8
Stunningly enough, it took less than twenty-four hours for me to all but forget about the spirit-trap.
Were this a fiction, I would wax here about how I longed for my spirit-trap throughout that entire week away, how I crept out of our rented cottage in the dead of night to howl my pain to a gibbous moon, confident that my cries would somehow reach my boxed companion back in the city.
But life is never that rich nor that tidy. It is a messy, multitudinous thing, rife with calls for the attention of a young boy. And when all is said and done, that is just what I was that summer: a seven-year-old boy, a child, one just as susceptible to the temptations of summer afternoon swims and ice cream as you were in your formative years. I make no apologies for this.
On the second night of our stay, my father took me down to the pier where a band of teenagers were lighting off fireworks. Watching those tadpoles of sulphurous light squiggling down and dissolving just above the black lake water was miraculous to me. I stood with my hand inside my father’s, my head reclined to drink in all those artificial shooting stars, and I felt
right
. It might have been the first time I had ever felt truly slotted into the world, ever known a sense of belonging.
That night set the tone for the remainder of my holiday. The entire week was a kaleidoscope of bright, simple pleasures. I did think about Capricorn now and again, usually at night while lying alone in my rustic bedroom. At first my thoughts would be tinged with homesickness, but after a day or two of rural exploring and playing my attitude toward Capricorn began to shift. Curtains and the thing born of it were no longer as important to me.
Perhaps it was the degree of my divorce from my haunted home life, or the new sense of acceptance that I felt when actually
talking
to my folks instead of scuttling up inside my own head, but I began to worry over what I had done. I actually came to view Curtains and Capricorn not as accomplishments, but as aberrations. They started to feel wrong. Even the once-loathed prospect of returning to school had assumed a more appealing lustre.
But our holiday came to an end, and my parents delivered me back into the underworld I’d so eagerly bored my way into earlier that summer.
Not until my father took the highway cut-off nearest to our street did my appropriate feeling for Capricorn return: fear.
As my mind conjured palpable memories of just what I had waiting for me beneath my pillow, panic wrung my throat dry, my blood began to roar in my ears.
Our front lawn was overgrown and our mailbox brimming over with bills and advertisements. The porch light had burned out. (As I write this, a part of me is there on that porch as my mother sardonically reprimands my father for being too slow while he fumbles with his house key in the dark.)
My mother let out a sigh of relief once we crossed the threshold.
“I’ll take these bags,” she said. “You go help your father with the others.”
I moved down the driveway, glancing over my shoulder, watching the lights go on inside my house one room at a time. The warm glow brought a measure of comfort.
“You excited about school tomorrow?” my father asked as we lugged the last of our baggage into the foyer.
Before I had a chance to answer, my mother called out, “Jean? Jean, call the police!”
“What’s wrong?” my father returned, letting the suitcases drop.
“I think we’ve been robbed! Look at Michel’s room!”
“Stay here,” my father ordered. He crept down the hallway, squinted through the doorway to my bedroom, and grimaced.
“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, darling.” She rubbed my shoulder but did not look at me.
“It doesn’t look as though anyone broke in,” my father reported after investigating the entire house.
“But Michel’s room!”
“I know.”
“What?” This time I directed my question at my father. He was rubbing his face, he was frowning. “Papa, what’s wrong with my room?”
“It’s been turned upside down, that’s what’s wrong with it,” he answered.
I took off down the hallway, impervious to my parents’ pleas to “wait, wait, wait!” to “Get back here!”
Nearly every one of my belongings had been upset in some way. My dresser was lying on its side, all four of its drawers upturned and gutted of clothing, coins, the drawings I’d deemed worth keeping. Some of my toys had been stomped into plastic splinters, others had merely been flung. The posters on my wall had been reduced to shredded strips still impaled to the plaster by shiny brass tacks.
My pillow was lying behind the door. There was no sign of the box it once concealed.
I felt my parents moving up behind me as I stood in the doorframe.
“Don’t touch anything!” my mother commanded, though in a tone that was too gentle to be commanding.
“I did this . . .”
“What?” my parents gasped in concert.
I repeated my false confession, wondering just where it was coming from. I fabricated some admittance of being frustrated over not being able to find a certain toy just before I’d gotten in the car with my mother, and that my frustration had mushroomed into a tantrum.
Though I was expecting wrath, my mother and father both wore masks of deep concern instead of rage. After exchanging a few glances with my father, my mother shook her head ruefully.
“No,” she said, “that’s not true. I was in here packing just before we left for the cottage, and your room did
not
look like this!”
“I know. I . . . the thing I was looking for was already packed, but I didn’t know that. I thought I’d lost it. I got mad.”
The lie hewed so well with the situation that I knew it could not have come from me, at least not totally. As I noted earlier, I never really learned the art of lying, and certainly not at the age of seven. Thinking that swiftly and adeptly was alien to me, but somehow my parents believed me.
“Well, you’re going to get it!” my father warned.
“I’d make you clean up every inch of this room right now if you didn’t have school in the morning!” added my mother. “But I know what you’re doing as soon as you get home tomorrow afternoon! Now go to bed!”
I pushed my way through the debris and heeded her.