The Wave Rule

It was cold and close to three in the morning. Philip was standing in his driveway, considering the distance between his slippers and the neighbor’s side door.

Locked, he thought. Probably locked.

Was it twenty yards? Fifty? Living in New York City all his life had him measuring the world in inches, but here in Vermont everything was yards, acres, miles. In the month since he and Anna and their son Chris had moved out of their two-bedroom apartment in Harlem, Philip hadn’t knocked shoulders with anyone. He hadn’t side-stepped a gaggle of bumbling tourists or felt a stranger’s warm breath on his neck. That was the thing about life out here: the gaps between people. Away from the crowds, with so much space to move and breathe, he could always see them coming.

Mrs. Preston’s lights had gone out at ten, same as always. The darkness between the houses was thick; stars snuffed by low clouds pressing down like palms on glass. The more Philip stared the more the night air seemed to stretch, as if it were a pliable substance—something he might reach out and touch, shape to his liking.

He bent down in the gravel driveway and massaged his knee. A biker had clipped him two years back and given him the lousy power to predict the weather. It wasn’t snowing yet, but a dull throb promised snow was on the way.

This was a problem. His plan required that he be quick, nimble, light on his feet. He had been those things once. He could still remember the day he’d realized he was faster than his father. He’d beaten him to the end of the block, the same race they’d run a thousand times, each time with the same result. He’d cried that day. Big snot-webbed sobs. He hadn’t been able to say why, but now he thought he understood. It was erosion. Diminishment by degrees. He’d looked back to see his dad bent over and huffing, and in that moment a small but reliable piece of his world had vanished. And the pieces just kept falling away, bit by bit, by and by, reducing him from what he was, what he might be, leaving behind someone he didn’t recognize. Someone who stayed up nights, standing in the dark, staring at the neighbor’s side door.

He rubbed his knee.

It’s locked. Go back to bed.

Anna was back inside, conked out on what she referred to as Tic Tacs, but were actually temazepam. She’d gotten her doctor to prescribe a barrel of the stuff before they moved, as if modern medicine stopped with the 2 train. “A bottle of me time,” she called it, like a joke. It was getting to be the only way she could sleep anymore. Philip could hardly blame her. Chris had kept them both up close to midnight, pinching his cheeks red and shouting verses from “The Wheels on the Bus” until he was hoarse and coughing.

The ladies on the bus say: “don’t mind me!”

Philip stood up in the driveway and winced. A speck of snow touched the side of his face, melted, ran. The next moment the air was full of it, billowing ghostly white. It seemed impossible that there was ever anything but snow, falling.

He stared at the door.

Go back to bed.

He tugged his measly jacket across his chest and half-turned back to the house, to Anna and their bed, then his hand closed on the keys in his pocket and a voice glanced across his mind. A single phrase, so clear and present he almost jumped.

Nobody locks their doors up here.

~

“Nobody locks their doors up here,” the realtor told them on their first tour through the house. Anna found the listing just before Chris’s fifth birthday. They’d talked for years about making a change, finding a place they could fix up, make their own, wondering aloud at the promise of renewal, growing tired of waiting for a perfect moment that never seemed to come. There’d been a small party at the old place. Chris hardly noticed as his friends—really just the children of Anna’s duty-bound coworkers—handed him gifts and said so long. He’d even refused his cake. They’d had to throw half of it away.

“The place has everything you’ll need,” the realtor said, a welcome mat grin bolted to his face, “generator for when the weather gets rough, two car garage, washer, dryer, fireplace, and a charming little river along the side. Not that you need a river. Not that anyone needs a river. But a river is a good thing to have.”

Philip saw no room in this to disagree.

“People find the sound of running water soothing,” the realtor went on, pulling their attention away from some cracks in the molding. “Science says that’s because our ears are trained to listen for water in the wild, so we know we won’t die of thirst. It’s a survival method. Saw that on Hulu.”

