Arlinda curled herself into a ball, pulling away from her mother's touch. “I hate you!” she screamed. “I'm going to tell Daddy all about you!”
“Fine!” her mother said. But she was wincing, moving away, and Arlinda could see how her eyes suddenly sparked with hurt, then narrowed. “Good! You hate me? Why not, just like everybody else. So tell your precious daddy, see if I care!”
Her mother sat down on the couch and closed her eyes. Arlinda watched her furtively, thinking she might suddenly spring up and strike her, but her mother merely put her head in her hands, and Arlinda hurried past her, arcing as far away as possible as she neared her mother, then running down the hall and into the scary bedroom, the one where her grandfather had slept before he died. It was full of boxes of his belongings.
She stopped crying even before she closed the door. She felt numb, as if she were hollow and her body might collapse, like a paper bag filled with air. She could hear, as she sat on the bare bed, the scratch and rattle of the chinchillas in their cages in the next room.
She wondered what would become of her. Had her father really abandoned her? Or would he come and take her away, so she would never see her mother again? How long would she have to stay here? What would happen to her dolls and books at her real home? Did her mother hate her? Did her father?
For a long time, she just lay there, her eyes open. She was afraid. The dusty-smelling cardboard boxes crouched around her, circled the bed. The shadows of the trees shook and trembled against the walls, thin and crooked pantomimes of lurching figures, of people dancing. Beyond the wall, the sound of the chinchillas was like voicesâtittering, whispering, telling secrets.
It was late; she had been vaguely asleep, vaguely dreaming, when her mother came in. At least, it was a woman who looked like her mother, in her mother's nightgown, which was transparent in the moonlight, so that she could see the outlines of the woman's body, like branches behind a thin curtain.
“Arlinda,” the mother whispered, as tender and gentle as a real mother. “See how pretty. See how soft.”
There was a chinchilla in the mother's hands. Arlinda could see its eyes glistening.
“Momma,” Arlinda said, softly, as her mother sat on the edge of the bed. There was no way of knowing that this would be the most gentle moment she would ever remember passing between them. There was no way of seeing that her parents would fight again and again in the coming months, that in two years she would have a new mother, a mother like the ones at other children's houses, a mother who baked cakes and went dancing with her father. There was no predicting how little she would see of her crazy mother when they moved away, or how she would come to hate and dread visiting her. She couldn't have foreseen that her mother would live on in the house with the chinchillas even after the grandmother had died, even after Arlinda and her father had gone far, far away. All Arlinda knew then was that, for a moment, she had the key to all those secrets.
She felt her mother's hands on her own, felt the softness of the chinchilla pressed against her palms. It was its shivering, it was the heaving of its lungs, it was the quick muffled beating of its terrible heart.
THIRTEEN WINDOWS
1.
I
t is set in a wall of yellow brick, third floor, no curtain. The house next door. Neighbors, but he's met them only in passing and can't recall their names. Behind their window is a room so pink that it must be lit by a colored lightbulb. Davis can see a dresser with a rolled-up window shade on top of it, and another window, also uncurtained, which faces the street. A small dog comes in and stands on his hind legs, with his paws on the windowsill, his ears pricked up. He watches the cars passing on the street intently. Standing like that, the dog's body is reminiscent of a tiny, nude man.
2.
A red sports car, idling in the lane beside Davis, waiting for the light to change. The girl inside it is black, pretty, with professional-looking makeup and a turbanlike hat, made of silvery, metallic material. She is singing. Davis watches her lips moving, and she doesn't notice him looking. The song she is singing along with is apparently a sad one. It makes her feel sad, too, and she is moved, involved in the sound of her own voice mingling with the voice on the radio.
3.
He needs new glasses, and here is a storefront. Rows and rows of lovely eyeglasses, expensive frames. He smiles. Some of them are fairly outrageous! Davis wonders what he would look like if he wore those ones with the tortoiseshell along the top, arched like surprised eyebrows. He needs new glasses.
4.
The new town is larger and more discreet. When their moving van pulled into the driveway, none of the neighbors came over to introduce themselves. It is not a close-knit block. The elderly woman across the street folded aside her curtain for a moment, idly curious, perhaps noting the out-of-state license plate on their car, observing as Davis's wife hustled their young son around to the backyard, watching briefly as Davis and his wife struggled down the van's ramp with the old sofa. When Davis glanced back over to the house, the neighbor was no longer peering out.
5.
Davis can imagine his wife pausing for a moment beside their big front window and looking out, expecting, for perhaps the third or fourth time, to see the car pulling into the driveway. He can picture the curve of her neck, her head inclining slightly as she tries to peer through the transparent outlines of her own reflection through the glass. In the background, the boy may be crying, or asking for something. She stares out into the growing dark. Leaves fall.
6.
