The Narrows(13)
“That’s not dinner talk,” Wendy Crawly said in a small voice.
Brandy looked quickly down at her plate. “Sorry.”
“And I don’t want to have this discussion with you again, Matthew. Am I understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t appreciate being lied to, either.”
“Sorry,” he said…and felt his sister administer a swift kick to his shin underneath the table.
“All right, then,” said Wendy.
They ate the rest of their meal in silence.
5
That evening, as everyone else slept soundly in the Crawly house, young Matthew awoke with a scream ratcheting up his throat. He was tacky with sweat, the ghost-fingers of a retreating nightmare still tickling his spine. He sat up stiffly in bed, the twin windows across the room like eyes, seeming to blaze with moonlight.
In the dream, he had been back in the field staring up at the plastics factory. This time he was alone and it was nighttime—or at least the sky was dark enough to make it seem like nighttime, though he supposed it could have been dark with an oncoming storm. As he stared up at the building, dull flashes of light bled out from the gridded windows. He approached the building and attempted to climb on top of some fallen trees to peer in through the windows. But the windows were too high, and it seemed the higher he climbed, the farther up the side of the building the windows scaled. Then, from all around him, there came the sound of a thousand beating wings, the sound filling his ears like the drumbeat sound of rushing blood, and he was crippled and frozen by a shuddery disquiet.
In the half-light, he listened to the house creak and moan—house-speak, his father had called it on the nights when Matthew was younger, afraid to sleep alone in his room with all the noises of the house surrounding him. Just house-speak: talking to the wind, the moon, the stars. Nothing at all to be afraid of. As it often did, this memory caused his face to turn hot and his eyes to sting. Matthew hadn’t seen his father in over a year, and he’d spoken with him on the phone less than a half-dozen times. He was living now in someplace that had a strange and unfamiliar name. And while no one had ever directly confirmed this bit of information, he had surmised that he was living there with another woman. The few times he had summoned the courage to ask his mother for more details about his father’s disappearance, one look at Wendy Crawly’s worn and beaten face would cause him to change his mind. He did not want to talk about those things with his mother. She had cried enough on the porch by herself in the beginning, just barely within earshot, and that had been bad enough. Matthew didn’t think he could take it if she broke down in front of him. Or because of him. So he never asked questions.
He flipped the sweaty sheet off his body then climbed out of bed. Without turning on the bedroom light, he found the mound of his clothes at the foot of his bed. Snatching his shorts up off the floor, he carried them over to his small desk where his Superman lunchbox sat. He felt around in the pockets of his shorts for the money Dwight had given him, his panic rising when he found both pockets empty. He rechecked them, pulling them inside out, but there was no money in there.
He clicked the desk lamp on. Yellow light spilled out across the desk and half of the desk chair. Beneath the cone of light, Matthew again reexamined the pockets of his shorts. Then he went to the heap of clothes at the foot of his bed and sifted through each article of clothing—shirts, balled-up socks, another pair of shorts. There was no money anywhere.
Retrace your steps, said a voice in his head. He thought of the story of Hansel and Gretel, how they’d left behind a trail of breadcrumbs in order to find their way back home. Stupidly, this made him think again of his father, who had left no trail of breadcrumbs and appeared to have no intention of ever coming back home.
Holding his breath, because he thought doing so would stop his heart from beating so loudly, he crept out of his bedroom and onto the second floor landing. Across the hall, the doors to his mother’s and Brandy’s bedrooms were closed, the doorknobs a shimmery blue in the moonlight coming in through the high front windows. He proceeded to descend the steps, avoiding from memory the risers that made the most noise. It was like sinking down into the belly of a great ship. Over summer vacation he’d read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and not the dumbed-down version for children either. This had been the actual, honest-to-God novel. And while he did not fully understand everything he’d read, the glory and trepidation and horror of the adventure resonated with him more than any movie ever had. He thought of that book now, and how the underwater light shining through the portholes of Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, must have looked just like the swampy, blue-gelled moonlight coming through the windows of the front hall right now.
He’d hoped that thinking about this would alleviate his fears.
It hadn’t.
Around him, the house sounded alive. As he crossed from the front hall to the kitchen, a gust of wind bullied the house and made popping, groaning sounds within the walls. Matthew froze, his heart thudding with a series of pronounced hammer strikes within the frail wall of his chest. On the kitchen counter, silverware and drinking glasses gleamed in the moonlight coming through the window over the sink. Across the kitchen, the flimsy floral curtain that hung over the panel of glass in the upper section of the porch door seemed to radiate with a cool, lackadaisical light. His bare feet padding on the cold kitchen tiles, he went to the door, unlocked the dead bolt, and slid the slide lock to the unlocked position. It made a sound that echoed loudly in the empty, silent kitchen, causing Matthew to once again hold his breath.