I was the sober driver that night.
We'd planned it that way because Halloween in our city turns the
streets into a kind of moving carnival.
Kids and parents on early loops, then packs of 20 somethings in
rented costumes, with plastic fangs and glitter wings weaving
between bars. Our friend Aaron had a small
costume party at her apartment near the Arts District.
String lights, bowls of popcorn dusted with cinnamon sugar, a
punch bowl with floating orange slices, and a laughable sign
that said not poison. I stayed off the punch and kept
2 bottles of water so I could ferry people home.
It's an easy job in theory. You wait, you stack everyone's
coats by the door, you check the street for your car where you
parked a few blocks away, and you do laps dropping off friends
to their apartments. It's only easy if nobody notices
you. We spilled down the stairwell
around midnight with the usual messy goodbye, Aaron insisting
we take leftover chips, Marco trying to stuff a fog machine
into his backpack until we talked him down, Lila scooping
candy corn into napkins like it was contraband.
The five of us, me, Lila, Marco, Jess, and Ben, cut down the
block under a wind that had finally picked up and pushed
discarded spider web decorations into snarls along the fences.
We were a harmless group. Lila still had her paper cat
ears on, freckled face painted with whiskers that had smudged.
Marco was a cowboy with the hat in his hand and the holster
empty. Jess wore a red Cape because she
said she didn't have time for anything more involved.
Ben had stripes painted under his eyes like a football player,
though he kept forgetting and wiping one side off every time
he rubbed his face. If you asked me later when
exactly I first felt watched, I would say it was when we turned
off the brighter block and onto the side street where I'd
parked. There was a car idling halfway
down, a shape more than a model, headlights off, just the soft
ticking sound of an engine cooling.
The street was thin and residential, bungalows with
porch lights and skeletons zip tied to railings.
A couple passing us wore robes and carried plastic cups.
A guy in a cheap skeleton mask, elastic string, glossy skull
face, walked the other way and didn't give us space, forcing us
to step around him single file. I remember the smell as he
passed a sharp citrus cleaner trying to cover something
chemical and sweet. He didn't look back because it
was Halloween. We didn't think anything of the
mask because it was Halloween. He didn't need to hide.
I clicked the fob and our car's tail lights winked. 2 cars
beyond the idling 1. You parked in Narnia?
Jess said she had her Cape pulled tight against the wind.
When we got in, there was the normal shuffle of belts and
bags, the argument over who gets the middle seat, and that brief
cozy moment where the doors are shut and you're in your own
bright pod on a dark street. I checked the mirrors.
The idling car was still there. The skeleton mask guy had
disappeared behind us. We spent the 1st 2 minutes
debating food. There's a 24 hour Taco place
just off the main Blvd. that's basically tradition after any
party. I would have gone there without
a second thought any other night, and maybe that's the kind
of sentence people wrap tragedies around.
Later we started up the block. The idling car slipped forward
with us, smooth, as if we were both joined to the same string.
I signaled right, more out of habit than anything, but didn't
turn. It signaled too, then corrected
when I didn't. Weird.
Lila said, watching the mirror on her side.
The lanes opened at the corner and I expected them to pass They
didn't. They stayed exactly 1 car length
back then, half a length. Maybe they want our spot.
Ben said. He was scrolling on his phone,
half curious. Then they can wait a lifetime.
I said, trying to keep it light. I did something my dad taught
me. A cheap test for tails. 3 rights
in a row to make a box and end up where you started.
It's hard for someone to explain away following you through that.
The streets here make it easy, grid stacked on grid.
I turned right, they turned right, I turned right again, and
it was like we were attached by a rigid bar now.
OK? I said, mostly to myself.
One more. I made the 3rd right and when we
came back around our party St. the car behind us made that turn
to a beat later, as if they were giving us the courtesy of
pretending not to be obvious. Don't go home.
Jess said quietly. She had both hands on the strap
of her bag, her bright Cape look theatrical while she said
something that practical, but her tone was flat, not panicked,
not dramatic. It was a logic voice.
Don't go home. I put on my signal and didn't
use it. I drifted left, then right,
brought my speed down to the limit, then slower.
The car behind us compensated perfectly.
Not in a rage, not impatient, more like they were studying
what speed felt most natural on us and matching it.
I turned the radio off so I could hear the engine and tires.
It's funny, the things that matter.
The thin breathy sound of tires on cold asphalt is a calmer
noise than the chunky slap of deteriorated patches.
Calm noises help you think. I told Lila to dial 911.
The operator didn't sound surprised, which helped and hurt
at the same time. She asked for our location, the
car model, if we could tell, and whether it had followed us
through those 3 rights intentionally.
We didn't have the model yet. All I could see were low
headlights, a small badge on the grill, a windshield with a tint
strip. The operator told us to keep
moving, keep doors locked and go to a well lit place with people.
Gas station, grocery store, casino, anywhere open.
Do not drive home. She said the same monotone logic
Jess used. If they attempt to get you to
stop, do not stop. I'm on the line with you.
We debated the closest options. The Taco place was busy, but
it's lot is small and choked with cars like it's designed for
Fender benders. There's a 24 hour grocery 15
blocks up with bright floodlights and cameras, but it
sits in a pocket where the streets go wide and empty at
night. I picked a different Target, the
big casino at the edge of the neighborhood where security
rides golf carts in circles and there are 1000 eyes and 100
cameras. I told the operator.
She said that was fine, people would meet us out front.
I had never in my life been grateful for a casino until that
second. When we merged onto the wider
Rd. The follower stayed exact.
Every lane change they took it to the city reared up in holiday
color. Orange and purple lights draped
on bushes, inflatable ghosts thrashing in the wind, porch
lights flicking on and off in waves as motion sensors tripped.
The follower toggled their high beams once, slow, as if
measuring our reaction. I kept my face forward and my
hands steady at the top and side of the wheel.
The steadying was for me. My hands had started to sweat so
much that the leather went slick.
Somewhere near the freeway ramp, with traffic thinning in, the
glow of the casino visible on the horizon like a false
sunrise, a second shape slipped into our bubble.
