The first time Claire opened the
closet door and found a long, dark hallway, she closed the door and left. A silver jolt of adrenaline snarled up from her
stomach to her heart and then constricted around her throat. Her fingers curled arthritically around the
door knob and her hand felt separated from the rest of her body by static, but
she managed to close the door.
Closed the door and left the room.
Within a day, the memory had taken
on a surreal, fuzzy tone and by the fourth day, she could not think about it in
the same space as reality. She’d had
vivid dreams all her life. She could
remember certain dreamscapes more clearly than the house she was born in.
She did not go back and open the
closet door. She knew she didn’t have
to. Didn’t have to prove anything. Her older sister, Jen, and her boyfriend,
Marco, opened it all the time and there was always just a closet.
It was the trauma.
The stress.
The sleepless nights and the new
surroundings.
I’d stayed with Jen before and I’d
known Marco almost as long as Jen had, but this wasn’t a sleepover in my big
sister’s city apartment. This was Dad
finally losing his job again and Child Services finding his stash after I had to
drive him to the hospital. I hadn’t been
able to stay in my own lane on the drive there and had been pulled over. Dad and I had been loaded into the cop car
and taken the rest of the way to the hospital.
The cop said I wouldn’t be in trouble, I was only thirteen. I’d done what I thought was right and blah,
blah, blah, did I know what had happened to my father?
His nose was bleeding and he was
puking and seizing, of course I knew what was wrong with my dad.
Marco cleared out his office the
day I got there, stacking all his stuff in the corners of the living room. He left his desk in there until he could
reorganize the living room.
“We’ll look into something better
than an air mattress soon,” Jen promised.
Which means they think this is
permanent. Marco’s sacrificing his office
and Jen’s buying me a bed. Dad’s gonna
survive, but they don’t think he’ll keep custody. Jen thinks she’d be a better guardian than
Dad. She’d never say it, not now that
she’s outta the house, anyway, but she still thinks it. Marco thinks so too, but he comes from a real
family. He thinks Dad should always get
another chance anyway.
No one talks about custody. We talk about him, but not about it.
“He’s agreed to go into rehab
again.”
“He’ll get it straight this time,
it never sticks the first try.”
“We’ll make a trip over there next
weekend.”
Dad loves Marco. Loves him.
He knows Marco believes in family, knows Marco will always give him a
second chance. And a third. And now he knows Marco will make sure Jen
can’t keep me away from him. She wouldn’t,
but he worries.
****
Weekends came and went before
Claire opened the closet again. This
time she brought a flashlight. Because
it was only her. Because Jen and Marcos
and that one dude who had bunked here during a road trip all opened the closet and
it was just a closet. Because when Jen
had been busy making breakfast and asked Claire to grab a jacket from the
closet, she had faked sick to avoid opening the door and seeing that
not-closet.
So while Jen was at work and Marco
was out to meet her for lunch, Claire grabbed a flashlight and went to the
closet.
The closet opened into
darkness. Claire’s thumb slipped off the
button twice before she managed to click on the flashlight. The beam twitched and swayed. The hallway’s floor was made of what looked
like chain link fencing, but the links were much smaller and closer
together. The walls were corrugated
sheet metal. When Claire turned the beam
to the ceiling, she felt the floor lurch beneath her feet slightly. Above her was pure blackness and even with
the flashlight, she could not see the ceiling.
She turned the beam back downward.
The walls wept rivulets of
corrosion and rust down its ridges.
At the very edge of her
flashlight’s beam, Claire could make out a wall where the hall branched right
and left.
Crouching just outside the
threshold, she tapped the end of her flashlight against the floor. The beam flickered off briefly and the floor clinked.
Claire waited—
One-one
thousand.
Two-one
thousand…
…One
hundred twenty-one thousand.
—and nothing changed. The floor didn’t fall away, there was no scrabbling
within the walls, and no voices calling faintly from within. Claire pressed her hand lightly against the
floor and then pressed down. Harder and
harder, but the metal links barely bowed at all. Which, she knew, meant it was time to
decide.
She stalled a minute longer,
turning the flashlight over in her hand and rapping the butt of it loudly
against the wall. The sound echoed down
the hall a ways and she counted off sixty seconds. She stretched out her right leg, straddling
bedroom and the closet. And then she
brought her left foot across.
