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She learns quickly enough that there is one neighbour – three doors down and across the street – who does not interact with anyone at all. Tammy sees her from afar once or twice, dark hair and big sunglasses behind tinted car windows, but the woman drives directly into her garage and does not emerge into the open until the door has firmly connected with the ground, as if maybe she is allergic to fresh air. This neighbour does not attend the Christmas or New Year’s parties that Tammy is immediately invited to just a few weeks after she moves in. She does not join in when all the new neighbours take turns bringing over cookies or casseroles like cliché small-town housewives, introducing themselves and drinking tea at Tammy’s kitchen table and learning about the divorce, her childrens’ names, what grade they’re in at school. And she does not, it seems, take part in holiday decorating.
A handful of them flock to Tammy’s house when they spot her climbing a ladder to hang Christmas lights, insisting that they don’t mind helping her out. “It’s not a one-person job,” they tell her determinedly, and so she allows them to prop up another ladder and the job is done about five times faster than it would have been otherwise. When she looks to the one house on the block that has no lights at all and wonders aloud whether they should all offer to help there, too, someone actually shudders.
“Bad idea,” he answers immediately. “Trust me.”
“Why?”
“That’s the Oceans’ place. The daughter moved back in when her folks died, and she doesn’t talk to anyone. Gives off some kinda weird vibes, if you ask me. I’d steer clear, and make sure the little ones do, too.”
After that, she pays more attention. The door of that house remains firmly shut while a neighbourhood New Year’s Eve party carries forward noisily past midnight. When someone sets up what is reportedly an annual outdoor Easter egg hunt around all the houses here, they invite Tammy’s children outside with their baskets, and not a single egg is hidden on the Oceans’ property. There’s a block party at the end of the summer and all the kids draw on the pavement with sidewalk chalk while their parents barbecue burgers and share small talk, and everyone pointedly avoids so much as setting foot on one person’s front lawn.
And then there is Halloween.
Tammy sets up a giant bowl of candy on her front porch with a sign – TAKE TWO! and a smiling jack o’lantern – and bundles her children up to head out into the cold, long sleeves under their costumes. With one little hand in each of hers and her older son leading the way, they head up the street, and she stands with other parents by the end of each driveway as they race up to the door to knock. Three doors down, she spends this quiet moment glancing across the street at the Oceans’ house. It’s a big house, even for the neighbourhood, with an immaculate front lawn and garden. She’s seen gardeners come and go on a regular basis, even maids coming around from the back of the house where they evidently let themselves in and out using a different door. But never the woman who actually lives there, not without darkened car windows in the way.
The light at the front door is on.
And still, nobody sets foot on the path to get there. It’s all smooth, wide flagstone, lined by flower beds on each side. Tammy narrows her eyes, focusing in on each front-facing window, checking for the shadow of a person there, and doesn’t see a thing.
“Mom, come on, let’s go,” and Tyler is back, tugging impatiently at her hand. They move on, down to the next house, and the one after that, and then turn off their street altogether to circle around the rest of the neighbourhood, too. There are plenty of houses that nobody approaches, a couple on every street. They all follow that unspoken rule: No light on, no trick-or-treaters. Tammy thinks of the Oceans’ place every time she sees one, with its light illuminating the front steps and the heavy wooden double doors.
When they return to their street, the home stretch with tired feet and bags full of candy, Tammy suggests, “Maybe we should try that house. We missed it before.” The light is still on, and Tammy is pretty sure nobody has gone up to the door at all, even the kids from farther-off parts of the neighbourhood. How far does the Oceans’ reputation stretch? Why leave the light on at all?
Wrinkling his nose, Derek surveys the house. “Nobody goes there,” he informs her, adjusting his grip on his bag of candy. “Max said she’s a witch, and she’ll curse you if you get too close to the house.”
“Is that so?” muses Tammy. Derek is the oldest by four years, and if he’s been sucked into believing a word of his friends’ urban legends, there’s not much of a chance that either of his younger siblings will disagree. “I think even a witch might make an exception tonight. It’s Halloween, after all. That’s a witch’s favourite night of the year.” He shrugs, not looking entirely convinced, and Tyler shuffles his feet uncertainly. Maggie looks from Tammy to her big brothers and back again, like she’s trying to decide who she trusts most. On a delicate pause, Tammy shrugs. “It’s the end of the night, anyway. If nobody goes there at all, maybe she’ll have tons of candy. But if you’d rather go home…”
She turns away, back towards her own house, makes it maybe two steps before Maggie pulls on her hand. “Wait, Mommy, I want to go,” only now that she’s managed to change their minds, nobody wants to go up to the door alone – not even Derek, who’s ten now and usually incredibly outspoken about how independent that makes him. They step down the path together, all four of them, and the kids all swivel back to look at Tammy nervously when they reach the door, so she’s the one who reaches out to knock.
As they wait quietly, the kids wide-eyed with their little fingers curled tight around the handles of their candy bags, Tammy wonders whether this is a bad idea. Maybe the light wasn’t even left on intentionally at all. Maybe she won’t answer the door, just as she apparently never does, and this will only confirm the whole neighbourhood’s stories about how decidedly unfriendly the woman is.
