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March 1994
The house feels like a continually held breath, a pregnant pause, a rubber band stretched taunt to the point of snapping. Waiting, waiting, always waiting.
Sometimes, Kate isn’t sure what she’s waiting for anymore.
But wait she does. It’s all she can do most days, when she’s heard the front door open and lock firmly, the click of the key echoing like a shot in the otherwise quiet house. She sits with her back pressed to the drywall, mimicking the stillness of the house, letting it settle around her until she can notice every creak, every tiny sigh of the shifting foundation. When she was a little girl, kept awake by the fears of monsters in her closet and watching her from the shadows, her father used to make her hot chocolate, the two of them drinking it together on the couch with the lights out, trying to muffle their laughter so they didn’t alert Joy to their midnight snacking. Then, he’d told her about houses settling, moving and shifting even though they weren’t alive, a perfectly reasonable explanation for the sounds she would hear, so nothing to worry about Katie Kat, nothing at all.
He’d been half right, given the fact that the monsters weren’t in her closet.
Then, she’d listened, breathless and afraid, in her bed, for every little sound. Now, she does the same, straining her ears for anything out of the ordinary. A footstep where it shouldn’t be. The sound of a lock that hasn’t been slid into place. A careless moment that could make up for the countless careless moments that had lead her here in the first place.
He’s given her books. Paper. Little trinkets to keep herself occupied with. But Kate leaves them untouched most of the time, sitting, listening, watching the squares of light as they move across the carpeted floor. The same, every day.
But there’s nothing. No unlocked door. No unannounced visitor. There never is.
Kate crawls across the floor toward the mattress he’d dragged down here for her, presenting it to her like he expected she’d be pleased with his generosity. For a day or two, she’d tried to make up the bed each morning, when she heard his footsteps upstairs, pacing back and forth through the kitchen, the alarm clock that alerted her to another day. But what was the point anyway of arranged pillows, crisp sheets, and so she’d given up on that pretty quickly and the blankets are bunched beneath her as Kate flops onto the mattress now, pressing her face toward the pillow that smells of sweat and unwashed hair and of Martin, of the last time he’d come down to see her.
She reaches for the tangled sheets, pulling them over head, trying to block out the watery light coming through the windows, the world that goes on without her. She could stay like this for hours, days, forever, and no one would ever know if she got out of this bed again. Only the house, with its pregnant silence, would even register if she stopped breathing at all.
March 1995
The house exhales beneath Kate’s ear, pressed to the floor, listening. She closes her eyes, breathes in tandem, filling her lungs as the house shifts, fills, heaves.
Below, she can hear the door. Footsteps. Exhale.
She’s gotten good at this, easing herself from her body, sliding through the bones of the house instead. She’d had plenty of practice at Martin’s, the endless hours of waiting -planning if she was feeling particular spirited; drifting if she wasn’t- when every sound became imperative to understand, to read. The creaks familiar, his footsteps a constant soundtrack, the life going on above her head while she wondered if it would be better or worse for him to come down to see her.
The creak of the door as it opens. The pitch of her mother’s sigh, the jingle of her bracelets as she rests her elbow against the door jamb. “Today isn’t a good day.”
The carpet is soft against her cheek, the shell of her ear. Kate focuses her attention from the open mouth of her bedroom door and toward the individual twist of fibres, beige and fraying. Her palm rests against the floor, feeling the movement of the house around her, how it inhales in preparation to expand, to shift bones and insides, to grow.
She likes to imagine that the house has been happy to have her back. Relieved to feel the brush of her fingers on door knobs, the quiet exhale of her breathes as she laid awake at night looking at the shadows in the corners.
“Mallory.” Her mother, voice pinched likely to match the expression on her face. “I said-”
Kate’s mouth feels tacky and too small for the protest she imagines herself sending through floorboards and ceiling, toward her mother down in the entryway. The house must carry the message anyway because the door squeals again, widening, the footsteps heavier.
The house seems to breathe a little deeper now. Kate can feel it, the ease of the breaths now, how her own ribs seem to expand now to give her lungs room to inflate.
“If she wants me to go, I’ll go,” Mallory wheedles even as she moves away from the door, the floorboards sending the echoes of her footsteps up through crossbeams and screws to brush against the shell of Kate’s ear. “I promise, okay?”