When her father hadn’t paid the
cable bill, he’d joked about ants taking over the TV when all they could see
was static. Little black and white ants
rioting across the screen. Her chest
felt like that now, like roiling waves of insects skittering around inside of
her.
She stomped one foot against the
floor and the chain links chink and chime sharply. No light pushed into her peripheral vision
from behind, from where the windows in Jen’s bedroom were. The air smelled stale and damp and little
motes of light flew in little flurries across her flashlight’s beam. Deeper into the not-closet, metal groaned
softly. Her legs wouldn’t carry her another
step forward. The sound of her foot first
clanking against the floor had severed all lines of communication between her
brain and her extremities.
Which is all the same in the end
because the only signals her brain could send out involve complicated strings
of shrill, panicked denials.
A shining sliver of panic lodged
into her brain. Behind her, where the
closet door should have been and through which light from the bedroom windows should
have been shining, she heard hoarse, labored breathing. Close enough to cut through her brain’s vapor
lock. She spun back toward the door,
dimly aware that it must’ve been her own breathing that startled her, and saw
the doorway was still there. The bedroom
was just as she left it and sun was still shining in through the windows. The light just didn’t reach the
not-closet. It was like an unfinished
drawing, the light just ended at the
threshold. So did the distinctive smell
of the heavy duty laundry detergent Jen used.
The room had reeked of it since Marco had piled all the clean laundry
onto the bed to be sorted, but just a foot into the not-closet, the smell was
totally absent. So were the sounds of
suburbia. No cars, no lawnmowers, and no
kids running around on the weekend.
Just a low, bubbling snarl that
rolled through the corridor.
Her brain shut down entirely. Survival instincts older than the human race
kicked in like hotwiring a car. Exposed
wires touched and the engine coughed to life.
Claire ran.
****
Marco found her crying in her room
when he got home from lunch. She didn’t
answer when he knocked on the door.
“Claire, I gotta know you’re
okay. If you can’t tell me you aren’t
concussed or bleeding, I have to come
in, alright?”
She grunts something wet and hoarse
and not nearly coherent enough to appease Marco. He comes in, eyes circling her. Looking for any sign of injury. No blood, no heavy fallen objects, and no
holes in the wall so he shifts gears.
Loud, concerned, and authoritative softens.
“Hey, hey, hey, Claire—Claire
what’s wrong?”
It takes a couple minutes of
cajoling just to get the ball rolling, but eventually Claire remembers the
basics of human speech.
“Nothing, Marco, nothing. Sorry, just forget about it.”
He crouches down next to me and
puts a hand on my forearm. His hands are
delicate and slim and Jen always makes fun of them when they pretend to
bicker. I turn my head so none of the
tears trickle down onto his hand.
“You know the house rules, I’m not
allowed to forget about it if you keep crying.”
“That’s not a thing, you made that
up. Just—”
“C’mon, kid. I know I’m not Jen, but I am almost a fully-functional adult and
I’m engaged to a psychiatric nurse. That
has to make me qualified to help out a crying middle-school girl, right?”
“Marco, it’s—I don’t wanna talk
about it, okay?”
“Was it a boy? I’m not much good at fixing heartbreak, but I
can call Grandma Fuentes. She’s got
hook-ups with some nasty folks. Cartels
and shit, y’know?”
I hiccup and snort. Grandma Fuentes is short and plump and the
smiliest person on Earth. When I look up
at him, the world comes into focus. The
new room filled with my old stuff. The
baseboard of my bed that I’m leaning against, the brightly colored pillows and
blankets, the mess on the floor, and the light from the window coating almost
every surface in sight. Outside sounds
come filtering in. The gushing tears
subside into a leaky, snotty mess.
“Shut up, Marco. I’m gonna tell her you’re lying about her
again.”
Normalcy slowly reasserts
itself. The impossible starts feeling
impossible again. Closets are just
closets and I’m just some little girl crying on her older sister’s fiancé.
I drop my head, so my hair covers
my face, and wipe my nose.
“How was lunch with Jen?”
It takes a second for him to
respond. If he answers, it takes us
completely away from whatever I was crying about. I keep my head down until he speaks, putting
my face back together and letting the fabric of reality knit itself back
together.
“Good, good. Went to that little pub thing, McArthur’s.”
“Talk about anything fun?”
“Eh, I think they’re gonna cancel
one of the comics I’m working on right now, so I don’t need to be three issues
ahead anymore.”
“Aw, which one?”
