“I do.” I smiled and slipped off the couch onto the floor, pulling my knees into my chest and rocking back and forth. “Ooh, that’s better. It grows on you,” I added
“Me too,” Isis announced, coming to lay next to me and rolling back and forth. She giggled and climbed on top of me. “Fly me, mama.”
I grinned and propped her on my feet, lifting her high.
“Now you,” she bellowed hopping over to Sarah and pushing her on her back.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sarah laughed, floating Isis on her feet.
From upstairs there came a faint creaking, as if someone had taken a step.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Sarah.
Sammy had gone into Traverse City for a meeting with his editor.
She turned and shook her head.
We both sat still. I shushed Isis when she cried out to be lifted again.
The sound came again, like rafters sighing - or was it a footstep?
“This is an old house,” Sarah answered, tilting her feet so Isis could lay across them.
“I’m just going to listen in the hall.”
I stepped into the foyer.
Shadowy stillness hovered at the top of the stairs, and yet I felt distinctly that something lurked up there, just out of sight. I clutched the ornate banister and studied the gloom beyond the bit of colored light through the stained-glass window. The darkness seemed to draw the light in and devour it.
“Show yourself,” I whispered, challenging the black emptiness.
The foyer seemed too warm and airless. I held my breath, unable to look away because the moment I did, something would race down the stairs behind me.
Suddenly I wanted to gather Sarah and Isis and run into the daylight.
“Hey.”
A high, horrible scream punctuated the stillness as Sarah’s fingers closed on my elbow.
Sarah gasped and stumbled back, and I realized it was I who had screamed.
I stuffed my fist into my mouth, shaking my head, my eyes surely as wide as hers.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” I said, the sound of my words breaking the spell, the terror dissipating.
Isis ran into the foyer, brown eyes huge in her baby face.
“Mommy?” Isis asked, bottom lip quivering.
I gathered her in my arms and looked apologetically at Sarah.
“I was standing here listening and maybe imagining. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I screamed like that.”
Sarah grinned and shook her arms out.
“Whew. Damn, Corrie, I thought someone was up there. I was ready to run to the kitchen for a butcher knife.”
The rigid muscles of my face softened. Isis planted a kiss on my cheek.
“Mommy scared?”
“No, honey-bear. Not now anyway.” I turned to Sarah. “Maybe I do find this house a tad spooky. There’s a bookstore in Northport. Fancy a trip into town?”
Sarah shifted her wide brown eyes to the top of the staircase for just a moment.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER 9
Now
Corrie
“I know you don’t want to hear this, honey, but everyone is worried about you,” Sarah told me, setting a bowl of steaming tomato soup on the table in front of me. She had made a tiny sour cream heart in the center of the bowl.
I stared at it and thought of Sammy. He and his twin were so similar it was scary, which made me laugh out loud. Scary had risen to a whole new level in my life during the previous days, and to consider a glob of sour cream scary was downright hilarious.
“This is what I’m talking about,” she said, sitting across from me at the table and taking hold of my clammy hands. “Are you weeks away from the loony bin?”
I shook my head and suppressed my laughter.
“I’m sorry, I realize it’s not funny. None of this is funny.” The smile fell from my face. “Sammy’s constantly in my thoughts, and I see this little heart and it reminds me of something he would do or say, and then I’m laughing because I can’t help it. And I don’t know why it’s funny, and I don’t understand why I can’t help it...”
“It’s okay,” she told me, giving my hands a squeeze. “I’ve laughed in church and at funerals, and even one time when I was getting fired. I’m no stranger to the awkward laughter stuff. He’s in my head too. He’s constantly commenting on things in typical Sammy fashion.”
“Thank you,” I told her, wishing I could share with her the other stuff too - glimpsing him, feeling him near me.
“That being said, I think you need to talk to a therapist.” She spoke the words slowly, gauging my reaction.
“The therapist who needs therapy,” I murmured.
Sarah nodded and tucked one of my curls behind my ear.
“Where’d you go last night, honey? Amy mentioned you went out for a few hours?”
I flinched away and shrugged.
“I drove around. I needed to clear my head.”
Guilt swirled in my stomach. I flashed on the cemetery and Sammy‘s brown eyes gazing at me in the stream. Sarah would love to see Sammy, hear his voice. Was I wrong to hide him from his twin?
“How’s Brook?” I asked, hoping to shift the conversation.
Sarah frowned.
“I haven’t seen her since…”
She paused, and I knew she’d started to say Halloween, but Halloween had become synonymous with Sammy’s murder.
“You should call her,” I said. “She seemed nice.”
Sarah studied me, and I took a sip of the hot soup. I wasn’t hungry, but if I wanted Sarah to relax, I had to take a few bites.
“She is nice but… with everything that’s happened, dating seems trivial.”
I nodded.
“But it’s not. That’s how it starts.”
For a moment, I drifted back nine years to the balmy summer evening when I first met Sammy.
We were both walking out of a ridiculously bad horror movie. My girlfriend had dragged me along because she liked the lead actor. I’d dropped my notebook. The cover depicted a cow quoting the famous Rumi poem: “out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field...”
Sammy, alone at the theater and wearing ripped jeans and a Creepshow t-shirt, picked it up, glanced at the image, and laughed before handing it back to me.
When he looked at me, really looked at me, I experienced the strange pull I’d heard people talk about – love at first sight, instant attraction – and I tried to say something witty and indifferent, even though my heart had stopped beating, and I recognized in his gleeful brown eyes that he felt something too. Maybe not the same thing, how could I know? But something…
“May I?” he had asked, taking my notebook back. He flipped to the last page, pulled the pen from the spiral binding, and wrote his name and his phone number in surprisingly readable print.
“Will you call me?” he asked, handing my notebook back.
I was silent and oddly breathless, but I managed a nod, and then my friend Rita dragged me away with a long glance at my future husband that seemed to say ‘she’s not usually this crazy.’
Fourteen months later, we were married.
“You’re staring into your soup like there’s an eyeball floating in it,” Sarah said, forcing me back to reality.
I stirred the sour cream into a swirl and took another bite.
“No eyeball, just memories. They’re like landmines. No matter which direction I choose, I step on one.”