Her mother has nothing to offer but a huffed breath, a slammed door. Kate closes her eyes again as she listens to the footsteps, the cadence of them becoming familiar as they cross the hallway toward the open bedroom door. There is so much you can understand about someone without even having to see them. Kate understands this now in a way she wishes she had then, when all she had was what she could see, how easily a sweet face and understanding smile could hide all the other, sharper things. The heaviness of Mallory’s footsteps a reassurance that she will firmly root herself into whatever space she determines to be a part of. The smell of hair dye and perfume Kate knows she steals from her mother, off set sometimes by the smell of ink or Sharpie from where she allows Kate to doodle on her arms or the rubber nose of her sneakers. The way the air shifts around her to make room for Mallory there on the floor, how Kate can picture the movements without even having to open her eyes; how Mallory stretches out, their heads nearly touching. She can feel that closeness through the staticky carpet fibres, in the way the floorboards resettle, bedroom door whispering closed after being nudged by boot tip.
Kate focuses on the house, the muffled sounds of her mother clicking back into the kitchen, likely muttering to herself in annoyance that Mallory has been able to do so easily what she, herself, cannot seem to do. Beyond, she imagines her father in his office, the door closed as he moves from one phone call to the next, or simply to hide the fact that he needs a moment with his thoughts, how the normal life he’d likely promised himself would return once his daughter had has yet to materialize.
And then, close enough to touch, Mallory and the sounds that come with her: the rustle of oversized fabric and jewelry and the steady exhales that Kate can feel soft as a feather against the top of her head.
“Bad day, huh?”
The way Mallory says it almost makes it sound like it’s a sort of joke they’re both in on, like the type of code you might toss out to the red-faced, annoyed gym teacher when you don’t feel like getting sweaty on the track in between chemistry and calculus. Sorry coach, I can’t. I’m having a…bad day.
Certainly not some sort of shorthand for short-circuiting while attempting unsuccessfully to process kidnapping trauma.
Kate opens her eyes, Mallory’s face blurry and out of focus from the lack of space between them. There was a time when Mallory seemed almost afraid of her, pulling her long limbs closer to her body like she worried about what would happen if she were to accidentally sneak a toe or fingernail into Kate’s space. But the required distance between them seems to grow smaller by the day, so much so that Kate often finds herself knocking elbows with Mallory when she turns around, getting a mouthful of hair or shoulder when they fall asleep on the couch or floor after watching the midnight movie on the local access channel. Or this, now, the fibres of the carpet blurring into Mallory’s mascara thick eyelashes.
“Sorry my mom tried to chase you off,” Kate mumbles, rather than try to answer the question. The tone Mallory had used suggests that it doesn’t matter anyway. The look she can see in Mallory’s eyes hints that it very much does.
Mallory scoffs, rolling onto her back, pulling up her knees. “I’m pretty used to your mom trying to chase me off by this point.”
This is certainly not an understatement. At first, Kate had enjoyed the look on her mother’s face when Mallory would show up. The horror that was only surpassed by her lovely doll child imitating the mannerisms of the local delinquent, like bad teenage influences could be the only possible explanation for Kate wanting to shed her old skin. But it hadn’t taken long for Mallory’s presence in her life to have nothing to do with the effect it had on her mother. “And yet, you keep showing up.”
Mallory gives her a grin, all teeth. “I’m stubborn that way.”
“I think you’re just a good friend.”
Mallory is all hard edges and dark lipstick. Music that vibrates Kate’s teeth all the way down to the roots. Stubby bitten finger nails and the type of laugh Kate’s mother has always told her was unladylike. And she looks so pretty when she blushes.
“Now I know you’re having a bad day,” Mallory says, reaching out to gently flick Kate’s forehead. “It makes you all sappy and weird.”
Kate laughs, rubbing at her forehead with the heel of her hand. She finally pushes herself into a sitting position, her head swimming from the drastic change in position, the loss of the house to hold her together. “See, this is why I like you, Mal. You never baby me.”
She’s teasing, mostly.
But not about the important thing. About how Mallory never treats her like she doesn’t know who Kate is, the way her mother does, always looking at her like a stranger has come back to the house. Or like, in spite of her best efforts, all she can see is the very worst things her mind can conjure up, the way her father does, how Kate sometimes catches him looking at her with an expression of forlorn horror on his face like all he can do is think about what Martin Harris did to her in that basement.
Sometimes, Kate thinks about telling them the truth. The whole truth and nothing but, so help her God. If only because she thinks it might make her dad stop looking at her like that.
Mallory looks at her like sometimes she forgets that Kate is Kate Wallis, the girl from the basement, someone she has to be careful with rather than someone she can wrestle with in the front seat of the car for control of the radio.
“Baby you. Please.” Mallory scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Why would I want to do that? Haven’t you had enough of people kissing your ass?”
Kate cracks a smile, shaking her head. “Yeah, no thanks.” She picks at a loose thread of the carpet, pulling it free, rolling it around between the pads of her fingers. “I’m glad you didn’t let my mom chase you off.”
