When the Lights Go Out(71)

I smile and she knows, the moment she arrives, that something is wrong.

“What’s happened?” she asks, staring at me with the deadpan expression of a teenage girl, one that hides a legion of feelings behind that single blank stare. Sadness, confusion, fear. Her eyes—oh, how blue they are! Even to this day, they shake me to the core—are poker-faced. But not for long.

As I take her in, I realize that though she’s wise beyond her years, she’s still a child. A child who will be an orphan soon. I pat at the step beside me and tell her to sit down, cursing myself for trying too hard to look nice. I forget in that moment everything that I’d planned to say—all the wise old adages on life and death that I prepared to quote—and say outright to her instead, “Jessie, I’m dying,” my voice flat and even, just barely above a whisper, trying desperately to stay calm for her sake. “I’m going to die,” I say as that inexpressive demeanor cracks before me and tears rush to Jessie’s blue eyes, flooding them instantly, a flash flood of tears.

I stare at her stoically, trying not to cry as Jessie breaks down before me. But it’s hard to do. Jessie rushes into me, throwing her arms around my shoulders and neck. She pulls me in tightly as I purr into her ear, “Now, now. Don’t cry. Everything will be all right,” enveloping her in my arms, patting her back, stroking her hair.

“I’m not scared,” I tell her, lying through my teeth because these are the words she needs to hear. “Sooner or later we all die, Jessie. It’s only a matter of time. And this is mine.”

To say I’m not heartsick would be a lie. To say I don’t feel ashamed would be too.

Because after everything I did to make Jessie a part of my world, I’m leaving her alone to fend for herself, and for this, I feel guilty as sin.





jessie

I’m lying in bed when I hear a noise from outside. It makes me jump suddenly, makes me spring inches from the mattress and into the air.

What I expect to see when I look outside is a garbage can lid getting hurled to the ground, one of those galvanized steel ones clanging to the concrete. Because that’s the sound I hear, the din of metal on concrete, and I imagine a colony of hulking rats climbing on shoulders to scale the garbage can, working together to carry off whatever’s inside.

But instead when I peel the shade back and gaze out, I see nothing.

The moon, the stars are nowhere to be seen tonight. It’s pitch-black outside.

For hours on end I find myself staring into the black nothingness that is Ms. Geissler’s home. My body shakes from the cold, though as always I sweat. And I think that I have a fever, because that’s the way it feels to me. Icy cold on the inside, but sweating through layers of clothes, my skin damp with sweat. My clothes stick to me as my teeth chatter. I’m not sure I have it in me to survive another night. I wonder what a panic attack feels like, a breakdown. I think that’s what’s happening to me.

My eyes adjust to the darkness, making out shapes. The blackened windows, the balcony suspended three stories in the air on stilts, the flat roofline, the porch, the sliding glass door.

As I stare, I watch a squirrel leap from the branches of an oak tree and onto the rooftop. It vanishes into the eaves of the rooftop, as voices speak to me through the floor register again. Peripheral cooling, they say this time, and mottling of the skin, their voices weak and watered down, far away from here. But I can’t be bothered this time to run and throw myself down over the metal grate because I know they won’t hear me if I do. Even if I scream at them through the vent, they won’t reply because they never do. Because they’re only in my mind.

I hear the sound of footsteps too, quiet, restrained footsteps that slink up through the floor register and into the room with me. A giggle.

Shh, someone says, voice suppressed. Let her sleep.

I can’t turn away from the window. Like bugs drawn to a light at night, I can’t bring myself to look away. The window is the color of ebony, of charcoal. It’s jet-black, the window shade motionless, completely inert.

I take in the rectangular shape of the glass itself—narrow and tall—the stagnancy of the shade. There is no one there. Behind the window and the shade, the room is empty and dark.

Until it’s not.

Because, at three in the morning, the light flicks on.

There’s an immediacy to it, a sudden unexpectedness. So much so that I almost fall from the edge of the bed. It happens all at once. A lamp turns on and the shades go up at the same time. The room becomes flooded with light.

For the first time I have a clear view of the room inside. What I see is a bedroom of sorts. An attic room, one space divvied up by three windows. Like a triptych, a painting where three canvas panels come together to create one scene.

In the first, a bed’s headboard is pressed up against a wall paneled with a dated oak that stretches from floor to ceiling. The bed is unmade, a marshmallow-white comforter pulled down a foot from the head of the bed, pillows lay flat. There is a lamp on beside the mattress that lobs the soft yellow light across the room.

In the second canvas is the foot of the bed and the bottom two vertical columns of a four-poster bed frame. There is a wooden door on the back wall that leads to a hall. Or a closet. It’s closed, so I don’t know where it goes. A random cord dangles from the ceiling, belonging to seemingly nothing. At some point in its life, it might have been a fan or a light.