When the Lights Go Out(13)

I feel out of place in this strange place. The house smells different than what I’m used to, an earthy smell like pine. It’s older than Mom’s and my old home, where I lived my entire life. One of the windows doesn’t close tight so that when the wind whips its way around the house as it does tonight, air sneaks in. I can’t feel it but I hear it, the hiss of the wind forcing its way in through a gap.

I lie there in bed, trying hard to catch my breath, to not think about dying, to will myself to do the impossible and sleep. Beside me, on the floor, are four boxes, the only ones I brought from the old home. Some clothes, a few picture frames, and a box of random paperwork Mom kept, just an old white bankers box, kept closed with a string and button. It seemed important enough for Mom to keep, and so I kept it. A thought comes to me now: Could my social security card be in that box, tucked away with Mom’s financial paperwork?

I climb out of bed and turn on a light, dropping to the floor beside the box. I loosen the string and lift the lid, meeting reams of paper head-on. If there’s any sort of method to the madness, I don’t see it.

I search through the paperwork for my social security card, to be sure the numbers I dashed off on the FAFSA form weren’t incorrect. That I didn’t write the wrong ones down by mistake. Because never in my life have I been asked to give my social security number, and so it’s conceivable, I think, that I have the numbers mixed-up. I look for the card itself, grabbing stacks of paper by the handful and flipping through them one sheet at a time, hoping the card falls out. But instead I find the deed to our home, an old checkbook ledger. Gas and electric bills. Years’ worth of tax returns that gives me pause, because if I know one thing, it’s that Uncle Sam isn’t about to pay out tax refunds without a social security number.

I set everything else aside except for the tax returns. My eyes go straight to the exemptions, the spot where someone would list their dependents and their dependents’ social security numbers, meaning me and my social security number. Except that when I come to it, I find the line blank. Mom didn’t list me as a dependent and, though I double-check the year of the form to be sure I was alive at the time, I see that I was. That I was eleven years old at the time the form was completed.

And though I don’t know much about income taxes, I do know it would have saved Mom a buck or two if she had thought to use me as a tax deduction. A baby gift from Uncle Sam.

I wonder why Mom, who was frugal to a fault, didn’t claim me as a dependent that year.

It was a mistake, I think. An oversight only. I dig through to find another 1040 in the tower of paperwork—this one older, when I was four years old—and search there for my name and social security number, finding it nowhere. Another year that Mom didn’t claim me.

I sift through them all, six tax return forms that I can find—my movements becoming faster, more frantic as I dig—and discover that never once did Mom claim me as a dependent. Not one single time.

I turn off the light and get back into bed. I lie there, wondering why Mom didn’t claim me as a dependent. What did she know about the IRS that I don’t know? Probably a lot, I reason. I don’t pay taxes. I’ve never once been sent a check from them. My only knowledge comes from hearsay, from eavesdropping on clients like Mr. and Mrs. Ricci, discussing whether they could claim Mrs. Ricci’s shopping binges as exemptions, all those fancy clothes she toted home in the trunks of cabs.

Mom must’ve had a good reason for what she did.

I listen to the clock, tick, tock. I don’t bother closing my eyes except to blink, because I know that I won’t sleep. I pull the blanket up clear to my neck because it’s cold in the room. Though the thermostat downstairs is set to sixty-eight degrees, I have yet to hear the heat kick on.

Fall is here and winter is coming soon.

I’m rubbing my hands together for friction, to try and create heat. To make myself warm. I rub them together and then press them to my cheeks. Rub and then press, rub and then press. And that’s when I hear a noise.

It’s sudden, the kind of noise that makes me sit up straighter in bed, that makes me hold my breath to listen.

The only way to describe it is a ping. A ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. It’s a piercing noise when it comes, like some sort of mechanical bleep or chime, the second or two between each ping a welcome reprieve. I rub at my ears, certain at first that the noise originates there, in my own eardrums. That it’s merely tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, something only I can hear.

But then I realize it’s not coming from my ears.

It’s coming from somewhere on the other side of the room.

I stare though the blackness but see nothing. It’s too dark to see much of anything, aside from my own hand when it’s pressed all the way up to my face. And so I push the blanket from me and rise, following the noise. I move blindly, feet guiding me, my steps small because I don’t know what’s in front of me. Where the bedroom ends and the stairs begin. I have to be careful so that I don’t fall.

I skirt around the edge of the bed, where I find myself on the other side of the room, hunched at the shoulders because the squat ceiling doesn’t allow me to stand upright. From there, the noise rises up from the floor to greet me.

I drop to my knees, running my hands over a metal grate by accident. There I discover a floor register, one of those metal contraptions that attaches to the end of an air duct and leads somewhere under the floor, to some other room in the home. That’s where the ping is coming from, from some other room in the home. In my imagination, I see a mallet being tapped against the slats of another register in another room, because that’s what it sounds like to me. Like metal on metal, rhythmic and fixed.