Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
CW: Car accidents, violence.
I wouldn’t describe it as waking up. If you’ve been in a car accident, you know the violence. One moment, your life feels the size of your body, muscular years of loves and hurts wrapped around a thousand calcified tasks, a routine that bears you up even on the mornings when nothing makes sense. Then your days break open with the sound of rupturing metal. You splinter like a windshield. It’s an awakening, of sorts, but it’s not like waking up.
This is what it’s like when I’m torn loose from sleep. Fumbling for my phone to check the time, my heart running loose and peeing itself behind my ribs. I sit up, pulling the baseball bat from its spot beside the bed and bringing it across my lap. The stack of labeled boxes along the wall seems to teeter, but it’s just me wavering back to my senses as the screaming begins.
They’re still out in the hallway, but they’re coming closer.
At first they cry out in fear.
• • • •
“Everything happens for a reason,” Kevin says from the front seat. Water cascades down the windshield, obscuring the world. “Your house is opening up so many opportunities for me.”
Alma is sitting backward in the passenger seat, cross-legged, her back against the dash. “Has the screaming died down?” She’s like a slightly better version of Kevin, although I’ve known him much longer. I’m already worried I’ll lose her if they break up.
Bluish foam splashes the windows. Unseen machines clatter, and wet tentacles of cloth slap the sides of the car. Kevin read somewhere that running errands together is the hot new way to maintain friendships. Once we’re done with the car wash, we’re going to vacuum out his impeccable SUV and spray his tires with black gloss. A realtor’s car is his home, he says, apparently forgetting about the home he shares with Alma.
I’m not sure why they still want to run errands with me, but I’m grateful to be along.
“No change,” I tell her. “Still screaming, every night.”
“Could you ask them what they want?” she asks.
“I think they don’t want to be murdered,” I tell her. “But it’s a year too late for that.”
“Still, it’s a great house, right?” Kevin asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer, turning back to Alma. “She’s like the perfect buyer for that place. I’ve never known Carey to back down from anything. She’s a warrior.”
Kevin will never let me forget that I used to beat up the kids who gave him a hard time. He still thinks of me as bigger and braver than I turned out to be.
Kevin goes on in mounting excitement. “My boss has started sending me more distressed properties,” he says. “It could become my thing—hauntings, murder houses, et cetera. There’s this one, a rambler in Pinefields, two bedrooms. If you go into the kitchen around one a.m., the floor is covered in blood.”
“Oof,” Alma says. “Tough sell.”
“Well, single-story living is very desirable for retirees. Lower square footage means less upkeep.”
“How long does the blood last?”
“Gone by dawn, the sellers say. As long as the buyer doesn’t have to wake up early to go to work, they’ll barely know it’s there.”
“Still limits your market,” Alma notes.
“I’m working on that. I might spend some money to put a minibar in the dining room, with a countertop height fridge to keep some snacks. They’ll never have to enter the kitchen at night.”
“Nice,” Alma says. “Good hustle.”
“Can’t stop, won’t stop,” Kevin says.
They beam at each other. It feels like I’m observing from a long, cold distance, an anthropologist noting the domestic rituals of creatures with far better prospects than her own.
Real estate is only the latest of Kevin’s various money-making gigs, but it’s the first one he seems to truly enjoy. Alma is always running a couple different virtual jobs, most recently doing remote human resources work for small companies where she knows no one.
Kevin and Alma believe in hustle. Their devotion to the concept borders on religious. They both believe the world bows down to the people who don’t slow down, who constantly look for a bigger bite. Hard work is the difference between happiness and regret.
On a bad day, their faith reminds me of the way my mom spent my entire childhood trying to pray away depression. Years after I left home, she discovered that forty milligrams of fluoxetine did what Jesus never could.
I sense the conversation slipping away. I wanted to talk to them about how I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stand living in the house, but I didn’t want to take the air out of Kevin’s sails. I was his first big sale, an unexpected windfall after I got the settlement money from my car accident. It seems unfair to tell him I’m thinking about selling the place. He and Alma were kind enough to pick me up, since I haven’t bought another car or tried to drive since the accident.
