The House Behind My Dreams
I didn’t cry out. I stood frozen in the chilly hall, unable to look away from the wedding picture as the edges of the room seemed to dim.
I moved closer. A cloudy fingerprint marked the glass near one corner. My gaze traveled to the groom’s collar: Mark wore a dark-blue tie fastened with a silver clip in the shape of a feather.
My balance wavered. I knew that little clip. I had given it to Mark for his thirty-second birthday, two years before.
This photograph couldn’t belong to some distant chapter of my childhood. It showed something recent. While Mark and I shared a bed, paid our mortgage, and wondered aloud about children, he had stood beside the woman I thought was dead—my mother.
“She hung that up around three years back,” Arthur murmured from the doorway. A damp paper towel was in his hand; his eyes were on the sauce spilled across his porch. “She said the place ought to feel more like a home.”
I faced him, my hands shaking so hard I pinned them against my thighs. “Three years ago? Sarah died in a car that rolled over on Interstate 71. I went to the funeral. The casket stayed closed. I chose the flowers myself.”
Arthur gave a slow shake of his head. He didn’t seem furious or out of his mind. He looked worn through. After rubbing his boots with the towel, he dropped it into a nearby bin.
“I can’t tell you who’s buried there, Little Bird,” he said, his rough voice low. “Sarah rented this place from me four years ago. She stayed upstairs, in the room with the window toward the street. The one you keep watching.”
His bent, stiff finger aimed toward the staircase. Its green carpet had faded, the middle flattened by years of feet.
“Where is she?” The words came out of me small and reedy.
“She was gone six months ago,” Arthur replied. “Didn’t take her things. Didn’t take that picture off the wall. Afterward, he was the only one who showed up.” He indicated Mark’s face in the photograph. “He came late one night, filled two boxes, and paid what was left of the rent in cash. Said she’d gone to a medical place in upstate New York and wasn’t coming back.”
I fished my phone from my pocket. A crack split one corner of its screen. I opened my messages and found Mark’s latest text, sent two hours earlier.
Boarding my flight from Denver now. Be home by 7. Can't wait to see you, babe. Miss you.
Mark worked as a software consultant and traveled three days each week. That was what the itinerary pinned to our refrigerator had always told me, anyway.
“Did she leave anything else?” My throat felt raw as I asked.
Arthur slipped a hand inside his flannel shirt and drew out a little brass key, darkened with age, on a simple ring. He offered it to me. His fingers didn’t tremble at all.
“A week before she vanished, she handed me this,” he said, barely above a whisper. “She told me to give it to any girl who came here looking just like her. Said it opened the basement. Then she told me to warn that girl not to go back to her husband.”
I stared at the key lying across his creased palm. A board upstairs creaked, then another, as though somebody were moving back and forth by the window.
The boards complained a second time. Whoever was up there seemed to be heading for the front of the house.
Arthur clutched the doorframe. The warmth drained from his weathered face until it looked like old paper. “I locked that door myself this morning,” he breathed, his eyes fixed overhead. “I’m the only one with a key.”
“Mark could have one.” My voice sounded borrowed. “He carried her things away. He paid you. Did you change the locks after he came?”
Arthur swallowed, and understanding gathered in the deep creases around his mouth. Slowly, he shook his head.
I lowered my eyes to the tarnished key in my hand. Mom had left it for me. She’d known I would arrive here someday, at the house that had been appearing in my nightmares for eighteen years.
I didn’t wait for Arthur to answer anything else. I crossed the hall and raced up the worn staircase, my boots quiet on the carpet. I had to see who occupied my mother’s room. I had to know whether the ghost in my dreams would finally turn around and face me.
Lavender and dust lingered in the tight upstairs passage. Three doors stood along it. Two gaped open onto vacant closets and mattresses without sheets. At the far end, the last door was firmly closed: the room looking out onto the street. The room with the window.