“The ghost story one.”
“Campfires? But your art was
so good on that one!”
Marco smiles. “Yeah, but did you actually read it? Dude had no idea what to do with the story
after they gave him a second story arc.”
“True.” I pause.
“And he wasn’t a great writer to start with.”
“Heh, at least he sent me the
scripts on time.”
The normalcy briefly butts up
against what happened earlier, but my brain is getting less and less willing to
process it with every second. “Not like Duncan.”
He rolls his eyes
dramatically. “Duncan is an artiste, what does punctuality mean to a
work of such literary import?”
I turn up my nose haughtily—the
image slightly offset by the sniffling, “The critics simply adore your collaboration though,
Marco.” My hand flutters. “The, the…symbiosis
of your pencils and his words is simply transcendent.”
“Ugh,” he grimaces “Now you’re just
reading the back cover of the first trade paperback. And don’t let Jen hear you talk like that,
she still likes Duncan.”
I snort. “That’s because she thinks it’ll be an easy
out-patient procedure to get his head back out of his ass.”
Marco laughs. “Don’t swear like that. Jen’s gonna think you’re picking up bad
habits from me, kid.”
****
The metal floor rattled and clinked
as she walked across. Halfway between
the door and the wall ahead, Claire uncapped an oversized car marker and drew a
huge orange arrow pointing back toward the door. She capped the marker and swung the
flashlight beam over the arrow, it lit up slightly like a reflector on a bike.
Sleep deprivation and wildly
inconsistent eating habits have taken their toll. Her brain felt stuck between gears, a
single-minded, obsessive focus on the not-closet and a floaty disconnect from
the world. Her skull felt a size too
small for her brain and her scalp tingled.
The ant riot raged across her chest.
She’d almost brought Jen or Marco
along with her this time. The closet was
just a closet when they opened it, but what about when she opened it in front
of them? Almost. She’d been stymied by the other side of the
coin. What if she opened the door and
there was nothing? To be crazy and
unable to tell reality from fantasy or to be sane and thought crazy. Those would be her options at that point and
she might never figure out which was true.
Jen worked at a psych ward for teenagers. Just a couple days ago they’d admitted a girl
because of a psychotic break. Couldn’t
figure out what was real.
Jen came home exhausted that night,
looked completely heartbroken telling Marco about that girl. It was that look that kept Claire from
talking to them. Because that girl was
only two years older than Claire and couldn’t figure out what was real.
So she’d walked over to Wal Mart,
bought two car markers and a backup flashlight.
She’d loaded her hand-me-down satchel bag with the markers, flashlight,
a bottle of water, and a bag of Chex mix and waited for the house to empty out.
Trying to get a grasp on her own
thoughts felt like trying to pick a single conversation out of the din of the
gym right before an assembly started. It
was all jumbled fragments and foggy murmurs that never solidified.
Carrots
and peas. Carrots and peas.
Her dad had told her that when
actors needed to create noise like background conversations, they would say
things like “carrots and peas” and gesture like it all meant something
grand. Nonsense sounds to round out the
silence. But the bit players in her head
weren’t doing their jobs right. The din
was becoming a rising tide, drowning out the important dialogue. The leads were tripping over their lines and
only a few useful bits of information could reach through the noise.
Leave
an arrow.
Shine
a light down the hallway before walking.
Drink
some water.
Carrots
and peas.
The fragments that made it through,
they weren’t really her thoughts. She
was vaguely aware of that. The car
marker was just breadcrumbs. The light
was just look before you leap. The water
was just her Dad’s voice, ironic advice about her health. All external thoughts that had lodged into
her brain.
The beam of her flashlight bobbed
from wall-to-wall-to-floor and it occurred to Claire that something had
changed. The floor was no longer rusted
links of metal, it was cement. Rough
like sandpaper and, in places, damp and stained. A sharp, acidic smell wafted towards her.
One of her own fragments shouted to
be heard. Over and over, the same
sentiment tumbled softly through her mind.
What
if Jen comes home?
What
if Marco comes into the bedroom during a break?
Over and over.
What
happens if someone closes the door?
Claire turned a corner without
uncapping the marker. Freezes. The last seven seconds rubber banded back to
her brain. Like having a conversation
where you didn’t quite hear what the other person said and your brain takes a
second to process it, getting the information straightened out even as you say
“what?”