“Another one,” Kevin says, “is a three-bedroom, open plan, nice refresh on the kitchen, but the old guy who died there still shows up in his favorite chair in the living room, glaring at you.”
I’ve been silent in the back seat too long. A well-meaning therapist has told me I should be maintaining friendships, and now I feel guilty. “Why don’t you get rid of the chair?” I ask.
“Oh no,” Kevin says. “No no no. The chair conveys with the house. He loses it if you remove the chair.”
• • • •
They drop me off in front of my townhouse after lunch. I bring home half a sandwich—which Keven paid for—in a Styrofoam clamshell. He honks the horn as the SUV peels out of the neighborhood’s shared parking lot, and I have the strangest feeling I’m being dropped off at camp by my parents, who are now liberated to enjoy themselves.
My townhouse is sandwiched at the center of the row, crouched behind a tufty, yellowing hedge. The neighbors’ yards have the lived-in look of people who have been accumulating fragments of personality for years: monstrous rose bushes hiding weathered garden gnomes, a low fence that is meant to look like wrought iron, a faded flag with a poodle on it. The neighbor to my left steps out of the powder-blue, dog-flagged house as I approach, holding a leash with a pit bull at the end. I’m guessing the poodle must be long gone, but they’re still flying its banner.
The first few raindrops hit me as I give a halfhearted wave. Kevin will be so sad to see his fresh car wash spoiled by rain.
The neighbor, an older guy in sweats, opens a large purple umbrella, which he carefully positions to shelter the dog. I still haven’t found my umbrella in the wall of boxed belongings that lines the edge of my sparsely furnished living room. My hair has begun to stick in rivulets to my forehead. The dog regards me with a complete lack of interest.
“So you bought the house,” the neighbor says. Raindrops slide off his umbrella and fall between us.
“Yup,” I reply.
“That’s good.” He doesn’t meet my eyes, just stares at the facade of my house. “That place was empty for . . . almost a year, I guess it must be. Since . . .”
I hear the unspoken question, and nod to signal that I know the history.
“A shame,” he says. “Such a shame. Nobody saw it coming, at least not us. He was quiet. Not exactly friendly, but quiet. I never saw him do anything that, you know, would make you worry.”
“No,” I say. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that the entire neighborhood is afflicted, to some extent, from what happened in my house. Not by the screams, but by questions and guilt.
I turn to my door. I’m already soaked.
“We heard it,” the neighbor says. “We were the ones who called the cops. But it was all over by the time they arrived.”
“That sounds awful,” I tell him, trapped between a desire to leave and his need to explain. I’ve been up since just after three, when the screams began in the hallway, but he’s clearly haunted, and I have a hard time turning my back on that.
“It really was,” he replies.
I take a long, calming breath. He looks so forlorn, gripping his vivid umbrella in a vein-roped hand, walking his bored, sullen dog. “Can you still hear it?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No,” he says, “but it’s never far from my mind.”
“I mean at night,” I clarify. “Do you hear anything at night?”
“Not a peep. You’re the perfect neighbor.” He looks confused, and his eyes search mine for confirmation. He looks like someone who does not want the burden of knowing more.
I tell him anyway. Allowing the rain to soak into my clothes and run down my face, I describe my nightly vigil.
He hunkers down under the umbrella as if beaten under pounding rain. “I’m sorry to hear about all that,” he says. The dog pulls at the leash, ready to move on.
I’m not sure now why I thought he should hear the full story. “I just figured you should know.”
We smile through a mutually apologetic retreat, and I fit my key in the front door. Kevin insisted on replacing all the locks, as if there’s anyone left who’d want to go inside. I sit on the living room floor, the only carpet that didn’t have to be torn out and replaced before the sale. A damp pool gradually forms around me. “What do you want?” I ask the house.