A person in a costume stepped off the curb and put two fingers
to their throat like they had something stuck and needed help.
They did it right at the cross street where the line of cars
was moving just slow enough that stopping wouldn't cause a honk
storm, but just fast enough to keep me from parsing the
expression behind the cheap plastic mask.
The skeleton again, same glossy skull.
The Cape on their shoulders wasn't a costume piece for fun.
It was rain, slicker material, light catching on it like fish
scales. They didn't actually step into
our lane, just barely into the gutter, 1 foot on cold asphalt.
If I had been driving alone, if it wasn't Halloween, if this
person had done that gesture any other night, in any other
context, I might have stopped. The follower took that moment to
close distance. I could see their hood now, the
grill pattern. An economy sedan, dark, maybe
Gray or black. A badge that suggested Japanese,
not American. A sun shade on the dashboard,
collapsed and shoved down. The kind of detail that sticks
with you because it gives a car a personality.
Don't stop. Lila said loud over the sound of
the blinker I'd left on without realizing.
Keep going. I kept going.
The skeleton figure turned their head as we passed too slowly,
like they were giving themselves time to remember us.
Their eyes looked black through the mask holes.
But that's what cheap masks do, turn everyone's eyes into holes.
The operator told me to signal ahead of time and not do
anything abrupt that would cause a collision.
She said officers were heading toward the casino.
That security had been notified to meet a white compact with
five occupants on the Horseshoe Dr. Keep doors locked, she
repeated. If you're stopped, do not
engage. We'll be on your side when you
arrive. It took 12 more long blocks.
The follower kept one car length between US and sometimes half,
like we were connected by a retractable belt cord.
When we made the final right into the casino property, they
didn't peel away. They followed.
The security SUVs were there, orange lights strobing without
the siren, Two guys in Blazers and radios, another in a cap
walking briskly into the wash of our headlights, waving us
forward into a pocket. The follower slowed, then
ghosted past the entrance in the right lane and went straight.
I didn't realize I had been holding my breath until my body
did that lock up thing again and I had to force the air out.
We parked in the bright, bright lights like a store display.
The operator stayed on the line until a uniformed security
officer tapped my window with that small polite knuckle.
His badge said, see Alvarez, you're the call.
He asked and I nodded and he asked if any of us were hurt and
we shook our heads in unison and that weird human choreography we
all do. He asked for a description and I
gave him what I had. Economy sedan, dark grill with
small diamond pattern sun shade on dash.
Driver wearing a mask earlier on foot that matched the one on the
sidewalk. He raised his eyebrows at that.
Two of them, he said. You sure it's not just one guy
changing strategies? I was sure of the mask on the
sidewalk but not sure of the driver, so I said maybe 2, maybe
one with a friend, He wrote as I spoke, then looked at our plates
and read them into his radio. It was reassuring and
humiliating at the same time, to be catalogued.
I felt like a child telling a teacher that someone had
followed me home from the bus. We went inside the lobby, under
the lanterns and autumn garlands, where bored people in
costumes waited for rides and a woman with a martini glass
laughed so hard she hinged backward against a column and
spilled half on the floor. Normal world still existed in
there. You can feel resentful of normal
when your world has narrowed to a single problem.
Security had a stand by a coffee kiosk.
An LVMPD officer came in 10 minutes later, the kind of 10
that feels like an hour because your adrenaline is draining and
your legs are going watery. He introduced himself, asked for
the story again, asked whether we had posted anything on social
media from the party that would give away our plan to leave or
our route, asked if we had seen the car in the neighborhood
earlier when we arrived. We hadn't.
We also hadn't posted much, except for Jess, who had put a
story up from the balcony at Aaron's place with that exact
glitter of the downtown lights in the frame.
You could triangulate if you knew how.
Turn those to private for a bit. He told her, and she did, with
hands that shook. He told us that sometimes on
nights like these, a pair will work an area, one on foot, one
in the car, looking for people leaving parties who have to walk
to their vehicles in ones and twos.
If it smells like a designated driver situation, that can make
it more likely you aren't hammered and you'll notice
faster. So they wait for groups and try
to peel one off with a distraction.
If that fails, they follow. For what?
Ben asked. The officer shrugged in that
pained way that says robbery, carjacking, who knows, but none
of the good options. Security told us they'd walk us
to our car if we wanted to head out, and the officer said a
patrol car could escort us to a main road.
Do not go home, he said, echoing the operator.
If they're serious, home is the last place you want to lead
somebody, and if they're just idiots, they'll peel off when
you stay in public spaces. We waited 30 minutes watching
kids in costumes ride their sleep crashes to the floor while
adults made small talk into plastic cups.
When we finally went back out, I felt the same wrong quiet I'd
felt on that first St. The wind had slowed.
The skeleton zip tied to the railings out by the valet lane
barely twitched. Security flanked US1 in front
and one behind, hands in their blazer pockets like they held
something heavier than hands. I eased into traffic with a
patrol car falling in two vehicles behind, lights dark.
The plan was to drive to a diner with a lot that backed up to a
Main Street, sit a while, see if anything shook out.
Everyone had their phones out, not to film, just to anchor
hands. We made it to the diner without
anything dramatic happening. That felt like a miracle by
itself. The officer parked on the street
and came in and got a cup of coffee, the kind of presents
that calms other presences. It's hard to describe how
jittery your body still feels after the threat seems gone.
It's like someone pumped you full of static and every door
chime or ice machine rattle makes your scalp pull tight.
We ate fries we didn't want. I didn't drink coffee because my
hands were already buzzing. After an hour, the officer said
he needed to roll, but he'd circle by a few more times, and
he left us with the advice. People always leave in these
moments. Trust your gut.
Don't post in real time. Don't stop for strangers in
masks. On Halloween, we left in two
cars this time. I drove Jess and Lila.
Marco rode with Ben because his apartment was closer to Ben's.
We decided nobody was going straight home.
We'd meet at my place on the north side, where there are cul
de sacs and neighbors who walk their dogs at insane hours and
then reassess. It felt almost superstitious to
say the plan out loud in the parking lot.
