In the Shadows of Children (2 page)

From the look on his neighbor’s face, he was blaming himself. Aaron felt guilty, and then felt slightly angry as the guilt crowded in with every other emotion. He didn’t have the energy reserve to be gentle with people right then.

“Thank you for the offer. And please thank your wife. I know how hard this has been on her, too. I’m just very tired.”

Mr. Jackman nodded. “I know how hard it is. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to knock on our door.” He turned to go, and Aaron saw a back that was much more stooped than the last time he’d seen his old neighbor, and shoulders that were much narrower. Mr. Jackman turned back. “You know, we’ve missed you, Aaron. We always asked your mother about what you were up to, and she was always so proud.”

Aaron set his jaw against tears as he watched Mr. Jackman head back inside.

* * *

Aaron understood why his behavior was a mystery to the people in the town who still remembered him. He was a popular kid with a lot of friends. His family life had been as good as a kid could hope for. His father had been old, mellow and funny. His mother properly mothering. Despite him being five years older than his younger brother, they’d been great friends, had barely ever fought.

So it was a surprise to everyone when Aaron left and never came back.

He chose a school in California, as far away as it was possible to get and stay within the United States. And then he never visited. He always had an excuse—summer internships, summer classes, travel expenses—but it was fear.

His brother Bobby had been terrified at Aaron’s desertion, then hurt, and finally furious. Whatever it was that had scared Aaron so badly that he’d returned home only three times in fifteen years, he and Bobby had once faced it together.

Whatever he’d escaped, as dim as the details were, the raw emotions still burned in him. He could still feel every bit of it in his memories of leaving for college: the terror that he’d be allowed right to the front door, suitcase in hand, and then be jerked back; the feeling of elation as the house diminished behind him, even after it was out of sight, feeling it shrink as the miles between them grew in the back of his family’s SUV, Bobby staring glumly at him, his breath hitching as he barely controlled himself; the guilt when Bobby called, ranting about things Aaron couldn’t remember, couldn’t understand even then, though he knew he should have been able to; that guilt turning to anger; those two emotions mixing up in his gut and rising bitter in his throat as he told his brother not to call him anymore; the cold feeling of utter loneliness in his chest, of total abandonment, a hollowness that made him scared to breathe too deeply for fear of popping, and knowing it wasn’t his despair he was feeling there surrounded by friends, but his brother’s, which he could feel across the thousand miles between them.

He didn’t want to feel it, so he told Bobby to stop calling him if he insisted on talking such nonsense.

He remembered the way his younger brother restrained himself after that, the tenuous control he showed right up until Aaron wanted to get off the phone and Bobby refused, demanded, cajoled. And if the meltdowns at the end of phone conversations were bad, the response to Aaron’s confession that he wouldn’t be returning home for the summer was like a flash bang going off, a blast of light and sound so intense it was physical, followed by silence, ringing silence, until…

“I’m all alone,” Bobby said before breaking off the call.

Aaron began to dial him back, but stopped halfway and, after putting the phone back in its cradle, understood that Bobby was right.

He didn’t hear from his brother that summer or for most of the fall semester. When his phone rang late one night at the beginning of winter break his sophomore year, which he was also planning on spending in California, he did not expect to hear Bobby’s voice.

“I thought you’d want to know that I’m going to end this. I’m facing it down.”

“Hold up, Bobby. What are you talking about?”

“You never had to go through this alone. You don’t know what it’s like. It has to end.”

But for some strange reason, the rest of the conversation had been lost in his mind, the thread of it cut, the end frayed and so abrupt that it didn’t feel natural. Aaron couldn’t remember what had to end, and he couldn’t remember what he’d said in reply, but he remembered that Bobby didn’t listen to much of it before hanging up on him.

Aaron hesitated, thumb over the numbers.

Over the years since, he’d played out the scenario thousands of times in his head, sometimes coming back to himself after having spent hours down a different timeline, one where he’d called his parents immediately after Bobby hung up, where he hadn’t stood frozen for ten minutes, thumb hovering over the keys. He played out other lives he could almost swear were real, where his parents ran up and found Bobby in his room, got him the help he needed to make it through the next few years until he could escape, too. He moved out to California, studied computer programming, and he and Aaron became rich entrepreneurs. Or he studied something completely different. It didn’t matter. What mattered is that in all these scenarios, Bobby eventually got away, just as Aaron had, and when he did, he forgave Aaron. He told Aaron that he would have done the same thing if he’d been the older brother.

Aaron did hesitate, though, just those few minutes, to call his parents in the middle of the night about something he no longer understood, some vague threat that had blacked out most of his childhood.

And when they went to check on Bobby, he was gone.

* * *

After taking his phone from his pocket, Aaron sat on the porch steps and dialed Sarah, his wife. He’d lost time in his staring, and Elijah would soon be in bed. Aaron had promised his son he’d call him every evening to say good night. Elijah was a sweet boy, and Aaron wanted to soak up as much of that as possible. He’d known another sweet little boy who’d become angry and sullen and then had disappeared.

Aaron shoved the thought aside as Sarah said, “Hey, I was just wondering about you.”

“What were you wondering?”

“How are you doing?”

There was that “you” again, though it felt much more sincere coming from the woman who’d stuck by him for the past decade than from all the townsfolk who hadn’t seen him in almost as long.

“I’m okay.”

“How was the funeral?”

“It was a funeral.”

“Come on.”

“It was nice. People had lots of nice things to say. I felt weird being there, though, like everyone was watching me.”

