Chapter 11
Dodie
I took a shower after the hike through the woods, washing the mud, sweat, and chill from my skin.
I used the hallway shower, because I couldn’t stand the idea of even entering my parents’ bedroom, let alone using their en suite.
So I used the bathtub-shower I’d used through all of my childhood, standing naked under the spray.
I put my hand on the cool tiles, looking at their white-and-Tiffany-blue swirl pattern as a memory bubbled up.
Me sitting in this bathtub, the warm water up to my chest, hugging my knees and crying as I stared at these same tiles.
It had happened more than once. I hadn’t known I remembered it until now.
How old was I in this memory? Young. Possibly before Ben. Ben was a late baby—I was six when he was born, Vail eight, Violet nine. Our parents were strangers to each other by then, and Dad was rarely even home.
Looking back on it as an adult, it was surprising that my parents had stood each other’s company for long enough to create a final, unexpected child.
Then again, based on my disappointing personal experience, such an act can take ten to fifteen minutes.
Maybe they tolerated each other for a quarter of an hour and the result changed all of our lives.
In the memory, I was crying after a nightmare.
I was tired, terrified. I’d escaped from my room.
My childhood was harrowing, but not because of any human villains—evil teachers, neighbors, priests, or the other ghouls who preyed on children.
The ghouls of my childhood were under my bed, under the water.
That water smelled so terrible, and it was so cold.
When I escaped it, I’d sit in the bath, crying as the hot water ran in the tub so no one could hear how scared I was.
I stared at my fingertips on the tiles. The water had come less frequently after Ben arrived, though it still came. It never came on the nights he crawled into bed next to me, warming me with his little body. Ben had changed everything.
We’d adored him, all of us, even Mother.
It was so easy to do. As a baby, he’d bobble his bald head and blink at us with his wide brown eyes.
His arms would fly up and he’d crow with pleasure when he recognized us.
I still remembered the feel of him cradled in my arms, his little legs kicking in his pajamas as he made a happy chuffing sound.
I remembered the feel of the trusting skin on the top of his head against my lips.
There was no question of caring for our little brother once Ben arrived.
Mother only needed to care for him for the few hours a day that we were in school, and then we fought to look after him.
For afternoons, weekends, holidays, and summers, Ben was ours.
We looked after him together or separately.
We fed him, changed him, bathed him, played with him, read to him.
We held him all night when he had a fever and cleaned his vomit when he had the flu.
We held his arms as he learned to walk and taught him the letters of the alphabet.
He liked games, goofy songs, and bedtime stories.
The sweetness and light of our little brother made the bad dreams as wispy as smoke.
I turned off the water and grabbed a towel.
Ben had even had a good effect on our parents, at least for a while.
Dad had come home more often. Mother had been sweet and affectionate with Ben, more so than she’d ever been with any of us, and we didn’t even resent him for it.
We adored him too much. When Mother had drifted her attention away from him after a few years, distracted as she always was by something more interesting than her children, we were happy about it.
It meant we got more of him to ourselves.
But at first, she’d been as in love as we were.
I still remembered her holding him swaddled in a blanket, directing us as we put his room together.
Vail had been sent to the attic to retrieve the old crib, which had been put away after I’d outgrown it.
Violet had dug out the worn baby blankets we’d all used.
Steam filled the bathroom. I didn’t want to put my old clothes back on, so with the towel wrapped around me, I opened the door an inch and put my face to the gap.
“Look away, Vail,” I shouted in case he was out there. “I’m coming out.”
There was no answer, so I gathered my clothes under my arm and swung the door open. I stepped into the hall, turning toward my room.
I stopped.
On the dusty floor were fresh, wet footprints, leading away down the hall. They were the size of the feet of a six-year-old child.
—
Vail lay all the way down on the floor of the hall, pressing his cheek to the scuffed hardwood. He looked like he was taking a nap. He stared long and hard at the footprints, careful not to touch one.
“We should photograph this,” he said at last. “I brought my work camera.”
I’d found him downstairs, fussing with the TV, which had stopped working again. Now he squinted at the footprints, angling to see them under the light. There had never been a question of not believing me.
“If you want to do it, then do it quickly,” I said, squeezing the collar of the bathrobe I’d put on. “They’ll dry.”
“Get a lamp.”
He got up, and we gingerly stepped over the footprints as I unplugged a lamp in a nearby room and he got his camera from his bedroom.
Was I frightened? I supposed I was. What I mostly felt, though, was vindication.