We did anyway. I noticed the Gray sedan two
blocks after we pulled out. It wasn't the exact car from
before. I still couldn't swear it was or
wasn't, but it had the same small diamond grill, the same
low hood, and flat windshield with a tint strip.
It emerged from a right turn behind us, like it had been
orbiting, and found a line. I didn't say anything at first,
because Speaking of fear feels like unwrapping it and giving it
weight, and because sometimes you Missy things when you've
been primed to see them. We made a left, It made a left.
Three blocks later I was back in the box.
Right, right, right, and the sedan did it with us.
That same half beat delay, which is almost worse because it
suggests calculation. I said the word.
Now we're being followed again. Lila didn't make a sound.
She buckled herself again, even though she already was.
Jess said take us someplace for cameras.
I put on my signal for a right and took an immediate left into
a gas station with a convenience store that never closes, pulling
right up to the doors so the overhead lights poured across
our hood. The sedan shot past and then hit
the brakes and reversed slightly like it had overshot by
accident. A man got out.
No mask this time, hood up, face shadowed, hands out from his
sides like he was trying to show they were empty.
He started to approach slow. Not too slow, just that perfect
pace that looks reasonable from a distance and specific up
close. The convenience store clerk saw
him and reached for the phone. I threw the car in reverse,
backed up to make space between US and him, and angled so our
lights were in his face. He shaded his eyes and kept
walking. He got close enough that I could
see his cheekbones, the shine of a scar line under his eye, like
someone had missed. With a cigarette, he put one
hand out, palm down, like you would to a strange dog.
You dropped something, he said, mouthing it more than saying he
had nothing in his hand. I laid on the horn.
It wasn't brave. It was just the simplest loud
thing I could do. The clerk flinched.
A couple at the pump looked. The man froze for a second.
Then he did this ugly thing with his mouth that wasn't a smile
and turned away as if he'd gotten a message and left.
Not because he'd been deterred, but because his window hadn't
opened and he'd have to pick another.
He got back in the sedan. It pulled forward and out of the
lot. I took my foot off the horn and
realized I'd been pressing so hard my calf cramped.
The clerk waved us inside and locked the door behind us as if
it were a hurricane shelter. He said saw him outside earlier,
just milling. He used that word like he'd
picked it up from a police show. He called the non-emergency line
and gave a description. We waited again, all of us too
wired to sit down, standing in this bright convenience store
with racks of gum and batteries and disposable lighters, a wall
of refrigerators humming like a farm of bees.
The world looks ridiculous when you're scared In it, Every
normal object feels like an insult.
An officer came 30 minutes later, took our statements
again, then told us something I think about a lot.
There are people who use nights like this like camouflage, he
said. Masks, crowds, noise.
They test your boundaries to see how polite you'll be while they
get close. You did the right things twice.
Keep doing them. He offered an escort again.
We took it again. We drove to my place in a
miniature parade, and I parked in the driveway with the patrol
car idling long enough for us to get inside.
I've never been the kind of person who draws the blinds.
I did. That night.
We all camped in the living room like a slumber party we didn't
want. Nobody opened a drink.
We watched a bad horror movie on mute, the kind where the monster
is a metaphor and the characters keep going into basements.
We laughed not because it was funny, but because it's a relief
to feel the shape of a joke in your mouth when you've spent
hours only feeling edges. Around 4, the officer texted to
say they'd driven a few loops and didn't see anything that
matched our description circling.
He said if we had any footage on our doorbell cameras in the
morning to send it in and he'd attach it to the report.
Stay in groups tomorrow, he wrote, Which made me think of
the day after Halloween like it was a separate holiday.
Come down day, the morning when you do inventory of the damage
and the missing pieces. We slept in our clothes in the
morning with that particular morning after light that makes
everything look overexposed and harmless.
We checked the doorbell footage at 211 AMA, car rolled slow past
the house and then again at 234, lingering long enough that you
could see the driver's profile. Hood up, no mask.
At 2:40, a person in a skeleton mask walked past on the sidewalk
on the other side of the street and stopped at the nearest
neighbor's trash can as if to tie their shoe.
They looked up at our house once, turned their head like a
bird testing angles, then kept going.
We sent the clips in. I don't know what would have
happened if we had tried to out polite them into telling us what
they wanted the first time. The part that makes this more
than a spooky night story happened a week later.
A detective called me at lunch. Their voice had that careful
nurse vibe that cops get when they're about to tell you
something you'll need to sit down for.
They said Two men had been picked up across town after
trying a similar follow an approach at a shopping center
where one had stepped in front of a car with a mask on while
the other pulled up behind to block it.
The driver had done exactly what we did at the gas station, horn
lights into a public pocket. Only she had a dash Cam and had
clipped the guy on foot's sleeve when he stepped too close.
The plate on the blocking sedan had been captured.
One of the men had a heeled scar under his eye.
The detective thought it matched our description.
They were looking at them for a string of attempted robberies.
No successful ones on Halloween, he was glad to say.
He asked if we'd come in to view a photo array.
We did. It wasn't dramatic like on TV.
It felt procedural and annoying and then suddenly very heavy
when you put a finger on a face and say yes or no to the kind of
question that can sit on your tongue like a brick for months
if you get it wrong. Lila cried afterward because the
act of pointing at someone and saying I think that's him made
all the small choices we've made that night feel enormous by
comparison. We went for coffee and sat in
our normal seats with our normal mugs, and every time the door
opened, I felt my back go rigid, the way your body does when it
expects a repeat. We heard later that the two men
took pleas on lesser charges tied to the other incident,
where there was more camera coverage and an easier timeline
to prove our clips were supportive.
Which is such a dry word for the way your stomach folds when you
watch a skeleton mask pause at your neighbor's trash can and
turn their head toward your house.
The detective told us they believe the pair had worked
Halloween as a cover one year prior, too, but nobody had quite
gotten a plate before. I don't know if that's true, and
I don't need it to be. It's enough to know that we
weren't the main characters in their story, we were simply
available. I changed a few things after
that. I stopped posting anything in
real time, even a harmless photo of a drink on a table, because a
corner of a neon sign can tell someone with the right eyes
exactly which bar you're at. I moved my car keys to a hook by
the back door so I didn't have to go back through the house to
get them if I'd forgotten them by the front.
