Nathan Hill - The Nix

She sipped her water, then pressed the cold glass to her forehead. She closed her eyes. It was a long, tedious Saturday afternoon. Henry had gone into the office after another one of their fights, this one on the issue of dirty dishes. Their late-seventies-era avocado-colored dishwasher had finally stopped working this week, and not once had Henry volunteered to clean the growing pile of plates and bowls and cookware and glasses that had overrun the sink and much of the counter. Samuel suspected his mother was intentionally letting the pile get out of hand — maybe even contributing to it more than usual, using several pots for a meal that probably required only one — as a kind of test. Would Henry notice? Would he help? That he did neither of these things was something she extrapolated great meaning from.

“It’s like home ec class all over again,” she told him when the pile finally became unbearable.

“What are you talking about?” Henry said.

“Just like in high school. You go have fun while I cook and clean. Nothing’s changed. In twenty years, absolutely nothing has changed.”

Henry washed all the dishes, then claimed urgent weekend duties at the office, leaving Faye and Samuel alone, together, again. They sat in the kitchen and read from their respective books. Incomprehensible poetry for her. Choose Your Own Adventure for him.

“I knew a girl named Margaret in high school,” Faye said. “Margaret was a very bright and witty girl. And in school she fell in love with a boy named Jules. A handsome boy who could do anything. Everyone was jealous of her. But it turns out Jules was her Nix.”

“Why? What happened?”

She set her glass in the puddle it had made on the wood. “He disappeared,” she said. “She got stranded, never left town. I hear she’s still there, working as a cashier at her dad’s pharmacy.”

“Why did he do that?”

“That’s what a Nix does.”

“She couldn’t tell?”

“It’s difficult to see. But a good rule to remember is that anyone you fall in love with before you’re an adult is probably a Nix.”

“Anyone?”

“Probably anyone.”

“When did you meet Dad?”

“In school,” she said. “We were seventeen.”

Faye stared into the yellow haze of the day. The refrigerator chugged and hummed and clicked and all at once, with a brief final electrical zap, it quit. And the light went out. And the countertop digital clock radio died. And Faye looked around and said, “We blew a fuse.” Which meant of course that Samuel had to flip the breaker, because the breaker box was in the basement and his mother refused to go into the basement.

The flashlight was heavy and solid in his hand, its aluminum handle dimpled, its big round rubberized face an appropriate size for striking something violently in a pinch. His mother didn’t go into the basement because the basement was where the house spirit lived. At least that was the story, another one from his grandfather: house spirits that inhabit basements and haunt you your entire life. His mother said she’d encountered one as a child and gotten spooked. She never liked basements after that.

But she insisted that her house spirit appeared only to her, only she was haunted, and Samuel was perfectly safe. He could go into the basement unharmed.

He began to cry. A soft and light whimper, because either there was a cruel ghost living in the basement watching him at this very moment or his mother was a little crazy. He shuffled his feet along the concrete floor and kept his attention narrowly focused on the beam of light in front of him. He tried to be blind to everything but that circle of light. And when he finally did see the fuse box on the other side of the room, he shut his eyes and walked as straight as he could. He shuffled forward and stuck the flashlight out in front of him and continued in this manner until he felt the flashlight’s face bump into the wall. He opened his eyes. There was the fuse box. He threw the breaker and the basement lights came alive. He looked behind him and saw nothing. Nothing but the ordinary basement junk. He stayed a moment to collect himself, to stop crying. He sat on the floor. It was so much cooler down here.

IN THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS of the school year, Bishop and Samuel fell into an easy alliance. Bishop would do whatever he wanted, and Samuel would follow. These were simple roles for the both of them. They never even discussed or acknowledged it, but fell into their positions like coins falling into their slots in a vending machine.

They’d meet in the woods for war games near the pond. Bishop always had a scenario ready for their games. They fought Charlie in Vietnam, the Nazis in World War II, the Confederacy in the Civil War, the British in the Revolutionary War, the Indians in the French and Indian War. And with the exception of their one confused attempt to play War of 1812, the wars always had a clear objective, and they were always the good guys, and their enemies were always bad, and the two of them always won.

Or if they weren’t playing war, they’d play video games at Bishop’s house, which was Samuel’s preference because then he might run into Bethany, whom he loved. Though he probably wouldn’t have called it “love” just yet. It was rather a state of heightened attention and agitation that manifested itself physically as a smaller vocal dynamic range (he had a tendency to shut down and become penitent in her presence even though he did not mean to or want to) and an intense desire to touch her clothes, between his thumb and forefinger, lightly. Bishop’s sister exhilarated him and terrified him. But she usually ignored them. Bethany seemed unaware of her influence. She practiced her scales, listened to music, closed her door. She traveled to various music festivals and competitions, where she won solo violin ribbons and trophies that eventually went up on her bedroom wall, along with her various posters of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and a small collection of those porcelain masks representing comedy and tragedy. Dried flowers too, from her many recitals, when afterward she was given big bouquets of roses that she carefully dried and then affixed to her wall, above her bed, an efflorescence of pastel greens and pinks that exactly matched her bedspread and curtains and wallpaper color scheme. It was such a girl’s room.

Samuel knew this bedroom because he had, two or three times, spied on it from a safe position outside, in the woods. He left his house right after sunset, under a deepening violet sky, came down to the creek, and made his muddy way through the woods, behind the houses of Venetian Village, past the gardens where roses and violets were closing up for the night, behind the odorous dog kennels and greenhouses that smelled of sulfur and phosphorous, behind the house of the headmaster of Blessed Heart Academy, who could sometimes be found this time of night relaxing in his custom-built outdoor saltwater Jacuzzi, and Samuel would move cautiously and slowly and watch out not to step on twigs or piles of dead leaves while he kept one eye on the headmaster, who from this distance looked like an indistinct white blobby thing, the many parts of him — belly and chin and underarms — notable only for their heavy sag. And on around the block, through the woods, down to the street’s stubby end, where Samuel took a position among the tree roots behind the Fall house, perhaps ten feet from where the lawn met the forest, dressed entirely in black, with a black hood pulled down to within an inch of the ground so that the only bits of body that he showed the world were his eyes.

And there he watched.

The yellow-orange glow of lights, shadows of people as they migrated through the house. And when Bethany appeared within the frame of her bedroom window, a bolt of anxiety cracked in his belly. He pressed into the ground harder. She wore a thin cotton dress, which is what she always wore, always a little classier than anyone else, like she was returning from a fancy restaurant or church. The way the dress lightly swung as she walked, and then the way it so softly came to rest against her body when she stopped moving, gliding back down to her skin, like watching feathers fall elegantly through the air. Samuel could drown in that fabric, happily.