I lifted one leaden leg and then another, until I crouched again before the little door, my heart hammering against my ribs. I swallowed the saliva coating the back of my throat and lifted a hand to the tiny metal handle.
The metal felt icy, sticky even, and I jerked my fingers away.
Don’t be silly. I heard my sister’s voice a second time, but it had lost its power to deflate the terror ballooning at the backs of my eyes.
I returned to the handle, cold, and pulled. The door swung open easily, and I fell back with a thud, landing hard on my butt.
I scrambled away, pushing my palms and heels into the polished wood floor, sure something or someone would come crawling out on hands and knees, teeth snapping at my face.
Instead, I stared into thick darkness. A musty smell wafted out, as if it had been closed for a very long time. No yellow eyes peered from the dark. No monster bounded from the deep. The little closet sat empty, the dust on the floor undisturbed.
CHAPTER 6
Now
Corrie
I can’t remember how long it felt like Sammy and I were just pretending to be grown-ups. Playing house, mimicking our parents (his more than mine), but we were not really like those adult people. Even after the wedding and the baby and the mortgage, I still found myself elated by this enormous secret we shared: it was all just an illusion, time had stopped at twenty-one. After all, he was still Sammy. Sammy, whose gangly arms and legs were always stuffed into funky ‘70s band t-shirts and torn, faded jeans. He was cool in that way smart guys obsessed with Star Wars are cool. His always-laughing face was long and thin and made longer by his shoulder-length auburn hair that his mother called amber waves of grain. He hated and loved that.
We rolled through life together like a single, solid wave, as steady as the tide. We were that connected. Soul mates, love of my life, the One... I got it. I understood every single cliché, every ridiculous label, every Disney-concocted fantasy of happily ever after. Not in an arrogant way, either. I didn’t stand on some pedestal of love and pity the rest of the world for their disconnected and dysfunctional relationships. I knew how lucky I was. That’s the truly awesome power of an overwhelming love - it builds this perfect bubble around you, and you sort of forget everything else.
When Isis came along, we welcomed her into the fold as if she had always been. Our creation, our love child. During her first year, she slept between us at night. Sometimes I would wake to see Sammy’s enormous brown eyes gazing at her with this mystified expression, as if she was an alien who teleported into our bed at three a.m. I knew the look. I experienced the same awe, and when he looked up into my eyes, that knowing passed between us wordlessly. That was our bond. We didn’t need vocabulary. We could have been mute and still reveled in the knowledge that we understood the other completely.
Those days have begun to feel like a dream. I remember them, but I can’t recreate them. It’s such a horrible curse - the way my mind shifts to the present and slowly releases all that came before. I’m sure it’s still stored in there, but I can’t reach in and grab it. I can’t smell his skin after a long day at the beach or hear the funny pitch of his laughter after he’s just smoked a joint. All the nuance has blurred and faded.
“Momma?”
I opened my eyes, pushing myself up to sitting in bed.
Isis stood at the foot of the bed in her kitty pajamas, clutching her stuffed Gizmo.
Sammy had relinquished control of much of his monster memorabilia to Isis after her second birthday, when suddenly her eyes lit up every time she entered his study. Gizmo had been the first to go, and when he handed her the bulge-eyed Mogwai, she had jumped up and down and raced through the house to show me her new friend. The items still off-limits to Isis had been moved into Kerry Manor’s study, but even those were likely smothered in her sticky fingerprints.
The study had been Sammy’s favorite room in Kerry Manor. I had often found him there, comfortable in a throne chair with its ornate high back, his feet tucked into a pair of Bigfoot slippers, giggling as he read a Tales from the Crypt comic book and listened to Bill Evans light across the keys with haunting clarity.
I have not been in the study since the morning after I found his body. I walked in once, in the hours after it happened, and clutched the scattering of papers on his desk. I crumpled them into a tiny ball and shoved them in my mouth and tried to stifle the sobs erupting from the mysterious cellar in the darkest parts of my being. Eventually when I choked, I spit them out and raced from the room.
“Dada...” Isis continued, as if Sammy was hiding under the covers like he always did and would spring out to scare her at any moment.
I pulled back the comforter to reveal the empty white sheet and patted the silhouette of his body I couldn’t see, but felt sure was there.
We had returned to Kerry Manor the day before, four days after Sammy’s death. My sister and her husband accompanied us, so I wouldn’t be alone in the house, though all of them - Amy, Todd, Sarah, and Helen argued with my choice to return. Isis and I could stay with any of them, but I refused their offers. If I wanted to be close to Sammy, I needed to be at Kerry Manor.
Isis crawled onto the bed and laid her head in my lap. She stuck her index and middle fingers in her mouth and sucked. I stroked her wispy blonde hair that shot like sprouts from her soft, pink head.
Sometimes Sammy had called her his hairless princess because her blonde strands grew in so slowly.
“There’s my sweet girl,” Sarah said, appearing in my doorway. She held a canister of cheese puffs. “Did she wake you?”
I shook my head and turned to look out the window at the lake. Sarah bore such a striking resemblance to my dead husband that something ripped open every time I looked at her.
She knew as much and kept her distance. I hated to put her in that position. Surely, as Sammy’s twin, her own loss struck a deeper chord than mine, but my grief trumped my compassion.
“Icy? Cheese puffs?” Sarah shook the canister, but my daughter burrowed under the covers next to me.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” I told her. “Thank you.”
She left, and I tugged Isis from beneath the blankets and pulled her back onto my lap. My pajama bottoms were damp from the sweaty, nightmarish sleep I’d had. I shivered as her warmth seeped into my clammy skin.
She tilted her face to mine and repeated her earlier plea.
”Dada?”
I rested my palm on her forehead and tried to look into the dry emptiness that rose up to meet me at her question. How could I tell my two-year-old child her father was gone forever? That his body lay in the cold, hard ground, but his soul had escaped the confines of this desperate life for something sweeter?
“Dada’s not here, Honey Bear.”
“Dada’s in heaven?”
I looked at her sparkling eyes nestled in her perfect round face.
I nodded and pulled her closer.
CHAPTER 7
Now
Corrie
“Todd is happy to ask the people renting your house to leave, Corrie,” my sister Amy told me, folding tiny pairs of mismatched pants and shirts Isis had destroyed with a variety of chocolate fudge-pops and grape juice.