I started doing small, boring safety things with religious
consistency. 3 rights when I'm not sure.
A lap around the block if I think I'm being dramatic.
No stops for anyone in a mask, even if they're doing the
universal gesture for choking. And I could be the hero in a
story instead of the wary adult in a boring one.
There are better heroes out there.
Security guards and Blazers with radios.
Clerks with a phone and a locked door.
Officers who drink diner coffee at midnight on a holiday because
they know what people use holidays for.
I add myself to that system now. I don't pretend I'm separate
from it. If you want some climactic
moral, I don't have it. We didn't outsmart anyone.
We did not bravely confront 2 men in a parking lot and wrestle
them to the ground. We didn't even get the dramatic
catharsis of lights and sirens at the curb of our house.
What we did was make a series of decisions that felt small in the
moment and turned out to be the only ones we needed.
Stay together, stay visible. Trust the ugly feeling.
Go where there are people. Ask for help.
Do not be polite to someone who wants you to hand them your
safety like a gift on Halloween night.
A year later, we went to Aaron's again.
Fewer people came. We left earlier.
I parked closer. The streets look the same.
Webs peeled off fences, leaves scudding kids in costumes
practicing their grown up voices.
We did the same walk to the car, but this time all of us were
quiet as we crossed that darker block and I could feel our heads
tilt in the same animal way, scanning when a guy in a
werewolf mask brushed too close and muttered sorry.
My body did that cold tremor inside the bones that it did
last year. And then I watched him hand a
dropped wallet to a woman and walk on.
It's a relief when a mask is only a mask.
It's not always that way. We still went for tacos.
We ate them inside with the fluorescent lights making
everyone look a little sick, and we laughed at nothing in
particular until it sounded real.
On the way home, we did not see a follower.
Or maybe we did and they were just a person going our way.
It's hard to know the difference anymore.
And maybe that's the point. The edge where your instinct
saves you and your paranoia wastes you can look almost
identical when you're driving under a full moon with your
friends asleep in the back seat and the radio low.
What I know is this. The worst kind of story leaves
you alone at the end, and the best kind leaves you crowded by
ordinary kindness. Security officers and Blazers, A
clerk who locks a door. A bored cop with diner coffee.
Friends breathing in the dark of your living room because it
feels safer than breath alone. We got the second kind.
Sometimes realistic and terrifying is also a little bit
lucky. We took it and went home.
When the sun was up, we pulled the blinds anyway.
We slept. I grew up learning how to cross
a yard without looking left or right.
In Ash Ridge, our milltown with the river that always looked
like it was holding its breath. I spent my holidays bouncing
between Grandma Ruth's bungalow and Aunt Tessa's shotgun house.
They were two houses down from each other, which sounds simple
until you know what sat between them.
A sagging duplex owned by Miss Kincaid, a towering woman in mud
caked boots who polished her siding with vinegar and muttered
scripture at kids like myself. If you timed it right, you could
pass while she was scrubbing, the smell grabbing the back of
your tongue, the sound of her rag rasping aluminum like she
could erase what was written there.
By God, don't gawk, Grandma would say.
Just go on. And if Aunt Tess was the one
sending us, she'd add hustle. Hands in your pockets, eyes on
your feet. People like to pretend it
happened all at once, like a switch flipped and that's when
the bad thing began. But that's not how it works.
It's a slow creep, a handful of small choices that start to
rhyme, which porch you cut across, which gate squeaks when
you stop telling the grown-ups certain parts of what you saw.
By the time you realize those choices connect you to
something, you're already in it. You've already crossed the yard.
On Halloween, the year everything came apart, my
cousins and I were rounding the block in dollar store masks with
pillowcases. We insisted on calling sacks
because it sounded tougher. The mill had shut down the day
shift early, and the steam whistle blew in the afternoon.
A long, flat note that made all the dogs bark cold had settled
in with the dark. Ash Ridge does that in late
October. The sun drops like a coin and
the blue turns to black all at once.
House lights snap on down the street as if they're copying
each other. Porch bulbs glow like watchful
eyes. We ran the distance between
Ruths and Tesses like we always did, knees high, breath puffing
white. We didn't talk about Miss
Kincaid, not out loud. You don't point to a thing
you're hoping won't point back. We reached Grandma's with a hall
you could live off for a week, and while the adults were
sorting in the living room, checking for tampered wrappers
like that was the danger, they started reminiscing about trick
or treating back when. That's when my cousin Luis made
the dare. He had a little gap in his front
teeth and always stoked the fire. 10 bucks each.
If we ring Kincaid's bell and say trick or treat Miss K loud,
you got to say the K Hell no, said my sister, who liked to
sound tougher than she was. 10 bucks, he sang, already counting
it in his pocket. Cash money from my stocking
fund. It was a stupid dare, which made
it irresistible. We were half wound up on sugar
and half on the thrill of being big enough, now nearly
teenagers, to put our feet on a porch we'd avoided our whole
lives. The adults were 3 beers into
their own holiday. Uncle Marco, Aunt Tessa's
husband, was telling the story of the time he got chased by a
rooster. Laughter was a warm wall behind
us. We slipped out the back door
because it made us feel like we were doing something serious.
The duplex cut its shadow across the narrow yard, like a bad hand
laid over your mouth. The porch sagged.
One of the rails had a crack, spidering down it.
On either side of the steps, raised beds made out of stacked
pallets held late tomatoes, their vines limp in the cold.
The dirt was heaped high and tidy, A homec volcano.
It had that loamy just turned look, the kind that clings to
boots and dries and flakes on your carpet.
Vinegar stung my nose, Yo, Louise said, already halfway up
the steps. Candy is candy.
Don't, I said, because you have to be the one who says don't,
even if you don't mean it. We were all looking at the door.
It was painted a flat, stubborn green and had a little square of
glass up high, privacy glass with a wired net like an old
school window. Someone had scrubbed circles
around the knobs so hard the paint had a different Sheen.
There, Louis reached the bell was a brass button with a crack
through it. He jabbed it somewhere inside a
buzzer. Tried and failed to be musical.