The house doesn’t answer.
“What do you want? Speak up.”
The house doesn’t know, or won’t say.
• • • •
Here they come. I hear the first cry from the end of the hallway, through my closed door.
There will be a moment, as there is every night, when no matter how I prepare, the sound of them screaming overwhelms my defenses. You’d think I could get used to it. I’ve adapted in some ways; I know they can’t physically hurt me, that no matter how loud their cries, they couldn’t rustle a curtain. They’re just an echo of what happened here. I keep the bat beside the bed because holding it comforts me, not because I need to defend myself from ghosts.
I just can’t get over this moment, and knowing it’s coming only makes it worse.
All experiences fall into one of two categories. Some are like water: you move your body within them, and although you’re aware of the passage of time, of the restless exhaustion setting in, you don’t mark every stroke or breath. When you look back, you remember the way the depths felt cool beneath you and the way your fingertips wrinkled up afterwards. There is nothing more specific to the experience. Much of our time passes like that. We tread water, and later remember not the individual clouds that passed overhead, but the idea of clouds, the certainty that there must have been a sky.
But a much smaller number of experiences pivot around a moment. If you’ve been beaten up, you may know what I mean. I got into a lot of fights as a kid. Sometimes I was defending Kevin, but often I wasn’t. I believed all the TV shows that said that the best way to handle a bully was to confront him. My dad called me “scrappy” and had no more opinions on the matter, even when I came home bloodied and ashamed.
Lots of bullies, it turns out, don’t back down. Instead, there’s this moment, a very specific instant when you realize they’re going to beat the shit out of you. They’re not going to walk away; they’re going to fight, and when you’re pinned under them on the ground, you recognize you’re at their mercy. You can flail and yell, but they get to decide what is about to happen, and they’re going to use that power to hurt you.
What you remember afterwards is that moment—the pure, distilled bitterness of your situation like a drop of poison falling on your tongue.
I sit up in bed, alerted by the faintest and precise sense that something is terribly wrong. The room is nearly empty—just the bed, a night table, and a stack of boxes along the wall. I hadn’t even managed to finish moving in before the nightly ritual stopped me in my tracks.
It’s coming now. The house shivers. A rush of wind gathers into voices, and the voices begin to howl. The sound comes closer, growing louder as it progresses down the hallway to the bedroom. I grip the bat in sweaty hands. There’s a nauseating transition when the cries pass through my closed door, when my mind rebels against the absence of a physical shape producing this din, the effortless transit through the solid door and into my space. I’m shaking, my body expecting an assault. They’re in the room with me now, just at the foot of the bed.
At first, they cry in fear.
• • • •
“I can’t do it,” I tell Kevin over the phone, once the screaming has fallen silent.
“Carey?” He sounds like a man waking up after surgery, still half-medicated.
“Yeah, it’s me. I can’t stay in the house,” I say.
I can hear Alma in the background: “Ask her what’s going on!”
“What’s going on?” Kevin says flatly.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s quiet again now. I just can’t do it anymore. I thought I could. It’s every night.”
“I thought you liked the place,” Kevin mumbles.
“Well, I—”
Alma’s voice in the phone, “Carey, what’s going on?” She must have stripped the phone from Kevin, who wasn’t acting with sufficient hustle.
“What’s wrong with Kevin?” I ask.
“He had a long day,” she says. “What’s happening over there?”
From the bathroom, there’s a faint, dull thunk.
“Fuck,” I say.
When you’ve spent as much time as I have sitting up in bed, listening for the moment your house becomes a horror film, you know all the soft ways the place mutters and settles. At nightfall, the house consoles itself. The beams in the ceiling emit a series of muffled chirps like a mother hen gathering her chicks. The fridge and the aquarium hum tunelessly, passing the hours.
The screaming has stopped. The house should be silent, hollowed out and exhausted.
Thunk.
“Hang on,” I say, my voice projecting a calm that is as convincing as it is fake. “There’s someone in my bathroom.”
