What We Hide

CHAPTER 1: Foundations

A vehicle coming up the drive changed the pressure of the air against the north-facing walls. Other arrivals had sounded like this. The removal trucks in 1939, a taxi in the lean years of the 1960s, its handbrake set badly on the slope. The Johnson & Reid flatbed in 1998, which had idled at the foot of the drive a long time before its doors opened.

Arrivals were known by their weight and their hesitation. By what they disturbed in the air. This one was a family.

Four bodies in a moving vehicle distribute their weight in a way that carries, the shift between seats, a child leaning against a window, another child's feet up on the dashboard until a voice said "feet down, Liam". The vibrations of voice traveled through the frame of the car, into the ground, up through the stone foundation and the joists and the lath and plaster as something that was not thought and was not language but was held.

The car stopped. Four doors opened in sequence: front passenger first, then the rear doors both at once, then the driver's door last. The driver sat a moment after the engine cut.

The front door of the house had been painted white in the spring. New hardware, brushed nickel, the screws already showing the soft burr of a driver bit run too fast. The realtor had called it 'move-in ready' and the phrase had passed through the entryway on an April afternoon and dissolved into the walls like everything else.

The door had been rehung by a contractor who whistled while he worked, shimmed the top hinge twice, and left it at that.

The frame was not the problem.

What came in first was the sound of them laughing. Not at anything. The boy was a compact and restless pressure already known from the drive. He tripped on the threshold and did not fall, performing instead an extravagant stumbling recovery that carried him three steps into the entryway with his arms windmilling. This is Liam Cooper.

The girl behind him made a sound between a snort and a laugh, cut short almost as soon as it started. The woman, the mother, said "Liam, oh my god", in a voice that was alarm decaying fast into helpless affection. This is Sarah Cooper.

All of it arrived in the entryway together, warm and careless and completely itself.

The entryway held it.

The oak staircase absorbed it.

The plaster walls, sealed now over cream, over yellow, over a burgundy long since painted out, held the warmth.

The boy stood in the middle of the entryway with his arms still out, chin up, grinning at nothing in particular. In his right hand, held away from his body was a small plastic Carnotaurus with one arm missing at the shoulder. He looked at the staircase. He looked at the ceiling. His weight went foot to foot, restless, never quite still.

His right foot came down on a board near the east wall, three steps in. He shifted, stepping instead over that board, going on, already looking at the stairs again.

The girl came in carrying a canvas tote over one shoulder. The strap pulled that shoulder lower.

She stopped inside the threshold. Her weight shifted once, then settled. This is Emma Cooper.

She did not move through the space immediately like the others.

Her eyes went to the staircase, the ceiling, the patch of afternoon light on the floor.

The house had been vacant since April. The renovation had cleared most of what vacancy leaves behind, that thick stillness of rooms which have held no breath for a long time. Not all of it.

"This place is weird."

"You'll get used to it, Em. We all will, in time", Sarah replied.

Emma's nose creased at the bridge. "What is that smell?"