When the Lights Go Out
I need to get this over and done with. I need for this to be through.
I’ve combed and curled my hair. I lathered blush onto my cheeks for color, not so that I’ll look nice, but so that I look alive, my current pallid tone far more synonymous with death and dying than with vigor. If I look healthy and robust, then maybe Jessie won’t be as concerned. I wear a nice shirt. I plaster a smile to my face, one that sours the longer I wait.
I practice the words I’ll soon say, saying them aloud so that I can get control of my cadence and rhythm, so that my voice doesn’t shake the way it often does when I’m scared. Truth be told, I am scared, yes. I’m absolutely terrified. Though I won’t dare say that to Jessie; for Jessie’s sake, I’ll put on a brave face.
The braking of the school bus sounds to me like the screech of a barn owl. I watch as Jessie clambers down the massive steps on the heels of her classmates, eyes lost on the ground as they often are these days. Her backpack is heavy; she slumps forward to counter the weight of it and I force back tears, knowing that my days of watching Jessie emerge from the school bus are coming quickly to an end.
I smile and she knows, the moment she arrives, that something is wrong.
“What’s happened?” she asks, staring at me with the deadpan expression of a teenage girl, one that hides a legion of feelings behind that single blank stare. Sadness, confusion, fear. Her eyes—oh, how blue they are! Even to this day, they shake me to the core—are poker-faced. But not for long.
As I take her in, I realize that though she’s wise beyond her years, she’s still a child. A child who will be an orphan soon. I pat at the step beside me and tell her to sit down, cursing myself for trying too hard to look nice. I forget in that moment everything that I’d planned to say—all the wise old adages on life and death that I prepared to quote—and say outright to her instead, “Jessie, I’m dying,” my voice flat and even, just barely above a whisper, trying desperately to stay calm for her sake. “I’m going to die,” I say as that inexpressive demeanor cracks before me and tears rush to Jessie’s blue eyes, flooding them instantly, a flash flood of tears.
I stare at her stoically, trying not to cry as Jessie breaks down before me. But it’s hard to do. Jessie rushes into me, throwing her arms around my shoulders and neck. She pulls me in tightly as I purr into her ear, “Now, now. Don’t cry. Everything will be all right,” enveloping her in my arms, patting her back, stroking her hair.
“I’m not scared,” I tell her, lying through my teeth because these are the words she needs to hear. “Sooner or later we all die, Jessie. It’s only a matter of time. And this is mine.”
To say I’m not heartsick would be a lie. To say I don’t feel ashamed would be too.
Because after everything I did to make Jessie a part of my world, I’m leaving her alone to fend for herself, and for this, I feel guilty as sin.
jessie
I’m lying in bed when I hear a noise from outside. It makes me jump suddenly, makes me spring inches from the mattress and into the air.
What I expect to see when I look outside is a garbage can lid getting hurled to the ground, one of those galvanized steel ones clanging to the concrete. Because that’s the sound I hear, the din of metal on concrete, and I imagine a colony of hulking rats climbing on shoulders to scale the garbage can, working together to carry off whatever’s inside.
But instead when I peel the shade back and gaze out, I see nothing.
The moon, the stars are nowhere to be seen tonight. It’s pitch-black outside.
For hours on end I find myself staring into the black nothingness that is Ms. Geissler’s home. My body shakes from the cold, though as always I sweat. And I think that I have a fever, because that’s the way it feels to me. Icy cold on the inside, but sweating through layers of clothes, my skin damp with sweat. My clothes stick to me as my teeth chatter. I’m not sure I have it in me to survive another night. I wonder what a panic attack feels like, a breakdown. I think that’s what’s happening to me.
My eyes adjust to the darkness, making out shapes. The blackened windows, the balcony suspended three stories in the air on stilts, the flat roofline, the porch, the sliding glass door.
