As Franky withdrew her hands into the crawl space, I looked around and wondered where to go. That’s when I thought of Dereck on the other side of those woods, slaughtering turkeys in time for Thanksgiving. I began running across the street, toward the path beyond the first of those empty foundations.
But Franky had made her way out of the crawl space by then and started running too. Just as I got to the edge of the foundation, she caught up and shoved me so hard from behind that I found myself falling over the edge. I landed in a murky puddle at the bottom and looked up to see Franky standing up above. My mind felt so dizzy that her image shifted and reshaped itself.
My back, my arms, my legs—all of me—felt in too much agony to move. And yet, I needed to since she was making her way to the crumbling cement stairs. As I lay there, so many memories and thoughts flashed in my mind: There was Abigail drawing a map on the walls around me the night before she left. There was my sister and me creating the details for our imaginary home over and over again: a window, a painting, a doorway. There were my parents, who had come to this neighborhood and bought the lot across the street, starting their lives out like any other new couple. How could they have known they’d be the only people ever to live here? How could they have known how horribly wrong things would go for them . . . and for all of us?
I tried to get up. The most I managed was to roll over onto my stomach as the murky water splashed around me, soaking my jeans and sneakers. Franky ambled down the stairs, slipping on the rocks but not falling, hurrying to reach me. When she did, she grabbed a hank of my hair and pushed my face into that dirty puddle, holding me there so that I was unable to breathe.
The shhhh in my ear grew louder still, the sound warping itself into something higher pitched and hysterical. And then it became an altogether different sound—it became a kind of tune instead, one I recognized. For the first time, I heard the words as my mother’s lilting voice sang that song she used to hum:
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.
Franky lifted my head by the hair and yanked me out of that water. For a few fleeting seconds, I saw the cracked gray walls of the foundation. I saw the fading daylight. I saw the fallen leaves around us. And then she shoved my head down, smashing my face against the cement. In the white light and blistering pain that followed, that shhhh warped itself into the sound of my mother’s voice once more. I heard her there, so close now, singing that old choir song to me:
Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!
Again, Franky lifted my head, and again she brought it down. The force was so great that this time it felt as though the world had stopped. I tried to open my eyes but could not. I heard no sounds, not even my mother’s singing.
And then, after what felt like a long stretch of time, my eyes blinked open into the gloom of that water, and I had a vision of her: my mother, standing on the other side of some great abyss, that dirty water an ocean between us. She wore the beige trench coat from the video I played that day in the basement so long ago while Rose messed with the fuse box and Dot bathed in the tub upstairs reading her silly book. For a moment, the image flickered and blurred just as it had done that day on the TV screen. I’m losing her, I thought. Once again, I will have to let her go. But then her image sharpened. And when her lips moved, she spoke in a serious voice.
“This is what I will tell you, Sylvie,” my mother said. “Each of us is born into this life with a light inside us. Some, like yours, burn brighter than others. As you grow older you will come to understand why. But what’s most important is to never ever let that light go out. Do you understand what I am trying to say?”
“Yes,” I opened my mouth to tell her, only to take in more dirty water, swallowing it, filling my lungs.