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  “Are you kidding me?”

  “. . . I don’t hear anything.”

  She leaned into him, his chin whiskers catching her fine hair, and spoke softly, “Where’s the rifle?”

  Chapter 2

  Debra kept secrets from the time she was nine, pretending to have a normal life. Having been an only child, she longed for someone her age or older or younger, a friend to share her secrets with. She made friends easily, but her mother condemned them. Fakes, she would say, nobody smiles at you unless they want something. They lie to get what they want from you. Debra and her mother moved often, sometimes driving for days, running from evil people who do evil things—people who didn’t exist. Debra didn’t want a doll or toys when she was little, not as much as she wanted a friend.

  Painting from the top of a ladder, Debra heard a fistful of knocks at the front door. She could see the top of someone’s head through the door’s high diamond-shaped window. Whoever it was, they must have been standing on their toes to see inside by the way their eyes disappeared and appeared.

  I’ve got company now? It had almost been a month since Debra first came there. The house wasn’t ready for guests. There were bare light bulbs overhead—no light fixtures yet. The yellowed floor had been scrubbed clean—no new carpeting either. No working windows. No electricity upstairs. For every ‘no this’ or ‘no that,’ her only comfort was that ‘no one’ had actually been upstairs when the floorboards creaked. As far as she could tell.

  Debra towel-dried her painted fingers, close enough to the door to hear them talking.

  “I can’t wait to see the suckers who bought this dinosaur,” a man’s voice said. “They should have just torn it down.”

  “Be nice,” a woman’s voice said.

  She was angry, hurt—him looking down on them, on her. Who were these people? Her neighbors? There were only two other houses on the gravel road. Beyond that, freshly tilled farmland as far as the eye could see.

  Debra opened the door politely. “Can I help you?”

  The man held a plate of cookies. The woman held a casserole, her face awash in smiles. “Hi. I’m Julie. We heard someone bought this place. Been meaning to stop by. This is my husband, Kyle.”

  Kyle nodded in agreement without so much as a smile. His serious manner and his perfectly groomed hair reminded Debra of a banker, except for his jeans and a flannel shirt. He was tall and thin, sunburned crow’s feet around his eyes. He shook Debra’s hand so loosely, she wondered why he even bothered. His hands felt rough and callused; then she noticed that he was babying a scabbed-over cut between his thumb and forefinger.

  “I’m Debra. Nice to meet you,” she said to the man, feigning a smile. Julie handed Debra the casserole. “I’ve been dying to see what you’re doing in here.”

  Debra took the meal, and noticed calluses on Julie’s small freckled hands. Then she noticed the same freckles around the laugh lines of her Irish-like face. “This is really nice of you,” Debra said. “Thank you.”

  “The cookies are from Sam and Marie. They live right over there.” Julie pointed to a house that Debra couldn’t see. “They wanted to come and meet you but he has a touch of Alzheimer’s; it’s acting up today. You’ll like them.” Julie had a friendly way about her, like she’d known you all your life. Her dark hair curled in spirals to her shoulders in hues of red, so different from Debra’s long straight hair, a pecan kind of brown. Debra liked her, the lilt in her voice; it was the sort of voice you’d heard at Girl Scout camp in the middle of the night when your bunk-mate giggle-whispered.

  “I have to thank them for myself. Just a couple of days till we move in. Tell me. Are there any stories going on about this place?” she said half-kidding.

  “Don’t all old houses come with old stories? Believe me, I’ve heard them. Don’t pay them any mind. Just kids trying to scare each other.” Julie stepped inside, glancing around. “You’ve really been working here. I’d love to have a big house like this. How many rooms does it have?” Kyle came in behind her, set cookies down on a sawhorse, and just stood there rattling his pocket change, an unnerving thing about him.

  “It’s got fourteen rooms and two stairways. This’ll be the living room,” Debra said, suddenly troubled when she saw the rifle at the foot of the stairs. Out in plain sight, here all these weeks amid paint cans and varnish, dusted in sawdust and splattered in paint, it seemed to have blended in with the scenery. She would say that Greg put it there haphazardly moving in their stuff. She would act put out, downright appalled, that he could be so careless as to leave it there. But there was no need. She directed them elsewhere. “We’re keeping this old front door. My husband says it brings character to the house,” she addressed both guests. “We have to replace the window in front. We’ll do the rest of them later.”

