Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 6: Now

I give Carmen and Marcus a brief head start, just enough so they won't notice me following, then tip-toe out the kitchen door behind them. I'm not sure why it feels like I'm sneaking around; after all, they've come to visit us and I could be chasing after them to catch up and say hello.

But that's not what I'm doing.

I crouch on the steps of the porch, moving silently and sticking to the shadows like a child playing flashlight tag.

I witnessed a change between the two of them in the kitchen before they left and it strummed something inside me that I'm afraid to ignore. It was that phenomenon when a too-sharp laugh or a shift in the room's light suddenly exposes a raw, darker truth in a given situation. In this case, it's the barely perceptible flash in a husband's eyes as he speaks to his wife that marks the switch from casual bickering to a violent dynamic.

I don't have a plan for what I'll do if I reach them and Marcus tries to hurt Carmen in front of me. The idea that I could intervene against Marcus physically is laughable, but maybe I'll shout loudly and give Carmen time to run away. Or maybe just making my presence known will be enough to dissolve his rage.

But it is Carmen's voice, sharp with indignation, that first reaches my ears across the yard. "I'll bet you would have liked to meet the baby." The word "baby" is barbed with the bitterness of repeated use.

Marcus murmurs an unenthusiastic response, but I can't decipher his words.

The two beams of white emanating from their flashlights bounce around in the darkness, illuminating various segments of hardened grass and now, rising before us, the patch of woods that divides our two yards.

I decide to turn back. Whatever instinct compelled me to follow behind them is clearly wrong. Carmen doesn't seem to be in danger. If anything, from what I've overheard, it seems like she is the one lashing out at Marcus here.

But then, just beyond the line of trees where the black of the night becomes blacker still, their two flashlight beams stop moving.

I stop, too.

The words of their conversation are indecipherable by the time they reach me, but I can tell they are speaking excitedly. So I creep closer, approaching the edge of the forest.

Crunch.

My boots land heavily in the layer of dead leaves that suddenly covers the ground. I freeze. They definitely heard that.

But no; Carmen and Marcus are still talking animatedly. I can just barely make out the shapes of their two bodies among the gnarled, grasping branches.

A few yards beyond them, the outline of the small shed looms ominously on the border of their property. When I've walked past the shed in the daytime, it has never struck me as anything but nondescript and functional. But now, it seems to draw the surrounding landscape toward it with an inevitable darkness that hums from within its weathered walls. I turn away from it deliberately, tucking my hair behind my ears.

That's funny. I'm only wearing one earring. Between my right forefinger and thumb are pressed a delicate golden bird and its tiny backing. This pair of earrings was a gift from Owen to celebrate the first time I had a long-form article published in a lifestyle magazine. He cooked me a delicious dinner and then presented me with the set of little birds, impaled upon golden rods. My left hand, though, tugs downward on an empty earlobe.

Huh. Well, I'll look for the missing left earring in the morning. It has to be around the house somewhere; it's not like I've strayed far since Thomas's birth.