Gwendy's Magic Feather

53

GWENDY OPENS THE DOOR to the house she grew up in, the only real honest-to-God house she’s ever lived in—with an actual garage and sidewalk and yard—and walks inside. The interior is dark and silent. She immediately turns on the overhead light in the foyer. Her father’s car keys lie on the hardwood floor, dropped in panic and unnoticed. She picks them up and returns them to their spot on the foyer table. Walking into the living room, she turns on the lamps at each end of the sofa. That’s better, she decides. Everything looks to be in its proper place. You would never even know by looking around what kind of chaos the morning had brought.

She walks upstairs, running her hand along the polished wood bannister where four empty red stockings hang. Halfway down the carpeted hallway, she glances into her parents’ bedroom, and that’s when any semblance of normalcy inside the house is shattered into a million jagged pieces. The bed sheet and blankets are pushed into a heap on the floor. One of the pillows and a significant portion of the white mattress sheet are streaked with dark splashes of blood and bite-sized chunks of a half-digested meal. Her father’s pajamas lie in a pile on the floor at the entrance to the small walk-in closet. The entire room smells sour, like food that has been left in the sun too long and gone bad.

Gwendy stands in the doorway, taking it all in, and then she springs into action. She makes quick work of the bed, stripping the sheets, blankets, and pillowcases. Bundling them together with her father’s discarded pajamas, she runs them to the basement, holding her breath, and dumps the dirty sheets and PJs into the washer. Once that’s done, she returns upstairs and sprays the bedroom with a can of scented air-freshener she finds in the bathroom. Then she takes down clean sheets and pillowcases from the top shelf of the closet and remakes the bed.

Standing back and examining her work, she remembers the reason she came to the house in the first place. She finds an overnight bag and packs a change of clothes for her father, a clean nightgown for her mother, and several pairs of socks. She doesn’t know why she adds the extra socks, but she figures better safe than sorry. Next she goes into the bathroom and gathers toiletries. Adding them to the bag, she zips it up tight and heads into the hallway.

Something—a feeling, a memory, she’s not really sure—makes her stop outside the doorway to her old bedroom. She peers inside. Although it’s long been converted into a combination guest room and sewing room, Gwendy can still picture her childhood bedroom with crystal clarity. Her beloved vanity stood against that wall, her desk, where she wrote her first stories, in front of the window. Her bookshelf right there next to a Partridge Family trashcan, her bed against the wall over there, beneath her favorite Billy Joel poster. She leans into the room and gazes at the long, narrow closet where her mother now stores swathes of cloth and sewing supplies. The same closet where she hid the button box all those years. The same closet where the first boy she ever loved had died violently right in front of her eyes, his head bashed to a bloody pulp by that monster Frankie Stone.

And that cursed box.

“What do you want from me?” she asks suddenly, her voice strained and harsh. She walks farther into the room, turns in a slow circle. “I did what you asked and I was just a goddamn child! So why are you back again!” She’s shouting now, her face twisted into an angry mask. “Why don’t you show yourself and stop playing games?”

The house responds with silence.

“Why me?” she whispers to the empty room.