When the Lights Go Out(63)

She’s quiet at first. “Jessie, honey,” she says, the look on her face one of concern. Condolence. Shame. “Oh, Jessie. Poor, poor, Jessie,” she says instead, pitying me, ignoring my threat to call the police. She takes a step toward me, makes an attempt to stroke my arm with her gaudy gardening gloves. But I pull back. “You must be mistaken, dear,” she says. “The third floor, I told you already,” she says, making a sweeping gesture of the greystone behind her. “I don’t go up there anymore. I haven’t been up there in months.”

It’s a lie. I know that’s not true. I know because she was there.

“I saw the light on in the attic. I saw you standing there in the window looking out. Watching me.”

“No,” she says to me, shaking her head, looking concerned and confused. “There are no lights up there in the attic. I’d had a lamp once, just an old floor lamp, nothing special, but the squirrels chewed their way right through the cord. Can you imagine?” she says then, tsking her tongue and shaking her head. “Pesky little things. It’s a wonder they didn’t electrocute themselves.” And for the briefest of moments it sounds so genuine, so real, that I almost see the squirrels’ overgrown teeth gnawing their way through the cord, cutting power to the floor lamp.

But not quite.

“I know what I saw,” I insist.

But somewhere deep inside me, I also wonder if I do.

“You must be mistaken, Jessie,” she says. “Maybe it was a dream. You’ve lost your mother. Grief can be a terrible thing. The isolation, the desperation—” But I stop her before she can cite for me the stages of grief. Her eyes now are chock-full of condolence. Sorrow. They mock me. I know what she’s doing. With her pitiful eyes and her compassion, she’s trying to make me question my own sanity, to make me think I’m crazy. A by-product of the insomnia and the grief.

But I know what I saw. There was a light on in the third floor. There were eyes in the window, watching me.

“Then let me see,” I insist. My words are assertive. I attempt to call her bluff. “Let me go to the attic. Let me see for myself that there is no light there.”

Her lips curve upward. She grins. Not a happy smile, not a mocking smile, but an appeasing one. She’s placating me. “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s quite the mess, Jessie. I don’t even think it’s safe to go up there,” she says. Not until she can get her contractor out to clean it up, which she says she really needs to do. It’s been too long and the attic, for now, is just a waste of space. And then she says that she must go. Rain is on its way, she says, staring skyward. Until now I didn’t notice the storm clouds rolling in. It was all blue sky and sun, but now it’s not. Now there are clouds. “The weeds are calling me,” Ms. Geissler says, turning, stepping closer to the thistle and away from me.

And then, in that moment, from up above, the clouds burst apart at the seams. Rainwater comes pouring down. Just like that, the sun-dappled sidewalks are gone, getting replaced with puddles. I take my eyes off Ms. Geissler, looking down, to see my feet submerged in a puddle of water. Across the street, the little boy’s chalk hippopotamus gets washed away, rallying his tears. He begins to cry. But not before first throwing his chalk so that it breaks in two, screaming, “It’s ruined,” and then stomping off and heading inside, hot on his mother’s heels.

I look back toward Ms. Geissler, but already she’s gone.

In the distance, a screen door slams and there I am.

Hair matted down, wet clothes binding to me. All alone.

*

The rain, only a cloudburst, is through. Over and done with. No sooner had I fled the lawn for the cover of indoors than it stopped. The sun forced its way through the clouds again like a baby chick breaking free from an eggshell. The world turned yellow, golden.

Drop by drop the rain disappeared, going back up the way it came down. And then the sun set, turning the world to pink and then purple and then black, welcoming another sleepless night.

I stare out the window and into the third story of Ms. Geissler’s home. I stare until my eyes get tired from it, so tired that my retinas begin to burn, the lid continuing to twitch. And yet I can’t bring myself to blink because in those milliseconds, I might miss something, a flicker of light, eyes in the window staring back at me. The house itself blurs, softening at the edges because I’ve been staring too long.

But still, I don’t blink.

The shades on the third-story window are drawn. All three of them pulled taut. Like the world outside, the room is dark. For hours on end, there’s no one there. Evidence that I’m mistaken. Evidence that I am wrong. That Ms. Geissler hasn’t been standing in the window watching me at night, and that my imagination only made it up. It couldn’t have been a dream because when you don’t sleep you don’t dream. And so instead it was my mind playing games with me.

All night long, the window remains empty and black. It’s cold in the carriage home because I’ve turned the heat completely off in an effort to prevent noises from sneaking in through the ductwork. So far, it’s working. There are no voices; there are no pings. No music. But as a result, the temperature in the carriage home hurtles to fifty degrees. My fingers and toes go numb.

As I lie there in bed listening to the tick, tock of the wall clock, it dawns on me. Mom is not my biological mom. It seems so transparent, so glaring there in the witching hour. As if it’s been staring me in the face all this time and I just failed to see. I look nothing like her, for starters, which doesn’t necessarily matter because for all I know I’m a dead ringer of my dad. But still, it’s cause for doubt.