Same Costume
Part 4 of 4
A 4-minute read.
She took her hand off the lock.
She walked back down the hall at a normal speed, because the shape at the window could see her. She picked her keys up off the hook and her phone off the chair arm.
“We’re going to Beth’s,” she said.
“Okay.”
The okay came too fast. She heard it. She kept moving.
Out through the kitchen. The slider was sticky in the cold and she had to lift it on the track. The sound it made was enormous. Nothing came down the stairs.
The backyard was wet. Frost coming. The grass took their steps and gave them back as two sets of prints in the silver. Hers and a small one. She made herself not count the small one twice.
Fenner Street was over. 8:44. Porches dark. Folding chairs folded. A smashed pumpkin at the end of the Burkharts’ drive that somebody’s brother would get blamed for. Two doors up, Beth’s kitchen was lit like a stage.
Dana went through the gap in the hedge, across the patio, and knocked on the kitchen door with the side of her fist.
Nobody came.
The kitchen was fully lit and fully empty. A pot on the stove with the burner off. Beth’s phone face-up on the counter, screen dark. The chair pushed back from the table at an angle, the way a chair is when somebody stands up mid-sentence.
On the table were two pillowcases.
Not folded. Not new. Cut. Two holes each. Elastic gathered at the throat in a knot that kept slipping, the exact repair Dana had made at her own counter with kitchen scissors nine minutes before six.
Empty. Flat. Laid out side by side like clothes somebody set out for the morning.
Dana stepped back off the patio.
She looked at her own house across two yards.
Her back door was open.
The slider she had lifted on its track and pulled shut behind her, all the way, she had felt it seat — it was standing open the width of a person. The kitchen light she had not turned on was on. The shape of her kitchen was the shape of a room with somebody in it.
“Car,” she said.
They went around the side, down the drive. She did not look at the front window as she passed it. She does not know, to this day, whether anything was at it.
She put the kid in the back and did the seatbelt herself because her hands needed a job. The pillowcase went on the seat. She got in front. Locked the doors. All four at once. That good hard sound. She started the engine and did not put on the headlights until the end of Fenner.
Route 9 was empty. Gas station. Dark bank. The drugstore sign still on.
She caught the red at Route 9 and Miller.
She sat with her foot on the brake and her hands at ten and two and made herself breathe out all the way, once, the way they teach you.
“You okay back there?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to Grandma’s.”
“Okay.”
She checked the mirror.
The kid was sitting up straight against the seat back, hands in the lap, looking out the side window at the closed drugstore. Sneakers still on. Hair still flat with static.
Next to the kid, the pillowcase lay across the seat where she had dropped it, and the two holes cut in it were pointed at the mirror.
At her.
She had set it down folded, face into the seat.
A bedsheet cannot turn over.
The light went green.
Behind her, a car she hadn’t seen come up flashed its brights once, politely, the way you do.
Dana drove.
*
That’s the end of this month’s 4-part read.
Part 1 of next month starts Sunday on this Page and on Facebook. Free Preview of The Overlook Wife.
Leave a Reply