As I stare, I watch a squirrel leap from the branches of an oak tree and onto the rooftop. It vanishes into the eaves of the rooftop, as voices speak to me through the floor register again. Peripheral cooling, they say this time, and mottling of the skin, their voices weak and watered down, far away from here. But I can’t be bothered this time to run and throw myself down over the metal grate because I know they won’t hear me if I do. Even if I scream at them through the vent, they won’t reply because they never do. Because they’re only in my mind.
I hear the sound of footsteps too, quiet, restrained footsteps that slink up through the floor register and into the room with me. A giggle.
Shh, someone says, voice suppressed. Let her sleep.
I can’t turn away from the window. Like bugs drawn to a light at night, I can’t bring myself to look away. The window is the color of ebony, of charcoal. It’s jet-black, the window shade motionless, completely inert.
I take in the rectangular shape of the glass itself—narrow and tall—the stagnancy of the shade. There is no one there. Behind the window and the shade, the room is empty and dark.
Until it’s not.
Because, at three in the morning, the light flicks on.
There’s an immediacy to it, a sudden unexpectedness. So much so that I almost fall from the edge of the bed. It happens all at once. A lamp turns on and the shades go up at the same time. The room becomes flooded with light.
For the first time I have a clear view of the room inside. What I see is a bedroom of sorts. An attic room, one space divvied up by three windows. Like a triptych, a painting where three canvas panels come together to create one scene.
In the first, a bed’s headboard is pressed up against a wall paneled with a dated oak that stretches from floor to ceiling. The bed is unmade, a marshmallow-white comforter pulled down a foot from the head of the bed, pillows lay flat. There is a lamp on beside the mattress that lobs the soft yellow light across the room.
In the second canvas is the foot of the bed and the bottom two vertical columns of a four-poster bed frame. There is a wooden door on the back wall that leads to a hall. Or a closet. It’s closed, so I don’t know where it goes. A random cord dangles from the ceiling, belonging to seemingly nothing. At some point in its life, it might have been a fan or a light.
In the third canvas is the man.
Which makes me clutch a hand to my mouth, to keep myself from screaming.
He’s leaned up against the window, the very same window where someone has been standing behind the shade watching me. His back is turned to me, as he sits on a ledge, pressing his back to the glass. He’s dressed in brown, all of it, everything I can see, blending into the walls. Camouflage, a disguise. His hair is brown, pruned close to his head. I can’t see his face or his eyes.
I stare at him for minutes, unmoving, he and I both frozen in place.
And then he rises. And as he does, I see that he is tall. He stretches in place, hands above his head, back arched. His stride is long and decisive. He crosses the room in three easy steps—what might take me eight or ten—all with his back in my direction, as if he knows I’m watching him. As if he knows, and he’s toying with me. Playing a game of peekaboo. Of blind man’s bluff.
His hands hang limply by his sides. I set my own hands on the window glass, as if reaching for the man on the other side of it.
I can feel it beneath my skin, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Something about this man strikes a chord with me. His stature, his posture, the color of his hair. I’ve seen him before. Like Michelangelo’s statue of David. You’d know it by David’s carriage even if you never saw his face. He stands with his hand on his hips, left knee bent jus
t a bit. His head is pitched to the right, looking at something off in the distance, something only he can see. Not me.
As my eyes fall to his right arm, I notice a watch on his wrist. A watch on his right wrist, which means to me that he, like the man in the photograph, is left-handed. I think of the man standing there in Mom’s photograph in the saggy blue jeans. An afterthought to the lake and the boat and the trees. An addendum tucked neatly away in parenthesis. Almost forgotten, but not quite. I race to my bag and withdraw the photograph, holding it to the window so that I can see.
The stature is the same. Not just similar, but the same.
He’s the man from Mom’s photograph.