Nothing. He jabbed again.
That was enough in my mind. Dare done, we said.
The K We could back away now, spend our 10 bucks on cheap
fireworks at New Year's. But then we heard the frantic
banging from inside. Not footsteps, not a shuffle.
The banging of things being pushed out of the way fast.
The kind of sound that says someone had been waiting for
exactly this and couldn't get the door open quick enough.
A body colliding with furniture, A chair skidding.
A table leg knocking. I tasted metal in my mouth.
Louise grinned. Because he didn't hear what I
heard. He was listening for the story
he would get to tell. The wired glass went dark, a
shape filling it. The handle rattled like someone
was on the other side with a handful of spoons.
Then the deadbolt turned and the door swung open hard enough to
bounce on the chain. She stood there like she'd grown
out of the hallway, tall and broad shouldered in those mud
caked boots, a streak of vinegar across her forearm where she'd
wiped her mouth. The blood is on your heads, she
said, and she was smiling, a smile that didn't move her eyes.
In her left hand, low against her side, she held what I
thought was a Halloween prop until my body told me.
Different skin, the wrong color. Hair matted but clean, like it
had been combed too much. A mouth that didn't open.
Teeth soft, looking like they were made from chalk.
Eyes that didn't have the living shine.
The neck didn't end in a flat fake edge, it ended in something
too complicated for my brain to let in all at once.
The smell wasn't rot, it was copper and something sour like a
penny dipped in vinegar. I ran first.
There's no pride in it. I heard someone scream, not her,
not this time, and I watched my feet take the steps 2 at a time
like they were attached to someone else.
I felt the porch give under me the way old wood does when a big
person steps close to you on a bus.
I remember the air on my teeth. I remember my hands slapping my
thighs as I pumped them. We crashed through the gate and
sprinted the strip of grass to Grandma's back door Behind us.
The buzzing sound went again because someone's elbow hit the
bell as they fled. It kept pinging as the door
swung on the chain, which felt funny later when we told it like
a joke we were trying not to tell on ourselves.
We broke into the kitchen like deer candy, spilled across the
linoleum and fanned in skidders all the way to the cabinet toe
kick. The adults stood up fast, moved
by that instinct I understand now, but hated then.
The one that checks for blood and broken bones before
believing your words. We talked over each other.
We put our hands out to show they were shaking.
We said she had a head, a real 1.
Like a real head. We garbled it because once that
word was in the air, it made us all try to take it back.
It only took a minute for the grown-ups to decide the most
comforting thing they could decide.
It's a prop. Aunt Tess said she wanted it to
be a prop. So it was a sick joke.
Grandma added. Which put it in a category of
things that happened in the world but aren't your problem as
long as they're over there. Uncle Marco was already halfway
to a laugh. People do all kinds of stupid
stuff on Halloween, he said. You can buy those at the farm
store now. It's nothing.
Nothing. It was a big word to put on,
something that still made my hands shake.
But once they said it, it gave us a place to put.
The moment we shoved it in the cabinet with the sacks and the
roast pan and closed the door, we breathed.
We told ourselves we had overreacted.
We watched the movie on TV, the one with the immortal slasher,
and pointed out the fake blood they put Outsider.
They told us to talk about things we understood.
We were fine. If you don't count the way I
could feel her boots on the porch boards every time the
house settled. Weeks passed like that.
As the air got thinner and sharper, the mill did what mills
do in the cold. Steam rose.
Half the windows stayed lit all night because a small town's
economy doesn't have weekends. The duplex shorten the daylight
no matter when you walked by it. I dreamt of that wired glass,
the way it went dark every time I crossed between Ruths and
Tessa's. I kept my sight line on the
joint where the sidewalk seam ran straight to our back fence.
I didn't look, but I felt when she was out there, the way the
side yard would go quieter when she was near.
The way animals notice things before we do.
Squirrels freezing, a stray cat staring at a point on the ground
and then stepping away like it didn't want to offend it.
Do not engage. Grandma told us that
Thanksgiving when we were tripping over each other in a
house too small for that many bodies.
It was snowing in pieces here and not here.
She said it while she put the rolls on a rack.
Soft thing in a hard motion. If she says something to you,
you keep on. If she looks at you, you keep
on. She talks at me, My little
cousin Dina said. She whispers like she's in
church. What does she say?
Dina shrugged. Kids shrug when they don't have
the words. Not for me, she said finally,
which shook down things I didn't have names for either.
We ate, we squabbled, we napped off Turkey, we cut through that
yard every time we had to. We noticed new things and
pretended we hadn't. The soil in her raised bed
stayed loose and mounded even as the frost came.
She planted nothing that could survive winter, but still raked
and padded as if seed were sleep and would wake when it was
ready. I found small bones in the top
layer, once white and delicate, like the end joints of chicken
wings. Raccoon, Marco said when I
showed him. He didn't look very long.
The vinegar smell never left. She scrubbed in the cold with
her sleeves shoved up to her elbows, lips turned blue.
Scripture came out of her like something she was chewing.
Passover. Us, she would say at the siding,
like she was giving the house instructions.
Two weeks after the holiday, Aunt Tessa's baby was cutting
teeth and not sleeping. I know this because the whole
block knew it, the way a baby's cry travels through wood and
worry. Tess had started keeping the
diaper bag by the front door, a habit she never had before.
She became the kind of person who checks the weather on her
phone and lays the baby's coat out the night before.
On the day it happened, she had the baby on her hip and her keys
in her teeth and the diaper bag bumping her thigh on its long
strap. She parked at the curb because
her little driveway was half ice.
This detail matters because it meant she had to pass closer to
Miss Kincaid's yard on her way in.
Then she would have, if she could have pulled right up.
When Tess tells it, she says the air went weird in that exact
little strip between the sidewalk and her porch.
Dead quiet. She says she realized she
couldn't hear her baby for a second because the baby had
stopped to listen too. A shadow dimpled the light at
the edge of her vision. She thought it was a branch
dropping with ice. Then the world tilted.
Miss Kincaid came from the hedge with something held low and
hidden quick for a person that size.
