Hilltop House

Cora, Two

Ugh. What was she supposed to do at four in the morning? It was too early to get up and eat. She could go out and watch something, but her mother might hear her and wake up; they might have to talk to one another. Cora sighed and looked at the plain white wall across from her. She suddenly realized the place looked like a padded room in an asylum. It needed her stuff. Yesterday, she'd grown too angry and shoved that box in her closet, hadn't she?

Placing her bare feet onto the floor, Cora was startled at how cold the boards felt. It was August, wasn't it? And the AC was on, but those floors felt like ice. Anyway, she went to the closet and opened the door all the way. Her box was sitting where she'd left it; a sort of reassurance coursed through her. This place couldn't be an asylum if she still had her stuff. She pulled the box out a bit, reopened it, and, with more sentiment, began going through the items she'd been unable to before. The darkness certainly wasn't helping, though, so Cora rose to turn on the light switch by the bedroom door. As her finger flipped the thing, she sensed, suddenly, that something was . . . different. But she couldn't quite place what it was. She flipped the switch a couple more times, wondering if it had something to do with the light, but then it hit her—the bedroom door was open. The closet door was open. Somehow, they were simultaneously open, and they weren't even close to touching one another.

She was sure they'd bumped up against one another when she'd first examined the closet, and yet here they were, together open, somehow . . . as if . . . one of them had moved . . .

But that was ridiculous. Obviously, Cora had just been wrong. She shrugged it off, turned back to unpacking.

By the time the sun was beginning to rise, around five thirty, Cora had gone through all her belongings. The huge stuffed llama was on her bed, as was an afghan blanket her grandmother had crocheted. It was a rainbow of ugly, but it was the only physical thing that connected her to the woman anymore. The band posters she left in the box, feeling like she'd left those behind with Ben, who felt too far from her to be influencing her taste in music right now. The locks and keys she displayed on her windowsill, until she could find a better place for them. That'd been another thing that bonded Cora to her grandmother, she reflected; the old woman had loved antique and thrift store shopping. The two of them would go out literally every weekend to check the same stores and their perpetually different wares. That sense of never knowing when you'd find a treasure, the excitement of thinking that maybe this time you'd get some crazy deal, the thrill of having something no one else would have--she'd gained those joys from her grandmother, though she'd grumbled often as a child on those weekly excursions.

Cora sighed. She missed the woman something terrible. Hadn't seen her since her mother had come and swooped her up and away right at the end of sixth grade, right before those hideous, tumultuous middle school years, pulling her out of her private school where she knew all the kids and sticking her into a public school where nobody looked twice at her. She still hated her mother for it. None of it made sense then, and it still didn't make sense now.

What did make sense, though, was that Cora was legit beginning to grow hungry. She'd not even touched the takeout her mother had brought home last night, and that decision was beginning to have its effects.

She got up and turned the light off, swathing the room in a sort of dull burnished glow from whatever sunlight was attempting to make its way in. The way the house was set up was standard enough. The two bedrooms were at one end, bathroom between them, and then there was a living and dining area next to a kitchen next to a set of stairs leading into a basement. There wasn't much to it. Cora had preferred her grandmother's big old house, a huge three-story, ricketty, ghosts-in-the-corners sort of place, falling apart at every turn but somewhere to find a dusty corner and imagine, somewhere to sneak about and explore. Now that had been a house. Cora had spent her somewhat lonely but adventurous childhood there, after her mother had left her there as a baby and didn't return until the girl was twelve. And while Cora had at times been a little scared of her old grandmother, that house had offered a plethora of opportunities. Boxes and boxes of weird items in the attic and upstairs rooms, decades of dust built up on piles of junk everywhere else, a cellar that was the stuff of haunted nightmares . . . excellent distraction for a child attempting to forget that her mother hadn't wanted her.

Anyway, this house was sadly inferior. It was just so normal.

Careful to be quiet, not yet sure where the floorboards to avoid were, Cora slipped down the hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen. She grabbed a banana—one of the few things they'd picked up at a quick run to the nearest grocery store after the movers had gone—and returned to the front room to sit on the couch in the gloom of the early morning.

The living room window did, at least, offer a clear view of the rest of the street, enhanced because the house was on that hill. There wasn't much to see at the moment, Cora noted, but it would be an interesting place to sit when she was bored, if she felt inclined to study the neighbors. Niecey had been fun, at least. She'd reminded Cora of her grandmother. She wondered if the woman lived alone and figured she probably did. Maybe she was a hoarder or a cat lady. Her grandmother hadn't been so much a hoarder as a collector. She hadn't kept random nonsense like used paper towel rolls and plastic hangers. She'd been more the sort to have thirty-five ceramic planters shaped like animals and body parts and Roman busts in her sunroom, all with plant matter in varying states of life and death, overflowing onto the tiled floor; or the sort to fill an extra bathroom with shelves of strange perfume bottles and baskets and casques of old costume jewelry that glittered like pirate treasure; or the sort to buy a thousand disintegrating black and white photos of strangers from flea markets and estate sales because she felt sorry for the subjects, who no longer had anyone to look at them, and to tape those photos along the wall of her living room. No, if Niecey were a hoarder, she'd surely be the sad kind, the ones who couldn't dispose of meaningless junk for fear their worth was somehow attached to it.

If Niecey were a cat lady, though, Cora could get down with that. She loved cats, at least the pretty, snuggly kind. Too bad her mother was allergic. That woman spoiled everything.

Cora had seen her mother talking to a couple of the other residents on the street yesterday evening. One had looked like another elderly woman, and another a middle-aged couple. None of them seemed very interesting.

Sighing, Cora pulled her legs up under her body and shivered. Why was the house so cold? Her mother had thrown a blanket over the back of the couch, and Cora was grateful for it. She wrapped it around herself, then realized she was done with the banana but was too newly comfortable to get up and throw away the peel, so she just held the floppy, greasy thing somewhat at arm's length before tossing it carelessly onto the coffee table, unconcerned if it left some grossness.

A movement caught her eye, just as she began to wonder whether she should pick up that banana peel and do the right thing with it. Cora turned to the window, saw that a few houses down, a white pickup truck was pulling into the driveway. Pulling in? Wasn't it a little late to be getting home? With interest, she watched the same boy step out of it that she'd seen step into it yesterday afternoon. He was wearing the same clothes, and he slammed the driver's door with absolutely no regard for potentially sleeping neighbors. Where had he been all night? He didn't even have a bag or anything, which might've indicated an overnight or camping trip or something. He went around to the passenger door, opened it, and leaned in; Cora couldn't help but notice he seemed to have a pretty nice shape, in spite of his sort of lumberjack attire. She wondered what his name was. Everything about him indicated it was probably something like Chuck or Dwayne or Jesse.

He pulled back out of the passenger side with what looked like a six pack in one hand, and then he suddenly turned and looked toward her house, right at the big picture window beyond which Cora sat watching him. Her breath caught ever so slightly—he couldn't see her, could he? Surely not. The lights were off, and it was a distance, from him to her. But still, the way he looked at her window, far more than just a glance as he fumbled for his keys and locked up his truck, was nerve-wracking. She didn't move an inch for fear of being spotted, as if she were a frozen rabbit caught munching grass. Only when he reached the sidewalk to his door did he turn to his own house, and by then, Cora had gotten enough of a look at his face to determine he was actually rather attractive, after all.