Paula lives in the cul-de-sac. She likes it there. The smooth curvature that dead ends into the split-level Gary bought for them back when it was enough to work at the drugstore. When the paycheck stretched far enough to pay the mortgage and keep food on the table and clothes on two kids’ backs. A boy and a girl. Long gone now from the house at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, but she likes to sit at the dinette in the kitchen and pretend she can still hear them upstairs. Rustling around. Whispering even though they’d never whispered when they’d lived here.
Theirs was a house of noise. Brian taking the stairs two at a time, forever talking with his mouth open, and Jennifer, the landline semi-permanently attached to her ear while she chattered on and on about tennis practice and some lip gloss she absolutely had to have that cost twenty dollars more than Paula felt it needed to.
Now, it is so quiet. Empty rooms filled with furniture she still polishes every Wednesday and floors she mops on Sundays. She melted into her routine a long time ago, and she won’t forgo it now simply because it is only her eating and sleeping and drinking and pissing in a house that the bank says belongs to her. At least on paper. She knows about eminent domain. Remembers it from school. Along with the Pythagorean Theorum and that WWI began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Every morning, she drinks her coffee in the living room in front of the picture window. This gives her the best view of the street. The early morning dog walkers and the young mothers with their strollers and the health nuts who jog until they are more sweat than skin.
With Gary gone, she no longer has to hide the camera.
There’d been a fight when he first found the tapes. Demands that devolved into threats. For a brief time, she’d thought he might leave her. He told her it wasn’t right, invading people’s privacy like that, but it’s her street. Her right to keep track of the comings and goings of everything that happens there. And now, she’s free to do as she pleases.
On the nights she can’t sleep, she takes the tapes out. Runs her finger along the hard plastic cases until something inside her tingles. Then she’ll pull the tape out, plug the camcorder in to the tv, taking care to match the red, yellow, and white cords to their correct inputs, and slide the tape into its slot. Tug her panties past her ankles as the blue screen glitches, the street snapping into view.
It never takes long. Not like this. Nothing at all like the dead-nerved years of Gary flopping on top of her like a fish and then falling asleep, leaving her to clean up his mess. Had he ever made her come? The young bride she’d once been panting under his fingers as they found the exact spot. The exact rhythm. She no longer thought so, but memory is a fuzzy thing. Easy enough to confuse it with belief simply because there’s nothing there to document it. No evidence.
Tonight’s tape is old; from when the Yancey’s still lived next door. The husband, Marty, fancied himself something of a handyman and was forever in the driveway, stationed behind a table saw that only ceased its whining after he’d had too many beers and stumbled inside to sleep beside his mousy, mincing wife Nina who didn’t understand that store bought ham salad wasn’t an appropriate thing to bring to a barbecue.
Marty appears at the edge of the screen, measuring tape in hand, and Paula grimaces, her hand slowing as she tries to re-focus on the street itself, the heat haze coming from the asphalt, the whir and chirp of deep summer cicadas, anything but that greased up lump of man, but he pauses there, in full view, and she sighs. Drops her hand. She could stop the tape, choose another, but it would interrupt the ritual.
On screen, the scene jumps. A dark line bisecting its center, Marty somehow frozen in the middle where he’d not previously been. Right? She hadn’t looked away, but he is no longer at the edge of the screen. Has drifted closer to her house and the middle of the screen. He is turned to face her, his mouth stretched, one side ticked higher than the other. A tingle settles in her belly, but it is not the same tingle as when she chooses the tapes for the night.
She doesn’t remember this. Marty appearing anywhere except in the periphery. He has distracted her before, but if she is patient, if she waits a few minutes, he will vanish, and the video will be only the street again.
But he is staring across the years at her, his face warped into that sideways smile, and she holds her breath like she used to when she was a child, cold under her quilt, watching the dark outline in her closet shift into something like the glimmer of bared teeth.
She blinks, and the tape restores itself. Marty vanished back into whatever project he’d decided was most important all those years ago, and the street returned to normalcy, even if the trees and bushes are smaller than she knows them to be now.
Her underwear’s still tangled at her ankles, but she stops the tape. Rewinds. Tugs her panties to her waist before she hits play. The screen jumps then settles on the version she carries in her memory. Marty at the corner of the screen and then gone. She rewinds again, again, a third time, but she cannot replicate the glitch.
