In the story, Colleen’s mother would be lost in the woods, and she would discover a house that was an exact replica of their own. She would be surprised when her key fit the lock, and she would go inside to look around. In each room—the kitchen, the living room, Colleen’s room, her and Colleen’s father’s bedroom—she would find a different version of Colleen, some older, some much younger. Colleen’s mother called it the Magic House because it was a place she could always go to find all the Colleens that Colleen had ever been.
“I was thinking of that story just now,” her mother said. “I was thinking of it when I walked up the stairs and saw that your bedroom door was open. I thought you were in here, and I thought of the Magic House and I wondered which version of you I would find.” She stopped talking and looked around the bedroom. She unfolded the napkin and laid it across Colleen’s lap. “I always told you that whatever version of you was in front of me was my favorite version. That’s still true,” she said. “Right now, you are my favorite version of you.”
Colleen smiled.
“So we’re in the Magic House?”
“Yes,” her mother said. “We’re in the Magic House.”
Wednesday, October 31, 1984
Chapter 6
It was Jay’s feeling that something was happening outside the house that woke him in the middle of the night, but it was the bright light that found its way through his window and past his blinds and onto the wall on the other side of his room that made him sit up in bed and listen. He could hear car engines and voices. He heard someone laugh. He thought of what he’d heard the night before when he’d woken to Janelle’s and Rodney’s whispered voices, and he wondered if he had stumbled into another nighttime event that would have eluded him had he slept through it. And then he heard what sounded like a gunshot. Seconds later, someone’s fist was beating on the front door.
The light came on in the hallway, and he heard Janelle call his name. She’d spent the day in tears, setting the baby down only when Mr. Bellamy or a neighbor or friend of the family could convince her to rest, to sit on the couch, to lie down on her bed, to hold the phone to talk to their mother. He did not know whether or not Janelle had slept, but her voice sounded clearer and stronger than it had since they’d learned the terrible news that morning.
Another bang on the door.
“Jay!” Janelle called from the hallway.
“I’m in here,” he said. She opened his door and clicked on his light. Her hair was messier than he’d ever seen it, and her eyes, though puffy with sleeplessness and grief, were wide with uncertainty at the sound they had both heard.
“What’s going on outside?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I just woke up. There’s somebody at the—” But he wasn’t able to finish before the window behind him exploded and pieces of glass blew through the blinds and something heavy landed on the floor by his bed. Janelle screamed, and Jay rolled off his bed and onto the floor, his feet touching whatever it was that had just been thrown into his room through the window. It looked like a tree trunk or a piece of firewood, and for just a moment Jay allowed himself to understand that he would have been killed had it hit him on his head.
“Come on out!” a voice called from outside.
“Oh, my God,” Janelle said. “Oh, my God.”
The sound of the log crashing through the window must have awakened the baby where he slept in the nursery, because he began to cry. Janelle seemed suddenly reminded that there was another soul in the house aside from hers and Jay’s, and she left Jay’s doorway and ran to the baby’s room on the other side of the hall. Jay crawled across his bedroom floor, reached up, and turned out his light.
“Janelle,” Jay called out. “Leave the lights off.” He could hear her in the nursery, trying to calm the baby, trying to calm herself.
“Come out here, boy!” the voice outside said. “We ain’t here to hurt nobody.”
Jay stayed low, and he half-walked/half-crawled into Janelle’s bedroom, where he went straight to her closet and reached for the top shelf on Rodney’s side. He took the case down and opened it, and then he stood again and took one of the boxes of cartridges that he had not yet touched until that moment. He opened the rifle just as he’d seen the man in the woods do it, and with a shaking hand, he popped a cartridge inside and slid the bolt closed. He picked up the rifle in one hand and the box of cartridges in the other, and he bent at the waist and moved from the bedroom to the hall on his way to the front door.
Janelle must have seen him as he passed the nursery, because she stepped into the hallway behind him and cried out for him, but Jay didn’t turn around. He knew he was going to open the door and confront whoever was out there.
Jay stopped at the door and set the box of ammunition on the table against the wall, and then, in what seemed like one motion, he turned the lock, opened the door, shouldered the rifle, and pointed it outside into a blinding light. He could not tell the source of the light, but he imagined that spotlights were being trained on him because the light came from many directions, and it was brighter than headlights. He could not see beyond it, but something alerted him to the presence of other people, perhaps a dozen, perhaps more. He could hear their voices over the sounds of truck engines, and he could hear other engines revving and other voices calling out in other parts of the community.
Although Jay could not see the face belonging to the voice that he heard next, he knew exactly to whom it belonged.
“Boy, I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you carrying that rifle again.” It was the man who’d pointed the pistol at him and Cody in the woods.
Jay moved the rifle to point it in the direction of the man’s voice, but he could not see anything beyond the porch landing where he stood. He was shirtless in a pair of old basketball shorts, and he was suddenly aware of the vulnerability of his body, and he was also aware that he had never fired a weapon and did not know what would happen if he fired this one. He heard someone laughing out in the yard on the other side of the light.
Jay moved the barrel of the rifle again, doing his best to track the source of the laugh, but there was only more laughter.
“He looks like a goddamned deer,” someone said.
“Take that little buck down,” another voice called. More laughter.
“Listen here, boy,” the man from the woods said. “We don’t need y’all bringing drugs into this county. We think it’s time y’all pack up, get on back down to Georgia, take that peach of a sister back where she belongs.”
Jay felt something wet on his arm, and he realized it was a tear and that he’d been crying. He did not know how long he stood there, but it seemed that hours passed. He kept his finger on the rifle’s trigger, kept it raised and pointing blindly into the light.
“You think about what I just told you,” the man’s voice finally said. “You think about it.”
There was the sound of car doors opening and closing, and suddenly the bright light waned as vehicles backed out of Janelle’s yard and swung around in the street in front of the house. Jay kept the rifle raised, but when he looked to the road, he saw men in the back of the trucks, some of them sitting on the sides of the trucks’ beds and holding Confederate flags on long poles, others standing behind spotlights fastened to the trucks’ roofs. A few trucks spun their tires and kicked smoke into the air, and then they tore off down the road toward Southport. The last truck to leave their yard was a big dually with lettering on the side. It flew a Confederate flag from the back of its cab. There was the sound of a gun being fired into the air, and Jay flinched and ducked from the doorway back into the darkened house. He heard laughter, more squealing tires, and then the night went silent and dark.