  “This is going to be nice when you’re all done. I love the arched doorways,” Julie said.

  “Greg arched them himself. This one goes to the kitchen, and the doorway to the dining room is over there. There’s a corridor in the dining room that leads to the basement. And that’s the bathroom, of course. We’re only doing five rooms, enough to move in. You should have seen it when we first bought it.”

  “It must have been pretty bad. Every time I drove by, I saw one of you guys throwing a cartload in the dumpster. Look at your hands.”

  Debra lifted her hands where Band-Aids had taken an art form. There were splinters and blisters, in addition to biting her fingernails and cuticles.

  Kyle interjected. “Come on Julie. We’ve got to go.” He held the door open.

  “You’ve got to work up to getting calluses. I have some Udder Balm. If you can get past the smell, it’ll really help.” Julie seemed to ignore the husband.

  “Hey, it was nice meeting you. Come on Julie.” Kyle snatched the back of her collar and tugged.

  Julie jerked away, shooting him a dirty look. “Go on if you’re in such a hurry. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Kyle left, not so much in a huff, as it seemed indifference.

  “I know how it is,” Debra said. “Thank you for bringing dinner. It was nice meeting you.”

  “Don’t mind him. He thought your husband might be here. I’ll get some of that salve for you. I’m right down the road, just across the way.” Julie pointed in the direction of her house. “You can see it from halfway up your driveway. I better go. He needs me to iron his dress-shirt. Some sort of meeting tonight. If I don’t hurry I won’t catch him in the shower.”

  Debra grinned in anticipation like when you know the end of a joke and you want to hear it anyway because it’s just plain funny.

  “Whenever he gets pissy, I wait till he’s in the shower and turn the washing machine on. A load that takes all the hot water,” Julie said, her eyes gleaming. “He gets pissy so often he thinks we need a new hot water heater.” She scooted out the door and took off jogging. “. . . see you soon.”

  Debra yelled, ‘bye,’ and waved from the porch, content, really content for the first time since she’d been here. Someone like this, she thought. Way out here. Someone who gets it.

  Having to pee, Debra unzipped her jeans in the bathroom before remembering that Greg had turned off the water.

  “Geez-oh-Pete.” At this point the gas station was too far. She traipsed down the corridor that led to the basement. A quick flip-of-the-switch was all she wanted, just enough water to flush. The stairwell was dark and steep; the light-bulb’s pull-chain at the bottom. She clicked on the flashlight from Greg’s toolbox, and holding her pants up, cautiously stepped down the narrow stairs. Every inch she eked past spider webs meshed in between the cracks of hand-hewn quarry-stone walls. She stopped at the bottom step where she could finally reach the light, not wanting to take the last step onto the broken cement, muddied from the last rain. It smelled like the bottom of a creek bed, like earthworms and sludge. Spider webs were draped from the ceiling to the walls, and hung like shelves in every corner.

  The quarry-stone walls
dating back to the 1800s were pitted blocks of sandstone—every bit her idea of a dungeon. From where she stood, Debra scanned the walls, trying to see the water valve. But she didn’t know where to look. A wolf spider the size of a quarter sat very still at the bottom step, then scurried across the floor. She shuddered right down to the bone. Another spider sat like a brooch on a jacket that Greg had hung on a hook. And in that moment before the light flickered off when all she could hear was her own heart, she swore that something was crawling up her leg. She let out a piercing yell, kicking wildly. She kicked off her shoes. She kicked off her jeans and dashed up the stairs in her panties, wanting to nail the door shut right then and there. At the top of the steps she eyed a yard stick that she’d used to stir paint, and picked it up. Then she made a mad dash to the basement and flogged her jeans to death right there in the sludge. Holding them at arm’s length, she brought them upstairs and looked them over. She begrudgingly pulled them on, and ran outside to the back field. The sun shining off the white of her derrière, she squatted behind a briar bush where no one could see.

