Chapter 5
Chapter five
Two days after moving in, I’d just tucked Henry into bed after reading “just one more” story when Whit texted that a friend of his family wanted to talk with me about a job.
A job. Really, the man was unbelievable.
If I hadn’t desperately needed work, I might’ve resented his help, even considered it interference—like when he’d arranged for childcare with someone I’d never even met.
But instead, I was grinning like a teenager getting a text from her crush.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I sent a brief, businesslike reply thanking him for the lead and promising to follow up, then looked up the business online. It was a used bookstore and coffee shop appropriately called Ever After Coffee and Books. It was perfect, exactly the type of place I’d always dreamed of working.
Damn it all.
“Mama!”
I sighed, already knowing what was coming. Henry was relentless when it came to his bedtime reading. I couldn’t blame him, though. He came by it honestly. And I knew these times would be gone all too soon, so I always caved.
“What’s up, baby?” I called, walking back down the hall to his room. “You’re supposed to be going to sleep. No more stories tonight.”
But when I entered the room, Henry was fast asleep, blankets tucked beneath his chin, gripped in his little fists, his eyes buttoned up tight.
A chill ran along my spine like a thousand squirming spider legs. I crept in, trembling as I scanned the shadows, praying I wouldn’t find anything, that maybe Henry had just called out to me in his sleep.
Thankfully finding nothing, I sank down onto the foot of Henry’s bed, willing my pounding heart to slow down, reassuring myself that it was fine.
Shaken, but forcing the unusual incident out of my mind, I went into the bathroom and started a bath, opening the frosted window a crack when the room grew a little too warm, but not wide enough to let anyone walking by get a bit of a peep show.
I’d never had a tub big enough at our little place to take a bath and relax.
Once, at an old farmhouse Vivian and I had stayed in for a while with one of her boyfriends, there’d been a huge clawfoot tub where I’d soak for an hour at a time, draining a little water and adding more when it got to be too cool.
The rest of the experience staying there was total shit—Vivian had made sure of that.
The guy—Mike—had been one of the good ones.
A loving boyfriend to her, a rare father figure to me.
One hell of a difference from what she usually shacked up with.
I’d actually let myself hope that we could stay, be a real family, maybe even get a dog or something permanent.
But Vivian picked fights with Mike all the time, drank too much and threw empty Jack bottles at his head, tried to drag me into the middle of it and then would call me an ungrateful whore when I took his side.
One time, Mike bought me a jacket that I’d wanted and gave it to me for my birthday. Vivian was beyond pissed. She and Mike had quite the screaming match over that one. And she marched the jacket out to the burn pile and set it on fire.
We left the next day. That was the first time I ran away. I went back to the farmhouse, begged Mike to let me stay. But I was fourteen, so Mike did what any decent guy would’ve done and called the cops. CPS got involved for a while.
Yeah…if I’d ever hoped to have any relationship with my mother, I’d pretty much blown that.
She tolerated me afterward, still let me stay wherever she was staying.
But I’m pretty sure she only kept me around because it made her situation more pitiable and consequently easier to con people into thinking she was a good mother just trying to make ends meet and take care of her daughter.
Bitch.
I stripped out of my clothes and sank down into the steaming water, forcing all thoughts of Vivian out of my head, just letting the heat warm the frozen parts of me, the dark, shadowy parts of my past that I tried to keep locked away, so the cold truth didn’t burn so much.
I closed my eyes and let my arms float, wondering if this was what flying was like—weightless, carefree, no worries about what fresh hell was waiting for me the next day.
One day I would know. I’d get out from under the fear and hopelessness that gnawed at me whenever I thought about how I was failing my son. Failing myself.
Soon.
I could feel something coming, something that would change my life forever.
It was like I was poised on a precipice, peering down into a vast, haze-shrouded cavern, not knowing what was hidden from my sight, but knowing there was something so much better just out of my reach.
I was just going to have to take the leap.
I lay there, fantasizing about the home I’d make for Henry—maybe a little place out in the country like Mike’s farmhouse where Henry could be healthy and happy and run and play with all the friends he would make, and we’d definitely have a dog, maybe three.
The water had just reached the temperature where I’d either have to end my little respite from reality or add more hot water to stave off real life for just a little longer, when the bathroom door creaked.
My eyes snapped open. I turned, expecting to see Henry in the doorway, maybe needing a drink of water or a trip to the toilet—we’d gotten past the bedwetting stage a year ago, but he sometimes still had to get up in the middle of the night.
But no one stood there.
“Henry?” I called softly. “Is that you, baby?”
Silence.
Unnerved, but not yet frightened, I let out some of the cooled water and turned on the faucet, definitely needing that warmth to get rid of the chill making my skin creep.
The door had probably just blown open a little thanks to the slight breeze coming through the cracked window.
Completely reasonable explanation. I’d left the door open a little so I could hear Henry if he needed me. Next time I’d make sure to close it.
I don’t know how much longer I lay there, but I do know I was drifting off to sleep when I sensed someone else was in the bathroom. “Henry, baby, you should really knock—”
My words died on my lips when I opened my eyes.
There was no one there. But in the middle of the floor on the tile was a puddle of what I first thought to be water—which would’ve been weird enough considering I hadn’t been out of the tub, and nothing seemed to be leaking—but then I realized it was thicker, the edges not spreading out the way water would.
I sat up slowly, surveying the entire bathroom, looking for…I don’t know what. I tried not to let my imagination run wild, but that was next to impossible. I stood and grabbed my towel, wrapping it around me and stepping out of the tub to get a closer look at the puddle.