When Davis and his wife were first married, they lived in the upper half of a duplex. Their next-door neighbor was a woman who may or may not have been crazy. They would see her from time to time in her backyard, wearing her nightgown and galoshes, filling a bird feeder with millet. She was in her late forties, apparently unmarried, childless, and she talked to herself. She kept a coop of pigeons in her living room, in a large chicken-wire cage that must have spanned the length of the wall, and in the morning Davis would see the birds flutter briefly past the frame of window. There were always two or three rising up for a moment, a convulsion of wings, and then stillness. All the other windows had their shades drawn.
Davis found this woman fascinating. She became a character in his consciousness, part of the landscape of his and his wife's early life as a couple. They would report unusual sightings to one another: the time the woman crawled out of her third-story window and walked around on her roof, hunched over, apparently looking for something specific; the time she spent hours in her front yard, decorating her scruffy bushes with tinsel and Christmas tree ornaments. Long after they had moved away, they continued to imitate her high, hysterical cries when one of the pigeons escaped inside her house. “No! No!” she would wail. “Come back! Come back!”
7.
One night Davis is coming home late again, and he is certain that he can see his four-year-old son looking out of the secondfloor bedroom window. The curtains are parted, and the child's pale, oblong face is just an outline without an expression. What is he looking at? Davis wonders. Why isn't he asleep? It gives Davis an odd, panicky feeling.
The strange thing is that when Davis goes upstairs, the boy is asleep. Davis walks, feeling almost stealthy, down the narrow upstairs hallway. The lights are all off except for in his and his wife's room, a diagonal of light falling onto the carpet, his wife visible through the half-open door, stretched out on the bed with a book. Everything appears to be normal. His wife glances up when she sees him and he raises his hand, a signal that says both “Hi” and “Hush.”
He goes to his son's door and opens it. But the boy is flat on his back, snoring softly through his open mouth. Outside the boy's window, Davis can see a half moon, the branching of trees, the hovering, blurry saucer of a distant streetlight. Across the street, the neighbors' television is flickering in their living-room window, pale blue. “What is it?” his wife says. He turns from the window above his sleeping son's bed, and she is standing in the doorway, her book closed over her fingers. He shakes his head. “Nothing,” he whispers. He lets his eyes flick again to the television across the street. He can't tell what they're watching.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just me, playing tricks on myself again.” He shrugs, smiling.
8.
From time to time, he will see something that isn't there. He will appear to hallucinateâwhat?âa fast moving shadow, perhaps, or a globe of light, or sometimes a figure or a face. This has happened to him since he was small, and though it is always disturbing, he has come to accept it, the way others come to accept a nervous tic or an occasional hot flash. It is what happens, he tells himself, to people who spend too much time looking out of windows, or into them.
What is it about windows that he finds so attractive? It seems to be no more than a habit, like any other, something that calms the spirit. He has seen, for example, the way a smoker can sit with a cigarette, drawing on it, exhaling, eyes seemingly blank, or focused inward. That is what it is like, he has thought.
But sometimes he isn't so sure. Like on that night: it is almost four in the morning, and he finds himself slipping into his son's room again, to that window. Outside, the houses are all dark, and their walls glow in the glare of their security lights. A darkened window is like a face that pretends it doesn't recognize you. There is something about it that is coy, and mysterious, and mean.
He remembers that once, when he was about twelve, on his way home from school, he thought he saw a kind of scarecrowâa figure made of twisted vines and branches and dressed in old brown work clothesâpropped as if staring from his own bedroom window.
Once, in a parking lot, he thought he saw a dark, glittery fish, a carp maybe, swimming behind the windshield of a parked car. It seemed to flit, startled, and the light caught its scales, and then it was gone.
9.
Davis has never been a superstitious person. He doesn't try to read hidden meaning into anything he has seen or imagined seeing. It is, he believes, a simple misfiring of his optical nerve, a dysfunctional synapse somewhere in his brain. Perhaps it is due to a fall he had as a child. Apparently, he was fascinated with windows early on, because he once fell out of a second-story window when he was two years old. He doesn't recall the incident at all, but his mother has told it often enough. She can't imagine how it happened. He had been in his bedroom, taking a nap, and to this day she can't figure out how he got out of his crib and over to the window. She was in the kitchen, and (this has always been his favorite part of the story) she remembers looking up from washing the dishes and seeing, first, the window screen and then Davis himselfâflailing solemnly, a surprised look on his face as he dropped past the kitchen window. His mother said that he looked at her for a second as he fell past, seemingly pleased with himself.
He required some twenty-five stitches, and even today, if he lifts up his bangs he can see a faint, pale scar running along his forehead.
10.
No, he does not think of these things as omens. What troubles him is that he's never quite certain of what he sees. Did he see a woman in a silver turban singing in a red car? Did his son watch him pulling into the driveway?
One weekday morning before work he sees the woman next door, and in the course of polite conversation, he asks what breed her little dog is. He realizes as soon as he asks that this is bad, for he can't admit that he saw the dog while peering through her window. But the woman just gives him a blank smile. “Oh,” she says, “we don't have a dog.”
