When the Lights Go Out(59)

I tiptoe down the steps, one tread at a time, so slowly that it’s almost as if I’m not moving at all. As I descend, voices surface. Not just one, but two or three or four. One lead and a host of background singers to accompany the piano. It makes me gasp for breath. My legs become weak, incapacitated; they start to give as I clutch the stair railing for support, squeezing so tightly the muscles of my hands cramp.

I can’t go on. I don’t want to go on. But I do because I have to. Because there’s nothing there, because there’s some reasonable explanation for the sound. A car stereo playing outside the carriage home, maybe, the tune getting carried in through an open window.

But I won’t know what it is unless I go see.

I force myself to creep down the steps. I edge across the floorboards, willing myself forward, creeping, one step at a time. Following the sound, which comes from a wall and not the window at all because the window is closed tight.

The song isn’t coming from the stereo of a car parked somewhere outside.

It’s coming from inside the carriage home.

I go after the sound, and it leads me to an old vintage pie safe pressed flush against a wall, a petite bookshelf with a couple of shelves and a door. It’s one of the few pieces of furniture that came with the carriage home.

I grab a hold of the knob and pull the door open swiftly, dropping to my knees. As I gaze inside, I find that it’s empty, which makes no sense because the song is in there. It’s coming from the pie safe. I feel blindly with my hands, moving them up and down the edges of the shelves, feeling for something, though what I don’t know.

And then a thought comes to me.

What if the sound isn’t coming from the pie safe? What if it’s coming from somewhere behind?

I don’t think twice. I shove the pie safe out of the way. It isn’t heavy, but it isn’t light either. I press a shoulder into it. It takes some jostling as it skids across the floor.

And there, on the wall behind where the pie safe was placed, I discover a cast-iron air return grille. One of those wall-mounted vents that leads into the duct system. It’s an air return, one that sucks stale air from the room and cycles it back through the home’s ductwork, leading, I have to assume, to the floor register upstairs where I heard the undeniable ping the other night. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing.

Except that nothing is getting sucked up in here. Instead it’s getting forced out.

And it’s not air at all, but music. Gladys Knight & the Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

How can this be?

I press my whole body against the grille to listen to the song. Mom’s favorite. One she used to play over and over again until I got sick of it. Until I pouted and told her to turn it off because it was old people music. Those were the words I used. Old people music.

I’m stricken with the most impossible of thoughts, one that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.

Mom is there. Inside the home’s ductwork.

I set the urn down on the floor and, at first, try to jerk the whole thing off the wall with both of my hands. It won’t budge. I grip the edges of the grille and pull, but I don’t have a good grip on it and it slips easily from my grasp. I tumble backward, falling to the floor. The air return grille is wedged on too tight, held to the wall with four screws, one in each corner. I make an attempt to unscrew each with a bare hand, pinching and twisting the jagged screws until the skin splits, catching a sharp edge of it, one that’s been whet over time. My finger starts to drip with blood.

But the screws don’t move. Not even a little bit.

I grit my teeth and pinch and twist harder, but still nothing. They don’t budge the slightest bit.

And so I wedge a fingernail into the slotted screw and turn. But all that happens is my nail breaks, getting ripped in two, leaving my nails in tatters. I curse out loud from the pain of it before hoisting myself from the floor and hurrying to the kitchen for a knife. I shuffle through a cutlery drawer—tossing forks and spoons out of the way, spilling them one by one to the floor—and find a butter knife.

I run back to the air return. I fall again to my knees.

I stick the knife into the screw head, turning counterclockwise as hard as I can. Bearing down on that knife with my whole body weight.

This time, it turns.

I spin and I spin that knife, desperate, gasping, as if I might just find Mom inside the air return. Because for this moment that’s exactly what I’m thinking. That that’s where she is. Inside the air return. I don’t know how or why, but she is. She’s there. I’m just sure of it.

I pluck one screw from the wall and move on to the next one. And the next one. And the next. All four screws tumble to the ground.

The grille loses its grip on the wall and falls. The sound is clamorous. I shove it out of the way and look inside. It’s some sort of stainless steel box set there behind the air return grille, one that changes course about a foot of the way in. I can’t see far enough inside to see where it goes and so I reach in a hand, grasping, sweating, but come up empty, thinking that behind that curve there are miles and miles of pipes and tubes which somehow or other lead to Mom. Mom is at the end of those tubes, listening to her music, speaking to me.

I try going in headfirst and then feetfirst. But I don’t fit and in time give up, because I don’t know what else to do.

I spend the rest of the night lying on the floor beside the air return in the fetal position, listening to Gladys Knight sing to me.