My aunt didn't know she had a weapon until the loop of it
closed around her throat and bit.
Not wire like you picture from a cartoon line drawing.
Not smooth. It had teeth.
Later at the hospital, one of the nurses said the word for it,
like Tess should have known it. Something you could buy for
camping to saw through branches. The first jerk cut Tess deep so
fast her brain didn't understand why her body went hot and wet.
The second jerk took her to her knees and turned the world to
stars. The baby slid down her hip and
screamed for both of them. She told me later her first
thought was stupid. It was that she had to keep the
buckle of the diaper bag from catching because she loved that
bag and it didn't deserve to be scratched.
If you've never been afraid like that, maybe you'll think it's
silly. If you have, you know your brain
grabs anything that isn't the teeth around your neck.
The thing I can't shake is that Miss Kincaid was saying
something while she did it. Not cursing, not grunting.
Scripture regular as breath for the wages of sin is death.
While she reeled them in like she was pulling a net, Tess
scrabbled at the wire and felt the teeth, little notches meant
to eat whatever they tightened against.
She raked her hands down the loop and came up with blood and
fierce new panic at how slick it made everything.
The baby's cry somehow cut through.
It's the sound that called the house.
Uncle Marco was halfway down the hall when he heard it, the cry
he was wired to hear, and by then he was already moving.
He hit the front door so hard one of the hinges already
loosening, lifted out of the wood and set back again.
He didn't clock Miss Kincaid at first, because the scene
rearranged things. He understood.
Tess on her knees, head pulled back at an angle that made no
math. A glinting loop at her throat,
slick and black in places that should have been red.
The baby on the concrete in her winter suit, wailing like it was
trying to fill the whole street with sound.
A big woman in mud boots with both hands in play, pulling.
Marco grabbed the first thing on the hook by the door.
It was the cast iron poker from the fireplace, heavy at the tip
and ugly from years of coal fires.
He didn't aim, he didn't think about force or angle.
He swung like he was trying to break the night in half.
The poker rang against something.
It still makes me flinch when I think about the sound.
And the loop jumped open for a blink.
Tess slumped forward and coughed blood on the concrete in a way
that didn't sound like a cough. Marco swung again.
The second hit connected with Miss Kincaid's forearm, because
a bruise the color of eggplant bloomed there.
Later, in a photo we weren't supposed to see, the wire
dropped. It fell at the same time.
Marco yelled without words and reached for his wife.
The baby hiccuped in terror and then found another gear.
Neighbors lights flicked on like dominoes.
The sound of heavy boots running on an old porch finally happened
again, only this time it was ours.
I got there after the worst moment, which is luck I don't
pretend to have earned. When I came around the corner,
the street was full of people who didn't know how to hold
their hands, arms out, then pulled in, fists clenching and
unclenching like they were bracing to punch air.
Grandma Ruth was in her robe in the yard.
She had salt in her hand because she was going to thaw the step,
an absurd detail that sticks because my brain remembers
things that can smooth its thumb over.
Tess sat hunched on the bottom step with the baby in her lap.
The cuff of her coat was sobbing blood.
The cut was deep enough we could all see it was going to be there
forever. Marco stood over her with the
poker still raised, its tip bent now from the first strike.
He was shaking the way a car shakes when it idles too low.
Miss Kincaid had backed into her yard, panting, her eyes bright
and alive like this was play. When she saw all those porch
lights turning her way. She lifted her hands like that,
made it formal, and walked herself backward to her door.
The blood is on your heads, she said again, same cadence as
Halloween. She closed the door before
anybody reached her. I won't tell you we handled it
perfectly. Somebody ought to have done more
than stand there and bleed into their cuffs.
Somebody ought to have kicked her door in.
Or so it felt then. The truth is, fear and disbelief
make you bad at heroics. What we did was dial all of us
as if the number would answer faster if we multiplied it.
Marco tried to push his hand against Tessa's neck without
making it worse. The baby scream exhausted itself
into those tiny hiccupping grunts that come after when
their bodies keep reminding them to be scared.
I felt vinegar in my mouth, like breath you catch from close
talking. Somewhere a dog barked itself
hoarse and then shut up because it knew the shape of the new
world before we did. When the police came, the night
got more complicated and less dangerous at the same time, in
that madding way it always does. Red and blue brushed the duplex
into something that looked gentler.
Miss Kincaid let them in quiet, the chain on the door slack like
she had forgotten she ever used it.
She went with them like it was a dentist appointment.
She wore the boots. Scripture came out of her in a
steady braid, so steady one of the younger officers said,
Ma'am, can you stop? And she said no, like she
couldn't change the channel. A paramedic called Tessa's cut
clean because saying clean about something that wrong makes it
manageable. They wrapped it and warned
everyone not to look at it in the bathroom mirror for a few
days. They said things like you were
lucky your husband was home and it missed the big ones, as if
luck were a thing you could count and spend.
Luck was Marco on the other side of the door with a bent poker.
Luck was the baby in a thick winter suit.
Luck was a neighbor who heard the change in a cry.
They took Miss Kincaid away without a struggle.
She kept talking, and after she passed the porch light I stopped
trying to make out the words. Those particular ones weren't
meant for us. They were meant for whatever
place she had in her head where she could hold our family in a
net and pull the street. Waited until the tail lights,
turned the corner, then let out a breath no one realized it had
been holding. But the breath didn't go far.
It turned around in a minute and came back.
Because the ambulance was still there.
And because the duplex remained. And because fear settled in like
new furniture. Wrong at 1st and then so correct
you can't remember the room before it.
If that night was the moment the story got loud, what came next?
Talked in a whisper designed to carry.
The police went back to the duplex with people who wore
jackets from different departments.
They cordoned the yard with tape, like the movies, except
the tape only kept out people who cared about tape.
They asked Marco to describe the weapon, and he kept trying to
say it was a wire, and they kept trying to say it was a saw.
And after a while, those words didn't help each other.
They took the poker, too. I watched them put it in a big
zippered bag like it had a disease.
Then I watched one of the officers confer with his partner
and unzip the bag just enough to take the poker back out and hand
it to Marco. Keep it, the officer said,
quiet, convincing himself as much as us.
It's your house. That's how it ended up on the
hook by the door, where we could all see the bend at the tip,
like a question mark. They went into the duplex as if
they were stepping on ice, careful and testing.
The first day they were in there until dark.
The second day, they brought a man with a camera and another
man with a drone on a string that went into the crawl space
and hummed like a big fly. They took turns coming out to
stand on the porch and breathe in the open air like they'd been
underwater. On the third day, they came with
shovels. I want to be careful how I tell
the next part. It isn't a story, it's the part
of a life that shouldn't have to be spoken out loud.
But if I don't, then what we feared stays private.
And it shouldn't. They found pallet braced crawl
tunnels under her house that veered toward both family homes.
If you don't know what that means, it means the hollow
places under her floor didn't end under her floor.
She had built them out like hallways, using pallets, stolen
or scavenged, painted numbers still on the wood from shipments
that came through the mill, and she'd packed dirt into cut feed
sacks and use those to shape the turns.
The extra soil had to go somewhere, and it had gone into
those raised beds, tamped and raked and padded until it looked
like a woman who couldn't stop being tidy.
The tunnels came up shallow, under the ground near our fence
and near Tessa's step, as if she planned on making little doors
there later. They were careful telling us
that part, but we understood from what they didn't say.
Our houses had been added to hers in the dark, and the only
reason we knew it now was because a line snapped and let
the whole thing go slack. Some things they told us
straight. There was a candle lit hollow,
arranged like a shrine, the word they used because nobody knew a
simple name for a room with so many pictures and bones.
The candles were the skinny kind from the grocery store Saints
with flaking labels, the glass smoked and stuck to the plywood
floor by melted wax. The pictures were of people we
didn't recognize, which is somehow worse than if we had
newspaper clippings, not current obituaries.
Folded small lost cat Flyers, hair combed smooth and braided
around nails. Names written in a hard hand low
on the wood where you'd have to kneel to write them.
A line made in ash along the floor, like the border of a
country and human remains. They said it like that because
science has its own way of keeping a respectful distance.
They were careful. Like I said, every sentence had
a qualifier appearing to be thought to be likely pending,
But the world past the yellow tape knew what it knew.
You can't keep the particular chill of a block that has bones
under it from moving through your jacket.
When they condemned the house, the notice went up crooked on
the doorway and then straight because somebody with a square
in his pocket couldn't stand to see it.
Wrong. Miss Kincaid was taken away.
Another phrase our street made-up to put a wall between
ourselves and what happens next to people who do certain things.
We watched the duplex board up and go blind.
We watched crews come at it like it needed to be exercised.
Men in masks carried out pallets and set them down on the grass
as gently as groceries. When the trucks drove off, they
left tire tracks that filled with small standing water and
froze at the edges. That winter, the raised bed sunk
a little at the corners as the ground settled.
Rita, from up the block planted marigolds there in the spring
because she said the roots were good at singing to the dead.
I didn't argue with her, even though the science teacher in me
wanted to, the way I argue with a sneeze.
Ash Ridge has its ways. We narrowed our lives.
It wasn't a discussion. Locks we used to ignore got felt
twice, then three times. A night chain appeared on Ruth's
door that she could set with one hand.
The windows that used to be open.
A crack stayed shut. The bent poker took its hook
near the door where all the coats hung.
When I stayed at Grandma's, part of the bedtime routine became
seeing it. You'd turn on the porch light,
make sure the woodpile was stacked, glance at the hook,
then shut the light off in 2 steps.
Off on, off like a blink to some old God.
Marco set new screws in the hinges and swapped a hollow core
door for a heavy 1. He left the old door Outback in
case the baby wanted a play surface one day, and then never
once wished he had kept it. We had to pass the duplex in
daylight, of course. Errands didn't route themselves
around it for us. The boards over the windows
weathered to silver. Somebody spray painted a curse
there once and somebody else cleaned it with vinegar so hard
you could see the scrub marks in the wood from halfway down the
block. Every time I walked past I heard
the sound from Halloween, the frantic banging of someone
making a path to a door. It took me a long time to admit
that's what she thought she had been doing all along, making a
path between homes. Halloween's got strange.
The first one after we left the porch light off and felt guilty
for it. The kids on our block didn't
come around much anyway because word spreads invisible from face
to face. We bought the candy and ate it
ourselves and told stories low and fast, each of us trying to
calibrate how much to say in front of which children in the
years after we did leave the light on, because one year of
dark is a surrender and two is a habit, and we didn't want our
house to forget how to welcome. The doorbell went in awkward
spurts. We gave away too much chocolate
to each kid so they wouldn't linger.
We pretended with the unsteady laugh that belongs to new
widowers and people who've just gotten back a clean scan.
Miss Kincaid took up a lot of space.
Even gone, we developed superstitions like blisters
around her absence. You didn't leave a laundry
basket at the top of the basement stairs anymore because
the shadow it made from the kitchen light could look like
someone waiting in the corner. You didn't speak scripture in
the yard out loud because it felt like feeding a thing that
had learned to answer. Marco carried that poker around
the first few evenings as if he were learning a new limb,
setting it near whatever room he'd be in for more than a
minute. It clanged once on the tile and
the baby laughed, startling us with how clean the sound was
after so many ugly ones. I grew up in the way kids do in
towns like ours, all at once and not at all.
I left for a while like you're supposed to, and I promised
myself I wouldn't tell people from other places the story
because I hated seeing their faces go from polite to hungry
to sorry to a little entertained.
That's not what I needed from it.
I wanted a clean edge I could draw around it and label then.
Life didn't give me that edge. It gave me the reflex.
A porch light snaps on and something in me ducks, even if
I'm on a stranger St. in another state and there's no duplex.
Knitting in the dark between houses.
A baby coughs in winter and I find my feet carrying me to the
door before my brain even finishes the thought that it's
none of my business. When I visit home, my hand finds
the poker on the hook before I pour coffee.
It's a metal question I answer with muscle.
A year after the excavation, they tore the duplex down.
We didn't go watch. It wasn't an event.
It was an adjustment, like having a tooth pulled.
