal. Asking in the most casual voice I could manage whether his house-friend had a name.

"What house-friend?"

"The boy in the playhouse. Ms. Esti told me about your drawing the one with the window, and the friend you said wasn't from school."

Something crossed his face then, very quick, gone almost before I could read it. Not the performed confusion from before. But something closer to caution, the look of a child realizing an adult knows more than he expected her to. "Oh," he said. "Him."

"Does he have a name?"

Sammy considered the question with the particular seriousness. For reasons of his own, not to answer fully. "He said I shouldn't tell," he finally said, and went back to his cereal with an air of having settled the matter. And no amount of gentle pressing on my part, that morning or in the weeks that followed, ever got him to say more than that. I let it go, that morning, because I didn't yet know how to do anything else with it. I went back to my dishes, and my ledger. The small private architecture of worry I'd been building since the first week in this house. I added one more entry to a list that was growing longer than I think either Charles or I were fully prepared to admit, that autumn. A boy with no name, who appeared only when looked for sideways. Who had asked my son, in whatever language children use to make promises to each other, to keep a secret from his own mother. There was one more conversation that week I want to set down here. Though it happened almost in passing, an exchange you don't recognize as significant until much later. Turning it over in hindsight the way you turn over a stone looking for what's underneath. Charles found me out by the playhouse one evening, after Sammy had gone in for his bath. Standing in the open doorway looking at the small dim interior the way I imagine a person looks at a room where something important has happened that they weren't quite present for. He came up beside me and put his arm around my waist. For a while neither of us said anything. Just looked at the little square window, the leather hinges. The patch of grass worn slightly thin just inside the doorframe where two children's worth of shifting weight had pressed it down.

"You feel guilty about something," he said, finally, not quite a question.

"I feel guilty about all of it," I admitted. "The move. Sammy not having friends. Whatever's happening out here that I can't explain to you in a way that doesn't sound insane."

"You didn't make any of that happen on purpose."

"I know that. Knowing it doesn't always help."

He was quiet a moment, his arm still around me. The evening going from gold to blue around us the way it had the first time I'd seen the other boy sitting in this same doorway. "I built this thing for him," Charles said, "because I wanted him to have somewhere good. Somewhere just his. I didn't build it so you could carry around one more thing to blame yourself for."

"I know that too."

"Doesn't always help," he said, echoing me. And we stood there a while longer, the two of us. Looking at the small wooden house Charles had built with such patient hope. Neither one of us yet willing to say out loud what we'd both started, separately, to suspect. That the house we lived in and the smaller house Charles had built beside it were not, perhaps, entirely separate from each other after all. That whatever had been waiting in one had simply found, in the other, a second, smaller door to wait behind.I did not yet know enough to be as frightened of that as I should have been. I only knew that the playhouse Charles had built with such patient, hopeful hands. Built to give our son somewhere to be less lonely in, had become, within two weeks of its completion. A small wooden room with a door on leather hinges, in which my son sat for long quiet hours, talking to someone who was not, by any account I could offer Charles or Ms. Esti or even myself, supposed to be there at all.

I think about that older playhouse often now, the one that stood somewhere in roughly this same spot before ours. Torn down before the place last changed hands. I don't know who built it, or who played in it, or whether it stood empty most of its life. But I think about it, the way you think about a room you've never seen in a house you've lived in for years. Certain it must exist somewhere, just past whatever wall you keep mistaking for the edge of the building.

I have come to believe, though I could not have said it so plainly at the time. That the playhouse was never really for the Sammy I thought I was building it for. For the small, quiet, seven-year-old boy I worried over at school conferences and tucked in three stories deep most nights. I have come to believe it was waiting, instead, for some other version of him I hadn't met yet. And that whatever loneliness it was meant to cure had already chosen its tenant long before Charles drove the first nail.