Even without the account from the landscapers, I’d felt Ben’s presence in this house.
It could have been wishful thinking or the power of the bad memories this place held.
The footprints told me I wasn’t as crazy as I thought I was.
“They’re drying fast,” Vail said, winding the film in his camera and attaching the flash. “No time to set up a tripod. Let’s do it quick.”
I plugged the lamp into a nearby outlet, took the shade off, and turned it on. I held it above the footprints. I’d done enough modeling shoots to know what a fill light was. This was rough, but it would have to do.
Vail squatted, bracing himself with the easy balance of an athlete, and took one photo, then another. The flash popped loudly and the bright light glistened on the fading footprints.
“Did you hear anything?” my brother asked, stepping forward and winding the film again. I followed with the lamp.
“Nothing. I was in the shower.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“I beg your pardon. What do you think I was doing in the shower?”
He sighed, a deep, put-upon sound. “Were you talking to yourself? Saying anything?” he clarified. “Singing? Crying?”
He said it so matter-of-factly I couldn’t speak for a second, wondering if he knew about the crying I’d done in that bathtub. Then wondering if he’d done the same thing. “No,” I managed. “None of those things.”
“Did the lights flicker? The water?”
“No.”
“Did you see any bright lights?”
“No.”
“Did you feel any temperature changes?”
I was being interrogated like one of his UFO people. Well, that was fair. “No.”
“I didn’t notice anything, either. You can see the toe prints. You can see which way he was going.”
Ben’s round little toe prints, right there on the floor. I wished Violet had been here to see it. “What do you think it means?” I asked.
“He liked to escape from the bath.”
I remembered Ben’s squeals of delight when he’d escape bath time, one of his harmless games. He’d get out and run, and the next thing you knew, you were chasing a naked boy, trying to grab him while he was slippery as a fish. “He loved that game,” I said.
The flash popped again, and Vail straightened. He’d gotten all the shots he could. “It might just be a memory. But he also could be directing us somewhere.”
I put down the lamp and we contemplated the footprints, which were almost gone.
They began in the middle of the hall in front of the bathroom, as if Ben had been placed there from above, soaking wet.
From there, they traveled in a straight line away from the landing behind us, in the direction of the bedrooms, before they stopped, as if Ben had been lifted up again.
It was uncannily like he’d been set down by aliens, then beamed up.
That was why Vail had asked me about lights.
I knew that Vail believed, at least partly, that our brother had been abducted by aliens. I didn’t think so myself, and it was easy to make fun of Vail for it, to think of him as credulous or pathetic.
But even though I didn’t believe what Vail did, I envied him for that belief. The thought of Ben being taken into an otherworldly ship was more comforting than the thought of the other, more mundane, more garden-variety evil things that could have happened to him.
These footprints, though—they weren’t the product of alien abductions. They were made by Ben, and Vail was right: He was trying to tell us something.
“Where is he sending us?” I asked, pulling my robe more tightly over my chest.
“They don’t lead to his bedroom, or away from it,” Vail said.
We glanced at the closed door of the room that had been Ben’s.
His things weren’t in there anymore; we had cleaned them out at some point.
Had we finally believed he wasn’t coming back?
I remembered Vail and Violet hauling Ben’s small bed down the stairs to get rid of it while I hid in my room, unable to watch.
We’d had to dispose of his clothes, his sheets.
I remembered staring at his soft-bristled hairbrush in the bathroom every morning for at least a year, until one morning it wasn’t there anymore.
I still didn’t know who had finally moved it, but my money was on Vail.
“Then where is he leading us?” I asked. “My bedroom? Mom and Dad’s bedroom?” The prints didn’t point to Vail’s bedroom, and they might point to Violet’s if you used a lax interpretation of their direction.
“You didn’t see or hear anything strange in your room last night?” Vail asked.
Except for the water? Its cold, dirty depths threatening to close above my head as I lay in bed? No, sir. Nothing strange except for that rosy piece of my childhood. I shook my head.
“We didn’t sleep in Mom and Dad’s room, and we haven’t gone through it,” Vail said. “He could be implying…” He trailed off.
“What?” I asked. Every room in this house had been searched when Ben disappeared. Every drawer, closet, under every bed. Was Ben telling us there was something to look for that we had missed?
Vail went still and quiet, his body tense. He tilted his chin back and pointed. I looked up.
Right above the place where the footprints ended was the door that led to the attic.