I knew where to hide her when they brought breakfast up, and we shared it even though it wasn’t enough for two of us. I knew where to hide her when the governess came, so she could listen without being heard. I just wasn’t sure where to hide her if anyone really came looking. And they would, I was sure of it. It wouldn’t matter that there were locks on the door at the bottom of the stairs. They’d still come looking. Because they knew there was something different about me.
But for as long as it lasted, it was the best day of my life.
In between the fun stuff, we kept watch at the window, and listened, and late in the day a car stopped in front of the house next door. People got out and I recognized them from the photo she’d sent me, including the one in the middle.
I held up paper and a pencil. “Do you still want me to? The trick with the head?”
We watched them walk closer, and I was glad all over again that I wasn’t a girl, because I couldn’t ever imagine myself looking that confused over a simple question.
“No,” she finally whispered. “I couldn’t really do that.”
I sort of remembered what that was like.
It was less than an hour before they came, but before then we heard people calling outside and watched them troop over to the park and back again. Eventually the doorbell rang downstairs, big bonging chimes you could hear all the way up here.
It was time.
And I knew where to hide her now. It could work. I was very sure of this. I told her how it could, and this time she didn’t cry.
I drew myself first, getting everything just right because this was the trick that mattered most of all. Then I waited while we looked at each other, because I knew now that I loved her, even if I didn’t know as what, and there was nothing more to say, just listening for the voices and footsteps to get closer, until the keys began to click in the door, and Roni closed her eyes and nodded.
Back to the paper, concentrating very hard, blocking out everything else.
I drew her inside me.
And when I looked up again she was gone.
That was a long time ago, in a house I hardly remember, except for every square inch of the top floor, and the views. The house isn’t standing anymore.
But we’d pulled it off, waiting there innocent while they looked for her. It wasn’t as if they had to tear the place apart. Even with an entire third floor to search, there are only so many places something the size of a person can hide. I think they were a little afraid of me by this time, too. There’s what you know, and what you suspect, and what you don’t know, and they realized what they didn’t know was the biggest part of it, and so they must have decided it would be safer not to grill me too hard.
Inside, I could feel her moving, but later on she went to sleep, the way you can sleep when you’re with someone you trust.
We waited a long time, weeks and then months, for the search and suspicions to die down.
“Aren’t you ready to come out now?” I’d ask every so often.
“Just a little longer,” she’d tell me. “This is nice. This is really, really nice.”
Never in a hurry. So I asked less and less often.
Until there was no point asking anymore.
Of all the things my parents were wrong about when it came to me, why did they have to be right about this one: that the thing with the paper was something I’d grow out of someday. I don’t even know when it happened. It just did, and while whatever I put down on paper looked better than ever, it just sat there doing nothing, empty and lifeless and inert.
By now I must have gone through forests of trees, trying to remember what it was like, to recapture what once seemed so easy, so I could draw her back out of me again. But the results are always the same. One more crumpled wad of paper, one more curl of ash.
Yet still, she’s close, so close I can almost touch her.
But now her voice comes from so far away.
Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels, close to 100 short stories, and three collections of short fiction. Recent books include his second crime novel, Mad Dogs, and his upcoming fourth collection, Picking The Bones. This is scheduled for a fall 2010 release from Cemetery Dance Publications, and includes the award-winning story “With Acknowledgments To Sun Tzu.”
He lives in Colorado, where he’s at work on a gigantic new novel that doesn’t seem to want to end, and distracts himself with music and sound design, photography, Krav Maga, and organic gardening.
He used to think his drawings had mysterious powers, and still wonders if he might have once knocked a teacher flat just by thinking it.
Connect with him online at his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his new blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook.