December Park(33)

“I just didn’t want to get into it,” I said.

“Who was it?”

“Some guys from school.”

“Guys? More than one?”

“Well, only one of them hit me.” I wasn’t going to go into detail about how two of Keener’s friends had held my arms while Keener pummeled me.

“Did this guy start it?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled with just the corner of his mouth. “Did you finish it?”

I couldn’t help but smile a little, too. “Sort of.”

“You remember me teaching you and your brother how to fight?”

“Sure,” I said. He had brought home sparring gloves from the police department’s gymnasium and taught us the fundamentals of self-defense. Never start a fight, he’d told us, but never let someone put their hands on you, either. Know how to protect yourself.

My father looked at his wine, then peered out the window.

It had just started to get dark, and I could see groups of costumed children going door-to-door. They pounded down the twilit causeways, their pillowcases bottom heavy with candy. Minivans prowled at a distance behind them, filled with parents who were more cautious this year.

“Grandma said I gotta go next door and take cookies to the new people who moved in,” I said.

“Sounds good,” said my father, still staring out the window.

A few minutes later I pulled on my Windbreaker and, balancing a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies in one hand, walked next door. The moving van had left sometime around dinner, and the whole house was once again deathly quiet. Even the trick-or-treaters knew enough to avoid it, although that was probably because it still looked like no one lived there.

For one split second, I wondered if I’d dreamed the whole thing—the moving van and the movers, the boxes of comic books, and, most implausibly, that pale moon face in one of the upstairs windows.

I walked up the porch and knocked on the door. Then I peeked in the narrow window running down the left side of the door but couldn’t make out anything but dark, angular shapes. There were no lights on inside. I knocked a second time and continued to wait. Farther down the street, the Wilbers’ Rottweiler barked at two young kids dressed as Aladdin and Jasmine.

I was just about to leave when the front door opened partway. A woman of indeterminable age stood on the other side. There was a look of distrust bordering on hostility on her face.

“Hello,” I said quickly, almost robotically. “I’m Angelo Mazzone. I live next door. Here.” I proffered the plate of cookies. “My grandmother made these for you.”

The woman eased the door open a few more inches, the hinges squealing. She was haggard looking, with blonde streamers of hair framing her face. She wore no makeup and had very thin lips. Her eyes would have been pretty if only she adopted a softer countenance. I thought that maybe she looked older than she was.

She reached out for the plate of cookies.

I surrendered it to her, thinking, There is no way she can pull that plate through the opening in the door. She will have to open it wider. The thought was like cold water running down my spine; for some inexplicable reason, I didn’t want her to open the door any wider.

“That’s very kind,” said the woman. She possessed the small, timid voice of a squirrel. The door squealed some more as she pulled it open farther. Behind the woman I noticed a heap of cardboard boxes and furniture covered in ghostly white sheets. “Please come in.”

I wanted to say no, but my feet were already carrying me over the threshold before I knew what I was doing. When she shut the door behind me, it was like being sealed up in a tomb.

“I’m Doreen Gardiner.”

“Hi.”

“That’s some makeup.”

I made a sound that approximated, “Huh?” before realizing she was referring to my bruised eye and split lip. “Thanks,” I said, allowing her to believe it was part of a Halloween costume. Maybe Scott had been right, and I should have draped my father’s old boxing gloves around my neck.

“Do you want to wait here a moment while I get Adrian?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Have a seat inside and I’ll fetch him.”

The pronoun him threw me. The only Adrians I had ever known had been girls.

Doreen Gardiner waved me toward an adjoining room that, when the Dunbars had lived here, had served as a sort of parlor room, with plush chairs and a fancy love seat covered in clear plastic. It hardly looked like the same room anymore. There were no chairs, so I sat atop a box labeled books and watched as Doreen Gardiner mounted the stairs to the second floor. She walked with the hampered gait of someone suffering from osteoporosis, though she couldn’t have been more than forty-five. Maybe even younger.

I looked around the room. The walls were barren and scuffed, the ceiling pocked with water damage. The carpeting was an ancient shag the color of oxidized copper. The Dunbars had been an elderly couple who’d been meticulous about the upkeep of their house, so I was surprised to find it in such poor condition.

Overhead, I heard footsteps followed by a muffled conver-sation. Then silence.

I must have sat on that box waiting for ten full minutes before I heard footsteps pattering down the staircase. I stood up.

The boy who appeared at the bottom of the stairs was small, thin, timid as a mouse. His hair was the color of wheat, and his eyes, swimming behind the lenses of thick black frames, were so pale they looked nearly colorless. He wore a Spider-Man sweatshirt that looked too small even for his insignificant frame, the sleeves stopping several inches above his frail wrists. I knew without question that it had been his face I had seen in the window.