It was dusty, yes. But for a house that hadn’t been occupied—or entered—in eighteen years, it wasn’t dirty enough. There were no mouse droppings or ceiling leaks. No nests or dead rodents. No burst pipes. No mold. The electricity was on—Violet must have been paying the bill—and the fridge hummed in the kitchen. The furnace was still in its place in the cellar, silent but functional. When I turned on the kitchen tap, a burst of brown water had come out, and then it had run just fine.
I’d watched the water and thought,Eighteen years?
The air hummed in this house, a low-level vibration I felt at the back of my neck. Had it always been like this? Was that why I’d had such strange, vivid dreams when I lived here?
The figures standing over my bed. The light shining in my eyes.
After Ben arrived, he’d sometimes come into my room at night, and I’d awaken to find him curled next to me, his little body like a furnace against my skin as he slept. I’d brush my hand over his soft brown hair, and he wouldn’t wake.
I exhaled, because for a moment I could almost feel it again, Ben pressed next to me. My gaze fixed on the closed door of the closet.
Had I looked in this closet after he disappeared? I thought I had, but I couldn’t exactly remember it. I must have looked here, because it was one of Ben’s go-to hiding places. He’d slide into the back corner, his arms around his knees, laughing breathily and not very quietly into his hands. There were so many games he liked to play. We’dlooked everywhere for him that day and in the days that followed—from the attic, accessed only by pull-down stairs that Ben couldn’t have reached, all the way down to the cellar, which was really a crawl space just big enough for the furnace. In all of that searching, I would have looked in the closet.
I stared at the door, my skin prickling. I thought I heard— Was that a sound?
I stood, strode across the room, and flung the closet open.
There was a box of old junk, a hanging coat that had fit fifteen-year-old me. Untouched dust on the floor. Nothing else.
I peered into the gloom, searching for a trapdoor or a hidden passage. A wardrobe that led to Narnia. Somewhere my little brother could have gone.
We’d been so frantic—Violet, Dodie, and me. Hide-and-seek was Ben’s favorite game, and we liked to humor him. They’d hidden, and I was It. It was my job to find them. I’d found Dodie and Violet, and then we’d all looked for Ben.
We never found him.
The snow coming down soundlessly out the window, the silence. The heavy air. The panic as we searched and searched.
It hit me all over again, square in the chest. He’d been so excited. I’d failed him—I was supposed to find him, and I hadn’t. I still hadn’t. I was still staring into this closet, looking for his hiding place. Where the hell had he gone? Why hadn’t he been able to come out?Where did you go, little brother?
When they came home, our parents had looked, too. And then the police looked. The house had been searched, every corner and nook, for the little boy who had disappeared. He’d gone on a winter day with fresh snow on the ground, and there were no tracks leading to or from the house, no car tracks. Wherever Ben went, logic dictated, had to be somewhere in this house.
Come home.
“I’m here,” I said out loud to the empty closet, the silence, the dusty floor. “It’s me, Ben. I came. We all came.”
No one answered me.
I closed the door.
6
Dodie
I could hear Violet’s voice downstairs in the kitchen, her tone low and tight with concern. She was on the phone with her daughter.Yes, I’m here. Call if there’s an emergency. No, I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I’ll call you again soon.I stretched my legs out on my childhood bed and stared at the ceiling, listening. Violet sounded soparental. When had my sister become a parent?
Eventually, she hung up. Water ran in the hallway bathroom and a toilet flushed. Vail’s heavy footsteps pounded down the stairs. If I had to guess, I’d say he was going to the living room to see if he could get a signal through the rabbit ears on the TV. More steps on the stairs, then a drawer opened and closed in Violet’s room as she put her clothes in her old dresser.
I absorbed it for a moment, the sounds of my siblings in the house. In my life in a tiny New York apartment, I was used to the sounds of people all around me, but these weren’t strangers. I knew that Violet was likely brushing her hair right now, wrestling its thick length back into a fresh ponytail. I knew that Vail had left a mess of splasheson the bathroom counter. I also knew that in ten minutes, he’d have the TV working. Vail was good with technical things.
We had no plan here, because what’s the plan, really, when you’ve come to find your long-dead brother? No one makes a plan for that. We weren’t children anymore, and we’d never been happy in this house except when we were with Ben. And yet I felt something shift inside me, subtly moving behind my rib cage as I breathed the dusty old air of this house and stared at the flowered wallpaper of my childhood room. This place was familiar, and except for the dust, it felt more and more like I’d never left. Time bent in and touched itself, like a circle. The house knew me. It knew my strangeness.
I sat up, ignoring how my feet had rumpled the bedspread, and looked at the wall, sighing. I’d been—what—fourteen when I was last here? A juvenile idiot. I’d liked to cut photos from magazines back then and pin them to my bedroom wall. The magazines were shoplifted, because our parents never gave us any money and I was very good at stealing in those days. A skill I had let rust with disuse over the years.
The photos were still there, the last ones I’d had up when we left the house for good. What did young Dodie like to pin to her walls? No handsome movie stars or singers. There was an ad for Pond’s cold cream, another for Camel cigarettes. A tourism ad for St. Maarten, featuring a photo of a beautiful beach. A photo of a Christmas tree—not ours, of course—with presents under it. A catalog page featuring a pair of shoes that I probably wanted to either buy or steal. The pictures on my walls had changed constantly, an endless gallery of things I wanted, thought I wanted, or simply liked looking at. When I stopped wanting something, I threw the photo of it away.
In third grade, I’d been invited to a birthday party, one of the few times such a thing had happened. I’d gone, saddled with a shiny wrapped gift that I’d had to beg my mother to buy, and as I passed bythe formal sitting room at the birthday girl’s house, I’d spotted a framed family photo on a side table. It was of two parents and three children on a ski hill, posing with wide smiles, their cheeks a healthy blush of red.
I’d dutifully played the silly birthday party games, waiting for my chance. At a moment when the cake had come out and no one was paying attention to me, I’d murmured about going to the bathroom and slipped down the hall to the sitting room. Stealthily, I’d taken the framed photo from its place and slid it into my coat, which was hanging from a hook by the front door. At the end of the party, I’d walked out with the photo with no one the wiser.