The part of her brain focused on
walking herself through this maze, the part dedicated to breadcrumbs and
hydration, and the part overrun by anxieties and questions, they all drew her
attention in rapid-fire bursts.
The brain doesn’t really
multitask. Not the way people like to
think. A teacher had explained it when a
student tried to say she was paying attention to the assignment and texting. You can do multiple things at once—breathe,
walk, listen to music—but your brain isn’t focusing on those things all at
once. Breathing and walking and idly
thinking, those are all automatic. The brain
can do them without any conscious thought.
But trying to do multiple things that require real brain power at once
doesn’t work. The brain can’t really
manage it. Instead, it splits its focus,
jumping from one to the next to the next in rapid succession. It gives the illusion of multitasking,
particularly to those who can shift focus very quickly, but it’s
imperfect. There are gaps. Holes.
Overlap. Places where something
gets lost in the mix.
Something Claire had missed finally
caught.
The last time she turned, she
hadn’t left an arrow. And maybe the time
before. She had made three turns in
fairly rapid succession, had she marked any of them?
The floor changed to concrete, but
the walls were also different. Painted cinderblocks, instead of rusted sheet
metal.
Footsteps. Soft, almost inaudible footsteps approached
from off to her left. Still a ways off,
but moving towards her. Until they
stopped. For a second there was silence
and then she heard footsteps again, softly clop,
clopping like the wingtips her Dad wore to work and to court. Another hall cut across up ahead.
Clop, clop, clop, clop, clop... clop, clop, clop, clop,
The footsteps crossed at the
intersection ahead, but nothing crossed Claire’s flashlight beam. Just little motes of dust, drunkenly tumbling
to the floor. The footsteps trailed off
to the right and Claire took two hurried steps forward. Keeping tight to the left wall, she craned
her neck out to see around the corner. She heard footsteps still faintly marching
forward, but whether they were real or not delved down too many levels for her
to process.
From around the corner behind her,
something rumbled a cracked, wheezing bass tone.
Claire dropped her flashlight and
pushed off the wall. She turned to run,
stepped on the flashlight, and tumbled to the ground. The flashlight’s beam spun sickeningly. Her left ankle, her forearms, and hands shot
flares up to her brain. Until Claire
looked in the direction of the rumble as the flashlight’s beam came to a
stop. Half of the beam splashed against
the corner, but enough of it went down the hall to completely disable Claire’s
fine motor skills. Her brain gibbered
and howled.
It was humanoid, hulking and
malformed. One enormous arm rested
against the wall. The other arm was
shorter, swinging uselessly at its side.
Its head lolled sideways against its massive right arm, looking
downward. Spittle and what looked like
blood dribbled down off its face and onto the floor. Some part of her brain connected the stains
and dampness. The creature shivered,
lurched a half-step forward, and made a gurgling, retching noise. Something wet and stringy plopped to the floor. It shook harder and rumbled again, deep and
fuzzy, like a blown-out subwoofer. Not
just spit and blood, stomach acid. It
was so hunched over it could barely lift its head to walk. Barely illuminated, its face looked like
rotted flesh that had melted like wax. Its
stench was a tangible thing, hands pressed tightly over her mouth and
nose.
Her brain struggled to start back
up, but kept tripping over itself.
How
had this thing snuck up on her? How had
she not noticed it sooner?
It stumbled and vomited again,
blood and stomach acid and foamy spit splotching the floor and her brain
finally coughed to life. For a brief
second, she had seen the image of a person superimposed against the hulking
thing. Moving forward with stumbling,
rubber-legged steps and a hand against the wall, blood and spit and vomit
trailing behind. The image held for half
a second before fading, but it was enough.
Claire spun, kicked up off the
ground, and ran. Her stride was uneven,
her ankle swollen, but she was back on the rusted chain-link floor in
seconds. Seconds after that, she saw the
doorway back to Jen’s room. A small
voice bristled at the impossibility of finding the door so quickly and so
close, but Claire pushed that voice down as far as she could. She needed the door and the door was there,
that’s what mattered.
****
“Is Dad crazy?”
And just like that, it’s out. Completely circumventing the
thinking-things-through part of my brain and going right to the
let’s-blurt-out-all-the-edgy-paranoid-things-running-around-my-head part. Something happens to Jen’s face, but I don’t
look too closely to find out what.