“Wait, what? I’m calling the police!”
“Don’t do that,” I say, as one might talk to a child. “There’s no one really here. Just . . . something. I can hear it breathing.”
It’s coming louder now, the ragged, despairing gasps, wet with grief.
“We’re on our way!” Alma shouts.
“Hold, please,” I say.
“Don’t—”
I can still hear her shouting as I put the phone down on the bed and slide my legs carefully over the edge. My hands tighten around the grip of the aluminum bat. Back when I cradled it as a token of defense, it felt insubstantial, like a children’s toy, a gesture at violence. Now it has the sudden weight of a threat, like a car coming at you in the oncoming lane, or bad news walking down the hospital hallway and pausing at your door.
I’ve never been the type to go for a slow, horrifying reveal. If we’re going to have a moment, let’s get it over with. I twist the knob and push the bathroom door open so violently that it bangs against the towel rack inside.
It isn’t the amount of blood that’s shocking, but how widely it has spread. Fine droplets tint the air with a slick haze. The light from my bedroom sends my shadow across the spattered floor. I can see the edge of the mirror, and with a flush of cold sweat, I understand that there is something peering eagerly through the glass at me.
“Hell no,” I say, and close the door.
Alma has disconnected by the time I retrieve my phone. I go outside to wait for her and Kevin. It should take them no more than fifteen minutes to get here. After twenty, I call back. Kevin answers. I guess Alma is driving.
“What’s your address again?” he asks.
“Kevin, you sold me the house.”
“We can’t find it.” I can hear Alma shouting instructions to him. I recite the address and make him repeat it. He hangs up.
Another fifteen minutes pass. The concrete steps are cool, the streetlights soft and unconcerned over the parked cars. The night hangs like a shroud over it all, threatening to smother us in a damp embrace. I call them back.
“Hey, Carey,” Kevin says. He sounds clearer, less sleepy, but troublingly unconcerned, like he wasn’t expecting the call.
“Are you guys coming?” I ask.
“We can if you want,” he says. “We’re just out for a drive.”
“You were on your way here.”
“Right. What’s your address again?”
“What’s the matter with you?” I ask, a bit too loud.
Alma’s voice comes on the phone. “Hey, we can’t find you.” She laughs. “We thought we’d come by.”
I can’t stop the irritation from creeping into my voice. “An hour ago you were ready to call the police.”
“Why? Is it the house?” she asks.
Behind me, the door stands open, the light sending my shadow out onto the sidewalk. Several moths have already congregated like wayward spirits around the ceiling, beating themselves mindlessly into the lights.
I guess my house isn’t content to torment me, or to haunt my neighbors with guilt over whether they could have prevented the tragedy that took place here. It’s a blight on everyone who knows of its existence. It leaves the imprints of its fists behind, and our eyes avoid the blooms of bruises. Kevin and Alma have coped with its existence by forgetting how to find their way back. When you live in a haunted house, you live alone.
“Forget it,” I tell Alma. “Go home.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
I close the door, dooming the moths to death in the dusty corners of the ceiling, and go upstairs. The sheets hang off the bed from when I slid out to check the bathroom. I push open the bathroom door. The blood is gone.
It’s all normal. Everything is fine, I tell myself.
I don’t sleep the rest of the night.
• • • •
Have you ever been in a car accident? It happens to thousands of people every day. Life tears like a muscle, breaks like a femur. For months afterwards, even as splintered bits of bones itch new fibers across the fracture site, stubborn bruises remain. A bruise is an internal rupture, unspilled blood. It can’t be swabbed away. You wait for the body to reabsorb the evidence of its sorrow.
An accident doesn’t just break the body; it snaps the shape of your relationships with everyone you know. Nothing moves inexorably forward. Everything is suddenly made important. Life matters. For a while, I mattered.
Kevin and Alma drove me to physical therapy for months. “What doesn’t kill you . . .” he would say, opening the car door for me to extricate my crutches.
