HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter Two: Footsteps

The second time I heard it, I told myself it was the first.

That's the kind of sentence I would have laughed at, once, if someone else had said it about her own life. The kind of sentence that announces its own unreliability so plainly you wonder why anyone would bother saying it at all. But I'm trying to be honest here, in whatever way honesty is still available to me, and the honest fact is that by the second week in the house, I had already revised the first night in my memory into something smaller and more forgettable than it actually was. A floorboard. New walls settling. The ordinary creak of a house deciding where to put its weight. I had filed it under nothing so thoroughly that when the sound came again. On a Tuesday, I think, though I couldn't swear to the day even then, let alone now. Some part of me genuinely believed it was happening for the first time.

It came in the early afternoon, which should have been reassuring and somehow wasn't. Nighttime sounds have an alibi, they can hide behind sleep, behind the ordinary unreliability of a half-dreaming mind. But this was two in the afternoon, full daylight pouring yellow through the kitchen window. the radio was on low, a pot of something simmering on the stove that I'd have to remember to stir in another few minutes. I was standing at the counter slicing an apple for Sammy's snack, and above me, clear as anything, came the sound of footsteps crossing the upstairs hallway. It was not the quick light patter of a child's feet, which I would have recognized instantly and dismissed. But it was slower, heavier, deliberate in a way that made the hair go up on my arms before my mind had even finished registering what my ears had heard.

I set the knife down. I stood very still, the way you do when you're trying to convince a sound to repeat itself so you can be sure you actually heard it. It obliged. Once, then a pause just long enough to make you doubt yourself, then again. It was moving and this was the part that took the longest to admit, even to myself, even now. It was moving in the direction of Sammy's room.

Sammy was at the kitchen table behind me, methodically dismantling a juice box with the seriousness of a surgeon, very much present, very much not upstairs.

"Did you hear that?" I asked him, trying to keep my voice light.

He looked up, juice box forgotten for a moment. "Hear what?"

"Footsteps. Upstairs."

He considered this with the gravity seven-year-olds reserve for questions they suspect are tests. "Is it Dad?"

"Dad's at the hardware store."

"Then I didn't hear nothing," he said, which from Sammy was less a denial than an honest report. He went back to his juice box with the particular unbothered confidence of a child who has not yet learned that some questions deserve more than a shrug.

I went up myself, eventually, after standing at the bottom of the stairs longer than I'd like to admit. Telling myself there was nothing strange in a mother checking on an empty house, that this was simply what responsible women did. The hallway was exactly as we'd left it. boxes still half-unpacked along one wall, Sammy's door cracked open onto a room arranged with dinosaurs in a configuration. I recognized as a battle still in progress, sunlight falling in a long clean rectangle across the floor. Nothing. No one. The particular nothing that is somehow worse than something, because something at least gives you a shape to be afraid of.

I told myself it was the pipes. New houses had new pipes finding their new pressure, didn't they. I told myself a number of things that week, and I want to record them honestly, even the foolish ones, because I think there is something important in how reasonable they all sounded to me at the time. The mind is a generous editor when it wants to keep believing in an ordinary world. It will hand you pipes, and settling, and the particular acoustics of old houses, and it will keep handing you these explanations long after a more honest accounting would have run out of them.

It did not happen every day. That, I think, was part of what made it so difficult to name as a pattern rather than a series of coincidences. The footsteps had no schedule I could chart against the clock. No logic I could pin to weather or time of day or which room we'd been in last. Some days the house was entirely, blessedly silent, nothing but the ordinary sounds of three people and their accumulating life. Charles's radio in the garage, Sammy's cartoons, the dishwasher's long complaining cycle. And then, with no warning, no pattern I could find no matter how carefully I tried to track it, the steps would come again. Morning. Evening. Once, memorably, at four in the afternoon while I was standing in the very hallway they were crossing, and felt them pass directly behind me. It close enough that I swear, though I have learned not to trust the word swear, here or anywhere else. I felt a change in the air, a small displacement, the kind a body makes moving past you in a crowded room.

I did not tell Charles, not at first. I want to examine that decision honestly, because I think it says something true about who I was that autumn, something I'm not entirely proud of. It wasn't that I didn't trust him. It was that some part of me, the same part, I suspect, that circled the listing in red pen and let him believe the idea was his, understood that if I told him, the explanation he'd offer would be reasonable, and kind, and entirely correct by any sane measure. And that hearing it would mean having to choose between trusting my husband's reasonable kindness and trusting the small insistent certainty building in my own chest that something in this house had noticed me arrive.

I chose, for a while, to simply collect the evidence privately instead. I started keeping a kind of ledger, though I'd never have called it that out loud, a page in the back of my grocery notebook where I'd jot the time and the room whenever it happened, as though by writing it down in a list I could make it less a haunting and more a household maintenance issue, the kind of thing you'd hand to a contractor along with your concerns about the water pressure. Tuesday, 2:14 PM, upstairs hall, moving toward S's room. Thursday, 7:40 AM, kitchen ceiling, while C was in the shower. Saturday, no time noted, dining room, brief, stopped when I called out.

I called out, eventually. That was new, that week , a small escalation I noticed in myself even as I did it, the way you notice your own handwriting changing without remembering deciding to change it. The first few times, I'd simply listened, frozen, waiting for the sound to resolve itself into something explainable. But there came an afternoon, the dining room one from my list, when I was standing at the table addressing wedding invitations for Charles's cousin. An ordinary, mindless work, the kind that lets half your attention wander. And the steps started up directly above me, slow, even, crossing from one end of the room to the other, and something in me simply opened its mouth before I'd decided to let it.

"Hello?" I said, to the ceiling, in my own empty house, in the middle of the afternoon, and felt, the instant the word left me, a foolishness so complete it was almost funny. Except that the steps stopped. Not faded, not trailed off the way footsteps do when a person simply finishes walking and stands still. Stopped, all at once, mid-stride, the way a tape recording stops when someone presses a button.

I stood there a long time after that, pen still in my hand, a half-addressed envelope going slightly damp under my palm. I did not call out again, not that day. But I added it to the ledger anyway, in handwriting I noticed was not quite steady: Saturday. Stopped when I spoke. First time.