They thought maybe Chris would like the river. Gently down the stream, and all that. It was one of his favorites. But when they arrived Chris took one look at the water and exploded. Now every time they left the house, he would shut his eyes, scream as loudly as he could, throw himself on the ground and pump his legs in the air. Philip had to start pulling the car right up to the door so they could get him out of the house without him seeing the water, blasting the radio so he wouldn’t catch its endless babble. He wondered what Chris made of that sound. If it meant something other than drink, survival, life. Maybe it meant those things to him even more. Philip had grown tired of wondering. The boy was a frozen ocean. New and unfamiliar life churned beneath the surface, but the surface was fucking impenetrable. At a certain point you had to pitch the axe and skate.

Last week Philip was trying to get Chris into the car, humming the hits, merrily merrily merrily, offering a bag of Goldfish. Nothing was working. He could feel himself tightening, like a cord spun around and around, fraying, ready at an any second to break. Then he spotted Mrs. Preston, standing in her yard across the road. She was staring at them, her crop of gray-blonde hair shifting in the breeze.

Philip raised his hand and waved.

It was a rule around here. One of those unspoken rules, not written down anyplace, and maybe more essential for it: if you saw someone out and about, you waved. You didn’t have to know the person. You didn’t even have to be in the mood. What you were doing, where you were going, that was your business. But if you passed a soul along the way, you put up your hand and you waved. It’s just what people do.

But Mrs. Preston just stood there. Perfectly still. Her face was a smudge, made vague by the distance, but she was facing them all right. Watching. She stayed that way for a beat, two, long enough to take them in, then she turned and went back inside.

Philip was distantly aware of his hand, still raised, swishing stupidly in the air. He heard the click as the door swung closed behind her. Heard it even across the road, even over Chris’ wordless screams, which melted to a cracked and moaning dirge.

It was that sound that had kept him up that night, and every night since.

But it was more than that, wasn’t it?

Yes. Oh yes.

It was her impropriety. Her willful neglect of that fundamental code. And it was her face. That sketch of disregard. Not just of some rule, but of him. His life. What it had become, and all that meant. Who the hell was she? To look right through him? To deny him the simple fucking right to be acknowledged, to be seen?

He stared at the door.

The lines of Mrs. Preston’s house were almost lost now, dissolving behind the restless wall of snow. The door seemed far away, fading. Hardly there at all.

Now or never.

~

Years before, when Anna told him she was pregnant, Philip had done what he’d seen men do in movies. He’d hugged her. He’d smiled until his cheeks hurt. She’d seen it was a mask.

“I’m excited,” he told her, “I am. It’s just, what if we want to play tennis?”

“Tennis?”

“Yeah,” he could taste a bitter note of pleading on his tongue. “I mean, if it’s nice out and we want to go hit the ball around. What do we do?”

“Phil, you and I have never played tennis.”

Which was true, but that wasn’t the point. She didn’t understand, and he couldn’t say it, because it was an ugly thing he’d been thinking. Ugly and loud as sirens. He couldn’t tell her that it was that same feeling of falling away. That erosion. Only this time it was an avalanche. The whole face of things changed, reshaped forever.

When Chris was three, they’d taken him to see a doctor. The best around, according to some new Facebook groups Anna had joined—spaces where a slew of other parents could connect to confirm and elaborate upon one another’s fears. Philip sulked all the way to the appointment. He still held that the boy might grow out of it, that he was just behind the curve. Hadn’t he been prone to tantrums himself? Hadn’t he wet the bed well into middle school? What kid—hell, what person—didn’t face a bump or two along the way?

Then the doctor started talking. And talking. And talking.

“I tell you all of this,” she said, once she was through, “so you can—how do I put this?—temper your expectations.” Anna’s hand, which had a moment before been wrapped in Philip’s, dangled squid-like from the arm of her chair. “It’s important that you both understand the limitations your son will face, and what they will mean for your family moving forward.”

What Philip remembered most about that day was not the doctor or her words, but the wall behind her. It was covered in framed degrees and photographs, all looping calligraphy and high society. Her voice was reduced to a Peanuts murmur as he looked over that wall, the dozens of glossy windows into her accomplishments, testaments to her abilities, her access. Things she was busy telling them their son would, in all likelihood, never have.