Tyler nudges her with his elbow. “Mom, you should knock again.”
Teeth worrying the inside of her cheek, Tammy shrugs. “Maybe she’s not home.” But she knocks again, anyway. The third round of knocking is Derek, overcoming whatever fears his friend has instilled in him about being cursed, and then Tyler rings the doorbell. It echoes through the inside of the house and still, there is only silence. She wonders which other neighbours are home, whether any of them are peeking out their windows and whispering to each other about how strange it is that she’s brought her kids up to the Oceans’ front door. She counts to thirty in her head and then takes a little step back. “I don’t think she’s home, you guys. Let’s go home, okay? I’ll make hot chocolate.”
Back to the bottom of the steps, and just as Tammy’s foot connects with the flagstone path, there is a definitive click behind her. A click that sounds an awful lot like someone sliding back a deadbolt to unlock a door.
She spins back, all three of her children turning wide-eyed to look as the door opens. Not far, just a few inches, and despite the light here, it’s not far enough to make out any of the woman’s shadowy features. Just the dark hair falling in long waves, which Tammy already knew, and brown eyes glinting out to survey the people on her doorstep. Tammy first, a sweep of her gaze from head to toe, and then the kids in their costumes. “Trick or treat!” says Maggie loudly, holding up her bag.
“I… don’t have any candy,” says the woman.
Well, this whole adventure has been incredibly disappointing. Tammy reaches out her hand blindly in her daughter’s direction. “That’s okay. Sorry to bother you. Maggie, let’s go home, ’kay?” Derek is the first one to move, quieter than she’s ever seen him be in his life; all those stories must have really gotten to him. Hand closing around Maggie’s, Tammy tugs the girl gently towards herself. “Ty?”
He ignores her altogether and, instead, blinks up at the woman with the slightest frown knitting at his eyebrows. Focused, measured, he asks, “Are you going to curse us? For trep… trespassing?” Tammy freezes, watching the woman carefully, searching for any flickers of darkness across her face. The innocent yet extremely loaded question hangs in the still air for a moment, and Tammy feels as if she’s holding her breath. Any sound from trick-or-treaters down the street has faded away entirely. And then –
“Am I what?”
“Tyler,” Tammy snaps, probably a hundred times more embarrassed by this whole situation than she was ten seconds ago. It was absolutely a mistake, wasn’t it? Encouraging them to come knock on the door at this house, of all houses, despite the whispered warnings from the rest of their neighbours? There have been stories told to her for months since they moved in last December, and she simply decided not to give them too much thought, just because there weren’t any specific details given.
“Are you going to curse us?” repeats Tyler, a little louder, as if the problem is that the woman couldn’t hear him. Releasing Maggie’s hand, Tammy moves up the steps with renewed energy, making a futile grab for the six-year-old, who dodges her quickly. “My brother’s friend Max said you’re a witch. Is that true?”
Ushering Tyler down the steps towards his brother and sister, Tammy tosses apologies over her shoulder, hoping that she can get them out of there and never have to see this woman for the rest of eternity. “I’m so sorry. We shouldn’t have come and knocked, just the light was on, and I thought – I’m very sorry –”
And then, unexpectedly, the woman opens the door another inch or two.
“Wait,” she says. Her voice is soft but cuts through Tammy’s next mumbled sorry like a knife, shutting her up mid-word. With the door’s movement, the light can reach her face easier, and god, she looks movie-star beautiful. Her eyes are wide, framed by long eyelashes and smokey, slightly smudged eyeliner. Clad in high-waisted jeans and a sweater that flows all the way down to her knees, she stands just slightly taller than Tammy, or would, if not for the front steps. “I might have some. Candy, that is.”
She leaves the door open when she steps back further into the house, holding a finger up to signal them to wait. The front hall is large, sprawling, a wide staircase curving away to the second floor with an extravagant chandelier hanging above it. In the distant interior, Tammy can hear a cupboard opening and closing, a cardboard flap being torn away from a box, plastic wrappers hitting something solid. Then the woman is sweeping back towards them, silhouetted against a bright kitchen light at her back. She holds out a wide, shallow glass bowl with both hands and it’s filled up to the very brim with candy.
Tammy watches her curiously as the kids carefully choose one piece of candy each. This woman with rumours about her swirling around the whole neighbourhood, living alone in her parents’ house, eyeing the children before her in the wary sort of way that people unfamiliar with young kids do. And yet there’s a tiny glimmer of a smile at the corner of her lips as Derek, Tyler and Maggie drop their respective candies into their bags to mingle with the rest of the evening’s haul. “You can take more,” she says, nodding just barely at them. “It’s not like anyone else is going to come by.”
