Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

Inside, I put down my things and found an old sweatshirt of Brody’s. Tessa put it on and thanked me and then immediately made her way over to the fireplace mantel and picked up one of the framed photographs there.

“Is this your husband?” she asked. “Wow. Bet you have to fight all the ladies off.”

My mood darkening, I muttered, “You have no idea, kid.”

It was an old black-and-white shot of Brody on his mountain bike. In the picture, he is wearing a jersey and shorts and an Afro wig; it was some costume charity race he had done years ago. I joined her at the fireplace and gently took the photograph out of her hands and put it back in its spot, next to a framed picture of my parents and another one of my grandmother and me, taken at my high school graduation. I look incredibly young in that photograph. As I’ve aged, I find myself looking more and more like my mother.

I catch my reflection and wonder what she would have looked like at fifty, sixty, seventy years old. She’ll always be thirty-five in my mind, frozen in time, young, beautiful, vibrant.

She was full of life, until she wasn’t.

I rubbed my lower back and grimaced at the knot I found. “Tessa, it’s been a long day. I’m beat. I appreciate the apology, but it wasn’t necessary. I should apologize to you, my partner wasn’t trying to trick you or get you to rat out anyone.”

She looked at me with concern. “Do you want me to rub your back? I can get those knots out, if you want. I’ve studied massage therapy.”

I said, “No, thank you. I need to lie down and get some rest. Can we talk tomorrow?”

I put a hand on her shoulder and gently steered her toward the front door. She stopped halfway there.

“Is that your dog? He’s so cute! Here, puppy, puppy,” Tessa squealed.

Seamus ambled over and she knelt and ruffled the fur around his ears. He flopped to the ground and exposed his belly with a big grin, in doggy heaven.

I sighed and counted to ten and then tried again.

“Tessa?”

“Sorry, he’s just so cute. Yeah, yeah, tomorrow’s fine. We’ve got a performance, why don’t you come by and watch?” she said. She peeled out of the sweatshirt and handed it back to me.

I was surprised. “Fatone is having you perform?”

She laughed at my response. “Don’t you know, Gemma? The show must go on. We’re losing buckets of money if we sit here in town, not doing our thing.”

Tessa closed the front door gently behind her and I leaned against it, the wood cool against my forehead. She was a strange one, mature one moment, angry the next, then childlike, then solicitous.

I fed Seamus and let him out and then locked the back door and drew a warm bath upstairs. I lay in the hot water, a rolled hand towel for a headrest, and stared up at the darkness in the ceiling. A few years back, Brody installed a skylight above the bathtub. The rain struck the glass window with fat splatters and the sky beyond was dark and moonless.

A distant boom of thunder thudded somewhere, a few miles off, and through the skylight I watched as the night filled with a white glow that danced away as quickly as it had flashed by.

Another clap of thunder, this one much closer, was followed by a loud thud downstairs.

I sat up in the bath. “Seamus?”

There was no answer. Although he could be a real pain in the ass, that dog was trained to the teeth. If I was in the house, anywhere, and called him, he came.

“Seamus?” I called a little louder. “C’mon, boy.”

Another loud thud and I propelled myself out of the bath and into the white terrycloth robe that I’d tossed on the counter. At the same time, the lights in the house flickered once, and then twice, then went out completely.

I froze and listened to sounds that crept in, replacing the space where once there had been light. The rain was loud, much louder, as though the plunks and plinks and splats now came in through an open window.

Maybe through an open door.

I had lived in this house on the edge of the forest long enough to know most of her more intimate noises. Her winter noises, when her eaves and shingles crackled with frost and ice; her summer noises, when the wooden planks in the floor expanded and contracted with the heat. And her settling noises, the occasional creaks and squeaks as the foundation shifted imperceptibly.

I crossed the hall to our bedroom, moving quickly but silently, adrenaline kicking my heartbeat up to double time. Under the bed among a flurry of dust bunnies lived a long, flat box. Kneeling, awkward with my big belly, I opened the box and slid out the 12-gauge combat shotgun. The thought struck me that soon with a baby in the house we’d need to get a proper gun safe. Here I was worried about gun safety, with a possible intruder downstairs, and a hysterical laugh caught in my throat. I cursed Brody for leaving me alone while he went gallivanting around Alaska with Celeste Fucking Takashima.

Working in the dark, by feel, I groped in the nightstand drawer until my fingers felt the long, narrow metal shaft of a penlight. The light was weak but I was running on instinct and experience, assembling the rifle and sliding the rounds in the dim light as smoothly as I might assemble a sandwich.

Sixty seconds after I’d heard the second thud, I was at the head of the stairs locked and loaded. I kept my finger off the trigger and held the shotgun out in front of me, aimed at the ground but ready to lift at the first target that crossed my way.

I took a deep breath and peeked around the wall and looked down. A deep blackness filled the stairwell. I might have been at the bottom of the ocean for all I could see. Hesitant to use the penlight but knowing I couldn’t safely risk a descent without a quick look, I flicked the light on and off and saw in the second or two of illumination the front door gaping open at the bottom of the stairs.

I flashed the light again and watched as a gust of wind, ice cold and mean, tore in and gripped the door with tendril-like fingers. Caught unawares, the door traveled along the wind’s retreat, slamming back against the wall with another heavy thud.

Had I locked the front door after Tessa left? I thought through my actions of the night and could only remember for certain locking the back door.

“Seamus?” I called out once more and then began walking down the stairs, keeping the gun in front of me like a shield. With each step I felt a tremor make its way down my arm and into my hand. At the bottom, my bare feet took a final step and touched down on wet fabric; the area rug, soaked through from the rain.

I swore and started to close the door then paused and called one last time for Seamus.

He came bounding toward me from the side of the house, his coat soaked, his feet muddy, a ghost-dog in the dim moonlight.

“You dingbat.”

I pulled him in, shut the door and, in the dark, felt for the old towel from the hall closet and rubbed him off. As I dried off the last of his short legs, the house lights flickered and came on.

With Seamus at my heels, and the shotgun in my arms, I made my way through the first floor, room by room, checking windows and closets, taking my time.

There was nothing.

There was no one.

I felt silly, but the front door was heavy and even unlocked, I didn’t think it could blow open without assistance. I double-checked the back door and found it secure.

Upstairs, I repeated my search, room by room. I almost skipped the bathroom, as I’d been in there when the noises had started, but as I passed the half-open door, I noticed something strange.

The bathroom was dark.

I was almost positive I’d left the light on when I had bolted from my bath. I wouldn’t have taken the extra seconds to turn it off. And the power had gone off after I had put on my robe, hadn’t it?