I knelt and touched it. Thicker than water as I’d suspected, almost the consistency of hand soap but didn’t lather when I rubbed my fingers and thumb together.
“What the hell?” I murmured, frowning at the substance.
The instant the words left my lips, the bathroom door slammed, the sound echoing off the walls like a gunshot.
I cried out, starting so violently I lost my balance and pitched forward into the puddle, my hands sliding out from under me.
I landed hard on my left elbow, sending pain shooting up my arm to my shoulder.
Groaning, I rolled over to my back and lay there for several seconds, squeezing my eyes shut to breathe through it.
When the pain from the impact diminished to a dull ache, I slowly got to my feet and grabbed a towel from the bar on the wall to wipe up the puddle before I had a chance to slip again.
I tossed the towel in the hamper and turned toward the sink, half-expecting to see an intruder’s monstrous face in the mirror like in basically every horror movie ever, but to my relief I saw only my own face, eyes wide with fear and confusion, not sure that made me feel a whole lot better.
So much for my relaxing bath…
I turned back to the tub and gasped, covering my mouth to stifle the scream that rose in my throat.
A woman floated in the tub, long red—or maybe blond—hair fanned out in the water gone dark with blood.
She lay there, eyes wide, vacant, gazing into nothingness.
As I stared, unable to move, she sank slowly and vanished. The water cleared in an instant.
Then the trembling began—starting in my legs then climbing upward through my abdomen, my arms, my head…
The combined violent jostling of the contents of my stomach when I fell and the shock of what I’d just seen was too much.
I lurched toward the toilet, barely making it in time before I vomited with such explosive force that the water splashed up onto my face and hair.
My muscles seized, and I heaved again, the acid from my stomach burning my throat, my nose.
Too weak and shaky to do anything but collapse onto the tile floor in the fetal position, I lay there, sobbing—but quietly so as not to wake Henry—the image of the dead woman playing over and over again in my mind.
Who the hell was she?
She wasn’t the same woman from the hallway who I’d come to suspect wasn’t an intruder of the corporeal kind after all.
And she wasn’t a figment of my imagination, of that I was certain.
Had she died in my apartment? This house?
Or had she just latched onto the first person she thought might see her?
Not every intruder who showed themselves to me had anything to do with where I was.
Sometimes, it was almost like they just finally sensed an opening to tell their story and jumped right through.
And I freaking hated it.
But there was something different this time, something darker and heavier than what I usually experienced, a suffocating pressure that compressed my lungs, making me gasp for air between sobs.
Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the specter in my bathtub.
Maybe it was the realization that I was trapped, that there was nowhere I could go, nowhere I could escape to—at least not yet, not when I didn’t even have two nickels to rub together.
Who knew how long it would take to get back on my feet.
Before, when I lived with Vivian, I’d always just known we’d be leaving soon, that Vivian would be picking up stakes and moving on to the next temporary crash pad, and that the intruders would rarely follow.
But this time, despite my bravado with Whit, I had to stay where I was.
I had no money, no options except living in my car or going to a shelter.
And I had sworn that I would never do that to Henry.
I clenched my jaw and pushed up until I was sitting, my back against the vanity, and closed my eyes to keep the world from spinning.
Taking several slow, deep breaths, I focused on the image of my son’s sweet face, his smile, the absolute trust in his eyes when he looked at me, knowing that I would never let him down, that I would make everything okay.
I sniffed and wiped the tears from my cheeks, then forced myself to get up and stand on my still-shaky legs.
This time when I peered into the tub, there was nothing but the clear—and by now cold—water.
I reached down to let out the water, but hesitated, my fingers hovering just above the water’s surface.
But then I took a deep, bracing breath and plunged my hand in to pull the plug.
The tub gurgled as it drained, the sound oddly chilling, making me shudder.
“Stop it, Zellie,” I ordered, shaking my head to clear the images that flooded my brain.
I turned on the shower, adjusting the temperature until it was nearly scalding my skin, then discarded my towel and got in so I could rewash my hair and face to remove any residual vomit and toilet water.
I paused briefly to look around the bathroom again, making sure that I was alone once more, and pulled the shower curtain closed.
I quickly rewashed then stood beneath the water, trying to infuse some warmth into my bones.
It didn’t help.
Finally, I gave up trying.
Panic and fear gripped my heart in a ruthless grasp. I wanted to grab Henry and run, get the hell out of the apartment to somewhere else. But where was that? My mother’s?
Yeah, right.
One of my new neighbors?
Who’s to say the intruders wouldn’t find me in their apartment?
Whit Proffitt?
God, no.
He already thought I was a charity case that he was obligated to put up with for the time being. The last thing I needed was to show up on his doorstep—wherever that was—and beg for his help. Again.
I was stuck there. Trapped—at least for now.
My only chance to escape whatever the hell I was experiencing at Dawes House was to get the money I needed to support myself and my son as soon as I could.
Until then, I just hoped that seeing the spirit of a dead woman in my bathtub would be the worst of it.
Except deep in my gut, I knew that it wasn’t. I could feel a darkness creeping closer, a heaviness closing in.
I checked in on Henry one last time before climbing into my own bed.
The mattress was softer and more inviting than I’d remembered.
As I drifted off to sleep, I decided I’d meet the family friend Whit had mentioned to talk about the job at her bookstore.
And as soon as I had enough money saved, Henry and I were getting the hell out of Dawes House.