the design in the center was a fleur-de-lis. Maybe that’s what it was supposed to be. But the bulb in the middle didn’t come to a point like it usually would in a fleur-de-lis, and the two petals on each side of it curled so much they were almost circular. How could I not have noticed before how phallic that design was? Again, it seemed like something I would have had a laugh at in the past. I must have been blind not to have seen it.
On Friday morning I decided to take advantage of having my cell phone back and take snapshots of a couple of the oddities I’d noticed the night before. I wanted to ask my dad if he’d ever noticed them. I figured he must have, because his cop instincts made him super observant.
And that was when I took yet another step into the Twilight Zone. I left my house a little early so I’d have time to walk around the block before heading to the train station for school, but when I came to the antiques shop, its grille was up and there was shadowy movement inside, so no chance there. I hurried forward until I reached the row of houses with the tongue door knocker. There were five houses, and I could have sworn it was the one in the middle with the red door that had had it, but this morning there was no sign of the tongue. All the door knockers looked perfectly normal.
Perhaps the owner had decided the tongue was too weird, I told myself, but I couldn’t hold back a shiver of apprehension. It reminded me a little too much of the eagle incident.
I kept rationalizing and headed on to the house with the phallic design in its railing. There was no way the owner could have switched that out overnight.
But when I got there I saw that the design in the center was clearly a fleur-de-lis. I supposed if I squinted at it and looked at it sideways it might look a little phallic. But I was dead certain it didn’t look the way it had when I’d walked Bob last night.
That damn brain tumor is acting up again, I told myself, trying to laugh it off.
Maybe, thanks to my dad’s stories about all the whacked-out stuff that was happening at night, I’d somehow made myself sort of paranoid. Maybe last night I’d been actively looking for something to be strange and had convinced myself I’d seen it. Damn it, I was going to stick to logical explanations as long as I possibly could.
I snapped a quick picture of the railing on my phone before I left to catch my train. Surely I’d shattered the illusion now that I’d seen the railing in the bright light of day, but I wanted that photographic evidence in case my eyes or memory started playing tricks on me when I walked Bob later that night.
* * *
I spent the day trying not to obsess. Not only did I do a piss-poor job of it, but I was so lost in my own head that I couldn’t seem to concentrate on the inconvenient pop quiz my teacher sprang on us during calculus class. I’m really good at math—obviously, or I wouldn’t have been taking calculus—but my skills failed me that afternoon, and I knew I’d be lucky if I got a C.
I consoled myself with the thought that, unlike my mom, my dad didn’t pore over my every grade and share his opinion of my performance. But that thought evoked a strange twist of yearning in my chest. I’d gotten over the worst of missing my mom within a month or so of her moving to Boston, but every once in a while her absence would rise up out of nowhere and smack me in the face. I talked to her on the phone every week, and I’d be going up to Boston soon to spend Thanksgiving with her and my sister, but that wasn’t the same.
If my mom were still living with me, would I have confided in her about all the strange things that had been happening? I wasn’t sure I would have had the nerve, because talking about it would somehow make it all more real, but I might have. She was warmer and more approachable than my dad. At least more so than my post-divorce dad. But then she wasn’t warm and nurturing enough to hang around in Philadelphia