The Hiding Place

The front door slams downstairs. If I hear whistling, it’s dad. If not, it’s her. I count my heartbeats in my throat.

The sun has started its slow descent. The many-petaled leaves of the mimosa brush against the window screen like waves against the shore. Footsteps thunk across the floor toward the kitchen. No whistle. 

The hairs on the back of my neck raise. I need to hide, and not in any of the places I’ve been found before. My thoughts flick past like the dusty blades of the ceiling fan picking up speed. I shove behind the tall dresser. Its feet budge an inch forward on the floor but don’t make enough noise to be noticed, or so I hope. 

The old wood smell is thick in my nostrils. I can’t take a full breath; my chest wedged between the back panel and the wall. The footsteps on the stairs are plodding, weary. She expects to find me where she left me, like a doll. Sometimes I wonder if she knows I’m alive every second of the day and not just the minutes she sees me.

If she looks, she’ll see my feet, but I can’t do anything about that now. Every hiding place has its shortcomings. 

The doorknob turns. She enters my room. There’s a pause—she’s looking. The sixth floorboard from the wall squeaks like always. 

Maybe if she doesn’t see me, she’ll forget I exist. Maybe that would be better. I could live a shadow life, pillaging the kitchen at night, perfecting my hiding spots. I could be good at that life. Not like this one, where I always do and say the wrong thing, where I myself am wrong.

She bellows my name. My heart thunders. I hate how I love to be called and how it summons a cracking, ice-numbed fear deep in my bones.

All I can think is she must have seen my feet. The dresser is no good. I have to do better next time.

The watery light of dawn filters through my window. I can go wherever I want in the mornings, as long as I don’t make a sound. There’s a trick I learned, to pour myself out of my body until my feet feel light. Then I can hover over the stairs as I descend.

I find a pizza shoved in the fridge. They’ll forget about it if they don’t see the box again. I hold the screen door until it taps softly closed. The grass shimmers with dew and birds are singing somewhere high in the tree. My body pours back into itself like it always does. I sit on the back stoop and chew, tethered.

Next door, a screen door slaps shut, and I almost jump out of my skin. Through the fence, I see Ruby follow her dog into the yard. Sometimes I imagine I have a different life. One like Ruby’s perhaps, with two parents, a brother, and a little brown dog with white spots.

“Leave it.” She pulls at the dog. Her voice is hushed but urgent.

I press my cheek to the slats, trying to see. The dog is nosing at our shared tree, where the fence stops at its trunk and then continues on the other side, dividing the yard as neatly as they divided the house. 

The dog saunters over to me. Presses its wet nose against my knees through the fence.

Ruby jumps. “I didn’t see you there,” she says.

“Sorry.”

We’ve crossed paths on the sidewalk out front, but we haven’t spoken because my hand is always being squeezed hard to hurry me from the house to the car or the car to the house.

“What did your dog want?” I ask, curious why she called him away.

The dog is back at the base of the tree and Ruby darts after him. I follow on my side of the fence. 

“Stop it,” she yells, pulling at his collar.

On my side, the patchy grass stops where the shade grows too thick. The tree’s roots ripple under the dirt, as if it doesn’t know how to stay submerged. 

“What is it?” I ask again.

Ruby tilts her head to look at me through the slats. “You don’t know?” Somehow, it’s not condescending, even though she’s a year or two older than me. I shake my head.

“The kids down the street told me when I moved in,” she says. Her knuckles gleam white as she grips the dog’s collar. I wish it would come and sniff me again, then I could slip a few fingers through the fence and feel its silky head, but the dog’s whole body is straining toward the tree.

“They say a woman and a little girl used to live in this house, before it was made into a duplex,” says Ruby. I store that word away for later. “Then one day, the little girl disappeared. Only none of the adults on the street remembered her. They insisted the woman had always lived alone.” It’s already hot outside but a chill travels up my spine. 

Ruby pulls the dog to the back door and shoves him inside. There has to be more, something she didn’t say. I feel like I swallowed a stone. I will her to come back with my eyes boring into her skull. Then she does.

Ruby gets close to the trunk. The gap is bigger there than between the slats. “Give me your hand,” she says.

I reach through the gap and her hot fingers close around mine, guiding them. The bark is even, then raised and bumpy. My fingertips coast over a smooth bump, then rough bark, then another smooth bump. There’s nothing like that on my side of the tree. I count at least ten of them before Ruby releases my hand.

“What are they?” I ask.

“Teeth,” she answers.