“It’ll be fixed soon,” I say, feeling the tickle of a no-see-um on my leg, nipping at my skin with invisible teeth. I had swung the patio doors open earlier, letting in a warm marsh breeze that did nothing but bring the bugs in.
“How soon?”
“Tonight,” I say. “Maybe tomorrow. Once Dad gets home.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
I glace in her direction again and notice that her cheeks are flushed red, like she’s got a fever or something, but I know it’s just the heat: July in South Carolina is brutal. It can make you feel a little crazy, like you’re being cooked alive.
“Can we sleep outside?”
“No, we can’t sleep outside.”
Margaret nods, looking back down at her latest painting. It’s a mess of squiggles, childishly abstract, and I feel my chest squeeze a little, remembering her age again. Her innocence.
“You can sleep in my room,” I say, an apology for snapping at her. “We’ll open the window, get the breeze from the marsh. It’ll be cooler at night.”
She smiles at me, reassured, and begins to hoist herself up to get a clean canvas.
“I’ll get it,” I say, resting my hand on her arm and standing up myself. “Sit tight.”
I step over the milky water glasses and old paintbrushes strewn across the floor and walk across the studio to my mother’s easel. There are dozens of her paintings up here, almost all of them of us, like our own private gallery: Margaret sitting in a circle of statues outside, holding a teacup in the air; Dad smoking from my grandfather’s old pipe, clouds of smoke billowing out. The blank ones are in a stack by the wall, but before I can get there, something catches my eye.
I stop walking; there’s half of an in-progress painting peeking out behind the others. I move toward it and slide the top one to the side so I can see it more clearly, and when I do, I can barely breathe.
“Izzy?” Margaret says, sensing the sudden stillness in the air, my body rigid and unmoving on the other side of the room. “What is it?”
I don’t answer; I can’t answer. I’m staring at the painting, fully in view now, a worm of worry writhing in my stomach. It’s our backyard, that swath of green grass leading to the gentle hill that slopes into the creek. The long, wooden dock spooling out into the water and the oak trees on either side of it, their gnarled branches reaching out like wiggling fingers. It’s nighttime, the moon high in the sky, and in the very middle of it all is a girl: long brown hair, white nightgown, arms hanging heavy at her side as she stands ankle-deep in the marsh.
“Look,” Margaret says, and I jump at her sudden closeness. She’s standing right next to me now, though I didn’t even realize she had moved. She’s pointing at the painting, the girl. “Look, Izzy. It’s you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NOW
The early morning fog is still burning off the blacktop, hovering over the ground like a ghost. I leave my house at the first hint of dawn, deciding to walk over to the old man’s house in the daylight. It only takes a few minutes now that I know where I’m going, and once I arrive, I size up it from the sidewalk, a little brick bungalow that would be easy to overlook. It’s smaller than the other ones on the street, partially covered in overgrown shrubs and wild magnolia trees in desperate need of a trim. The paint is chipping off the siding, mold growing on the concrete sidewalk that leads to the front door.
On the porch, the rocking chair is empty, swaying gently in the wind.
I watch it, rocking on its own, and almost make myself believe that I had invented the entire encounter. Inventedhim. There’s just something about the way he was sitting there, staring into the darkness. The way he was looking at me as if he didn’t even seen me at all. I start to wonder if he was just a figment of my imagination, some kind of glimmer from my subconscious, so used to being alone so late at night that it just snapped its fingers and materialized some companyout of the shadows—because if I’m being honest, I have done that before.
Seen things, heard things, that weren’t actually there.
It is amazing, the kinds of tricks that the mind can play on you after two, three, fours nights without sleep. The kinds of things it can make you believe. The jarringdingof my doorbell, but when I step out onto the patio, seeing it empty; Roscoe’s incessant barking, but when I shoot him a look, finding him fast asleep. A fuzzy outline moving in my peripheral vision, getting closer, but when I snap upright and twist my head, open my mouth and begin to scream, realizing that it’s nothing more than the dim afternoon light making shapes out of an empty corner.
That still, I’m alone.
But no, I know he was there. Roscoe was growling, staring straight at him. I had seen him with my own two eyes, heard the creak of his rocking chair.
I had spoken to him—he just didn’t speak back.
I walk quietly up the porch steps and look at the chair. The wood beneath the rocker rails is heavily worn, the paint buffed away from years of use, indicating that it’s been in that spot for a long, long time. I inch closer, close enough to touch it now, and trail my fingers down the armrest, feeling the splintery wood on the pads of my fingers. I have a sudden memory of Margaret in this moment—the way we would sneak into forbidden rooms, our fingers dragging across various surfaces, touching things that weren’t meant to be touched—but then, like a dream, it leaves me again.
I look down at the chair, glancing around, making sure nobody is watching. Then I turn around slowly, lowering myself down.
Once I’m sitting, I rock back and forth wordlessly, the way he was. I look out at the street, at the very spot where I was standing before, and notice that, from this vantage point, I have a relatively clear view into part of my backyard. You have to look in just the right spot—a little clearing between some trees, beneath the streetlight,past a fence—but there,right there, is the back side of my house, that little tuft of neglected grass looking even more yellow from a distance. Only a few feet to the right, obscured behind some branches, is Mason’s bedroom window.
I can feel my heartbeat increase a little, a hopeful beating in my throat. Maybe that man saw something. Maybe he was outside that night, late, and saw someone in the backyard, creeping toward the window. Maybe he couldidentifysomeone—