“I mean, it’s a disease,
right? Addiction’s a disease in your
mind. That’s what everyone kept telling
us. ‘It’s not his fault.’ ‘There’s nothing you could do, don’t blame
yourselves.’ All that stuff.” Somebody’s cut the brake line to my
mouth. I’m hot and I’m shaking and I
can’t stop talking. I think I’m actually
melting from the inside-out. “So
something in his brain isn’t wired right or, or, or, it-it’s not firing right or not producing
something. It’s not voices-in-your-head
crazy or seeing-something-that’s-not-there cr—”
Whatever I was ignoring in Jen
comes to a head. She wraps her arms
around me and presses her cheek against mine so fast and so hard that my head
bounces off of hers. Little bruised,
purple splotches creep around the corners of my vision. For a second, I wonder if I really am
melting. Jen’s squeezing me like I might
slosh through her fingers and the left side of my face and neck is wet. Until I actually hear her softly sob, it
doesn’t hit home that she’s crying. I
lean into her and we sit like that for a minute. Jen softly crying and me too stuck between
babbling and hugging to do anything else.
She leans away for a second,
splotchy and snotty and staring intensely.
She rests her hands against my cheeks.
“How long have I taken care of you?”
Automatically, I think: Twelve,
almost thirteen years.
Mom and Dad had figured out how
badly they worked right around when Jen started developing adult perceptions of
the world. And then they screwed up and
had another kid. I have no idea why they
stayed together as long as they did, but Mom was gone within a year of me being
born. Dad told me once that he’d had to
fight tooth and nail to keep me from being aborted. I don’t think he remembers telling me
anything about it. Dad loved kids, but
wasn’t the sort to anchor an entire family all on his own. He had his hands full balancing keeping a job
and hiding his drug abuse. Jen managed
the home front. Made friends with our
elderly neighbor, Miss Williams, so someone could look after me while she was
at school and kept the house running after she got out.
She’s turning twenty-seven in a
month and a half and she’ll have spent nearly thirteen years of her life taking
care of me.
“Forever,” I finally say. “Even after you moved in with Marco, I spent
more time here than at home.”
“And now you’re here with me
full-time and I’m seeing less of you than I did before.” She runs her thumb across my cheek, wiping
away a leaky drip I hadn’t even noticed.
“I’m working too much, I—”
“Jen, you’re busy. You’re covering shifts. Your job is importa—”
“I’m making myself busy.” She
blurts. “I’m picking up too many extra
shifts, way more than I should. Zari’s
told me she’s gonna stop letting me cover shifts if I keep this up.”
Zari lost a nurse last year. Suicide.
She was sweet before, always fawning over how I’d grown at Christmas
parties and the like. Since then, she’s
looked a little ragged. Spread thin.
Jen’s stopped crying. Her face is red and her nose is runny, but
she’s back to what I always think of as The Core of Jen: ignoring all the white noise and focusing in
on what she wants. Nursing school,
taking care of Dad and me, or making a relationship with Marco work through it
all. Whatever she wants, whatever she
centers her focus on, is all there is in existence. It’s probably why she and Marco have made it
work, despite her splitting focus between him, nursing, and her family. It’s probably why Dad gets so worried
sometimes, he knows he has rightfully earned her ire. And it’s why, when my mind drifts towards the
closet again, I finally have a moment of clarity.
I wash my hands for what feels like
the seventh time in the last ten minutes and splash water on my face. I turn the knob all the way to the right and
then splash some more water on my face.
The skin around my eyes whines about the cold and my stomach threatens
another rebellion, but I am in control of all this. The cold water cleared my head and my stomach
has already emptied itself completely. I
close my eyes and just breathe. Deep
inhale through my nose. Hold it. Even, measured exhale through my mouth.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
I must have picked up a dozen
calming and relaxation methods from Jen when she was in school. It doesn’t stop my legs from shaking or my
stomach from trying to collapse in on itself, but it uproots my feet from the
tile floor and starts me out toward Jen’s bedroom.
Jen would be thrilled to know that
some of the relaxation exercises she practiced on me actually got put to
use. Maybe I’ll make up a story about a
really hard test and tell her I breathed my way through it.
I wrap my hand around the doorknob
and turn slowly so that the latch retracting doesn’t make a sound. I swing the door halfway open in one motion
and it groans softly in protest. Any
further and it’ll really start to creak.
I turn sideways and squeeze through the gap, careful not to lean forward
or backward and bump into anything.
