Headlights(30)

There were six bedrooms in addition to Noel and Marianne’s, and they said I could choose which one I wanted. They thought I would choose the big one downstairs, just down the hall from theirs, or one of the other big ones upstairs. But I knew immediately there was only one room I could take, and it was the smallest, in the corner of the upper floor. It wasn’t set up as a bedroom, but instead some kind of study with a wooden desk in the middle of it.

“Could I have this one?” I asked.

The Stansfields and the social worker shared a look. They’d later tell me they thought I’d picked the smallest room in the house because I was used to small spaces, because all of this was too overwhelming. And of course it was. It would be forever. But what I didn’t tell them until years later, until the terror only partially kept me up at night and I’d learned how to get by on the few hours of rest the house would give me, was that I couldn’t take the other rooms because:

I got a Bad Feeling in them, too bad to ignore. And—perhaps the more important thing—

The other rooms were already taken.

Footsteps creak above me as I sit in the living room in the dark. Music starts to play.

I press my palms to my eyes. I’ve never wanted this, to be terrified of every place, Bad Feelings everywhere. As a kid, to find shadows standing at the foot of my bed, watching me with a detached neutral curiosity that I instinctively knew was dangerous. I’d always seen shadows, but here, in this house, they were so much stronger, more vivid. So much more powerful.

Nightmares. Overactive imagination. I only partly told the Stansfields about it. They’d put me in therapy to process what had happened at the Happy Inn, and I told my therapist once, about the Bad Feelings, told him how my birth mother thought I had a special gift—“my shining boy.”

But my birth parents were young, tortured people, and my therapist suggested that maybe I was holding on to the idea of having some kind of shine as a way to hold on to my birth mom, the same way I picked Daniel for my name from the list. It was all in my head, something put there by a woman I barely ever knew and some old book she carried around.

And if it was real, what a shit thing, what an unforgivably fucked-up thing, that I would be visited by all these ghosts, and never the woman who was supposed to have been my mother.

Never her, and never Marianne or Noel.

Another creak upstairs. This old house the worst place for a kid with Bad Feelings and night terrors and traumatic memories. But my parents were so loving and warm that the house became more about that than anything else. They filled this place with love, chased out the shadows—or at least shined bright enough to keep them at bay.

But they’re gone, and now I stand in a haunted old house with no electricity and a lifetime of nightmares to share it with. And the loss that is so profound, it’s nearly blinding.

I don’t mean to, but—

I say, “Mom, Dad, if either of you is here…”

The music stops. I exhale.

“Because none of this is real,” I say in the quiet of the house. Because I’m just a sentimental asshole with PTS who would grasp for anything at all.

Another creak upstairs.

I go back to the garage, holding my breath through the kitchen, and grab the Drifter case files from where I left them four years ago. Copies of the files I am definitely not supposed to have made. They’re all stored digitally, but I try to avoid the computer when I can. Too easy to catch a reflection in the black of the screen. I clear the books, baskets, decorative items off the enormous living room coffee table, wipe away some of the accumulated dust. Lay out the files, one by one. Eight of them on the coffee table, the rest on the rug on the floor, all around the living room. I add the new ones.

I use my cell phone light to head through the side passage in the foyer to the lower stairwell. I pass a cold spot in the dark, a shadow drifting. I don’t let myself acknowledge the Feeling in my stomach. I tell myself I don’t hear the whisper, feel the touch on my skin.

My parents were the third owners of Whileago Manor, though they were the first to call it that. When Noel got on the phone with his parents after purchasing it and they asked if he and Marianne had named the home (a tradition in their family), Noel said, “Yeah we named it a while ago.” He was going to save the unveiling until they’d properly settled in. But Noel’s dad was hard of hearing, and “Whileago” just stuck.

Cobwebs catch on my face, and I cough and spit, try to clear them from my mouth and eyes. I walk through the lower living room, past the wine cellar and the gym. I open the storage room door, go to the far corner where the candles, flashlights, and matches are, and grab as much as I can carry. Something moves past the doorway behind me, the same shadow from the stairwell. I take a breath.

The house was built in the late 1800s, one of the only houses here at that time, and long before this was a neighborhood. Since its original construction, it’s been expanded and renovated by each of its subsequent owners. In one of the rooms on the top floor, there’s a huge vintage trunk containing the history of all the inhabitants. The first owners died here, and their photo albums, journals, various deeds and documents remained with the house in the trunk. The second owners must have had some kind of sentimental streak because they put it in their will that they wanted their lives similarly documented and left with the house. And then it became tradition, and my parents wanted the same. In the corner of this storage room, a cardboard box of Marianne’s and Noel’s lives sits on the floor, one I haven’t opened, haven’t done anything with. All the things I’m meant to go through and put into the trunk upstairs with all the other former owners’.