I would reply, “. . . makes me miserable.” Or, “. . . generates medical debt,” and he would laugh.
I can again walk without a limp, unless I’m very tired. I could manage a short jog if I ever bothered. The blood that made up my bruises has been reabsorbed. The days are just days again.
My friends no longer ask how my recovery is going. Everything is less dire, less important than it was this time last year. There are few Moments, just the long soak in what my life has become.
Thousands of people experience accidents every day. For many, it’s just a tremor that resolves into an inconvenience. They regard the fractured bumper, the license plate thrown into the street, and consider for a moment how much worse it could have been. The moment fades and they go forward. Others are injured; some die. These are moments that cannot be undone, but even a moment isn’t so powerful that it can sustain itself. Eventually, it just becomes a pivot into another time, an increasingly lonely territory forgotten by everyone else.
It could have been so much worse. The other driver only had a few scrapes. She admitted that she was distracted, and her insurance company didn’t try to fight a reasonable settlement. Most of the negotiation happened outside my limited awareness, as I struggled to lift my leg against resistance imposed by relentlessly supportive physical therapists. I emerged with a little money to help me figure out what to do next.
I should be over it by now. I should be floating, not stuck in the broken machinery of the moment when the world came apart. It didn’t kill me, but I don’t feel any stronger.
Once the settlement came in, I figured I needed some stability. I could use the money to buy myself a place. Nothing fancy, just somewhere I could recover.
There are boxes piled in the bedroom, in the living room, in the kitchen: fragments of my life that have been parceled out and sent to sleep until I can believe this is my home. I can’t imagine opening them.
• • • •
“You can’t sell,” Kevin says. “It’s way too soon. Closing costs alone will kill you.”
We’re sitting at the table in my small kitchen. Kevin is unwrapping barbecue sandwiches from Piggy’s while Alma roots around in the fridge.
“I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in six months,” I tell him. I’ve already made this point, several times, as if each repetition will finally drive the message home, but he doesn’t want to hear it.
Alma emerges with three beers. It’s noon. I raise an eyebrow.
“If you’ve been up all night, it’s still last night,” she says.
“What’s your excuse?” I ask.
“Solidarity.” They’re both somber and concerned, having apparently forgotten about their aimless drive the previous night. The chair scrapes as Alma sits down. I’m lucky to have friends whose hustle can be deferred enough that they can show up with food in the middle of a weekday.
“You can’t sell,” Kevin repeats. “Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. I can rent something for a while.”
His mouth twists in distaste. “When you rent, you’re paying someone else’s mortgage.” He peels back the slick paper and offers up a sandwich like an enormous flower. Thick red sauce is spattered across the wrapper. I swallow a sudden, foul mouthful of spit, and wash it away with a swig of beer.
“Not right now,” I say.
“No to Piggy’s? No ‘whee whee whee all the way home?’” He manages a passable imitation of the commercial, which has used the same tagline since we were both kids. He holds up the sandwich again, uncertain if I was joking. When I shake my head, he looks more worried than when I told him I hadn’t slept. “Can’t you just . . . put on earmuffs or something? Noise-cancelling headphones?”
“Nothing works,” I reply.
“Did you try asking them what they want?” Alma asks.
“They’re screaming,” I remind her.
“But do they want to be screaming?” she asks.
“No,” I say with exaggerated patience, “I’m pretty certain they don’t.”
“Never know until you ask,” she says, taking a long drink.
“I don’t think the house knows what it wants,” I tell her., “But I can’t go on like this.”
She nods. “Understood. Kevin?”
“I can put it on the market for you,” Kevin says. He looks as disappointed as I’ve ever seen him—worse even than when they discontinued the light brown M&Ms. You wouldn’t think that would be a big deal, but for young Kevin it was the first indication that he couldn’t rely on other people to do the right thing. “You’ll lose money, but I’ll do the best I can.”
