Karolina Waclawiak - The Invaders

I was still staying away from the nature preserve. No one asked me why. I knew Teddy wasn’t happy, no matter what we did. I thought if I was kinder to him he would never suspect that I had walked in front of the car. He had never asked how we had gotten to him so quickly. Time always seemed distorted during moments of tragedy.

The only thing was, sometimes the phone would ring and I would pick it up and there would just be the faintest breath inhaling and exhaling on the other end of the line. Sometimes I would ask, “Who is it?” But the breath just kept rasping. Sometimes I would stay on the line for five minutes and just count the breaths. The person never hung up; I always had to.

The last time it happened, I whispered “Steven?” and waited for an answer. There was none. I started to think about the way he had looked at me when I’d seen him with Lori. His lingering glance had morphed into a sustained look and I could remember the color of his eyes. I picked up the phone again and dialed. My mother’s number had been disconnected.

I had sent my mother another check and it was returned, too. This time I got it before Jeffrey did. I knew I had to go to her, find her. I was afraid of what would be there, but I had avoided it long enough. I didn’t want to sit in the house with Teddy as he scratched his arm, hoping to get it to move, to have feeling again. He was leaving sores in the hard-to-see places, but when I helped him out of his shirt I could see his frantic attempts to prove that this was all temporary. I had to get out, even if just for a while.

Maybe my mother had moved to New Mexico to live with my sisters in some vast desert town. I looked up their addresses on Google Maps and stared at the space and destitution of their squat square homes. I tried to look up their numbers, but they were unlisted. I knew my attempts were feeble. I couldn’t practice what I would say to any of them if I saw them again. I chose him, I was wrong. No amends seemed enough. I stared at the old trucks in their driveways and daydreamed about what their lives must be like. I saw cacti bent over in the sun in their front yards. I tried to move the camera on their streets and into their dirt driveways, closer to the windows so I could look inside, but I could only shift left and right along the main road. A hedge hid Vanessa’s house from me. I wish I could see a person. I typed in my mother’s address and clicked the street view on the map. A blue ranch with chipping paint. It seemed like autumn in the picture because the leaves on the trees were orange and yellow. I wondered how often they updated these photos. Had it been taken last fall? The fall before? Was her house really in this much disrepair? I tried to zoom in again and noticed a shiny material in the windows. I leaned closer to the computer screen.

My mother had tinfoil masking her windows.

I clicked the window closed in embarrassment.

I asked Jeffrey to take Teddy to his doctor’s appointment and got into the car.

I-95 had fewer cars on it than usual and I thought about how Jeffrey hadn’t even asked where I was going. He didn’t care.

When we were kids, my sisters and I thought our mother’s house was the world. The pond, the woods, and the farmland, where we would creep around to watch the cows sleep. We would hunt frogs and kick over stink cabbage, screaming as it erupted in the sulfuric smells of decay. Our hair would hang down loose around our faces as we used sticks as knives and pretended to spear each other, hunted for one another in the deep woods. We were always playing attack. Sometimes we’d crowd around the small stone headstone we had found in those woods. Laurel, it said. There was no last name. It was one of those hand-carved markers and we had different ideas about where it had come from. We imagined our mother asking one of her men to haul it out back for her, doing things her own way, not letting anyone know her business, not even us. We would run through the woods carrying our sticks high, chanting Laurel, Laurel, Laurel, resting only to cast spells of protection for our lost sister.

I parked across the street from my mother’s house and looked up and down the road: modest homes dotted yards that were encircled by trees. The area was surrounded by farms or old remnants of farms. I hesitated before crossing the street, not wanting to move past what I had been able to see in the Google street view. The trees were lush and thick and bore down on the small blue house. The windows did indeed have tinfoil on them, crinkled in some places, and I shuddered. My mother would never… Our family home would never look like this.

I didn’t know the woman who shut the world out with scraps of tinfoil and tape.

I finally made my way onto the lawn. There was no car in the driveway and I couldn’t imagine she had ever cleaned out the garage. I couldn’t look into the windows because of the tinfoil, so I went around the back, checking behind me to make sure no one was looking. All the windows had tinfoil on them, even the pane on the back door. What was my mother doing in there? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. There was nothing in the backyard and it looked overgrown. The front yard did, too, as I walked back around to the front door.

I knocked and pressed my ear against it. I didn’t hear a sound. She had taken away our keys when we left, saying she didn’t like drop-in visits. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I walked into the woods and tried to remember the way we used to go to find our sister Laurel.

It was as if the terrain had changed completely. Missing trees and layers of dry leaves, years of them, covered up any sign of our little stone. I stood in the woods and thought about how fearless we had been and how fearful I was now, even before Steven. As kids, we had spent hours getting lost and never felt concerned about finding our way again. We were explorers, through and through. Sometimes we’d daydream about staying in the woods forever, being close to Laurel and building a family of wild girls. And now she was a nowhere girl, forgotten under all these leaves. I stared at our house through the trees and at the small window that used to be ours, the small gravel patch underneath it, and walked toward it.

On hot nights my sisters and I would strip down to our underwear and run around the room we shared, arms flapping like we were crazy. We’d lounge around reading fashion magazines and trying on our mother’s makeup. We were in a rush to be women, to be looked at and admired. In the winter, with the wood stove burning hot in our room, we’d be nearly naked, window wide open, hoping the smoke would pour out, mouths up against the window screen breathing in the sharp, cold air. Sometimes we’d hear footsteps on the gravel and stare at the window, wondering who was watching us in the dark. We’d dare one another to take off our bra tops and we’d strut around in front of the window, trying to get the phantoms to want us, practicing at being grown up. We’d always aim ourselves toward the window when we’d hear that gravel crackle and put on a show. When we’d walk outside the window in the daytime we’d find crushed-up cigarette butts and our stomachs would tingle, knowing it wasn’t a raccoon out there, or a possum, making all that noise. It was a man. Someone who wanted to look at us for a change, someone who couldn’t get enough. In the winter we’d find them, too, covered in snow, wet through. We felt invincible then because we had all the power in the world. We were wanted, lusted after.

I walked up to the window now and kicked around looking for any cigarette butts, but the gravel was clean of them, and our small window was tinfoiled over, shutting it all out. I looked around and found a rock. I took it in my palm and hit the windowpane as hard as I could, then watched the glass fall inside the room. I stuck my hand through the broken pane, trying to unlock the window.