Safe as Houses

It was three o’clock and the TV was off. Because it was Valentine’s Day, MTV was running a special episode of The Real World about the best hook-ups from the first five seasons. It made Jennie uncomfortable. The grainy black-and-white security cam footage of bodies in beds felt like something she shouldn’t be seeing, and that made her not want to see it.

Jennie stood between the living room and the kitchen. The back of the house was all one big open space. In front of her was a dining table and a large window; behind her was a built-in desk with the family’s computer.

The house was eight years old.

She looked out the back windows at the empty bird feeder, its supposedly squirrel-proof pole sagging to one side. A female robin was on the perch, looking for seed in the cracked plastic chamber. Jennie wasn’t sure whose job it was to fill the bird feeder; her mom had never asked her to. She didn’t even know where the birdseed was kept. In the depths of the garage probably, places she never explored. The robin gave up and flew away.

Jennie’s parents were at work. Her mom would come home around 5:30, her dad around 6:30. Her mom would make dinner, then Jennie would eat it from a tray on the floor in front of the TV, her mom would eat it at the table flipping through a magazine, and her father would eat it in his office in the basement. Jennie’s older brother was doing his junior year at a fancy boarding school in New Jersey.

She wondered if she’d ever done this before, stood still alone in the house on purpose. Outside the sky was dense with cloud. Inside the light was a darker gray, almost brown, matching the bare trees and the dead grass outside. There was something about these browns of winter. They seemed to embrace and spook her at the same time. She stretched out her fingers. The dim light and the pink sleeves of her turtleneck turned her pale skin almost white.

Now that Jennie was in sixth grade, Valentine’s Day no longer involved cutting a hole in the lid of a shoebox, covering it with construction paper, and walking around the classroom dropping valentines into everyone’s boxes. Jennie had bought a set of cards from the drugstore anyway, Pooh-themed ones, and wrote some to her friends. It was strange this year, having to hunt people down in the hallways and during lunch instead of all being in the same class together. When she’d given Kaitlyn her card, Kaitlyn had replied, “Aww, you’re so cute, you’re the sweetest!” When she’d given Heather her card, Heather had rolled her eyes and said, “You’re such a nerd!” Only after seeing Heather did Jennie think back to what Kaitlyn had said and wonder if “cute” and “sweet” were good things. She didn’t bother giving Tricia her card. If Heather had made fun of her, Tricia was sure to be even worse. She folded Tricia’s card and hid it at the bottom of her backpack. When she came home, she buried it in the trash can so her mother wouldn’t see it and feel sorry for her.

Jennie looked into the living room. Just behind the couch were sliding glass doors that led out to the deck. They were covered by vertical blinds that tinkled when heat blew through the vents in the floor. The sliding doors were only ever opened once or twice a year, when the family had barbecues in the summer. The rest of the year they were kept closed, hidden behind the blinds. Jennie wondered why it had to be so.

She reached behind the couch and pulled on the beaded plastic chain to draw the blinds. They clicked as they collapsed against one another. Then she squeezed into the small gap between the back of the couch and the glass. She pushed the lever to unlock the door. She knew it would stick, but it was even more difficult to move than she thought. Her thumb turned white with strain, she planted her feet wide to give herself more power. At last it gave way. She rubbed her throbbing thumb, then yanked at the handle, putting her body into it, and slid the door open.

Cool air and the scent of almost-snow rushed in at her. Should she go get her shoes? But somehow she knew if she left, even for a moment, something would get lost. So she stepped outside in her socks and told herself that getting them dirty was adventurous, weird. She could do weird things.

It was still out here. The deck was large and empty, save for a picnic table. Behind the deck there was a little slope and then a band of trees that separated her house from the neighborhood on the other side of the hill. The trees were thin this time of year, and there wasn’t much privacy between the lots. But the house beyond the trees didn’t interest her. She looked at the trees themselves, their tangled gray-brown branches, the thick, rigid bark and the thin peeling bark. How rough those trunks would be against her hands.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of something white, like the tail of a rabbit. She crept quickly but stealthily to the edge of the deck and peeked over the wooden railing, but she didn’t see anything. Maybe it had already gone underneath the deck.

So far this winter, there had only been light snows, an inch here or there. Not enough to cover the grass. It was nothing like last winter: the three feet, the drifts taller than her dad, the whole delicious week off from school. Her brother was still at home then. Together they built an extensive network of tunnels along the driveway and in the yard. They brought warm Toaster Strudels into the tunnels to eat.

From here, she could see her neighbors’ houses, their yards sloped down grassy hills like hers. Jennie had read books about cities where neighborhoods were vast and had things you could walk to, but her neighborhood was just ten houses, a curved road, and a cul-de-sac. That’s where she lived, the last house as you exited the cul-de-sac.

