Roscoe and I are on the street parallel to my own now, just about to turn the corner, when the silence is broken by a low growl.
“Hey,” I say, yanking his leash. “Stop that.”
He keeps growling, the noise getting louder, angrier, his paws planted firmly on the concrete and his tail pointed back. He’s staring at something across the street, a house, and when I follow his gaze beneath the streetlight, I let out a small yelp, my hand jumping to my chest.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, exhaling, feeling my heart thump hard beneath my bones. “I didn’t see you there.”
There’s a man sitting on his front porch, just a few feet away. He looks old, maybe in his eighties, wearing a thick brown robe cinched tight at the waist. His hair is gray and disheveled, his eyes distant and dull. He’s sitting silently in a rocking chair, his slippered feet pushing himself back and forth. A gentle creaking barely audible despite the quiet of the night.
“Nice evening,” I say, smiling. Trying to break the tension. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m your neighbor, Isabelle. I live just over there—”
I start to point back toward my house, one street over, but the man doesn’t respond. Instead, he turns to me and continues to stare—at me, through me. I wonder if maybe he’s deaf or blind; if he can’t hear or see me. If my body is just a vague blur in front of him, no different from a shadow. My voice, a gust of wind.
I wonder what he’s doing right now, sitting alone on his porch at one in the morning. It seems strange, too late to be outside. But then I suppose he could say the same for me.
“All right, well. Have a good one.”
I pull Roscoe, forcing him to follow, all the while feeling the man’s eyes on my back. Once we make it home and step inside, I lock the door behind me with a little more urgency than normal, though I can’t put my finger on why. It’s not as though that man could be dangerous, trailing me in the dark.
It’s only later—around three in the morning, as I’m mindlessly flipping through channels, sinking deep into the couch—when I realize what it is.
All this time, there’s been an inherent strangeness to my nights, knowing that I’m awake while everyone else is asleep. Knowing that, in a neighborhood full of people, I’m completely alone. It makes me feel otherworldly, different. Like the only fish swimming across a never-ending ocean; like anything could happen and not a soul would see. But now, seeing that man—his eyes like peeled grapes as he stared into the darkness; the way he creaked back and forth in his rocking chair, a methodical rhythm, like someone had wound up a key in his back and left him to sway—I understand that there’s something even more unsettling than being alone in the dark.
It’s realizing that you’re not really alone at all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THEN
I sneak down the hallway, toes pointed, my bare feet avoiding the boards that are prone to creaking. I know them all: the soft spots in the wood that shift under the weight of my heel; the rusty door hinges that whine in the night. Margaret and I have turned this house into our own enchanted labyrinth—roaming halls, twisting doorknobs. Poking our heads inside barely used rooms and holding our breath as we trail our hands across the furniture, leaving behind nothing but finger streaks in the dust. The corridor looms before me now like a tongue rolling out of the depths of a darkened throat, but still, I force myself forward. Into the underbelly of the house.
It’s quiet, but my parents are awake. I can hear them shut inside Dad’s office. I can hear them whisper.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” my mother says, her voice like silk that’s starting to tear. “Henry, you don’t understand.”
I feel a rock lodge in my throat, and I swallow, trying to force it down. Dad works in Washington—the Rhetts have been in Congress since my grandfather’s grandfather, or so the story goes—but he always comes home for the weekend before turning around and leaving again every Monday morning. He usually brings Margaret and me some kind of present when he’s back—candied pralines or boiled peanuts or bags of thick, juicy scuppernongs that he picks up from a roadside vendor on his drive back from the airport—a reminder of his love for us that has slowly started to feel more like an apology. Or a bribe.
“I need you to come home,” she continues. “Stay home with me. Please.”
“You know I can’t do that,” my father says, his voice low and stern. “Elizabeth, you know that. You’ve always known that.”