I raised my eyebrows and said, “Shoot.”
“They’ve got a full-time slot opening up this spring, and I was thinking about applying for it.”
“Teaching?”
“I know it sounds crazy, and I know I didn’t just sit through six years of graduate school to end up back in the classroom . . .”
“But what about your post doc? What about the clinical work you wanted to do?”
“I know. I know,” she said, laughing, and rested her chin on her hand. “I’ve really enjoyed teaching. I like the kids. I like the students.”
I sensed the conversation sway dangerously close to our one area of incongruity—Jodie’s desire to have children. I felt a momentary flare of contempt for her, as if this were some passive-aggressive attempt at bringing up that old subject—I like the kids. But that feeling was just a spark quickly eclipsed by the look of genuine contentment on my wife’s face. Her eyes gleamed like jewels in the candlelight.
“Well,” I said, “if that’s what you want to do . . .”
“You mean you wouldn’t have a problem with it?”
“Why would I have a problem with it?”
“Well, I mean, after all the schooling . . .”
“You should do what you want. If you change your mind down the road, you can always go back to clinical work. Do you think you have a shot at getting the position?”
“I do,” she said nearly breathless. “I really do.”
“Hell,” I said. “Then go for it.”
We made love again that night and it was very nice, although it lacked the unconstrained sense of lust displayed by our previous coupling on the living room sofa the first week in the house.
“What is it?” Jodie asked me immediately afterward.
“What do you mean?”
“You seemed distracted.”
“It sounded like you enjoyed yourself,” I said.
“Is it the notebooks? That I took them out of the trash in London?”
“No.” To my own ears, my voice sounded very far away.
“Then what is it? There’s something.” She rubbed my chest. “I can tell.”
Kissing her forehead, I folded her up in my arms and hugged her.
“You’re not going to say anything, are you?” she asked after a while.
I said nothing more and eventually fell into a dreamless half sleep while Jodie got up and showered before coming back to bed.
Sometime during predawn, I was awoken by what felt like a cold hand touching my chest. I jerked upright in bed, a shriek caught midway up my throat. Jodie slept soundly beside me; I was surprised my start hadn’t woken her. Across the room and through the part in the curtains, I could see the three-quarter moon cleaving through the inky darkness of space and the pearl-colored luminescence of the frozen lake below.
I pawed sleepily at my face while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a needling sense of urgency directing me to get up, get up, get up. I peeled back the blankets and stepped onto the ice-cold hardwood floor. A shiver shot like a bolt of lightning through my body, and I felt my testicles, those two wrinkled cowards, shrivel to the size of dried figs. I pulled on my pajama bottoms and crept out into the hallway, still unaccustomed to the placement of the squeaky floorboards; I winced inwardly each time one creaked, afraid I’d wake up Jodie. But she was snoring steadily and lost in her own dreamland, and I made it to the carpeted section of the landing without incident.
As I’d done on that first night in the house, I peered over the railing to the foyer below. The boxes were no longer there, and moonlight poured in through the front windows unimpeded. I stood without moving, my hands balled into sweaty fists, and listened to the silence of the house all around me. Listened, listened. What was I waiting for? I had no clue. What had awoken me? I did not know.
In the basement, I fumbled for the cord of the ceiling light, and after floundering around in the dark like a mime semaphoring to a fleet of jetliners, I finally felt it wisp against my face. I pulled the light on and my retinas burned. Wincing, I stood in the center of the basement until my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I glanced around for any pools of water on the floor. There were none.
My gaze fell on the handprint across the room. Some fearful, overly sensitized part of my soul was convinced it would be gone—or worse that I’d find more of them now, dozens more, covering every section of the wall—but it was there. That lone child’s handprint.
Of course, I was still troubled by its presence . . . but something else from earlier that evening was needling at me now, too. Something important that I’d missed, though just barely. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I returned to bed accompanied by the uneasy feeling that I had overlooked something, then spent much of the following morning in a similar state. With Jodie at school, I attempted to get some writing done but found, not surprisingly, that my mind refused to focus. Soon I was drinking too much coffee while wandering around the house, watching a light snowfall through the upstairs dormer windows.
By noon, I’d checked on the handprint three times. Nothing had changed except that in the daytime it seemed less ominous. In fact, by one thirty I was beginning to convince myself that maybe Jodie was right—that perhaps this handprint had been here all along. The open paint can? I’d probably just left it there when I’d finished using it and hadn’t placed it under the stairs as I thought I had. It was a child’s handprint after all. And we had no children.
I decided to clean up the room that would become our office. There were still stacks of boxes in here, some of them nearly to the ceiling. I grabbed one and almost fell backward at the weightlessness of it: the thing was empty. I drummed my fingers along the side as I carried it and a number of other empty boxes out to the trash.
Some latch finally caught in the recesses of my lizard brain, and I suddenly realized what I’d been struggling to decipher about the handprint on the wall downstairs. Strangely, it had nothing to do with the handprint and everything to do with the wall. Because the drumming on the empty boxes made the same sound as my finger tapping against the drywall last night.
Hollow.
I rapped a set of knuckles along the drywall in the basement. Sure enough, it sounded hollow, as if there was nothing on the other side of the wall. I moved down the length of the wall, still knocking, until I heard the difference in the sound where the drywall had been hung directly over beams or cinder block.
Fueled by curiosity and an unanchored surge of emotion, I cleared junk from the hollow wall until the whole section was exposed. I traced the seams of the drywall, which hadn’t been taped up, while I calculated approximate square footage in my head: the basement was smaller than the ground floor, though I found no reason why this should be. By all accounts, the basement should have approximated the perimeter of the ground floor. Of course, that didn’t mean—
Sliding down the seam between two sheets of drywall, I discovered a tiny hiccup. I looked closely at it, practically pressing my nose against the wall. It was a hinge. Farther down the seam was a second hinge . . . and toward the bottom I located a third.
It wasn’t a wall at all.
It was a door.
But there was no doorknob, no handle, no way of opening it. I went to the opposite seam and attempted to cram my fingers between the two sections of dry-wall in order to pry it open, but it was impossible. Perhaps the door had been sealed shut long ago?
A door to where? Another room?
I hadn’t a clue.
Then I heard my old therapist’s voice saying, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out, while I thought of the storage cubbyholes we’d had in our North London flat: little hinged doors in the walls that were held closed by magnets.