And then he turns, wheeling toward the window, quickly, in an instant. My hand slips unintentionally from my mouth as a scream slips out. I hold my breath, taking in his trim beard and his sun-tanned skin, knowing I’ve seen him before. I don’t blink and I don’t breathe. Because I know this man. It isn’t just a hunch. Because there on his forearm is the very same scar, harder to see from the distance, but undeniably there. A six-inch gash, one that stretches clear from his wrist to beneath the cuff of a shirt, the skin around it puckered and pink.
And only then do I remember that the man in the photograph also had a scar.
As did the man at the garden. The one who sat reading Mom’s obituary and looking sad.
The scar is the smoking gun. The one I was looking for. The one I couldn’t see.
They’re not two men who I’ve been searching for, but rather one man. And though it feels unimaginable, impossible, outrageous and far-fetched, I know it’s true.
This man is my father.
He knows that I am here. He knows that I am here and he’s come for me.
Because why else would he be there?
Now that I see them, his eyes are like hazelnuts, small and dark. He stares at me. Like me, he doesn’t blink.
And then he steps from the window and reaches for the lamp. It turns off and then on again. A distress signal. An SOS. Morse code. Three short, three long, three short flashes of light. Save me.
He’s speaking to me. Communicating.
I rise from the bed, sitting on the edge of it. I force my feet into a pair of gym shoes. The shoes resist. My feet have been sweating. They’re tacky and they don’t slip easily on. The laces of my shoes remain untied, trailing me as I go down the treacherous steps. I race out the front door, leaving it open wide, and across the dew-covered lawn.
At first I don’t think. I just go.
Blades of grass reach out to tickle my legs as I cross the yard. The grass is long, in need of a trim, and my legs are bare, wearing only a pair of shorts. The air is nippy and brisk, but still, somehow, I sweat. It comes streaming down my hairline, gathering like swimming pools beneath my arms.
And then, ten or twenty feet from the carriage home, I start to question myself. What am I doing?
Suddenly I’m scared.
Three times I stop to get my bearings, looking around, in front of me and behind. Listening. A tree reaches out for me, brushes my arm, its leaves like the gentle caress of a human hand. I jerk back, startled and afraid.
It’s dark outside. So dark that I can’t see what’s three feet before my eyes. I don’t know what’s there, if anything’s there. My heart pounds inside me. “Is anyone there?” I call out, but no one replies.
Above me, I’m keenly aware that the blaze of light from the third-floor bedroom has gone dark. The house is black, no light anywhere. I think about going back, about turning around and going home. Of crawling onto the bed, of hiding beneath the sheets where I’ll be safely on base.
But then I come to a spot that’s halfway to the greystone and halfway back. I’m stuck in the middle, and the thought of going back seems as ominous as moving forward, especially since I left the door open wide. By now, who knows who’s let themselves inside.
I hear scavengers in the distance. Raccoons, crows, rats. A creature scampers away from me on the lawn. Ringed tail. Masked face. Footprints like human hands. And I imagine a contorted human crawling by on all fours, releasing a guttural growl at me. Running away.
I make my way along the brick paver patio and toward the front door. There I climb the steps to the front door. Nearly ten of them, each tread precariously thin. At the top I pause to catch my breath. I breathe in, holding the air in my lungs. Absorbing it. Letting it fill my cells and bob through my bloodstream like a buoy at sea.
Two sidelights flank the solid mahogany door. I see my bedraggled reflection in each as I stand with my hand on my heart, gasping for air. My hair stands every which way; my skin is a bloodless white, deathly pale. There are purple bags beneath my eyes.
I knock on the door. It’s a knock that’s uncertain at first, but one that becomes more certain with each second that passes by. Once, twice, three times I knock. There’s no reply.
Before I know it, I’ve knocked twenty-three times, each knock progressively louder, so that by number twenty-three, the knock is a pound. I raise my arm again but before I can bang once more, the porch light switches on. It startles me, the abruptness of it. Though after all this time, it’s anything but abrupt.