  At least that’s what she thought.

  Chapter 3

  Greg had worked from the time he was twelve, cleaning stalls at first and then chopping wood. Having been one of ten children nothing came free, not the Moped he’d seen for sale in someone’s yard, not even candy, which his mother condemned. Candy produced sickly kids, she would say, sickly kids couldn’t milk cows. He’d bought Hershey candy bars and Hostess everything with that first pay. He’d thrown it all up, too. By the time he was fourteen he was tearing off roofs, having donuts and Almond Joy candy bars for breakfast, all for a Honda Dream. At sixteen he started saving for a Harley. By the time he was twenty-one he had worked his way into almost every aspect of construction, his hands were entirely callused and Dick’s Bakery knew him by name.

  Tending to the old house’s demands, Greg was shoveling dirt along a trench that ran from the house to a creek which was twenty feet away from the house. He took off his baseball cap and swatted a deerfly, thinking about what to eat, and second-guessing himself all day, wondering if he should have used a solid pipe instead of a corrugated one.

  A black Ford Ranger advertising ‘Zore Masonry’ pulled in the driveway. A man shot up his hand, getting out. “Hi,” he yelled from the driveway, approaching Greg. “. . . stopped by with my wife the other day. I see you’re all moved in. How’re you guys coming along?”

  Greg reached up to shift his baseball cap—the one he usually wore. He was twenty-two years old and already losing his hair. He extended his hand. “I’m Greg. Good to meet a neighbor.”

  “Kyle.” The two wrangled a handshake.

  “Tell your wife thanks for dinner the other night,” Greg said, throwing a glance at the broken ground and back at Kyle. “It’s coming along. It’ll take a while. But we’re doing all right.”

  “Saw you working a backhoe yesterday. What’re you doing here?”

  “I replaced the drain tiles to stop the basement from flooding. Some moron, from who knows when, slopped cement over the drain in the basement that goes to that creek. I’ve got to level the floor with cement—might take a couple loads. I think I can get it down through the coal-chute.”

  “I wouldn’t mind helping you.” Kyle gestured toward his truck. “We can work something out. Say, would you like to go in on some freezer meat? I fatten a calf every summer, but this year my boys took over my stalls. They’re entering their own steers in the Lorain County Fair, counting on the money for college. There’s a lot of grazing in back of your place. We can build a lean-to.” Kyle rattled lose change in his pockets all the while. Greg had known men with this nervous tic—a sign of insecurity that could make a man humble or make a man mean.

  “I’d like to, but . . .” Greg shifted his gaze to a mound of dirt. How could he tell a stranger who had more change in his pocket than he knew what to do with, that he-himself was broke? He was embarrassed to say their kitchen curtains came from a garage sale and they rummaged through flea markets for mixing bowls and such. “I’m kind of cash-strapped these days, what-with the house and all.”

  “It won’t cost you anything, except to have it butchered. I can get a calf, three maybe four months old, cheap, and by the end of the summer we’ll have freezer meat. We can get him as soon as tonight. This is the time of the year to do it.”

  Chapter 4

  With one more box to unpack, Debra slid her finger over a chip on the edge of the plate, watching the motion of her own hand. He would tie it up, he said, it would eat grass. She would just have to bring it water. “Think about the money we’ll save,” were his exact words. “Steak by the end of the summer.”

  ‘Great. A big-horned creature—right in back,’ she thought to herself. ‘Great. A do-it-yourself Running of the Bulls.’

  Debra knelt next to the cardboard box, tattered as it was, the logo Exxon Motor Oil bleeding through masking tape. Maybe it was time to get rid of it, things she carried too long—memory scraps, some good, mostly not. She peeled off the masking tape and leafed through old report cards from grade school, letters from Greg, a goofy hat from King’s Island Amusement Park—keepsakes all. Lastly she unfolded a ninth grade English assignment where she had written a poem.

  The wind tarried through the sun sprinkled trees

  A chant of yesterday, today will seize . . . .