Tina, from the corner sent us a video anyway, recorded from
across the street. The machine put its mouth on the
roof and chewed. The house folded on itself with
a patience I didn't know wood could have.
Dust went up and the sunlight did that thing it does through
debris, making little angels for people who need them.
In the video you could still hear the mill 3 streets over the
hydraulic pumps that never die. The dog in the yard watched with
quiet eyes when the machine finished the lot looked like a
day after a haircut. Wrong at the edges, better for
the heat. They tamped it flat and left it
like that for months, open and honest.
A fresh scalp. Grass came back in clumps that
turned to waves if the wind was right.
If this were a different kind of telling, I'd deliver you an
answer right here. Why she did it, how long she
planned, what the names were on the wood and whether any matched
any missing notices. 20 miles. Either way, you can go on the
Internet and teach yourself to want answers that match.
What we got was the reality we live with.
The list that begins and then stops.
She is gone, they took her away. The duplex is gone.
The tunnel mouths looked at our houses once and came up in the
dark. Human remains were found, the
wire had teeth. Test survived, and the scar
lifts an inch when she laughs hard because that's how skin
learns to drape over memory. The poker on the hook is bent
like it bent itself that way from knowing us.
Sometimes when I visit, we do the old circuit without trying
Grandma's first, then out the back cut across the place where
the duplex used to cut across us, to Tessa's narrow place with
the tidy stripes in the rug from the vacuum.
There's space there now, which ought to make it easier.
It doesn't. Absence has weight, too.
My feet still want to run the little distance between the two
houses, because the part of me that knows running kept us
alive, that Halloween hasn't aged as fast as my bones on the
new grass in the summer, you can see where the raised beds were,
even after they graded it, even after the rains.
The land remembers how it learned to hold what was dug out
of it. Every so often, I'll catch a
breath of vinegar on the wind near Ruth's back step.
There are ordinary reasons the cook down the block makes her
own salad dressing. Somebody's washing windows the
way their grandma taught them. But the smell arrives with a
shape, sometimes a big person's silhouette on a porch, a rag in
an Oval motion that never stops, Scripture folded into in and out
breath, and I feel the yard grow long and my mother's voice rise
in my head. Don't gawk, don't engage.
Keep on. The light over Tessa's door is
on a motion sensor now. It comes up like a surprised eye
when anyone crosses the walk. You can't stand there without
setting it off. It's become a proof of life, a
way of measuring what we let ourselves know by what we cannot
help but illuminate. On Halloween, we boil cider on
the stove and leave a bowl of candy by the door with a note
that says take TWO, because trust is a muscle and we're
working it. Tess stands on the steps with
the baby, now grown into a kid tall enough to lift the latch
herself. They watch the street.
They hold their jackets closed at the throat without meaning
to. When someone comes up the walk,
the light wakes and our bodies flood themselves with something
old that we've learned to call normal.
We say Happy Halloween the way you say bless you after someone
sneezes, an old prayer cut down until it's only the parts that
fit in a throat. People move away, People move
in. The new folks hear the outline.
Sooner or later, someone mentions the house that isn't
there, the way you'd point to a missing tooth with your tongue.
When you smile, the story gets told again, and every time it
does, it changes shape, like a muscle learning to carry the
weight differently. Kids try to fit their own fears
into it, because it's the largest shape in the room, easy
to use as a coat rack. We correct what we can and let
the rest be. The worst part, we say, wasn't
the head, though in some tellings it's the first and last
thing. The worst part wasn't the wire
and the teeth and the way the doctor used the phrase missed by
a hair, like the hair hadn't been all over the floor already.
The worst part is the way we learned to run between houses in
a straight line without looking left or right, and how even now,
when the light snaps on, a part of me flees before a part of me
can stand. 2 summers after they tore the duplex down, I took a
morning walk early enough to mist my eyelashes.
I cut across the lot because that's what we do now.
We don't cede ground. The grass had come in thick.
There were footprints from a raccoon tracing the fence line
in little hands. I stopped near where the raised
beds had been and looked down. The dew had settled heavier
there, the way it does over hollows you can't see.
I crouched and pressed my palm to the ground, and it was warmer
there than the rest, the sun just catching it.
I don't know what I was hoping to feel.
Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I stood and turned back toward
Ruth's, and the motion light on Tessa's snapped on as if it had
felt me think about leaving. The bulb hummed.
The metal shade held a little heat.
The porch lay in its clean square on the grass, a bright
invitation. I went in for coffee.
I washed my hands at the sink for longer than the soap needed,
and then longer still, because it felt like watching someone
walk you home. When I dried them, I glanced
toward the door. The poker hung where it always
hung. The bend at the tip broke the
straight line and taught my eye to correct for it.
I pressed it with my thumb, a habit like people have with
wedding rings and scars, and felt the angle that says this is
ours now, even the ugly part. We keep it, we carry it.
We learn to be the kind of people who feel for it in the
dark and keep going, who lock the doors and still answer the
bell so the new kids will learn that a porch light can snap on
for reasons that are good. Later that night, the Block did
the thing it does best and made a minor miracle.
The smell of Stew on one side of the street found the smell of
cornbread on the other, and both came into Ruth's kitchen without
knocking. You eat even when you're scared.
That's one way home keeps its shape.
We laughed. We told the rooster story again.
We fussed at each other about who wasn't mixing enough greens
into the baby's plate, even though she's too old to be
called a baby now. When the sun went, it did that
coin drop thing I can't Unsee down.
Bam, the light slicing between the houses as if the day were a
thing to be cut. Someone passing in front of the
motion sensor on Tessa's porch set it off, and for a second my
chest tightened. The old way the light threw its
square on the grass. It found no one waiting in that
lost space between our doorways. Still, everyone in the kitchen
flinched a little, some of us more private about it than
others. Then we breathed out like we
always do and went back to our bowls.
That light will go on 1000 more times for 1000 harmless reasons,
and I'm going to jump every time.
But I'm going to keep walking that strip of grass between
Ruths and Tessa's, and I'm going to keep holding myself to a
simple ritual. Off on, off at the porch, A
blink that means nothing to anyone else and everything to
us.