There’s silence on his end, and I allow it. He eventually clears his throat, but his voice is gruffer than normal. “I love you, peanut.”
My heart warms. “I love you, too.”
He hangs up, and I relax back in the comfy rolling chair that is pleather and has a high back. There’s a lot of people my age who would be freaked out to be alone at night, but except when I was eleven and we first moved here, the dark doesn’t scare me. In fact, there’s a comfort in the blackness of night. A lot like a soft, heavy blanket. A lot like my mother’s hugs.
Searching for a solution to my problems, I swivel in the chair. I need to find someone else to work with on my English project. Someone who has a car, someone who will be easy to meet with, someone who will willingly work with me and someone who is absolutely on board with what I want to research. This topic means the world to me—literally life and death.
My cell pings and I glance down at the text. Glory: You need to contact me. I’m seeing things in your future that concern me.
There are things that concern me about my future, too.
Out of the corner of my eye, there’s movement. A shadow. I barely see the blur, and it darts from the living room toward the stairs that lead to the foyer on the first floor. My heart picks up speed. It’s past midnight. The time when this house comes alive. Beyond shadows, I haven’t seen the children since I was a child, and I’m hungry to see them again.
I’m up, out of my seat and I follow. A push of a few buttons, the alarm is disarmed and I open the heavy wooden door that separates me from the rest of house. At the top of the stairs, I strain to look down into the darkness. A faint light pushes through the thick stained glass over the main front door, creating shadows in the corner. There’s silence. So loud that it almost hurts my ears.
The children frighten easily so I creep down the stairs, working hard to distribute my weight to keep the old steps from creaking and moaning.
What do the children see when they frolic around this old house? Do they see their own home, in their own time, back when they were alive? Are they lost in their happy memories? Because that’s what I hope for death to be, lost in a dream of joy.
I lean my back against the wall, close my eyes and listen. At this time of night, at exactly this time, I hear their light footsteps tapping against the hardwood. Some nights, I’m lucky and can hear their giggles, and on rare nights, back when I was younger, I was offered the rare jewel of catching sight of more than just the hem of a dress.
I breathe in. I breathe out. The energy of the house surrounds me, and a child’s high-pitched scream pierces the night.
SAWYER
Tuesday Jan. 1: Well, Diary, I’ll introduce myself. My name is Evelyn. I’m 16 years old. I have tuberculosis and at the present time am in the Ray Brook Sanitarium trying to get cured. You must keep my secrets well, for I’ll tell you things that I want no one to know.
—Evelyn Ballak, 1918
The girl is at a desk, writing into a journal. I stand at the doorway, watching, listening, confused by the look of happiness on her face. I scan the hallway and see the exhausted doctors, the worried nurses, the people deathly thin walking up and down the hallway. Someone coughs. It’s a ragged, guttural, desperate sound. As if someone is drowning on dry land. And everyone stops and turns toward the noise.
A man stumbles out of his room and almost runs into me, and I jump into the girl’s room—my heart in my throat. He holds his chest, clawing at it as if it won’t work. He continues to cough, doubles over with it and then collapses to the floor.
He’s sick, they’re all sick here. They’ve been sent here to die and I turn back to the girl and she’s still writing and she’s still smiling.
“Haven’t you been told?” I say.
The girl looks up at me and blinks like she’s confused. Her innocence causes me pain. “Told what?”