Jennie’s house and the houses on either side of it were the newest, the last lots to be developed. Her neighborhood was located off of a winding, hilly road that ran parallel to Route 1. There were old farmhouses along this road mixed with the newer developments like hers. Eventually the road merged with Route 1 and led to the slow-moving Brandywine River and then, further, to a Revolutionary War battlefield. There was a very old house on the battlefield that Jennie had had to recreate in miniature for a class project, using little rocks and white paste to mimic the mortar.

A crash behind her made her head whip round, her face flinch.

One of the picnic table benches had fallen over. It wasn’t at all windy. The air was stagnant, floating. Jennie walked through it, feeling some resistance, and picked up the bench. It was lighter than she remembered, it didn’t seem capable of the terrific noise it had made. The picnic table and its two short benches had been painted a dull maroon several years ago. The paint seemed cheap to Jennie. It was gritty and rubbed off on light clothing. She set the bench down and wiped her hands on her jeans.

She saw movement to her right, something white again. The bunny must have gone under the deck and out the other side. She tiptoed quickly across and down the steps onto the lawn. The dry grass poked through her socks and she winced and staggered. She took them off. It was better to have more blades poking her skin all at once than one or two stabbing her through her socks. She knelt on the ground, put her hands on the grass, and looked underneath the deck.

She couldn’t see anything but dirt, leaves, spiderwebs. No glassy eyes staring back at her. No rustling. The grass was hurting her hands. She sat up and saw there were red impression marks on her palms. She rubbed them together and looked into the house, in through the sliding doors she’d left open. It was strange seeing the back of the couch like this. When these doors were opened in the summer, the couch was always moved aside to make a clear path out to the deck. It was upholstered in a pilled gray fabric, the kind that looked itchy but wasn’t. Unsurprisingly, the fabric was more pristine on the back. She could see what the couch must have looked like when it was new. Sometimes her mom would cover the cushions with an old fitted bedsheet. She didn’t know how to tell her mom she was embarrassed by this; it had been established as a thing that happened in their home and it seemed too late to say anything about it.

Jennie was so focused on the couch’s fabric that she didn’t realize there was something sitting on it.

Black holes, set deep in a powdery white head, a sort of blurred skull, were staring over the back of the couch.

Jennie fell back onto the grass, the breath knocked out of her. Her throat seized. The black holes, themselves a kind of eyes, were pointed right at her. But she couldn’t tell if they were really seeing her. She regained her breath and, as a test, crept slowly to her left. She couldn’t say how, but the eyes, the dull blackness, followed her. Jennie kept crawling, she scooted her knees along the ground. The thing rose from the couch and revealed its shape – sort of human, and male, though Jennie couldn’t say how she knew this. It floated up, up, and then vanished.

Jennie was very still. Should she try to run, get away? Where would she even go? She didn’t like any of her neighbors: a bunch of rowdy boys younger than her, and adults who didn’t seem to like her parents. She let the grass dig, hard, into her feet and hands.

She waited, but the thing didn’t reappear. She was convinced now that moving would make her more vulnerable. So she half lay there on the dead grass, watching and waiting. There was a flurry of nervous energy just below her stomach, a jumping prickling feeling. Was this something like how it felt to get your period? For the tissue to detach itself from your uterus? Then she felt dumb. What a stupid thing to think.

She’d closed her eyes at some point and they shot open now. It was right in front of her. Its body was thick and undefined but had the gleam of polished bone. Its black hole-eyes were very close to her face.

Jennie shuddered and let out a little cry. She hadn’t felt cold outside till now. Goosebumps spread over her whole body in a sudden convulsion.

“I don’t want this,” she said to the ghost.

It suddenly towered above her, without seeming to have moved at all. Its whiteness overwhelmed her senses. It canceled out everything she saw, smelled, heard. Her lips felt chapped and raw. She swallowed compulsively and tasted bile. She could see herself as if from above, crumpled there on the ground. I’m little, she thought, I’m so little. Her fear wavered. Could it feel pity for her?

She blinked a few times and the ghost, whatever it was, was gone. She was just there in her backyard, lying on her side, her knees bent, her hands outstretched on the cold sharp grass.

She rolled forward and pushed herself to her feet. They tingled. She picked up her socks from the steps. The deck was so cold that she couldn’t feel the texture of the wood on her feet.

She paused at the open sliding doors. Dry leaves had blown into the living room. She gathered them up with her hands but only created more little crumbs. She tried to brush them out onto the deck but they were caught in the fibers of the carpet. She gave up, no one would notice anyway.

Jennie slid the door shut. She locked it, once again straining to get the lever into place. Then she wiggled out from behind the couch and tugged on the plastic chain to close the blinds.

It was 3:50. I’m older than this house, she thought.