Suddenly I’m no longer trapped in a black hole but instead doused with a bright white light that makes me go momentarily blind. For a whole six seconds after the front door opens, I see nothing. Just blotches, spots, dots. “Who’s there?” I ask, voice still breathless, knowing it can be one of two people standing in the doorframe: the man in the attic window or Ms. Geissler.
“It’s three in the morning, Jessie,” she says to me. Her words are tired and annoyed. It’s Ms. Geissler, who, unlike me, had apparently been sleeping, spared from a night of insomnia, unlike me.
My eyes focus to see her wrapping a red cotton robe around herself, tying the belt into a bow and patting down her hair. “What’s the problem, dear?” she asks, her eyebrows scrunched up. “Is everything all right?”
“He’s here,” I say quickly, taking two small steps toward Ms. Geissler, bridging the gap from her to me. She takes a step in retreat.
“Who’s here?” she asks. And I say, “Him. A man. Upstairs.”
And it’s the blankness of her expression that gets me upset, that makes me snap. That and my overwhelming fatigue, my persistent irritability thanks to a lack of sleep. “You know who I mean. You know exactly who I mean,” I say roughly because I know he’s here, in her home. She has to know that he’s here. She has to know him, because why else would he be here? “The man in the window upstairs. The one who’s been watching me. He’s here.”
She presses a hand to her heart. Gasps, “There’s a man here? In my home?”
Her face goes white. She makes an offhand effort to peer over her shoulder and into the vacuous foyer as I take another step forward, one that gets my toes just inside her home. But only my toes. She resists, grasping the door hard and putting a foot behind it. She nearly shuts the door in my face. I lose balance, stumbling back onto the concrete stoop.
“I saw him in the window,” I tell her, pointing at the staircase behind her. “Upstairs. A man in the third-story window,” I say, and at this she relaxes visibly and smiles. She shakes her head and tells me that there’s no one in the third-story bedroom, her voice so sure that for a second I believe it. She says again that no one’s been in that room for months. Not since the squirrel incident, and then I think she’s going to rehash it for me, the whole story about the squirrels inhabiting the third floor. I know now that it isn’t true because there were never squirrels in that room but rather a man, my father, who she’s been hiding from me all these days.
“The attic ladder,” she tells me this time instead, “it’s a pulldown thing,” at which, like a mime, she grabs for an imaginary string over her left shoulder and pulls. “Broken for a couple of months. Wouldn’t you know it,” she says, “the exterminator mana
ged to break the darn thing. I just haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed.”
“But I saw him,” I insist, and she says quite simply, “You must be mistaken. There’s no one there. Because how would anyone get up there, Jessie, without a ladder?”
It seems so sensible, the way that she says it. And for a fraction of a second, I doubt myself as she hoped I would do. But then his image returns to me—him standing there in the window, looking out at me—and I know that she’s lying. That she’s keeping him from me. Hiding him from the world just as Mom has always done.
“Let me in,” I insist, pushing the door against the weight of her, and she says to me, “Now, now, Jessie. You had a bad dream, that’s all,” but of course this can’t be true.
“You were dreaming there was a man in the room,” she says to me. She reaches out a hand to mine but I pull briskly away. “Just a bad dream, that’s all. It will all be clearer come morning.”
“I know what I saw,” I tell her, voice cracking. But her face is suddenly so pacific, so kind, and she asks if I’d like for her to walk me back to the carriage home so I don’t have to go alone. It’s dark out, she says. Hard to navigate the way. “But not to worry,” she tells me. “I know this yard like the back of my hand,” and she reaches for my arm to lead the way home. She winks at me and says, “And besides, I have a flashlight.” And there it is, in the pocket of her robe. She flicks it on as if this conversation is over, as if she’s put my worries to rest and now I can go home, feeling assured that there’s no man in this home. No man watching me.
But I yank my arm away. “Why are you hiding him from me?” I ask. My voice becomes elevated, high-pitched, defensive. “Why don’t you want me to see him? Why don’t you want me to know that he’s there?”