“Ah,” he says. “I was under the impression . . .”
“No, no.” The woman laughs. “God forbid! My husband is deathly allergic to animal dander of all kinds. One whiff, and his throat closes up. He feels like he can't breathe. It's really awful.”
“That's terrible,” Davis says. He puts his hand to his own throat. He has a vivid image of the little dog putting its dainty black-nailed paws on the windowsill and cocking its head. A heaviness settles over him.
All that day, he feels depressed. Maybe it is getting worse, he thinks. He wonders if he should see someone about it. A doctor would probably refer him to a psychiatrist. Is he, perhaps, a mentally disturbed person? Maybe he has a brain embolism or something of that sort. Maybe, any minute now, he will feel a sharp, electric brightness in his head and then all will go black. He will open his mouth silently and then his head will fall limply onto the computer keyboard and a thin line of blood will draw a curving trail from his nose or ear. Oh, something is wrong with my life! he thinks suddenly. He doesn't know where this sense of sadness comes from. His new officeâthe unfamiliar trappings of the new job he'd felt so pleased with only a month agoâseems to become sharp-edged and grotesque as a dream: the thick white-painted pipes along the ceiling, the shelves cluttered with papers, the bare walls, and he instinctively turns his eyes toward the window.
Cars are driving by on the street outside; a long gray bus trawls slowly to the curb, and the doors part open. He watches as a tall, long-chinned woman in a trench coat emerges. In the back window of a bus, a ponytailed schoolgirl watches the woman, too, grimly interested, as if no one can possibly see her.
He feels calmer. Slowly, the feeling of panic lifts from him, and he reaches out to touch the cool glass of the window, almost affectionately. A warm fog of condensation forms around his splayed fingers, framing them, leaving a ghost that melts and shrinks when he draws back his hand.
11.
“Are you in love with me?” his wife says.
Davis looks up. The view from their bedroom window is not spectacular, but he likes the way the trees become one dimensional at night, the way the silhouettes of bare branches make dark-furrowed maps against the sky.
“Of course I love you,” he says. “Honey, what's wrong?”
“I'm sorry,” she says. “I'm sorryâit's just . . . oh, I hate it here! I hate the way we've been living since we moved here. I never see you anymore.”
“I know,” says Davis. “It's terrible.” He resists glancing out the window again, because he knows this will offend her. He has often told her he can think better when he is looking out a window, but she prefers to speak to his face. “It's horrible,” he says. “But maybe if we can just get through the next few months. . . . I mean, I won't have to work late forever. I'll be settled in soon, and . . .”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I just wish . . . I mean, you know what I'm talking about. It's like the cliché suburban life. You wake up one day and twenty years have passed and your kids are grown and your husband is a stranger.”
“I don't think it really works like that,” he says. He hugs her. “Not for us. We're not that type of person.”
It's not what his wife thinks it is, he knows that. It's not love or the lack of it; it's not working too much, nothing so simple. It's something much worse, he thinks. He holds her loosely, trying to name it. He can see his own reflection over her shoulder, against the window. The dark net of branches seeps through the mirror-image of his face, fingering across his forehead.
12.
He is driving home from work. What is it? he thinks. What is it? What is it? The cars in the next lane file past him: an elderly man, hunched over the steering wheel of his Oldsmobile, eyes wide; a bearded, angry man in a knit stocking cap; a lady whose children wave mockingly from the backseat as they drift past. One child, a lovely little red-haired girl, no more than ten years old, but wearing lipstick, smirks specifically at Davis. Her middle finger is extended as she waves.
Davis's lane is slower than theirs, and soon her bobbing hand grows small and vanishes in the distance. He does not feel affronted. The little girl is simply an image, which he adds automatically to a string of other images, extending back and back. A string of images curling, snaking through his memory in lazy figure eights, mobius strips of images that he sometimes wishes might lead him somewhere. And yet there doesn't seem to be any order to them, no specific logic: a dog on its hind legs; a window full of fluttering pigeons; the flick of a golden fish disappearing into the backseat of a car; his mother's startled look as he flashes past, falling.
What is it?
he thinks again.
13.
A darkened window is like a face that doesn't recognize you. He can sense that he is waiting for something, but it is too late. Everyone is asleep. All along the block, the windows are nothing but black rectangles set in solemn wallsâshades, curtains, blinds, silence. The shadows of trees stretch across the road, and cars on other streets murmur as they rush past. Beneath where he is standing, his sleeping son's mouth draws air. The boy's eyelids seem translucent, and his eyes rake back and forth, scoping something in a dream.
The glass of the window is soft and cool against his palms; limpid, liquid against his cheek, his lips. It is a membrane he could easily push through. It wouldn't take much, he thinks, and he would beâwhere? Where?
Somewhere else entirely.