  She mindlessly tugged at her lashes, staring at the poem, wishing she hadn’t found it; the reminder of when her father was killed, of the sound of him dying.

  Debra was thirteen when the courts awarded her father custody, the man her mother had stolen her from. She’d known little of him and less of his big-bellied wife. It was a happy time though. Her stepmother would say, ‘Here, come feel the baby move,’ and guide Debra’s hand to the ripple of a sweeping foot. Debra liked to think the baby looked something like her, maybe her eyes or her nose or her hair. Anything to make a half-sister whole.

  Her room was apart from the rest of the house, a screened in porch turned into a bedroom. It felt a little like camping. Plastic fastened over the screens kept the rain from blowing inside. She fell asleep to the wind whistling through the screens, puffing the plastic in and out—her father and new mother upstairs.

  In the warmth of a patchwork quilt, Debra’s eyes opened when she heard a rifle-shot and breaking glass. Disoriented at first, she thought she was waking up from a dream. Then she heard a woman shouting outside.

  “How could you do this? I thought you loved me,” the woman yelled. Debra heard another shot. She heard an explosion rumble the house. Thick smoke came quickly, smoke she could feel hot in each breath.

  She sunk to the floor where the breathing was easier and crept to the living room, and tried to yell ‘get out, get out,’ coughing, tearing, instead. She heard her father, her stepmother, coughing and choking upstairs.

  The curtains flamed wildly, the couch, the chairs. Something fiery fell from the ceiling. Debra bellied up to the nearest door and opened it, knowing somehow no one else would get this far. In the open door she saw Aida cock the rifle again.

  “Mom?” Debra felt her body buckle, her limbs give way. She could see her own self as though she were watching from above.

  Aida disarmed, and ran to Debra, and dragged her to the curb. Fire and smoke billowed through the doors and the windows, black, dense. Sirens in the distance, Aida rocked Debra’s body, clutching, holding it close.

  “See what happens when you don’t listen to me. I told you, but you just didn’t listen.” Aida sat suddenly still, a cellophane glaze in her eyes. “You said you loved me. How could you do this to me? I’m your mother . . . not her.”

  Amid the flames under the stars, a mother rocked a lifeless child. Blocking out the sound of sirens, the smell of smoke. “You just don’t listen. Look what you made me do.”

  A fire truck and an ambulance drove up to the curb, and a medic rushed over to Debra. “I’ve got her now,” a uniform said, reaching for her.<
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  Aida kicked at him, reality distorted. “No. You can’t have her. Take someone else’s child.”

  “Ma’am please. She’s in distress. It doesn’t look like she’s breathing.”

  Aida tightened her grip, her jaw clenched, hate in her eyes. The medic waved police onto the scene, telling her, “Ma’am, we can’t help her if you don’t let us take her.” The man’s voice was soft and sweet, something that fueled the ire in Aida.

  “I know what you do to young girls,” she yelled, squeezing the child in her arms. It took three men to subdue her for all the kicking and clawing and spitting she did. Finally handcuffed inside a police car, Aida watched them hover over Debra, their chest compressions jarring the small body. “This is all your fault,” she said, “look what you made me do.”

  Debra remembered it as though she’d watched the whole thing as an observer. With one deep breath her body reclaimed her soul. They said her heart had stopped. She knew she had died, for however long. Her unborn sister told her so.

  The doctors called Aida’s episode a relapse. She had stopped taking her medication for one reason or another. Aida didn’t remember any of it—shooting out the basement windows, the bullet hitting the gas line—an accident, maybe, but what did that matter? The judge ordered six months of in-house psych, and then released her because she was doing well on a new medication. Doing everything right, going to work on time, getting a place to live, Aida was awarded custody of Debra again. But as usual, not for long.

  Debra had been mindlessly tugging her eyelashes as she’d played the scenes in her head. Uprooting a tight bunch of them, eyelashes came out in her hand. She rubbed her fist in her eye, stopping herself from pulling out any more. She wasn’t going to start that again, not when it had taken so long to grow them back.