“Are you familiar with mosaics?” the doctor asked.

Anna gave a faint nod, uncertain of this word’s new presence in the room.

“It is an image made up of smaller, fragmented images.”

She let this hang in the air, giving them a chance to guess where she was going, Philip supposed. A pop quiz. He didn’t like it. Not one bit.

“What you can do for Christopher,” the doctor went on, “is try to see all of him. There will be good days and bad, good minutes within the bad days, and it is up to you to stitch them together. To allow the whole picture to be visible to you, even if the rest of the world can only see the pieces. Yes?”

Philip would have forgotten her lecture altogether if Anna had not taken it up, repeated it again and again, like a mantra. She’d even bought a mosaic print for the front hall to remind them of those words.

And he had tried to hear them, to hold the best of them in his thoughts, but mostly what he saw were the faces. Faces that pointed at them every time they took Chris to the playground or brought him shopping. Something would set him off, and there they’d be. Pitying, reproaching faces, glancing down at their own children, or no children at all, as they hurried to another slide, another aisle, breathing sighs of relief and murmuring their gratitude.

Then there was Her. Mrs. Preston. Staring at them from across the road. No pity, no reproach. Not anything at all. He might as well have been made of air. Just an empty space where maybe someone had been once.

~

Snow laced down, scalding Philip’s cheeks as he ran. He had to curl his toes to keep his slippers from flying. Somewhere below him his knee was screaming in protest, but it didn’t matter, didn’t matter. He was moving now, and movement was all there was.

He had it all worked out. It was simple. Elegant, really. He was as proud of it as anything.

He would go in and he would take something. Nothing special. Something small and unimportant. A coaster maybe, or a magnet off the fridge. It didn’t matter what. It would be enough to know that she had been diminished. Then, after a while, he’d go back, take something else. Bit by bit, by and by—that was how erosion worked. He knew it. She would know it too.

One day she would look up and she would know that nothing stays. Not a single thing.

A sudden slope, a dip, and he was in the road—little more than a track of dirt leading up from town, on to the larger houses in the hills. Mostly summer homes for people who didn’t have to choose between city and country. Most of those houses had names—ostentatious titles burned into signs along the road. Camelot, Weathertop, Wyvern’s Nest—names that made them sound like arcane castles or the dens of mythic creatures. They stood empty all winter, save the odd ski trip, and it was too early in the season for all that. No cars would be coming up the road. No need to look both ways. The night was his. A thing to be seized. Owned.

Another dip and he was on Mrs. Preston’s lawn. It was lousy with decorations: gnomes and pinwheels left out since the summer, collecting frost. He didn’t look down, only heard the sound of fresh snow crunching beneath his slippers. His eyes stayed fixed on that side door, pressing closer with each new breath.

He was so consumed by his advance that he almost crashed straight into Mrs. Preston’s mailbox. He had to swerve and clench his fists, press crescent moons into his palms just to get his body to listen up and stop.

His slippers skidded over powder and the door was there, inches from his nose. So close. So suddenly true.

His heart drummed exquisitely against his bones. He reached out, held the cold bronze knob, turned it.

It swung in easily.

Of course.

~

The smell hit him first: a flat, ripe odor. Almost sweet. The smell of fruit turning. He glanced to his left, to the place where Anna kept their fruit bowl on the kitchen counter.

But there was no bowl, of course, because this was not his kitchen. Was not his house.

A shiver moved through him at the thought. A panicked thrill that he was really here. That he had brought this secret design to life. It was almost enough to be standing here, almost enough to have crossed a line, broken the rules as she had done.

Almost.

His body, returning to him now, registered the cold in his feet. He stepped out of his slippers and placed them dripping by the door. Mrs. Preston’s boots were there, and her walking shoes, paired up along the wall like nervous couples waiting for the band to play something slow. There was an intimacy to the arrangement, as if he were a welcome guest, merely observing a household custom. He could almost hear Mrs. Preston’s voice, or what he imagined her voice to sound like, inviting him inside.

Help Yourself.

