Same Costume
Part 1 of 4
A 4-minute read.
The costume took nine minutes and kitchen scissors. Pillowcase. Two holes. A knot of elastic at the neck so it wouldn’t slide.
Sam wanted it that way. No cape. No store bag. No light-up anything.
“Ghosts don’t have shoes,” Sam said at the door.
“This one does. It’s forty-one degrees.”
Dana got the sneakers on. She snapped a glow bracelet around the wrist because a white sheet vanished against a white porch, and the bracelet was the only thing she could think of that wouldn’t ruin it.
They started at 6:40 at the top of Fenner Street.
It was the good kind of Halloween. Dry. Every third house had a bowl out, a folding chair, somebody’s dad holding a beer he wasn’t drinking. Cars crawled with their flashers on. Two older boys ran past in inflatable dinosaurs. The compressors sounded like a window fan.
Sam held Dana’s hand to the bottom of each driveway and let go for the walk to the porch. That was the deal. Dana stood at the mailbox and counted.
Four houses in, the pillowcase came back with three mini Snickers and a toothbrush.
“Somebody gave me a toothbrush.”
“Dr. Pellerin does that every year.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a dentist and he thinks it’s funny.”
They took the odd side first. 11. 15. 19.
At 23 the motion skeleton lunged. Sam screamed, then laughed with the scream still in it. Dana felt the night settle into the shape she had wanted since September, the shape she had been dreading without a reason she could say out loud.
At 27 there was a second ghost on the porch.
She saw it from the sidewalk. Same white. Same two holes. Same elastic gather at the throat.
That was the part that stopped her. She had made that gather herself, standing at the kitchen counter, because the knot kept slipping.
The other ghost was Sam’s height. Exactly Sam’s height.
Dana looked down. Her hand was empty.
Sam was already halfway up the walk.
“Sam.”
Not loud. She would not be the mother who yelled on a stranger’s lawn.
The porch at 27 belonged to the Kestlers, who hadn’t lived there in two years. Somebody had bought it in the spring. Dana had never met them. The porch light was on. A plastic cauldron sat by the door with a sign that said TAKE 2 PLEASE. Nobody sat out.
Both ghosts were at the cauldron now.
Same size. Same stance. Weight on one leg. Pillowcase hanging in the same soft line. One had a glow bracelet.
She made herself look at the bracelet and keep looking at it.
The bracelet one bent for the candy.
The other one turned its head toward the street.
“Hi, Dana,” it said.
Kids on this block called her Sam’s mom. Some of them called her Ms. Halloway. Not one of them had ever called her Dana. She was thirty-six. None of them were.
The voice was a kid’s voice. That was the worst part. Pitched right. A little breathy through the fabric. The sound a seven-year-old makes when they’re being polite to an adult and want to get it over with.
“Who’s that?” Dana said.
Both ghosts had a hand in the cauldron.
“We’re almost done,” the one on the right said.
“Sam, come here.”
Neither of them moved.
The dinosaur boys went by behind her, compressors humming. One shouted something. The other shouted it back. Dana did not turn around.
“Sam. Now.”
Both ghosts straightened up at the same time.
That was when she understood she had been tracking the bracelet, and the porch was lying to her. Orange party bulb. Green plastic. Green under orange turned into a gray smear on a white sheet. They had both moved. They had crossed. She had not been looking at the wrist for four seconds. Maybe six.
Her legs took her up the walk.
Up close they smelled like her own dryer sheets. Both of them.
“Ghosts don’t have shoes,” one said.
They were both wearing sneakers.
She crouched. The porch boards gave under her knee. Through the eye holes there was only dark and the shine of something moving, and she thought, I know my kid’s eyes, and then she thought, I have never once looked at them in a hole in a bedsheet in orange light.
Behind her, the storm door of 27 stayed shut. Nobody came out to laugh and explain.
“Whose mom am I?” Dana said.
“You’re Dana,” the one on the left said.
“You’re Mom,” the one on the right said.
Sam called her Mom. Sam had always called her Mom.
She heard how easy that was to know from the outside.
One of them held out a hand. The sleeve of the pillowcase fell back. A glow bracelet. Green. Ordinary. A dollar for ten at the drugstore on Route 9.
The other one held out a hand too.
No bracelet.
Dana took the wrist without it.
Behind her, the one with the bracelet said, very softly, the way Sam said it when she didn’t want anyone else to hear:
“You forgot the knot again.”
Part 2 Sunday on this site and on the Facebook Page. Free Preview of The Overlook Wife.
Leave a Reply