Same Costume
Part 3 of 4
A 4-minute read.
Two ghosts on the porch. She brought one home. At 8:06 something walked the upstairs hall while her kid sat downstairs eating Smarties.
She did not go up.
Every part of her body wanted to. That is what the stairs are for. That is what a mother does. You go up and you turn on the light and there is a coat over a chair and you feel stupid for a week and you tell it at Thanksgiving.
She did not go up, because if she went up she would be on the stairs, and whatever was on the second floor would be between her and Sam, and Sam would be alone on the first floor with the front door.
She moved the armchair instead.
She dragged it out of the corner and set it at the mouth of the hallway, at the one spot in the house where she could see the bottom of the stairs and the front door at the same time. It took four seconds. She had never thought about that spot in three years of living there. She found it immediately.
“Sit with me,” she said.
“I’m sorting.”
“Bring it.”
Sam brought the piles over, which meant carrying them in the pillowcase, which meant unsorting them, which meant a fight about it. Dana let that be the thing they were doing. She sat on the arm of the chair with her feet on the floor and her eyes on the stairs.
8:19.
The trick-or-treating on the street was thinning. She could hear it going the way a party goes. Voices farther apart. A car door. Somebody’s mother calling a name twice.
Nothing else walked upstairs.
She counted the landing spindles. Eleven. She counted them again to make sure she got eleven.
“Mom.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I take my shoes off now.”
“No.”
Sam thought about arguing and didn’t. That worried her more than the arguing would have.
The knock came at 8:31.
Not on the door. On the glass. The long window beside the door, the one with the sheer over it. Three taps at the height of a child’s shoulder. Tap. Tap. Tap. Patient. The rhythm of somebody who has been taught how to knock and is doing it properly.
Dana stood up.
Through the sheer there was a white shape. The line of the top of the head. The soft fall of the fabric. Nothing else. The porch light was off. She had never turned it on. She had never put a bowl out. This had never been a house that got trick-or-treaters, and she had liked that about it.
The shape stayed at the window.
It did not go to the door. It did not try the knob. It stood at the glass where it could be seen and waited to be let in, and that was worse than the knob would have been. The knob is a thing you fight. This was a thing you answer.
“Mom.”
“Stay in the chair.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Dana went to the door. Not to open it. She put her hand on the frame beside the window and looked at the deadbolt, which was thrown, and the chain, which was on, and she counted those the way she had counted the spindles.
“Go home,” she said through the glass.
The shape didn’t move.
“I’m going to call your mom. Tell me your house number.”
Nothing. The fabric stirred a little at the bottom. There was wind, so the fabric could stir.
Behind her, from the chair, Sam said, “That’s me.”
Dana turned around.
Sam was kneeling up on the seat cushion with both hands on the back of the chair, looking down the hall at the window. Completely calm. Not scared. Interested, the way kids are interested in a thing that belongs to them.
“That’s me,” Sam said again. “I forgot my shoes.”
The lamp was on in the living room. Dana could see the whole length of her child in it. Jeans. The pillowcase bunched at the waist where it had been pulled up. And on the feet, laced, both of them, still knotted the way Dana had knotted them at 6:39 in the hallway because they were running late.
Sneakers.
“You have your shoes on,” Dana said.
Sam looked down at them.
Looked at them for a long time. Longer than a kid looks at their own feet.
“I know,” Sam said.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Dana’s phone was on the arm of the chair, three feet from her kid. Getting it meant walking away from the door. Walking away from the door meant nobody was at the door.
Through the sheer, the white shape lifted one arm. Slow. Level with the glass.
Then the other one.
Both hands flat on the window, the way a kid does at an aquarium.
And a voice came through it, breathy and pitched right and perfectly polite, the voice of a seven-year-old being good for an adult:
“Mom. It’s cold.”
Dana put her hand on the deadbolt.
Part 4 next Sunday on this page and on Facebook. Free Preview of The Overlook Wife.
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