Mallory’s brow knits itself together, her eyes losing some of that fire that Kate, enviously, wishes she could borrow for herself. “You want to talk about it?”
“I…no. Yes? Maybe?” Kate presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, pressing until everything blurs to a black that makes it easier to pretend she’s alone. “What is there to say anyway?” She pulls her hands away and the world comes back into focus one pinprick at a time, pointillism in the form of Mallory’s concerned face. “Why is this even still happening? Why can’t I just…I don’t know…pretend like nothing even happened.”
Mallory lifts her eyebrows. “What would Slyvia say?” The corner of her mouth quirks in the briefest hint of a smile.
Kate humors her with a laugh, dry and brittle as it scratches it way out of her throat. “I know.” She rolls her eyes. “I just…I don’t know, okay? I don’t know why it’s a bad day. I just feel…” She holds up her hands, empty, useless, and then presses them against the center of her chest where she imagines her heart should be. “I just can’t…everything feels too hard.”
“Okay, so we just…don’t.” Mallory shrugs, getting to her feet and ambling her way over to Kate’s desk. “Who says you have to do anything anyway?” She grabs the chair, dragging it away from the desk and closer to where Kate has spent the majority of her day.
Kate looks at her, imagining her mother’s piqued curiosity, her annoyance, at the sound of the dragging furniture, who it reverberates through the house. Another secret she can’t infiltrate. “What are you doing?”
Mallory doesn’t answer, seeming to give the position of the chair careful consideration before deciding it has passed some mystery test. Then, she goes to Kate’s bed, pulling the quilt off the mattress. Kate almost protests, the sound dying in the back of her throat before it can fully emerge. Making the bed had been the only thing she’d managed for the day, the full extent of her energy, and now such a gesture of normalcy has been so swiftly undone.
But then Mallory unfurls the quilt, draping it over the back of the chair and back onto the bed, keeping it into place with pillows. Beneath the canopy, Kate can no longer actually see Mallory, can only guess at her fidgeting and tugging. “What are you doing?” She asks again, this time around the prickles of laughter in the back of her throat.
Mallory reappears, ducking beneath the crooked quilt, sitting next to Kate with their shoulders touching. “Hide out.”
From here, it’s impossible to see anything outside the fabric walls of the quilt, like, just like that, the world has disappeared. No mothers with pinched-lipped expressions or fathers who check and recheck the lock on the front door in the middle of the night. No gleefully whispered rumors and ghost stories and girls locked in basements and the people who put her there -villian, victim, both, all. It’s just the gauzy glow of the pastel squares and her and Mallory beneath and the house resettling to wrap around them.
Kate looks at her and it’s Mallory who looks away first, that pink in her cheeks, working at the cuticle with the fingers on her opposite hand. “Thank you,” Kate says softly. “Seriously. Thank you.”
Mallory gives her a smile, quick and jumpy. “Thanks for letting me in your fort.”
“I feel like I kinda have to,” Kate says with a shrug. “I mean you did build it, so.”
Kate’s pretty sure Mallory knows she would’ve let her in anyway.
March 1997
The building is a living thing, shifting, creaking, expanding and shrinking again in a cacophony of slamming doors and windows being forced open on uneven tracks. The thundering of footsteps on loose floorboards. Groaning pipes and shuddering ceilings. As she lays in the manufactured darkness, Kate listens to the hum of life moving through the building, the steady pulse of it thumping beneath her breastbone, rattling around her ribs. The blanket is scratchy and hot but she can’t bring herself to manage even the meager animal act of turning her nose toward a pocket of fresh air.
Instead, she closes her eyes. She listens to the sink running in the apartment next door. The way the wall seems to groan when someone slams a cabinet door shut. It’s harder to pretend that the world doesn’t exist beyond her closed eyelids when everything is so goddamn loud all the time.
Case in point: the squeal of hinges, the slamming of a bedroom door. The creaking of a bedframe and the way her body dips of its own accord toward the newly made bowl in the center of the lumpy mattress.
Kate doesn’t open her eyes, even as she can feel fingers tiptoe across the top of the blanket, brushing the crown of her head, teasing the nape of her neck. Kate groans, mumbling something that might sound like more of a protest than it really feels.
“Hide out?” Mallory’s voice is just as light as the brush of her fingers, and as insistent as she gently pulls down the blanket. Kate lets her, if only because the bed feels a little too lonely if she’s the only one in it. When she sees that she has Kate’s attention, Mallory’s expression sobers, a crease between her eyes. “Bad day?”
Kate holds open the edge of the blanket and Mallory folds herself into the curve of space she’d occupied hours before, before the siren calls of responsibility and Friday morning classes had pulled her away. Now, she smells like the thawing spring air outside, of acrid smoke and something sugary and still a little bit like Sharpie and the lingering press of Kate’s own perfume and shampoo clinging stubbornly to the both of them. Mallory pulls the blanket back down around them, her head resting on the same pillow Kate thinks she’s been occupying for hours, if not days, years, millennia at this point.
When Mallory opens her mouth, Kate shakes her head petulantly, crinkling her nose. “Nope, I don’t want to talk about me,” she says before the first syllable can leave Mallory’s lips. “How was class?”
“Fine, aside from the fact that I still have no idea what I was thinking, signing up for a class that meets for three hours on a freaking Friday morning,” Mallory groans, moving closer to Kate, sliding her foot between Kate’s.
“Me neither.” Kate fixes a pout onto her face, fluttering her eyelashes. “Abandoning your poor girlfriend to stay here all alone…”
But Mallory doesn’t take the bait, her expression far too serious for Kate’s liking. “If I had known-”
“Nope,” Kate says again firmly, resting her palm against Mallory’s stomach, the soft warmth of her skin even beneath her sweatshirt. “We aren’t talking about me, remember?”
Mallory rolls her eyes. She lets her hand slip over Kate’s, her fingers still chilled from her walk back from campus. “We could.”
Kate is certain her stare is far from stern underneath their makeshift blanket fort, her rumpled clothes and mussed hair probably doing little to sell the image of her as someone pulled together. Someone competent. Someone who doesn’t have bad days and take refuge beneath a stifling blanket. She wants to be the person she was last night, throwing her things into a bag in preparation for staying the weekend at her girlfriend’s off-campus apartment, ignoring the sidelong stares of her roommate who didn’t approve of Kate or Mallory or really anything at all except the boyfriend that Kate knew she would be sneaking into the room as soon as she was gone anyway. She wants to be the person she was last night, wrenching open the sticking window of Kate’s shoebox apartment so they could sit out on the fire escape and pass a joint back and forth as the sky darkened around them, hundreds of miles away from home, the brush of Mallory’s fingers on hers as they let their legs dangle off the edge the only thing to remind her of the girl she’d been. Here, she could be someone most people didn’t know, her name suddenly generic enough again that it matched the face of the white, sometimes smiling blonde girl with the taffy-sweet accent.
That morning, she’d woken up thinking about Martin. How he had looked at her sometimes, in those months where she had stopped being something special to him and had just become a problem that needed to be dealt with. How she’d learned that fighting him wasn’t worth what might come after and how sometimes he would still like to pretend, to lay there in bed beside her still flushed and sweaty and play-act like everything was fine and as it had been before though by then she’d had enough time to realize that things hadn’t been fine even then and all she could think about, laying there beside him stiff limbed and empty, was if he was thinking about how easy it would be to roll over, to crush her beneath his weight again with a hand on her throat and one over her mouth. And then she wasn’t that girl anymore, the one who made friends in her morning French class or kissed her girlfriend while Soundgarden played on the radio and someone overhead laughed along to the blurry voices of Jerry Seinfeld and his neighbors.
She was the girl who couldn’t get out of bed.
The one who listened to the thrumming life around her and wondered who would come if she started screaming or if there would be no one, again, always.
Mallory touches her face gently, her nail polish chipping, her fingers finding the odd constellation of freckles on her cheek. “Kate.”
“Mal.” But she crumbles easily enough, feeling the press against the back of her throat as real as she imagined Martin’s so many times. Kate swallows, trying to chase it away -the tears, the sensation, everything. She moves closer so that her forehead rests against Mallory’s shoulder, banishing the world far more successfully than a threadbare blanket ever could. “I just want it to stop. I want to stop having bad days. When do I get to stop having bad days?”
Even before, Mallory was the only person she could stand being close to. Not her mother, who wanted to fidget and pick at her, her worry manifesting itself in her need to fix and fuss. Not her father, who seemed worried about how to hug her in a way he never had before. Not her sister, who had been so reluctant for so much as a high five that her darting, abrupt attempts at an embrace had made Kate flinch. Now, when Mallory holds her, palm pressed to the curve of her spine, it’s not Martin she thinks of.
“I don’t know,” Mallory says quietly, the vibration of her voice, her breathing, sliding through Kate. “I’m sorry.” And then, after a pause, “But I still think I can make a pretty killer blanket fort.”
Kate laughs, watery and strained but without having to think too much about the effort of it. She lifts her head so that she can look at Mallory, can kiss her hopeful smile. Can kiss her again, for good measure. Mallory’s fingers against the nape of her neck, toying with the messy ends of her hair, only keep her rooted firmly in this moment, to this place, to this person.
“Yeah,” Kate murmurs, letting her lips brush against Mallory’s, “they are pretty great.”