The next morning, she was found dead, her gigantic leg having broken down the door to her house from the inside. That was all there was to it—the rumor of the hex, and its effect; Darla’s stories tended to orbit one or two gruesome details, and she insisted that this one was local, a woman who’d lived down the street.
“That’s not true,” I said on the morning she told me this tale. “That thing with her leg, that didn’t happen.”
“All my stories are true!” she said in response, making sure I saw the fierce determination in her eyes; this is among my most vivid recollections of Milpitas, of its sidewalks and rounded curbs in grey concrete, the secluded feel of its neighborhoods imparting just the right air for wondering whether a thing had happened this way, or that way, or some third way not yet imagined, or perhaps not at all.
* * *
OUR HOUSE GREW CHAOTIC; not all houses are built to protect the people inside them. For a season we lived with my father in San Luis Obispo again, weighing our options. I was old enough to get an allowance—a quarter—which I spent on two-cent candies and packages of stickers or trading cards. Wacky Packages were new and hot. Any boy whose bike didn’t sport several stickers was out of touch.
Gage even had the big poster, the one you could get by saving up twelve wrappers and sending in two dollars; I admired it the first time I saw it after moving back to town.
“I know,” he said, “but they had something even cooler than Wacky Packages a while ago. Check it out.” He dug around in a bulging box of old toys and Super Balls until he found a repurposed Band-Aid tin. Inside were cards with scenes from horror movies—vampires, mad scientists—captioned by Borscht Belt one-liners （“Look Ma, no fillings,” a vampire’s mouth agape, her fangs dripping blood）。 There was a woozy gravity in the moment. I’d been away for almost two years, but we were still the same boys who used to play “Frankenstein’s Revenge” in the driveway—a game in which one plays the monster, pulling at imaginary chains that bind him to the garage door, while the other plays the scientist or his misshapen assistant, mocking and tormenting the creature until all hell breaks loose.
“I’ve never even seen these,” I said.
“They’re from England. They had ten packs at Rexall. I got three.”
It was only a shared exchange between old friends, still young, but it confirmed that our growth had traced similar arcs in my absence. I did not, at the time, have the language with which to describe what the renewal of this bond meant to me: how it connected me to a safe place beyond the disorder that had stealthily taken over the reins in my family’s life.
We were gone by mid-August. I am unclear on the details; I was a kid. Gage and I kept up correspondence for at least two years; we had both grown old enough to be dropped off at a movie theater for a couple of hours on a Saturday, and we’d send each other reviews of what we’d seen.
At some point we fell out of touch, and somewhere along the line I lost his letters. Of course, I heard all about his success later on. At supermarket checkout counters nationwide, his name, for several years, was a hard one to miss. It was a welcome beacon from lost years for me. In the flashy typography of his books’ titles and in their eye-popping front covers, I sensed that he was the same person I’d known back then; and this was a comfort to me. Our visions may flare or recede according to the errands of our lives, but they remain.
It would be years until we met again. My family moved, then moved again: five times in eight years. Gage became a remembered figure from early childhood. That our friendship had been hardy enough to survive the initial sundering was something of a miracle, I see now. Making new friends grows harder when you don’t stay put; I learned, at my third new school in three years, that I had formed a mistrust of groups. I preferred the company of one friend to hanging around with a bunch of classmates. Your earliest friends hold a place of privilege in memory. As I began pursuing a solitary path heading into junior high, I would remember Gage, and wonder how he was: what sort of friends he had now, and whether we’d still be friends, given the chance. I always pictured him in the same house, safe and secure. Leaving and returning from the same doorstep, days turning into years. Growing into the person he’d always meant to become. A figment of my imagination, I understand now, but we imagine things because we need them.
3.
IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN YEARS LATER. My life had no discernible direction—I was drifting. Sometimes the drift went nowhere, and sometimes it headed for dark waters; there had even been a point, just a year or two earlier, when it would have seemed to any onlooker that I was idling haphazardly toward any of several early graves. Every affirmative choice I made whittled down my options a little. Every good chance I got I squandered.