Chapter 13 #2
As Luna closed her own door, she looked one more time at the frames hung on the hallway wall.
So many blank spaces, so much room for the people who weren’t there.
Her mother had told her nothing about them, and she had never thought to ask.
Maybe Luna would finally ask. Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe she could catch her mother in a rare moment of not-sad and redirect her mood so that sadness would be held at bay for just a while.
As Luna burrowed under her covers, she slipped her earbuds in and opened her bedtime app, pressed play on Cillian Murphy pretending to tell a story around a campfire.
How ridiculous , she thought, before she fell asleep.
she was dreaming, and her sleeping brain knew this, not that it made the nightmare any less terrifying.
The cold rain on her bare arms didn’t feel like dream rain.
The wind blowing in from the west, sharp and violent, didn’t feel like dream wind.
Luna was standing in the front yard in a rainstorm, tapping and tapping on her mother’s bedroom window.
It was so cold and her soaked T-shirt only made her feel worse, her skin tightening around her muscles as if it was trying to retreat back inside her body, away from this hideous, soul-crushing rain.
She could see that her mother’s bedside lamp was on. The warm yellow glow was visible between the gaps of the blinds. She must be in there reading, or watching Netflix on her laptop, or drinking herself to sleep, or all three. Luna closed her hand into a fist and pounded the glass. One. Two. Three.
“Mom,” she whispered. Why couldn’t she speak any louder, shout above the howling wind that was shaking the branches of the trees behind her? Luna spoke again, and her voice emerged from her throat tentatively. “Mom. It’s me.”
Luna looked down at her feet. She was wearing the pink Chinatown slippers that usually lived in the basement, for whoever went down there in only their socks and needed extra protection from the dust and spiders that skittered across the concrete floor.
They were tinged grey, as if the slippers were slowly growing mould, spores spreading upward from the soles.
The rain was falling right through the slippers’ mesh, and Luna couldn’t feel her toes.
She brought up her fist to smack the window one more time.
But as she looked up, she saw that the blinds had been opened and someone, a man, was standing on the other side of the glass.
He was faintly familiar, like a neighbour Luna had never spoken to but had seen every day walking to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes.
She squinted through the rain, strained to make out his features as he stood in silhouette, the bedside lamp little help with its dim bulb.
He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear him.
Luna stared at his mouth, at the way his lips were pursing and then opening. “Luna,” he was saying. “Luna, it’s me.”
It was then she recognized who he was. It was Grandpa Tom, the same man whose photograph she had passed a million times in the hallway: holding her infant mother, showing off a sockeye salmon in his olive-green waders.
The man who had died when her mother was a small child, whom no one ever spoke of, whose body was surely decomposing under the grass at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
His skin was grey. His eyes were sunken, deep in his head. He raised his hand and pressed his palm to the glass, and Luna swore she saw a blue bottle fly crawl out of his sleeve and fly upward and into his nose. He didn’t flinch.
Luna took a step back, unsure of where she should go or what she should do. She was suddenly no longer cold but filled with a heat that pressed on her bones. Run away , she thought. I should run away.
Through the window, she finally saw her mother, walking toward Tom from behind.
Luna waved frantically, hoping Alice would see her outside and know what to do, tell her where to go, where to hide.
But instead, she watched as Alice placed one of her hands on top of Tom’s head and the other under his chin.
With one smooth movement, she twisted and his head snapped off, a clean break right where his jaw met his neck.
His body collapsed, and Alice was left holding his head, his eyes still open.
Luna screamed, and Alice looked toward her, squinting, her head tilted, rivers of blood running down her forearm.
Carefully, she placed the head on the floor, then slid the window open.
Luna could feel the warm air as it rushed out.
“Why are you screaming, sweetheart? Come, let Mommy give you a hug.” And Alice reached out a long skinny pale arm, her fingertips grazing Luna’s sleeve.
“Mommy can make it all better,” she whispered.
Luna screamed again, and this time the scream lived on and on, its pitch so high and clear that it both pierced and suffocated at the same time.
She began to choke, her breath growing ragged as she searched for air, but there was none.
As she stumbled backward, her chest heaving and empty, the house grew taller and wider, stretching to become an enormous mansion with cracked shutters and faded blue columns.
Alice stood on the front steps, reaching and reaching for Luna.
Luna woke up gasping to Alice shaking her shoulder. “Wake up, hon. You’re choking in your sleep. Come on, Luna, wake up. Take a breath.”
At first, she was relieved at how her body felt like warm honey under her mother’s touch. I’m fine . Mom is here . She sat up into Alice’s arms, hugging her more tightly than she had in years.
But as she felt her mother’s fingers on her back, she remembered that cold rain, the fear that started as heat and ended in screaming, the image of her grandfather’s head in that window, her mother’s open eyes that could see nothing, until they could.
Just then, her mother’s hands pressed into her shoulders, and she could feel nails like talons cutting into the thin fabric of her T-shirt, slicing into her skin, scrabbling for the muscle underneath.
Luna gasped and pushed Alice away, scrambling backward until she was huddled against her headboard.
“Get out,” she hissed. “Get the fuck out.”
Alice sighed. “I think you’re still in that night terror, sweetie. It’s me, Mom.”
“I told you”—Luna’s voice rose in volume—“to get the fuck out.”
Alice stood up, smoothing down the front of her pyjama pants, and took a step toward the door.
“I probably woke you up too suddenly. It’s okay, Luna, just lie back down and when you wake up in the morning, it will be like nothing ever happened.
” And then she left, softly closing the bedroom door behind her.
Luna could have called all of this a nightmare, neatly categorized with all the other nightmares she had had in her life. Except Luna wasn’t asleep. She was wide awake, shivering under her blankets, willing her mother to never come into her room again.