The room was dark; darker even than the world outside, which was gradually brightening as snow collected on the ground, throwing back whatever moonlight slipped between the clouds. Philip rubbed his eyes. Sand-drip towers of shadow coalesced into stacks of books, a lamp, a coatrack. He moved by careful steps toward them, feeling through the dark, and struck his hip against an end table.

A shape teetered. He jutted out his arms to keep it from falling. His hand found something sharp and a gasp escaped his lips.

The house was quiet. Phillip remained frozen for a solid minute to make sure it stayed that way, then looked down to see what it was he had caught.

It was a statue, light and hollow in his hands, of a woman robed and crowned. One arm held a bow. The other was bent, pulling back the arrow that had pricked his hand. Something was attached to the base. A patch of color. He turned the statue over. An orange Post-it had been stuck there, almost lambent in the dark. Four words were scribbled across it.

Huntress. Mother. Moon. Wild.

Philip recognized the figure. He’d read about her during his brief flirtation with classics before coming to his senses and choosing engineering, a far more practical pursuit. Artemis, he thought, and felt a little thrill at having conjured the name from a far corner of his mind. His fingers traced the idol’s hair, her miniscule features. Pearl-blank eyes stared up at him. He felt an urge to cover them and had to pull one hand to stifle a laugh.

The ladies on the bus say: “don’t mind me!”

A groan rose out of the dark.

Philip held his breath and drew up his arm, ready to pitch the little goddess at the slightest shift or movement.

A gust rattled the windows, and the groan came again. Deep and long.

Philip breathed out, relieved. His own house did this too, stirred and settled when the wind was up. He wasn’t used to it; wasn’t sure he ever would be. The sounds of the city were one thing; pounding footsteps, neighbors arguing, clanging radiators and barking dogs. These things were to be expected. But walls weren’t supposed to talk all by themselves.

The sound never frightened Chris. No scary sound ever did, no reasonable thing to fear. Just water, and a million other ordinary things. The moans of an old house should have scared the pants off him. It was a sound ripped from a horror film. The sound that made the heroine prick up her ears and search the halls, only to find out later it was merely misdirection to distract from the monster sneaking up just behind.

Only that was him now, wasn’t it? The intruder. The creeper in the gloom.

Philip placed the statue back on the table, hoping it was facing the same direction as before, and promised himself to be more careful. He stepped lightly, squinting through the dim, considering each trifle and trinket as it announced itself: a bowl of matchbooks; a discarded mitten; a rundown candle, its last drippings scorched black. Plenty of options, but nothing that compelled him to reach out, take. Now that he was here, really here, he wanted it to count.

He stalked from one room to the next until his toe stubbed the landing of a staircase. A staircase that presumably led up to a hall. A hall that presumably contained a door. A door that presumably opened into Mrs. Preston’s bedroom.

Go ahead. Go on up.

The thought came like an aroma, one he couldn’t help but breathe in, savor. Because he could do it, couldn’t he? Go up, all quiet, open the door, stand at the foot of the bed. His knee was feeling better now, or else numb from the cold. Either way he felt sure that it could hold him upright. Maybe for hours. Maybe right up until the sun warmed its way across her pillow and she opened her eyes and saw him, standing over her. Undeniable. A real and solid thing.

What are you doing?

His stomach dropped.

What are you doing here?

He pulled his foot back as if it had discovered a bed of nails.

What the hell are you doing?

He felt his head begin to swim, felt the same panicky shiver move through him, knifelike, racking his shoulders. He put out his hands, groped for a surface to hold him upright, and felt something press against his palm.

He lifted it, held it close to his face—a small shape with three sharp corners, jet black against the dim. An arrowhead, cut from old stone. The type of thing you might find in a roadside giftshop, hung from a necklace. There were dozens, a whole collection splayed out on a table with no discernable arrangement. A bow hung from the wall above them. An honest-to-god Legolas type thing, carved up with little intricate designs. Philip ran his hand over the grip. Another orange Post-it note was stuck to the wall beside it, curling at the edges. He smoothed the note against the wall and squinted to read it.

