I tried moving, very slowly.
Then I stopped.
My feet were tangled in a garden hose.
They had a gardener, I bet; I remembered Laura mentioning something about having one. And he’d left his hose right down there in the soil at my feet, and he must have done plenty of watering in the afternoon, because by now my shoes were completely soaked.
I was getting pretty cold. The last thing I needed was to get sick, too. It would be a nightmare to be stuck in the house with my dad when I was sick.
I bent down, pretty slowly, and in a few seconds I was unraveling this immense hose, which I’d noticed when I stepped on it but had thought it was those roots I mentioned. Except the more I tried to unravel it, the more I succeeded in only sort of tying up my feet; I mean tying them together even worse.
Finally I had to bend down really low—and that’s when it happened.
This thing I’ve been waiting to tell you.
The thing with my elbow.
My elbow tapped the window at the bottom of the stone wall—I mean this sort of narrow transom window that’s maybe actually called a hopper window, now that I think about it.
It was open. I could see that the hose at my feet disappeared into the window.
When my elbow hit it—tapped it, I mean, and very gently—it swung back and forth like the hinge was oiled. It sort of really flopped back and forth, and I couldn’t help thinking what a great hinge it was, and not like the ones at my house that sound all haunted and creaky, or just let out a rip when you yank them shut—I mean a huge ripping horn sound like an elephant fart.
But this hinge was perfect and silent.
For a while, I just looked at the open window.
My first thought was that I should go home.
But I didn’t want to go home.
My dad would still be up.
Not waiting for me.
Just lying there.
Maybe wanting to talk.
I didn’t want to talk. I’d had enough of that, believe me.
Maybe, I thought, he’d be asleep with the TV on. You know why I thought that. I already brought it up before. But I doubted it. He was feeling too stressed to sleep. He’d be brooding, waiting to talk.
My feet were, like, glued in the soil. In the muck, really, because the gardener or whoever must have forgotten to close the faucet wherever it was, and the thinnest little trickle was coming out of the end of the hose, which was one of those new hoses that stretches really long and contracts really tight, which is exactly what it had done around my feet. But I managed to get it off, and the sill of the window was just high enough for me to sit on.
So I sat.
And I thought, Why not go inside?
It was just a simple thought at first, and as soon as I had it, I got scared. Really petrified. I’d tapped the window and it swung on some sort of spring-loaded or oiled hinge, and I knew it was only a matter of seconds now before an alarm would go off. I’d probably get stuck in the bushes and it would be just a few more seconds before the whole house would be awake and that woman cop would come cruising back with her siren on.
I was really feeling very nervous.
But then I realized that the window was already open.
I mean unlocked.
If there was an alarm—and I remembered Laura telling me how there was, and it was hooked up to this roving squad of vans you see driving all over the neighborhood day and night—it was not connected to this window. Or it was just turned off.
So why not go inside? I thought.
I wasn’t going to do anything.
I just wanted to get warm.
I’d never seen inside Laura’s house, anyways.
Why not take a look?
It was probably a club basement. There was one at the house where she baby-sat; we’d made out down there lots of times on the sofas. A huge club basement full of games and stuff. It’d be the same here, I thought. It’d be neat to just take a quick look.
A quick look, and then go.
I took off my shoes and, using the coils of the hose, scraped the mud off them as best I could. I swiveled around, which was tough to manage on that narrow sill, but I’m pretty skinny.
I went in face first. I was so quiet, the breeze made more noise than me.
I was halfway inside when I realized it was a straight drop in the pitch dark. I could scale down, though, because the wall was covered with jutting stones that felt sandy and gave me plenty of handholds. And there was a big metal sink right under the window, which gave me more to hang on to and balance myself.
I made my way down, turned myself around, dropped my feet until they touched something solid, and stood.
I was standing in front of the sink, one of those big sturdy ones like metal boxes you see in basements sometimes. I could already tell just by the smell in the air that this was no club basement, but a storage basement; it had that dead grass and gasoline smell.
I reached up, got my shoes, and reached farther to close the window.
But then I did something I can’t explain.
I didn’t close the window.
I knelt up on the sink, put my hands out the window, and patted down the soil where I’d been standing, so no one would ever know I’d been there. And when I was done with that I cleaned my hands and my shoes with the thinnest trickle of water from the faucet in the sink and wiped them with an already dirty rag that was sitting there, which I could barely see, except by the dim rays of
