She opened a cabinet, grabbed the cocktail shaker, tequila, and triple sec. “Well, if they’re gone, then let’s put some new ones in.” She was talking to me like I was a child.
My father set the pan on the stove, turned on the burner. The gas came on with a hiss and whoosh of flame.
I went to the closet where we’d stashed the three boxes of extra bulbs. They weren’t there. My fingers searched, spider crawling all the way to the very back, but no light bulbs.
“Margarita, Jackie?” Diane asked.
I shook my head, stared dumbly at the empty shelves. “No thanks.”
“Come on, Jax,” my father said, getting a box of spaghetti down from the cupboard. “Let’s all have a drink together.”
“Three margaritas coming up,” Diane said. “Now if I could just see what I was doing. Have you found the bulbs yet, Jackie?”
“No,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice level and calm. “They’re not here.”
My father was humming a tune I vaguely recognized but couldn’t name. I went out into the hall, tried the lights there. Nothing. The same was true in the living room. I went upstairs, discovered that all the light bulbs were missing there, too. The sun was down, and the house was grower darker by the minute.
When it’s dark, they can come out of the pool.
I went back down to the kitchen; my aunt was lighting candles and setting them on the table. She’d poured three margaritas. My father was sitting in a chair looking at his; he seemed agitated. Keyed up. He was still humming, drumming his fingers nervously on the table, casting furtive glances around the room. What was going on with him?
“All the light bulbs in the house are gone,” I announced. “Someone must have come in and taken them.”
“Who steals light bulbs?” Diane asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.The thing in the pool. That’s who.My heart was pounding. Shirley’s stories were getting to me.
“Well I know I sure as hell didn’t take them,” Diane said. “Ted, did you take the light bulbs?”
“Wasn’t me,” he said.
Diane looked at me. “You were here in the house alone.”
“You thinkItook the light bulbs?” My voice came out angrier than I intended. My aunt stared at me, then shook her head. “I have no idea who took the goddamn light bulbs.”
“What Idoknow,” Diane said, settling in at the table and taking a sip of her drink, “is that we’re all here, we’re all in one piece, and dinner smells amazing. Come join us, Jackie. It’s our last night together. It’s a wonder we’re not all locked up in the loony bin.” She took a sip of her drink, then shook her head, muttered, “This fucking house.”
I sat down at the table.
“Do you remember,” my father asked, “when your mother and I would pick you up at the end of each summer, and we’d all take a walk, go on one last trip down to the store? The four of us?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“Lex, she was always way ahead of us, she couldn’t wait to get there. Most times,” he went on, “it was like we were chasing her. We could hardly keep up. The best we could do was to try to keep her in our sights.”
He started to hum and drum his fingers on the table again. He was looking out the window above the sink, then at the door that was still bolted closed with metal plates.
Diane finished her drink and poured what was left in the shaker into her glass.
“She’d be off in this whole other realm, and we’d be two steps behind, doing our best to keep up. But we never could, could we?” my father said. “Not any of us.”
I was crying, and when I looked at my father, I saw that he was, too. His eyes looked dark, the pupils seeming nearly as black as the irises. They shone in the flickering candlelight like two black pools. He was humming again, and this time I recognized the song.I hear you knocking.
The phone rang, impossibly loud. Diane looked at me, expectant. “Are you going to get that?”
I walked on jelly legs over to the big black phone and picked it up. “Hello?”
“I’m sorry,” a small voice said. It sounded like my own, only much younger, and I had the strangest idea that my childhood self was calling. Me at ten, having just wished that Lexie wasn’t always the special one.