When Elena had moved away three
years ago, I had dreamt of walking out through the sliding doors. Instead of coming out in our backyard, I came
out in a small glass box, hovering over the neighborhood. Everything moved at double or triple speed
below. Moving vans took up most of
Elena’s driveway. The movers came and
went, carrying boxes and furniture out into the back of the vans, but as each
item was set down it caught fire. A box
came to rest, ignited, burned brilliantly for a second or two, and then another
box was set down on the ashes and the cycle began anew.
Elena’s family had lived in that
house for years before we moved in two doors down. She was the first playdate I went on after
moving in. We’d gotten on the bus
together for the first day of school. We
sat together every day for lunch and brought homework assignments for each
other when one of us was sick. My mom
left when I was too young to really understand, so Elena was my first experience
with losing someone important. I
remember a lot of sitting around my room, but I remember the nightmares more
than anything else.
I move on my tiptoes, trying to
minimize the floor’s groans. The
carpet’s too thin to soften my footsteps much.
Marco grunts and fidgets in his sleep and I freeze. My stomach clenches more tightly into a ball and
a prickling wave of cold rolls out through my abdomen.
Two years before Elena moved, Dad
didn’t come home one weekend. Left for
work Friday morning and didn’t come home for dinner. He wasn’t home when Jen and I woke up the
next morning either. Later that night, I woke up and walked around the
house. I couldn’t see out any of the
windows and neither of the doors out would open. Dad wasn’t in his room and neither was
Jen. I walked around until I heard a
scratching in the kitchen. As I got
closer to the pantry, I realized it wasn’t just one scratching sound. Faint, like it was coming from far deeper
back than the pantry even extended, I could hear small, sharp things
scraping. I ran out of the kitchen and
heard scratching under the sofa in the living room. Heard it in the armchair and saw something
straining against the cushion’s cloth.
The scratching was in the towel closet in the hall and under the sink in
the bathroom and franticly clawing at Dad’s door.
I told Jen about it the next
morning—Dad was still not home—about how real it was and how I couldn’t
remember waking up from it, I just opened my bedroom door and was back in the
normal house. She told me it was a
dream, that she never left her bedroom last night. Maybe I’d heard a bird or squirrel scratching
at the window and that had made it into my dream. She told me that she knew the best remedy for
bad dreams—a sleepover in her room.
Dad had shown up after a dinner of
mac ‘n cheese. Jen sent me to her room
and the two of them fought it out. I
could hear Jen screaming even down the hall.
Afterward, Jen came in and we stayed in for the rest of the night. We watched movies on her laptop until it was
time for bed. Curled up next to Jen, I
didn’t dream of a house filled with scratching, but for weeks afterward I was
convinced there was something wrong with that house.
I remind myself that tonight is
just a test run. Tell myself I’m not
going inside if the closet isn’t a closet when I open it. Tell myself again, that I am in control. I breathe deeply as Jen snores softly. Each part of the breath, the inhale, the
pause, and the exhale, all last longer than usual. I make a conscious effort to breathe in more
deeply than is natural, to pause longer than is comfortable, and to breathe out
until my lungs feel empty. None of it
automatic, none of it out of my control.
My arms are heavy and unwieldly,
but they move when I tell them to. My
hand grips the door knob. I look over at the bed—Jen is right over there—and pull the closet open.
Nothing.
Clothes and shoes and sheets and
blankets.
The next morning, I ask Jen if I
can borrow a scarf.
“Which one?”
“I dunno, come pick one out with
me.”
She smiles, doubly ready to do her
sisterly duties after our talk, and leads me to her room. I slip in front of her so I’m the one opening
the door. Later today, I’ll probably have
a heart-shaped bruise in the center of my chest from the industrial-strength
beating it’s doing.
The door opens up and I practically
collapse into the closet. I don’t leave
the closet the whole time. I stand in the
threshold, draping one scarf over my shoulders and then the next, modeling for
Jen. She chooses the striped one, an
array of icy blues, purples, and white cascading down to the fringy edges.
Halfway to the door, I stop.
“Go ahead, I’m gonna go back to the
closet and grab a blanket. I was a
little cold last night.”
Last
time. Final test.
The
closet was a closet with them asleep, it was a closet with Jen in here with me,
and it’s going to be a closet again when I’m alone.
More of Jen’s breathing exercises.
I wait until I hear her talking to
Marco in the kitchen before opening the closet again.
Nothing.
