It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

Author:Jo Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

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I leave the canoe in the annals of history, and the crib in the loneliness of the nursery, and return to my room.

It is only when I am inside with the door closed that I feel I can safely open the journal again and lose myself in its pages, filled with dread but unable to stop reading. I wish I were back with Elizabeth laughing over the crib instructions, but instead I am sitting on my childhood bed with cloudy light peering in through the curtains behind me, watching the words scrawled across the page by a tremulous hand, in a handwriting that is almost familiar, somehow.

Woke up in the middle of the night but I don’t know why.

How many times has this happened? How many times, waking up, and wondering, and feeling that there is something nearby that woke me but seeing nothing. I’ll never get used to it.

I remember the first time it happened, years ago, that I really paid attention to it, in the way you only pay attention to ordinary things when they suddenly become unordinary.

Everything was dark and it must have been quiet because Aggie lay asleep and undisturbed beside me.

Whatever woke me, it was more a feeling in the air. An uneasiness that pulled me from sleep. This house, I’d guess. There’s something in it that’s wrong, but you can’t tell it’s wrong, you only feel it. I see things, sometimes. Agnes has always told me it’s normal here, to see things, but Agnes has always believed in ghosts. We’ve been living here for years and I still can’t understand what it is about this house. What it is, really.

The time when I woke up in the dark to the strange, crackling uneasiness, like a feeling of illness trapped in the air, I got up to check on the girls thinking I was having some sort of parental second sight which you hear about sometimes—parents who sense something is wrong with their children without any real-world indication.

I went to check on Sammy, all fine there, and Lizzie, sleeping with her arms akimbo and her hair in wild tangles over her face, her chest rising and falling in only that gentle, fragile way a child’s chest does when they are sleeping.

Everyone was fine, so why that feeling? Why that static in the air? Why that sense that there was a presence, that there was someONE or someTHING else in the house, just out of sight? Lurking in all the mirrors, behind our reflections.

Since I was up, and could not, I think, go back to sleep anyway just then, I decided to check the other rooms. There are so many, in this house, and sometimes I forget what room I am in, and I find myself in a panic, thinking I’ve slipped through to another room, and another, and there are actually an infinite number of rooms in this house, and each time I open a door I will find myself in a room I have never visited before, and I will be lost forever.

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