I placed one hand on the notebook, as if touching it would shatter the reality of it and send it back in a scatter of fluttering confetti and dazzling disco lights to whatever secondary universe from which it had come. The pages were cold, cold.
Holding my breath, I turned one page and knew what I would find before I was actually staring at it: a faded Polaroid picture of Adam, Kyle, and me standing at the river’s edge in Eastport, our arms slung around each other, Kyle’s short blondish hair contradictory to Adam’s and my own dark furry mops, all of us squinting at the cameraman—our father—whose shadow darkened Kyle’s image in some hideous rendition of prophecy. I’d taped the photo into the notebook on the afternoon my father had driven Adam back to college while an unmentionable and foreboding silence ran like ice water through our house.
I closed the notebook but did not immediately stand. Truth was, my legs had surrendered to the strength of my horror; I could no more trust them to hold me up than I could trust the legs of a scarecrow. Instead, I swiped at my eyes with the heel of one hand, the moisture in them temporarily blurring my vision. And when my vision cleared, I happened to be looking across the room at one of the walls of hammered Sheetrock.
During the first week in the new house and at Jodie’s recommendation, we’d bought a few gallons of semigloss paint and painted the foyer and living room a cool sage color. The whole thing took us the better part of two days, and when we finished, we had about half a gallon left over. I’d hammered the lid back into place, then stashed the paint can in the basement underneath the stairs. The paint can was no longer there; it was on the floor between two pairs of winter skis and an old end table. The lid was on the floor next to the can, the paint-splattered underside facing the ceiling. On the wall, smack in the center of that barren landscape of white Sheetrock, was a tiny, sage-green handprint.
Later and for the rest of the week, as my mind returned to this very moment over and over again, I would come to understand that I knelt on the floor staring at that handprint for no more than ten or fifteen seconds . . . but at the time it seemed like a full hour ticked by with the hypnotizing lethargy of planetary evolution. I was aware of the fibers in my clothes, the heat suddenly radiating off my flesh, the goose bumps that prickled along the base of my neck. Capering before my eyes were the ghostly vinegar amoebas of broken blood vessels. I felt every crease in the musculature of my beating heart, every strand of fiber and sinew that networked throughout my body.
I rose and, on unsteady legs, made my way over to the handprint. I brought two fingers up and touched it: the paint was still tacky, not yet completely dry.
Smalclass="underline" a child’s handprint.
“Who’s down here?” Somehow I managed these words, though they came out shaky and unimpressive. Then, frightening myself further, I muttered, “Kyle?”
There came another faint clacking sound from across the room, startling me straight out of my skin, and I whipped around and practically dropped my ass straight into the open paint can. I rolled onto my side as the paint can skidded out from under me. In slow motion I watched it tip on its side and spin in a semicircle across the floor, leaving behind an arc of sage-green paint on the concrete.
“Christ!” I picked myself off the floor.
The clacking sound continued until it finally concluded in a deep-belly whump: the furnace kicking on.
“Jesus Christ.” I forced a nervous laugh, then went to the sink basin against the wall and turned it on. The pipes clanged and rattled before a gush of freezing water the color of copper came spurting out of the faucet. I thrust my hands beneath the icy water, which made me all the more conscious of the sweat that had broke out on my body. Then I grabbed a roll of paper towels and proceeded to clean up the spilled paint on the floor as best I could. I went through pretty much the entire roll of paper towels and only managed to smear the paint in great magnolia blossoms on the concrete.
Holding the last paper towel, I contemplated wiping the tiny handprint off the wall . . . but in the end, I decided against it. I knew why right away, although it would take me until later that evening to finally admit it: I wanted Jodie to see it and to prove to myself I wasn’t going crazy.
The shrill of my cell phone startled me so badly I nearly had a heart attack. When I answered it and before I could even say hello, Holly’s high-pitched voice erupted over the line: “Travis, are you okay? Should I call the police?”
CHAPTER NINE
“Yeah,” Jodie said, crouching down. “It’s a handprint.”
“But whose handprint?” I said. I was standing behind her, hands folded across my chest as if obstinate about the whole situation. She’d come home only two minutes before, her arms laden with shopping bags from Macy’s and smelling of various perfumes from the department store’s perfume counter, when I’d grabbed her wrist and dragged her down the basement stairs while the headlights of Beth’s car were still retreating from our driveway.
Now, staring at the handprint, Jodie reached out to touch it.
“Don’t,” I said a bit too loudly.
Jodie jerked her hand away as if some animal had just snapped at her, then shot me a quizzical stare from over her shoulder.
“Don’t mess it up. I want it preserved.”
“Why? Do you think this is Bigfoot’s handprint?”
I hurried to her side and crouched down next to her. “You don’t find this strange? Impossibly fucking strange?”
“That there’s a handprint on our wall?”
“That it’s a child’s handprint that just happened to appear here,” I specified, drumming a finger against the drywall a safe distance away from the print.
“So? The Dentmans had a kid. Is it that hard to believe some—”
“No, you’re not getting it.” Again, I tapped the wall. “This is our paint, the paint we used upstairs. Don’t you recognize the color? You picked it out, for Christ’s sake.”
“The same paint you spilled all over the floor,” she added with mild condemnation, glancing around the room. “Nice.”
“Forget about the floor. What about the handprint?”
“A coincidence?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you serious?”
“Why not? It’s a common color.”
“There wasn’t a single room in the house painted sage when we moved in, and anyway, I would have noticed this before.”
“Yeah?” Jodie said, and there was a disquieting tone of condescension in her voice. “Would you?”
“What do you mean?”
She stood, brushing her hands on the thighs of her jeans. “My bags are all over the hallway upstairs. Want to give me a hand?”
“Are you kidding? What about this?”
Jodie sighed. Her gaze went from me to the handprint, then back to me again. Finally, she said, “So do you have a theory about it you’d like to share?”
This caught me off guard. “A theory?”
“Yes. Where do you think it came from?”
“I-I don’t know,” I stammered.
“Then come upstairs and help me with the bags. I’ll get dinner started, and we’ll open a bottle of wine.” She turned to leave.
“Wait,” I said, grabbing the notebook off the floor where I’d left it. I held it out to her and shook it like a prosecutor proffering evidence to a jury. “Then there’s this.”
Jodie didn’t say anything; she looked merely resigned as she leaned against the wall and studied the notebook.