“They were probably just concerned about you.”

In truth, they were probably concerned for his mother, who’d died alone and unvisited. Aaron said, “I guess.”

“Did anyone ask about us? Like, why we weren’t there?”

Sarah had wanted to go to the funeral, but Aaron had convinced her not to. He didn’t want her or Elijah anywhere near that town, that house. She’d gone to his father’s funeral, but that was the only time, and that was before their son had been born. He wouldn’t expose his Elijah to—

“They understood.”

“What did they understand?”

“Sarah…”

“I just don’t want people thinking badly of us. Who doesn’t go to her mother-in-law’s funeral? Who doesn’t take the grandson?”

“It doesn’t matter what they think. In a couple of days this place will be banished from my life completely.” That thought struck Aaron hard, and he felt a burst of pure joy so radiant it burned away the fog of annoyance creeping over his mind. “They won’t think of us; we won’t think of them.”

“Yeah, anyway. Elijah’s standing here jumping up and down for the phone, so I guess I better let him talk to you before he explodes.”

After some rustling on the other end, Aaron heard, “Hi, Dad!”

“Hey, buddy. How’s it going? Did you really almost explode?”

“Ummm, no. But on
Power Rangers
today there was this bomb bad guy, I can’t remember what his name was, Bomb-something, and he was made of bombs and threw bombs!”

“Wow, was that a new episode?”

“Yeah. It was awesome.”

Elijah was obsessed with
Power Rangers
. He either wore or carried around a
Power Rangers
backpack at all times, filled with various
Power Rangers
action figures. When Aaron had time, he’d watch the show with him.

They talked about the episode and then said goodnight after Aaron promised to be home soon.

“I love you!”

“Love you too, buddy.”

Aaron’s mood lightened as he stood and pocketed his phone. Then he turned around and his heart instantly sank at the idea of walking back into that house.

Standing just outside the front door, Aaron wondered why he was there at all. Did he really need anything from inside? He hadn’t for the past fifteen years. He should let an estate person deal with all of it. They could donate or trash whatever couldn’t be sold.

He should walk away. He should spend the rest of his life hiding from a past he could barely remember.

It was that thought that sent him through the door, to the base of the stairs.

Aaron paused, one foot on the bottom step. He could at least wait until morning. A closet door might or might not have opened on its own. Either way, the situation was obviously beyond his courage. He could tell Elijah about that, about how his father had been terrified by an open closet and had to scurry away with his tail between his legs. Yeah, the Power Rangers daily battled giant monsters threatening to crush entire cities beneath their clawed feet, but they wouldn’t be able to withstand the horror of some loose hinges.

Aaron walked quickly up the stairs. Outside his old bedroom, he stopped again. The landing and the upstairs rooms had been dim before. After spending an hour outside watching the sun set, the house was totally dark. He couldn’t see anything beyond the shadowy portal of his bedroom door, couldn’t see the closet or whatever might have slunk out of it now that the fallen night had extended its territory.

If he was afraid of the monsters, he could start in his mother’s bedroom, instead.

Aaron turned on the landing light, then stepped forward, reached through his bedroom door and slapped his palm along the wall. His heart pounded harder with every beat as he sensed hungry, unseen creatures slinking nearer, stirred up by his flailing. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, and after he was sure he’d slid his hand over every inch of the wall several times before the switch decided to appear, Aaron flipped the lights on.

The fist that had squeezed his heart in fear remained in sorrow as he took his first close look into his and Bobby’s childhood bedroom in fifteen years. He’d been avoiding it all day. Even when his father had died seven years before, he hadn’t set foot upstairs, instead leaving to stay in a hotel, telling his mother she had enough to worry about without looking after a houseguest.

The posters, the stacks of magazines, the bookshelf full of comics…it was all the same. Even the action-figure battle scene stood complete. His mother must have dusted the figures and put them back in place.

He’d left her there utterly alone in that house for the seven years since his father had died, alone with her memories and keepsakes of when she’d had a family, when she’d been happy. And yet he could still barely stop his legs from carrying him down the stairs and out the front door.

He let his eyes drift over to what he felt was the reason: the open closet. Below a shelf stacked high with board games hung Bobby’s old clothes. Yet Aaron didn’t trust it, and watched the closet as he prepared to leave the room, flipping the light back off.

The closet changed.

Aaron leapt back in fright, colliding with the door frame, which sent him sprawling on his hands and knees on the upstairs landing.

“Aaron, wait.”

He didn’t, instead scrambling to the stairs on all fours, gripping the banister and getting his feet beneath him just in time to again barely avoid taking the same head-over-heels tumble that had broken his mother’s neck.

But this time he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, turned, looked up. He stood crouched, his hand reaching out behind him for the front door so that if anything appeared, he could turn and run all the way back to California, childhood mementos be damned.

He stared so hard the walls pulsed, the house quickened by his own heartbeat. Nothing stirred.

Something had been in the closet, something besides the clothes, board games and sports equipment that should have been there and—in an instant—weren’t.

When the lights went out, the closet changed into a black hole of nothingness.

He could have been mistaken. Maybe the shadows had simply been deeper than he’d expected because the landing light didn’t illuminate the room properly; except something had stepped into view, had stared at him from that dark tunnel.

Not something. Someone.

Aaron, wait.

His vision blurred and sweat suddenly beaded his forehead; his guts twisted like wet rags, forcing bile up his throat and then splashing onto the floor.