Gift from Roddy. Carved by hand. Ceremonial.

Further along the wall there hung a bronze medallion—Montreal, 1976 pressed into the metal—and a framed picture. A picture of her, Mrs. Preston, standing third tallest on a pedestal, clutching a bow. She was younger, but there was no mistaking her. That same cropped hair, those same eyes, staring. She was looking straight out of the frame, the faintest hint of a smile across her face, as if she knew he was standing there, bent toward her and shaking.

Not only could she see, she had a damn medal in accuracy.

Another note had been stuck below the frame.

Shoulder pain in finals. Those good cake-things in village. Roddy in stands, blue sunhat with ducks.

Philip palmed the arrowhead and knuckled his eyes until bright spots swam over his vision then dissolved. The room was dappled with the orange squares. They surrounded him. Each time he blinked another seemed to appear, scribbled with a word or a thought, burning out of the dark.

The smell came back to him, redoubled as he followed it to the kitchen and the pile of garbage bags in the corner, overflowing. Trash was Tuesdays and Fridays. He’d had to write that down himself, set a reminder on his phone until it worked its way into his mind, stayed put. If she had made a note for that too it had fallen, been kicked under the rug or bagged up with the rest of the trash. By the smell she hadn’t taken it out in weeks.

She had forgotten the days as she’d forgotten the medal, the goddess, the bow. A hundred things or more. The notes were her reminders. Clues signaling the way. Evidence that something was out there. Something she should chase down, find again.

Listening for water, Philip thought, and felt the thought was true.

Another groan came from all around. Deep snaps in the wood, like knuckles bending back as the old house shifted, strained, settled.

In the kitchen was a small table, the surface pocked from use. Philip pulled out a chair and took a seat. He unfurled his fist and turned the arrowhead over in his hand, thumbed its dull edge. From where he sat he could see the house across the street, his house, framed in the window above Mrs. Preston’s crowded sink.

Inside Anna slept. Chris slept. He slept too—or would have. Should have. Soundly in the knowledge that they were there, no others. No erstwhile versions of them stirring in some other dark.

Snow seeped through the sky. Behind the glass the world seemed restless, but the house stood solid. Its boards and windows all aligned, steady and true. As Philip stared each detail burned across his vision. He felt a consuming urge to gather every last inch, hold them in his mind before they could soften and vanish—

Garage.

Yellow light above garage.

Shabby roof.

Weathervane on shabby roof, shape of cat, twirling with gusts.

Green shutters catching snow.

Crack in window where bird hit.

Flower bed where bird is buried, dirt beneath Chris’ nails for days.

Leaning tree.

Spot on leaning tree picked smooth of bark, carved with crooked C-A-P.

Broken post on porch railing.

Nail in broken post.

Torn open palm.

Kiss on palm before bed that night.

Every night.

First night: Arriving before movers. House empty and bright. Chris’ face red from crying over river. Fireplace cleaned out, hollow. Chris moving on hands and knees toward it, sticking head inside. A sound. His voice, echoing up, all around. A laugh. Anna moving up close beside him. The two of them shouting up the chimney. Laughing. No stomping from above. No hammering through walls. No one to tell us stop. Just us, pressed together. No holding back now. Wordless cries shaking the walls, our bones, and Chris, Chris, eyes wide, a wonder, gulping in air like he could swallow the world.

The snow was coming hard now. It would be slow going back, he knew, and cold. The house murmured and the window shuttered. He couldn’t wait. Not a second longer. He placed the arrowhead on the table and stood. Pain crept back into his leg. He pressed his thumb into his knee, burrowing deep, hoping he might happen on some sudden and perfect relief. Outside a deer passed into the road. Its body gaunt, fur patchy, exposing pinkish skin beneath. It moved haltingly, pressing its nose to the powder, glancing back now and again at some sound only it could hear. Philip pressed his thumb deeper as he watched the tracks it made cross his own, almost buried. Almost gone. He stepped into his soaking slippers, pulled his coat, and stepped outside. He felt the cold touch his skin, felt the circling wind scream against his ear, felt himself fold into all that snow and motion.