And that got Aunt Doris’ attention.
She stood outside the door. “Is someone…is someone in there?”
Emily giggled.
Aunt Doris opened the door. She opened it very slowly, breathing very hard now, then threw it open all the way.
“You’re it,” Emily told her.
Aunt Doris screamed and fell down, clutching her chest and writhing on the floor. Emily could hear her heart struggling to find its beat, but it was skipping, speeding up and slowing down. And she kept screaming, of course.
So Emily jumped on top of her and banged her head on the floor until she stopped moving. Then she dragged her down to the cellar and buried her in the coal bin.
Mother would never know a thing.
*
The night after Emily knocked Aunt Doris unconscious, then tore out her throat in the cellar, Mother started acting very peculiar. More peculiar than normal, that was, because Mother was always very peculiar. Mother used to work very hard to keep the house clean. She’d scrub and wash and wax, make big dinners like roast beef and flank steak, but these days she never cooked or cleaned. She liked to drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and take pills. She was very thin and shaky, sometimes she cried and sometimes she held a pillow over her mouth and screamed into it.
But that night when she came home, she started asking questions about Aunt Doris.
“Emily…did she come over today?”
Emily just smiled. “She might have, but I hid just like you told me.”
“You…you didn’t hurt her?”
Emily shook her head. “I never hurt anyone. But sometimes I make them be quiet.”
“Oh, Emily…did you?”
“Did I what, Mother?”
But Mother could not ask the question. She needed to drink and smoke and talk to herself for awhile. She liked to do that. Sometimes she would curl up on the floor for hours, mumbling and staring off into space. Those were the times that Emily went down into the cellar for a snack. She would disinter all her dolls and they would have a little tea party. Emily would pretend they were eating, too.
Emily waited until Mother passed out and then she went and sat in her room. She could hear the Lee’s baby crying next door. It sure liked to cry a lot. When it was dark, Emily went out her window and over to the Lee’s house. She saw Mr. and Mrs. Lee watching TV through the window. They were very nice people. The baby had the room in the back of the house. Emily stood outside its window. Everything was done in blue so she knew it was a boy.
“Hello, baby,” she said through the window screen.
But the baby was sleeping and Emily knew that babies needed a lot of sleep. Carefully, she pulled the screen out of the window and went inside. She was very quiet. She did not want to disturb Mr. and Mrs. Lee. The baby was sleeping in a little blue onesie and diaper. He had a teddy bear in his crib and a Winnie the Poo mobile that spun round and round.
“Hello, baby,” Emily said.
She picked him up and he began to squirm. She held baby close to her and he squirmed even more. Then he began to cry and cry. As much as Emily cooed to him and sang songs under breath, baby would not stop struggling and crying. That was not good. If Mr. and Mrs. Lee came, they would not let her play with baby. They would take him from her and she did not want that. Baby was so soft and warm and chubby. Emily wanted to kiss him and touch him and suck the breath from his little mouth.
“Stop, baby,” Emily told him. “Stop making noise.”
But baby wouldn’t, so Emily made him be quiet. His little fat neck broke beneath the caress of her gray, flaking hands. Carrying baby by the feet, she slipped out the window. Long before Mr. and Mrs. Lee came into the nursery and the screaming and commotion began, Emily had baby down in the coal bin. She showed him to Aunt Doris.
And then she began to play with him.
*
Mother was gone the next morning and the phone kept ringing and ringing while Emily was playing dress-up. Mother did not want Emily answering the phone, but it kept ringing and ringing and Emily could not stand it anymore. Her hearing was very acute since she left the grave. She liked things to be quiet now. She liked things cold and damp and silent.
But the phone kept ringing.
Finally, she pulled it off its cradle.
A voice on the end said, “Liz? Liz? Liz, are you there?”
It was a voice that Emily had not heard in a long time. A very sweet, patient voice that belonged to Grandma Reese, Mother’s mother. Emily had always liked grandma whenever she came to town which was only a few times a year. Usually at Christmas and sometimes in the summer. She would always bring Emily gifts.
Emily liked to hear her voice, yet that emptiness inside herself would not let her feel happy or sad, just coldly indifferent.
“Liz? Liz, are you there.”
“Hello, Grandma,” Emily said.
And on the other end there was a gasping and a great commotion as the phone was dropped and grandma began to wail in a high, unnerving voice.
Emily hung up.
She did not like those kind of sounds.
Afterwards, Emily went back to playing dress up. She put on a white sparkling lace gown that looked very much like her burial dress. She wore a floppy straw hat with a big flower on it like rich ladies sometimes did at Kentucky Derby. Pearls and bracelets and long white gloves. In the mirror, she thought she looked very nice even though she was all swollen-up and blackening, worms crawling under her skin and flies covering her face. Her left eye had fallen out of the socket the day before and she could not find it. A great flap of skin hung from cheek now and you could see the skull beneath. When she grinned, her smile was all yellow teeth and gray gums, her lips shriveled away.
It was Saturday and on Saturday afternoons, Emily and Missy Johnson used to go play in the vacant lot across the alley. There were stands of trees to every side and it was like their very own kingdom. They liked to play very dramatic games as all little girls did. Usually, they would pretend they were sisters and their parents had died in a plane crash and they were hiding from the bad people who wanted to kill them. Or they would pretend one of them was dying from an incurable disease and the other was a doctor or a nurse trying to save them. But in the end, the sick one always died. And that was funny, because now one of them had really died.
Out the window, Emily saw Missy riding her bike down the alley. She had her plastic Barbie case with her. You opened it up and it was a little salon with mirrors and a wardrobe, lots of little dresses and shoes. She was going over to the vacant lot.
Mother had warned Emily that she was never to leave the house, but since she was all dressed up, she decided it would be okay. She went out into the backyard and right away Mr. Miller’s beagle down the alley began to howl. Emily walked over towards the vacant lot, her high heels clicking on the concrete. She saw Missy there. Missy had her back to her. She had her Barbie case open and was singing as she dressed Skipper and Stacey.
Emily came up behind her like she always had. “Boo,” she said.
Missy turned and screamed like Emily had never heard her scream before. She scrawled away on all fours and ran, screaming the whole while. Emily called out to her, but she wouldn’t stop.
Emily went back home.
On the way, Mr. Miller drove down the alley in his car and she waved to him. He just kept staring…staring so much, in fact, that he drove his car right through his own fence.
*