Later, when she’s given the kids hot chocolate and marshmallows and helped them sort through all their candy, facilitating moderately-fair trades amongst them, Tammy tucks them into bed, one after the other. This means reading Maggie two stories, easing herself out of Tyler’s room as quietly as she can after her drifts off in the middle of one, and then simply poking her head into Derek’s bedroom because he’s decided he’s too old for his mother to tuck him in at night. “Night, honey,” she says, and is already pulling the door closed for him when he calls after her.
“Mom?” He waits until she leans back into the room to continue. “I think Max lied about the witch.”
“Yeah?” Tammy pads into the room, leaving the door open so the light from the hallway falls in a long triangle across her son’s bed. She crouches down by the edge of the mattress to look him in the eye.
Derek nods, dirty-blond hair rustling on his pillow. “Yeah. Max doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. Nobody else wanted to go to her house, but she had, like, the best candy. And she seems kind of…”
“Nice?” Tammy supplies.
He shakes his head. “Lonely.”
This makes Tammy pause. It’s not that the word feels incorrect, attached to the woman three doors down and across the street. It simply surprises her, how perceptive her son is. “Hmm. Maybe she’s both.”
“Maybe,” he agrees. He blinks, the long kind of blink he does when he’s on his way to falling asleep. Maybe that’s one of those things that will never change about him, no matter how much he grows and how much he insists he’s not a little kid anymore. “Night, Mom.”
She shifts to kiss his forehead, and he’s too sleepy to protest the way he has been lately, which is nice. “Good night,” she whispers back. Downstairs, she makes tea and settles on the couch in the living room, turning and bringing her feet up so she can look outside. Lights in all the neighbours’ houses begin to flicker off, but not that house. The one her eyes are drawn to automatically now, though she can only see part of it from this angle. Derek’s words are echoing endlessly in her head. She seems kind of lonely, he said. And she wasn’t thinking it outright, when the woman was right there in front of her, but she’s definitely thinking it now.
Perhaps a little impulsively, when her mug is empty, Tammy slips on her shoes and coat again, and shuts the front door behind her softly. Locks it, though this is absolutely a safe enough neighbourhood to trust that all three kids will be fine for a few minutes. Purposeful, trying not to think about what she’s doing, she reaches the woman’s front steps again, knocks firmly, and waits.
It doesn’t take quite as long as last time for the door to open, and she doesn’t miss the way it wavers further open once the woman on the other side sees that it’s her. “Can I help you with something?”
“I just wanted to say thanks,” Tammy blurts out.
Dark eyes observe her seriously. “What for?”
“For answering the door,” she replies. It sounds stupid, and she knows it. She pushes her hands deep into her coat pockets and adds, “Um, and not shutting it in my son’s face when he was running his mouth. And answering again, now. I’m Tammy, by the way. I, uh, live down the street.” Awkwardly, she pulls one hand free from her coat and gestures in the direction of her own home.
“Debbie,” the woman answers. She follows Tammy’s pointing finger with her eyes to look at the house, then draws her gaze back. “You’re welcome, I suppose. I had some candy hanging around, anyway, so…”
Hovering there and wondering if she should turn around and go home now, Tammy glances past Debbie in the open space left between her body and the door. The glass bowl sits on a table there, a significant amount of candy left because Tammy refused to let her kids take too much of it. “You’ve got quite the assortment there,” she observes. Casual, but weighted enough to point out the obvious connection she has made between the varying types of candy there and the sound of brand-new boxes being opened, before. The stores don’t sell variety packs with Starbursts and Almond Joy and Twix bars all in the same box. Does Debbie buy candy and leave her light on every year? “Did anyone else come by after us?”
Debbie pulls the edges of her long sweater tighter around herself. She’s guarded now, like a mask has slid over her face and only her eyes are visible. Still, even though she does not know Tammy, she answers, “No.” She shrugs with only one shoulder, just the smallest of movements, as if this is just another way that she tries to contain herself from the outside world. “I can’t expect them to, really. Nobody around here likes me much.”
“Why not?” Tammy looks back at her evenly.
Another minuscule shrug. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. How long have you lived there?”
“Since last December,” she replies, hands back in her pockets now. It’s cold out, now that night has fallen in and settled around each house to fill in all the empty spaces with inky dark. “I’ve heard some things. No one can tell me why, though.” She tilts her head to one side, blonde hair sweeping over her shoulder as she examines Debbie. “So is there a reason?”
She almost expects a third shrug, but it doesn’t come. In place of it, Debbie drops her gaze down to Tammy’s feet and remains quiet for a moment, testing words on her tongue before she speaks. “My parents were not… particularly kind or welcoming people,” she says carefully, in the end. “It can be difficult to step away from that shadow when everyone around here already associates me, the name, the house, with that.”
“Or when you keep to yourself so much.”
There’s that tiny flicker of a smile again, just at the right-hand corner of Debbie’s mouth. It makes something spark very briefly in her eyes, and Tammy knows herself well enough to be able to tell that it’s drawing her in. “Touché,” she acknowledges. “My sister-in-law brought the candy. She’d say that, too.” She contemplates Tammy there for a moment and then says abruptly, “It’s cold. I have coffee, if you want.”