“Stupid thing,” she says and ejects the tape. Slips it back into its plastic case and re-files it according to the date scrawled on its side. April 5, 1999. Brian would have been seven. Jennifer twelve. The year Gary bought the fishing boat without telling her, and they’d not been able to go on their yearly beach vacation because of it.
Her skin itches, the unspent energy needling at its surface, but the moment is lost, so she shoves the bin back under the bed and settles back on her heels. It was a glitch in the tape, and she’s been off the past few weeks anyway. An adjustment to her blood pressure medication. The doctor had said there could be some side effects, but she’d stopped listening while he listed them out because everything these days has side effects, and she has to take the pills anyway, so what does it really matter?
She pushes herself to her knees, then her feet, and slowly makes her way to the kitchen. There is the cat to feed and a load of laundry that still needs folded and put away. A Lean Cuisine to heat up for her own dinner. She hasn’t bothered cooking since Gary died, and on the rare occasions Brian or Jennifer visits, they go out to eat, so she buys the frozen meals in bulk every Sunday. One for lunch and one for dinner.
Gary would be so proud. She’s finally dropped that last fifteen pounds she’d put on after Brian graduated high school. All of the clothes in her closet are slightly too big now. In the mirror, her body floats somewhere behind the excess fabric, and she pretends it isn’t her behind the glass but some other woman even if her knees and hips tell her otherwise.
But even as the meal heats, she knows she likely won’t eat it. She isn’t hungry. Her brain is still trapped inside that glitch, inside the evidence that has always proven stronger than memory. Maybe she is misremembering. Mixing that tape up with another. Because there are others. Marty found his way into a handful of recordings. It’s possible she’s confusing that April day in 1999 with the October day in 2001, but she remembers the jack-o’-lanterns beside the mailbox. They’d had a carving competition that year, and Brian had won with some zombie abomination that set her teeth on edge just looking at it.
Or maybe February 1997 with all its gray sky and dead lawn. The year they got that late April snow and Jennifer spent the entire time moaning about how spring break was ruined.
But no. She knows the tapes. The distinct anomalies of each. She is both director and watcher, and she counts her years by what’s recorded on them.
The microwave beeps, startling her back into the present, and she pulls back the film, the steam kissing her skin. Maybe she’ll take a melatonin tonight. Gary had been the one with no qualms about medication for sleeping, but she always worried even the tiniest dose had the potential to kill her. Menopause had been particularly brutal, but she’d had the tapes to help her through the long nights. She’d managed. And it’s shocking how little sleep a person actually needs.
She eats half of her frozen meal and tosses the rest in the garbage while the cat stares at her wastefulness. He’d been more Gary’s cat than hers, and Gary would disapprove of wasting food. Even if it did mean weight loss.
An hour later, the cat is fed, the laundry folded and put away, and the street is dark. Quiet. The sort of late fall night that leaves you chilled and looking too long at shadows. She is under the quilt but still cold. The room itself feels damp, as if she’d left a window open and forgotten to close it, but she checked every latch before lying down, and now, her sleep is light. A sort of drift that catches at the edges of something deeper without ever falling fully. The sort of sleep she had when the kids were little when she was forever waiting for the small sounds that meant they needed her. A bad dream or an upset tummy or a cough that wouldn’t go away.
The noise that wakes her is not the sound her now grown children once made, but it is no less familiar. A click, a whir, and then the gentle blue cast of the television coming to life, and she blinks and blinks, but it doesn’t change anything. The camera she left downstairs is now hooked into the small television Gary insisted on having in their bedroom, and the street view she knows so well skips once and then settles over the screen.
Pushing herself up on the pillows, she traces the evening back. The camera plugged into the downstairs television. The tapes all lined up in their containers, stored in the built ins around the fireplace. She hadn’t brought the camera upstairs with her when she came up for bed. And the view onscreen . . . it’s all wrong. She’d never filmed the street at night. Even now, without Gary’s questions and judgements, she films only during the day. She’s too old now to change her habits.
The speakers crackle, and she jumps, heart surging as she clutches at the quilt. Wraps it closer as on screen, the camera tilts, that alien, night world gone sideways, and then swings to face the house.
She shakes her head. She didn’t take this footage. Whoever is behind the camera isn’t her. But the footage doesn’t appear to be new. The willow tree that was her Mother’s Day Gift when Brian was born is still small, and the mailbox is still painted that awful cherry red Gary liked because he felt it set their house apart from all the other houses on the street, no matter how garish she felt it was.
