Now each time the yellowy-white paw stabbed down under the skirt for more dirt, it was like it was reaching down out of the sun.
Every few scoops, the paw would be replaced by a nose, breathing my fear in.
I pushed as far away as possible. I wasn’t exactly thinking rationally. All I knew, I guess, it’s that the more distance between me and them, the longer it might take them to find me.
If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.
The farthest I could get was right under Mom’s bedroom.
The whole way there, it was just dirt and the old dead weeds and grass that must have been live weeds and grass when this house got delivered here. They’d turned into mummies of themselves, mummies that crumbled into less than dust when I touched them. Twice I hit my head on something sharp under the house, and when I started ducking, then I hit my shoulder and back on it three more times, something up there tearing my shirt and cutting me, it felt like.
I beat on the floor again, just to say I had, I guess, that I’d tried everything I could, and I pushed back into the farthest corner of the skirt. My idea was that I could push my way out—from this side, the overlap would help me—make some kind of suicidal dash for the pump house roof, which I would magically fly up onto. Fear would give me wings, I don’t know.
I didn’t get all the way to the crack of light in the skirt, though.
Instead, I planted my hand into… a nest?
It was tacky and scratchy both at once, like whatever was living there had pulled all the broken things under the trailer under it, and then slobbered all over them until the trash went soft, could get shaped.
Only—not a nest, no. I looked with hands, traced out the contours.
A nest is open at the top.
This was more like a burst-open chrysalis.
One with a pocket deep down big enough for three of me.
My first thought was bobcats, since that was supposedly why the neighbor had all these dogs—bobcats had used to steal his grandfather’s chickens, so now it was a forever war—except this didn’t smell remotely feline. It didn’t smell like anything, really. And animals always have a scent, don’t they? Even the hunter animals, the reason they face into the wind, it’s that they don’t want their scent to get ahead of them, give them away.
Not this hunter.
It could come from any direction.
“Even the front door,” I heard myself say.
Dad?
I didn’t say it this time, didn’t know if I wanted it to be real, didn’t know if what started there could gestate or incubate or pupate into the kind of silhouette I’d felt crossing behind me in the living room. That I’d seen crossing the kitchen.
But you have to come from something, don’t you?
I told myself yes, you had to.
Because—because a ghost, it’s basically useless, it’s just a vision, a phantasm. It doesn’t even make sense that it could interact with light, much less a floor or a person or clothes. Meaning it had to have some kind of organic beginning, right?
I was still nodding, figuring this out.
When you come back from the dead, you’re a spirit, you’re nothing, just some leftover intention, some unassociated memory. But then, then what if a cat’s sneaked into a dark space like this, right? What if that cat comes here to die, because it got slapped out on the road or hit by an owl or something, so it lays back in the corner to pant it out alone. Except, in that state, when it’s hurt like that, when this cat isn’t watching the way it usually does, something else can creep in. Something dead.
It’s the injury that opens the door, I knew. The corruption.
But a cat isn’t a person.
Now that cat that’s not dying, is just panting, it has to wait for something else to crawl in, and then something else, and a third and fourth and finally some fiftieth thing. Just one worm at a time. You can build a self like that, if you compact it all together. If you remember how you used to be.
And if someone up in the living part of the house, if they remembered you too.
Dad was back because he loved us, yes. But it was also because I believed in him.
“Dad!” I said then, beating again on the floor of the house with the flat of my hands.
My face was muddy, I know, from the dust sifting down onto my tears and snot.
There was more daylight where the dogs were digging now. Almost enough daylight.
I pushed back into the nest, into where Dad had been rebirthed, and my left hand felt out something more regular than the rest.
I brought it up, couldn’t see it.
Three pushes over was the crack at the top of two panels. Just enough light.
I held my find up.
It was Dino’s superhero action figure.
It was whole now, like it had never been bitten through.
I smiled, understood: this was what I’d been telling Mom. Exactly. Dad was here to fix Dino. To help him. I was holding the proof right here in my hands.
I stuffed it into my pocket.
It was all about timing, now.
Just—the problem was there were four dogs, not one. With one, I could wait until it slithered under the skirt, then push through on this side, race for the pump house. With four dogs, though, they’d have to one-at-a-time it. Meaning that if I pushed through right when one crawled under, that would give the three waiting their turn a chance to hear me, come barreling around the side of the house.
And if I waited until all four crawled under, then the first would be to me by the time the fourth was crawling under, and I’d never get to push out.
There was no way to win.
I told my mom I was sorry. I told Dino his numbers up through twelve, and told him not to laugh about “8” like he always did. It could be funny, his funny snowman, but let it be secret-funny, and just keep going, on to nine and ten and eleven and twelve.
I told my dad it wasn’t his fault. That he never would have left us. That that truck had probably been going to blow a rod any day now anyway.
I was crying hard by then. From fear, from feeling sorry for myself. I was even already picturing ahead to what Dino would find when he got home from the bus stop alone. The dogs probably would have dragged me out front. Would I even still be a body? Would he play with it like it was just a squirrel or a cat they’d torn into? And would he then have to grow up knowing that it had been my thigh meat he’d flipped over three times, to see how much dirt would stick to it?
Mom would know right off, of course.
I hoped she wouldn’t blame herself for moving us here. I hoped all kinds of things, except what finally happened, right at the last moment, when there was a yellowy-white head under the skirt, snapping and snarling, in a frenzy.
What happened was footsteps crossed the floor of our house with authority. With impatience. Heavy footsteps.
And then the door opened, shut, and the first dog squealed.
Then the next, and the next, and then that yellowy-white head that was pushed under the skirt, it stayed there. But blood was coming from the mouth now.
My breath hitched twice—I was about to scream, I couldn’t help it, it was welling up from a place deeper than I could tamp down—and I stood all at once, to just leave this place, this scene, this everything, and what I stood into was a strut or a pipe or I didn’t know what, just that it was one thousand times more solid than me.
My face washed cold, my fingers tingled like they were going to sleep all at once, and all I knew with the world tunneling down from black to blacker, it was to claw for that one line of light I could see.
I woke with my mom hugging me to her. It was still daytime. She was holding me to her and she was screaming to someone, at someone.