“Thanks, buddy,” I say. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. It was my first sale, and I didn’t want to admit that this was such a big deal,” he says. “I’d just never known you to . . . you know . . . quit.” There’s no malice in his voice, but the words cut at me like a broken window, like a bone through skin.
Alma gestures to the packed boxes along the wall. “At least you won’t have much packing to do,” she says, not making it any better.
• • • •
The evening has soft edges and far less dread than I’ve come to expect at bedtime. The decision to unload the house has lifted a weight from me. I find myself ripping the tape off a box in the kitchen and rooting around in search of a spatula.
The baseball bat and I turn in early.
I don’t wake up so much as I come crashing back into the world. My limbs scramble wildly against the sheets, and I’m certain for one upended instant that I’m in the car again. I grab for the bat.
It’s still silent outside my bedroom door. I know it’s only a matter of time. I get up and go into the hallway to wait for the voices. There are no pictures on the walls, no sign of habitation, and it occurs to me that I haven’t done a great job of convincing the nightly spirits that this is anything but the house they remember.
Here it comes now: a flicker of dead air deeper than the silence before it, as if the house were drawing in its breath. There’s nothing I can do to contain the tightness I feel in my chest, the terror that precedes their arrival.
What do they want? Alma had asked. Do they want to be screaming?
Funny, I’ve never asked myself that question. It turns out the answer is yes; I feel like screaming all the time. I feel like screaming right now.
My voice precedes theirs by only a half-second. I lift the bat as the first howl breaks loose from my chest. At the moment their screams join in, I swing into their invisible terror. The bat buries itself in the wall and sends a crack halfway to the ceiling.
I don’t try to drown them out. I join my voice to theirs, letting them guide me as I swing the bat again. It passes through the din and smashes another hole in the white wall. Flakes of paint erupt around me. The wall beneath is spattered in a plaintive arc of dark brown. Dried blood. I hadn’t considered that the blood was still in the house, absorbed like a bruise.
I follow the voices down the hall, swinging wildly, pouring out the long months in which I was brave and tough and miserable.
The screams hover outside my room. I yell, my eyes slick and half-blind, trailing them into the bedroom. I bury the bat in the wall and it takes several violent tugs to free it.
I can almost hear Kevin’s voice: you’re destroying your investment. I don’t care. I’ll destroy it all. I hate the house and the pain it contains. I hate my own weakness. Other people have accidents and walk away. Other people have houses that drip blood or contain angry old men who get violent when you move their chair. Why can’t I just get over it?
Exhausted, I lower the bat, heaving in ragged breaths. This is the most exertion I’ve had since the accident.
The voices change. I should be prepared for this moment, but no matter how many times I experience it, nothing seems to change. Until now, they cried out in fear. Now they cry in pain.
With a howl, I smash the bat against everything in reach—walls, labeled boxes, the small bedside table. I beat the doorknob off the bathroom door. It clatters to my feet, and I bring the bat down on it repeatedly until the metal is torn and deformed.
Something is different. The house’s cries have fallen silent, replaced by my own. It’s as if they’ve been offering up their suffering, bearing it to me each night, asking me if I was yet ready to carry it for them. Every night, I’ve sat on the bed and watched it go by, invisible and boundless. Now I’m ready to hold it and give it voice. Now they can rest. I’ll take it from here.
The bathroom is splattered with blood, the air thick with an oily mist. I dive in, giving all my breath to the house’s pain. The sink cracks satisfyingly under the bat, and the cabinet doors come off the hinges, wooden splinters spinning across the tile floor. The toilet seat breaks into two half-ovals. My next hit sends them flying.
In the mirror is a dark shape and someone regarding me with wild eyes. My first blow knocks the glass off the vanity and sends it flying into the tub. Fragments explode like a windshield, and I beat at the remaining pieces over and over, the bat resounding off the porcelain until that, too, begins to chip under my assault.
You’re destroying your house.
It’s not Kevin’s voice this time, nor Alma’s, yet the voice comes clearly through the wall of my cries.
I’m destroying my house. My house.
I lean on the bat, drawing in wild breaths. I collapse to the floor, surrounded by fragments of metal and glass.
The blood I saw moments ago is gone. Everything is clean and shattered. I can’t undo the nightmare that took place here, but I can do better than covering it in a thin coat of drab paint.
I think, for just a moment, that I’ll cry, but I don’t. Maybe that will come later, but for now, I sit quietly in the wreckage of what I have.
• • • •
I wake up on the floor, coated in dust. My arms ache. I get a trash bag from the kitchen and begin methodically picking up debris. It takes over an hour and two rounds with the vacuum to clear the floor. There’s nothing I can do right now about the holes in the walls, the smashed mirror and fixtures. At some point, I leave Kevin a message, telling him I’m re-evaluating my situation and would like to talk to him.
I’m in the kitchen, cooking up potato pancakes with my recovered spatula and a frying pan I liberated from the bottom of another box, when Alma walks in.
“What’s up?” she bellows. “Kev’s busy showing a house. It has a weird pit in the basement. Gateway-to-hell type stuff.”
“Tough sell,” I say.
“It’s an unfinished basement.” She shrugs, as if this explains everything.
“Am I taking you away from work?” I ask.
“Yes, I’m supposed to be firing two people I’ve never met today, so thank you.”
“That sounds . . .” I’m not sure how to finish the thought, not wanting to offend her.
“Terrible, I know. I need to find a job in which I inflict less suffering. Is everything okay here?”
“Could be better.” I send her upstairs to see the destruction. When she returns, she’s solemn. For an instant, I think she’s about to extract a beer from my fridge, but she drops into a chair beside me.
“Was it them?” she asks.
“No, just me and my baseball bat.” I let it sink in. “I’m not going to sell the place. I’m remodeling.”
Several emotions pass across her face in a few short seconds—concern, disbelief, a flicker of fear—like I’m watching her navigate the stages of grief in fast-forward. I watch as she works through them, and even before she settles into a kind of grim acceptance, I decide that I can never lose Alma, no matter how things turn out between her and Kevin. She barely even knew me before the accident, but the fact that she likes the person who emerged gives me hope.
“It looks like the demolition part is over,” she says, eyeing me hopefully. “Right?”
“I think so,” I said.
“What are you planning?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I admit. “It might not be an improvement. But it’ll be different.”
She nods. “Do you want some help?” she asks.
It’s funny, but this question—do you want help?—is the one that Kevin never thought to ask. We’ve spent the past year playing the parts we knew. I was scrappy and tough, unconcerned by a few bruises, until the day I wasn’t that person anymore. “Do you know how to patch drywall?” I ask.
“No,” she admits, “but I bet someone on the internet does.”
I thought about the doorknob, the toilet seat, the vanity. The mirror. “I can’t afford to replace everything I broke.”
“Kevin knows people who can hook you up with stuff on the cheap. Come on.”
She shoos me out of the house. On the doorstep, she stops. “Wait a sec. I’ll be right back.”
As I wait by her car, the neighbor emerges from the townhouse next door. His dog lags at the end of the leash. The neighbor heads directly for me, then pauses, looking at the dog rather than me.
“I heard it last night,” he says. His dog yawns. I suppose I kept them both awake. “Screaming, and banging.”
“It was a bad night,” I tell him.
“I hope you’re okay.”
This means more to me than I expected, more even than I think it was intended. Once again, I consider how a haunted house afflicts far more people than the ones who live inside its walls. But it works both ways; if I plan to fix my house, I’m going to need help.
“It might be loud for a while,” I tell him. “I’m working on the place.”
Alma emerges with my baseball bat slung over one shoulder. “I’m going to hold on to this for a while,” she tells me. Then, seeing my neighbor, she adds, “For batting practice.”
I circle the car to the passenger side. Alma follows me. “When was the last time you’ve driven?” she asks.
“The accident,” I reply.
“Well,” she says, offering up the key fob, “do you want to start today?”