She watches the varying gradients of dark—blurred bits of grass and leaves against the dull shine of a sliver of moon—as the camera bounces through the front yard and then toward the back of the house.
The camera stays pointed at the ground, as if its user has forgotten it, letting it swing wildly at their side. Watching makes Paula dizzy, and her throat swells with nausea even as the camera finally steadies long enough for her to realize the camera has been set on the ground. There is a shuffling somewhere off camera. Footsteps. She waits for the person filming to come into view, but they do not, and again, that unseen hand picks up the camera. Turns it to face the house and the little door hidden in its side that leads to the crawlspace.
She has never been inside the crawlspace. It was always Gary’s domain, filled with dust and spider webs and all manner of many-legged creepy crawlies. Storage for the various tools he pretended to know how to use. The boxes of Christmas decorations he dutifully dug out every year when the kids were still home but were now left to molder in the dampened dark.
Once, years ago, she’d peered inside, arms wrapped around her body against the February chill as Gary cursed the house’s mechanics because he feared there was a leak somewhere that had spread to the foundation and insisted she see exactly how right his assumption was. She’d thought the leak was coming from the plumbing. In the end, they’d both been wrong and had paid through the nose for a new roof their insurance refused to cover.
The crawlspace door is open, and the camera moves, unnaturally steady now, further and further into the dark.
Her chest rises and falls, and it’s almost painful. The labor of breathing. The beating of her heart, accelerating in a way it hasn’t in a very long time.
The screen remains dark. There is the sensation of movement, of the lens searching for a source. She squints, and there is still nothing. If she couldn’t hear the tape whirring, she’d think it was a blank screen. She searches the edges of the screen, her brain hunting patterns, trying to create order out of chaos.
Because there is another sound. Under the tape’s noise.
Is it possible to be afraid of only a sound? Possible to feel the revulsion creep up her throat and settle slick and foul against her teeth?
She swallows, but her tongue is swollen, and she feels the urge to gag. Anything other than that sound filling her bedroom.
An animal sound. That wet slurping.
It is the sound of something nursing. Of something eating.
Some thirty years too late, her breasts ache, the letdown she hasn’t felt since Brian’s infancy suddenly rushing through the creped skin at her chest.
The light shifts into something brighter, and whoever holds the camera crouches, thrusts the lens forward into the slowly illuminating space. She doesn’t know where the light comes from, but it’s an irrelevant point, because it is her children in the crawlspace. Jennifer and Brian as she remembers them best. The children who stained the bathtub and requested snacks without pause.
They are so small. Tiny fingers wrapped around something impossibly red. Fibrous. They flash stained milkteeth as they lick and chew. Their eyes glowing impossibly in the light as they glance up at the camera and then away. Dismissive. As if they are used to this intrusion, or maybe performance. Either way, they will not be interrupted for anything so simple as their mother’s camera.
Jennifer pushes her hair from her face with the back of her hand, and Paula recognizes her fastidious movement. Her little daughter, forever concerned with cleanliness, with the need to groom herself. A habit not passed down from either Paula or Gary. Something all her own.
Seeing something so painfully familiar brings the nausea roaring back, and she stumbles to her feet, hand over her mouth, only not to make it to the toilet before the vomit comes rushing out between her fingers. It splatters against the linoleum and her feet as her vision blurs, white bursts of light in the periphery as the Lean Cuisine comes back up.
Behind her, the tape goes dark, but before it does, while she sways, dizzy on her feet, she hears them. Brian and Jennifer’s voices rising and falling through the syllables she imagines are etched in the very meat of her.
“Mommy.”
The room goes channel three blue, and Paula goes downstairs, finds the lemongrass-scented multipurpose cleaner, a roll of paper towels, and a crumpled grocery bag to put it all in. She cleans so she will not think. Sops up her mess and sprays the cleaner on the floor and wipes and wipes until the grocery bag is full. Knots the top and carries it out to garbage. Closes the lid and stares at the street and the view her camera should have offered her.
She does not think about those voices in the crawlspace or the red threads coating her children’s hands and teeth, and still, her knees buckle. The driveway rises to meet her, biting at her knees, and she moans behind her teeth because it is night, and the night is built for quiet instead of screams.
It isn’t real. The video. The children on the tape are not her children. It is not their voices she heard. Not the bone deep familiar sounds of their eating.
Kneeling there in the driveway, she says it again and again—not real—but when she pulls herself off the concrete and limps back into the house, the tape has not vanished or reverted back to the hours she carries in her memory.
