When I'm Dead by Hannah Morrissey

Author:Hannah Morrissey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

23

ROWAN

She’s in her vehicle, backing out of the garage when she taps the brakes. She stares at the backyard. Scarlet leaves blanket the ground and form a ring around the sugar maple from which they fell. Chloe used to climb that tree. She said she could see everything from up there—the lake, the lighthouse, the broken pier to the east; Forge Bridge and the police department to the west. North was a deader-than-a-doornail downtown and just south of them, across the yard, was Rainbow Row with its neighborhood of crack houses.

“Don’t call them that,” Rowan scolded her once, when Chloe had been seven or eight.

“What?” Having swung down from the lowest branch, Chloe stared up at her with big turquoise eyes that glistened with curiosity and innocence. A swipe of dirt marked her cheek. “Crack houses?”

Rowan raised a brow. “Yes.”

“But that’s what Daddy calls them.”

Rowan was aware. And for all intents and purposes, the one-story homes coated in flaking government-issued paint probably did harbor crack cocaine and other contraband. But there were probably a few that housed good people trying to stretch a dollar, old tannery families who’d lost their living when the place shut down. That’s the thing about places. You’re allowed to speak ill of them if you grew up there. “And what’s the rule about things Daddy says?” she quizzed.

Chloe dug the toe of her sneaker into the grass, then looked up at Rowan with an exaggerated cringe. “Not to repeat most of them.”

Rowan spit-shined the dirt from her daughter’s face. “Good girl.”

“But what should I call them, Mommy?”

After thinking for a few seconds, she decided on: “Row houses. It means they’re arranged in a row and they share the same sidewalk.”

Chloe pursed her lips, pondering this new nomenclature. “Row. Like your name?” When Rowan nodded, Chloe threw her arms around her neck. How she smelled like a child back then—Froot Loops and earth and fresh air. “I like that. It makes them less scary.”

When Chloe released her, Rowan held her hands, keeping her at arm’s length. “Why are they scary, honey?”

Chloe drew in a breath. Her eyes shifted from one shoulder to the other, as though to ensure no one was listening. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Because they look like broken teeth, don’t you think? Sometimes at night I dream about them. That I’m up in the tree and the city is really this giant monster and the crack hou—I mean, row houses—are its teeth and it swallows me up. And then everything gets dark and I try to scream for you and Daddy except I can’t. I can never scream in my dreams.”

The chill Rowan feels now is the same as the one she felt back then. She frowns and feels gravity pulling at her mouth. A tear slips down her cheek and splashes on the back of her hand. Had Chloe’s nightmares been a premonition? That one day Black Harbor would swallow her up and she’d be lost forever, unable to speak or scream?

The dead can’t scream.

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