CHAPTER 19 UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS #2
Noah stands and continues his search of the closet as I thumb through the rest of the papers.
At the very bottom of the stack is an opened envelope with my dad’s full name and an address I don’t recognize scrawled on the front.
I take out the piece of paper inside and it falls apart in my hands, like it had been torn up and stuffed back in the envelope.
One scrap reads, It’s not like it is in films, Jonathan.
This is not a fiction. The stories are so close to the truth of our family but they leave out the most important part .
. . ?why? Why would we do these things? Why must we do these things? If only they knew.
Nothing else in the letter is legible but there is a slightly yellowed photograph mixed up in the fragments.
It’s Grandpa Redwood lying still and stiff in his mahogany coffin.
His black glasses are perched on his face, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say there was a slight smile on his lips.
I shove the picture and the papers to the side.
I’m more confused and frustrated than ever.
The closet is nearly empty now but Noah snags a big leather tote from the deepest corner.
“Wanna check inside this?” Noah asks, handing it to me. “It’s the only thing left.”
I take it from him and toss it on the bed, pulling open the top flap.
The smell that wafts out is familiar and strange all at once.
Mom comes over to peer inside the bag. There’s some kind of blanket or robe bunched up inside.
I pull it out and the smell hits me again—sweet and smoky, like incense or something.
I realize this is the same smell and, from the looks of it, the same cloth that had been in my dad’s suitcase. I shake it out and hold it up.
“What is that?” Noah asks.
The garment has a deep black hood and is long enough to brush the floor even though I’m holding it over my head. “It’s a cloak. I think my dad said it was Grandpa Redwood’s.”
Mom and I exchange puzzled glances.
“So, your grandpa was, like, a cosplayer or something?” Noah asks. “He liked to dress up as what? Emperor Palpatine in his off time?”
“I’ve never seen this,” my mom says as she touches the fabric.
“And the smell. It’s like church. My grandma was Catholic, and I used to go to Mass with her when I was little, Christmas services, Easter.
” She smiles a little. I only know my grandmother from pictures.
A little pang of sadness ripples through me.
“They burned it in a censer,” Mom continues.
“The place would be filled with the smoke and the smell of it.” She lifts the cloak and sniffs it. “Almost the exact same smell.”
“Grandpa Redwood was at church?” I ask. “Wearing this?”
My mom shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. That man was many things and religious was not one of them.”
“So Dad brought back you and Noah,” I say, thinking through everything. “Who brought back the redhead, and the blond guy? Was it Grandpa Redwood?”
“Maybe,” my mom says. “I don’t know why he’d do it. He knew what we’d become. Maybe he didn’t care.”
“Why did Jonathan do it, though?” Noah suddenly asks. “His dad must have told him how it was gonna work. He knew it was gonna be hard for us, right?”
I glance at Noah and he has his bottom lip tucked between his teeth. His jaw is tense.
“Jonathan told me right after I was reanimated that he panicked,” Mom says. “That he didn’t know what he would do without me. He said he looked at Meka and couldn’t stand to let her be without me. I never questioned it. We’ve had so much more time together because of what he did but—”
“But?” I ask. Something in me expects that there has always been a “but.” Did she regret it? The way she has to live now, is it too much? Too difficult?
“But,” my mom continues, “Jonathan made the choice for me.” Mom lets her gaze move to the floor. “He loves me more than he loves anything besides Meka. He did what he thought was best at the time but that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t have a say.”
“Like my mom,” Noah says. “She made that choice for me too.”
My mom nods. She and Noah share something I can barely understand. I wish I could take away their hurt and confusion.
“Would you have made a different choice?” I ask. “If you knew and you had a say, would you have let him?”
My mom grasps my hand and holds it over her heart. A heart that no longer beats. “I wouldn’t change anything about what happened. All I’m saying is that I can make my own choices now.”
I put my arms around her and hug her tight. So tight I worry I might be hurting her and when I’m reminded that she can’t feel a thing, I squeeze tighter.
From down the hall there is a small thud. I freeze. Noah steps toward the door and listens.
“What was that?” I whisper.
Noah peers down the hall. The heat is kicking on and the pipes begin their annoying percussion of knocks and bangs, but between the familiar sounds of the ancient heating system is something else.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I look around the room for something to use as a weapon. I reach for the floor lamp in the corner, but Noah puts his hand on my arm and shakes his head no.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I’ll go out there first,” Noah says.
“What?” I ask. “Whoever it is might attack you!”
“Whoever it is can’t hurt me,” Noah says. He holds up his newly attached hand and wiggles his fingers.
“They can’t kill you,” Mom says. “And you can’t feel pain but that doesn’t mean they can’t do serious damage. Enough to make your existence unbearable.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“You think it’s those weirdos again?” I ask, my voice barely audible.
“I don’t know,” my mom says. “They have the book. They have Jonathan. Why come back here?”
Noah steps out into the hall and my mom and I follow close behind him. The tapping noise is louder and more frantic now. My heart is beating so hard I worry everyone can hear it.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
We ease onto the stairs and they groan under our collective weight. The tapping continues.
“On three,” Noah says.
“On three what?” I ask.
“One. Two. Three!” Noah says with no other instructions. He launches himself off the step and lands with a crash at the bottom. He rolls on the floor, then pops up with his fists raised in front of him. He looks down the entry hall toward the back door.
I scramble down after him, afraid of what I might see or who else might be down there but I’m not about to let him face whatever it is alone. My mom rushes down and stands beside me. The hallway is empty.
“You good?” I ask, trying to get a good look at Noah.
“Yeah,” he says, avoiding my gaze. The hot heat of embarrassment wafts off him.
I touch his arm. “That was . . . special.”
Noah presses his mouth into a tight line.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound is coming from the little window to the right of the back door. On the platform my dad had built for his feathered friends sits the biggest raven I’ve ever seen. It’s tapping its beak so hard against the glass I think it might break.
“It’s a bird,” Noah says, exhaling. “I almost had a heart attack. If I even could have a heart attack.”
He glances at my mom, who solemnly shakes her head no.
The bird continues rapping at the window and even though I now know it’s a bird and not some weird undead corpse coming to kill us all, it doesn’t make me feel any better.
“Why is it doing that?” I ask.
“Maybe it’s one of your dad’s regulars,” my mom says.
The tapping continues. Maybe it’s one of the birds my dad feeds. Maybe it came to eat or maybe it came to leave him a trinket. Still . . .
I walk toward the little window. The raven is situated on the lip of the perch.
It’s so dark outside, the bird looks like a shadow, aside from the eyes .
. . ?the milky-white eyes. I had jokingly called the ravens “beady-eyed” one time and I thought my dad was gonna cuss me out.
I apologized immediately and he told me it was okay, that the ravens did in fact have beady eyes—black as night and shiny like onyx.
But not this one, apparently. Its eyes are the only part of it I can see clearly and they are a cloudy white with a slightly bluish hue to them.
They are not the shining eyes of a living thing—they are the eyes of something that has been dead for a good long while.