The unseen camera operator. The crawlspace. The darkness opening to reveal Jennifer and Brian. The reddish thing they are eating. It is all still there.
She thinks of Gary. She would have known, wouldn’t she? If he’d been doing something like this? Taking their children under the house and forcing them to eat something she thinks might be some type of organ meat. A heart or a kidney.
She would have known. They would have told her somehow. They’d never been afraid of their father. Gary had a rigidity about him, a set belief in the manner things should be done, but he’d never been the kind to inspire fear. There’s was not a household where “wait until your father gets home” carried any sort of threat.
She’s listened to podcasts about things like this though. Women who spent their entire lives married to men who were secret killers or perverts. Women who claimed they never knew the inner machinations of the murderers sharing their bed every night. A load of horse pucky she’d always thought. What these idiot women told themselves so they could keep on living with themselves after all that poison found its way out.
But could he have done it? Even once? Taken Jennifer and Brian under the house and then convinced them, somehow, that it had all been a dream. They’d been sleepwalking and never mind the strange taste in their mouths. Nothing a glass of milk and a shower and Daddy tucking them back into bed wouldn’t fix.
For so long, she’s had the tapes. The physical manifestation of her memories. A record of everything she’s started to forget. Could there have been something else? Some terrible secret she’s managed to hold at bay because facing it, admitting it, is worse than keeping it buried?
She considers going through the tapes. One by one. The hours and hours of footage she’s gathered over the span of her life as a wife and mother. Let what she remembers play out on screen until she finds something she doesn’t recognize. Another bit of evidence, another breadcrumb pointing her toward the darker possibility that she hadn’t truly known Gary. Hadn’t truly known their children.
The thought of it exhausts her. She knows Gary. Well, knew him. Wherever it is that’s he’s gone in death, he hasn’t come back to haunt her in the way anyone less practical would have promised her. As for Jennifer and Brian, they are the poster children for being ridiculously well-adjusted adults. Therapy and prescriptions for anxieties she’d only ever known as a normal part of life.
If they were going to blame their parents, they would have already done it. Called a family meeting to discuss the time Dad pulled them out of bed in the middle of the night and forced them into the crawlspace. Filmed them while they ate some tough, red thing that tasted bitter and slick at the same time. Delivered an ultimatum and then done the very millennial thing of cutting off their toxic parents after Gary and Paula both denied that such a thing had ever happened.
She stops the tape. Stands. Moves before the exhaustion pulls her back down and forces her into a sleep that will make her forget. Before she puts the tape back in its case and pretends it hadn’t happened. The role she’s played her entire life. Swallow. Forget. Forgive the smallest cuts because what does it all really matter in the long span of a life?
Her memory is a haunted house, and now, even the one stable point has dissolved into sand. She goes outside. Shuffles heavy-footed through the damp grass, tracing the same path the camera took, until she’s standing in front of the crawlspace’s door.
Around her, the night opens its mouth, and she lets time dilate. Lets it stretch until she is touching the handle. The handle is unnaturally warm under her touch, and she shivers but does not pull back.
“Nothing here,” she says, and the quiet answers her with its emptiness. “Only boxes. Dirt. Silly old woman.”
She opens the door, and the warmth she expected isn’t there. Grave cold air licks at her as she crouches and peers inside. She did not bring a flashlight or a phone, and the moon is new, insisting on its shadow. There is no light to guide her way, but she inches inside, hands fumbling, searching for this thing that exists only on a tape from decades ago that might only be a product of her mind.
It isn’t enough to be known. Lived with. A soul can only exist if it is deeply, irrevocably seen. All the dirty cracks. The secret venoms. She has recorded it all, hoping it would be enough to drown in, but no amount of evidence can cover her trembling hands, reaching, searching, as she moves further inside.
Her mouth waters, stomach twisting with the sort of greed Gary would have frowned at.
“Don’t you think that’s enough, Paula?”
She stumbles, hip clipping the edge of a box, and the tang of dirt and mold settles thick on her tongue, but there is something else, some deeper taste, that leaves her panting, her fingers clawing at the earth.
In the back of the crawlspace, something shifts. Small movements her heart knows because she learned them when they were still portions of her own body.
Her children reaching back for her. Tiny hands offering everything she tried to capture on film because she wasn’t able to on her own. Never enough.
Never enough.
“Mommy,” they say. “Eat.”
