Shadows Burned In (8 page)

About nine
A.M.
the webschool would break to allow
students to go to the bathroom and grab a quick bite of breakfast or whatever
they liked, and they would be expected to be back in their places with bright
shining faces by 9:30. So around nine, her mother would be looking for her to
come out of her room. That meant Elizabeth would have to get out of the house
as soon as possible, before her mother discovered she’d left.

She stared down the empty hall, opened the door wide, and
dashed toward the safety of the bathroom. The door hissed as it slid open,
Elizabeth wincing at the noise. The dishwasher, just beginning to scour its
contents, easily covered the sound.

She hid there for a moment, catching her breath and
confirming the coast was still clear. A second door from the bathroom faced the
kitchen, so she pushed the keypad and cracked it by a couple of inches.

Her mother was standing right there!

Susan Jackson stared at the 3V webnews in the glass of the
microwave’s door, which doubled as both a window to see the contents of what
might be cooking and a 3V screen. Elizabeth had one eye wide at how close they
were, mere feet apart. Susan listened intently to the report about a brewing
crisis in Asia. But then a clanking from the direction of the dishwasher broke
her train of thought. Irritated, she turned toward the sound and walked across
the kitchen, away from her daughter.

Elizabeth opened the bathroom door and slid out almost
without thinking and was around the corner and into the foyer of the house in a
few seconds. She opened the front door, slid through almost before it was
opened all the way, and quietly keyed it closed behind her.

The sunshine felt like freedom. Her body lightened, as if
she’d just slipped off a heavy suit made of lead. Elizabeth actually stood a
little straighter and taller as her eyes adjusted to the bright, natural light.
She basked in its warmth.

She knew this feeling wouldn’t last long. When Skinner
called and her parents discovered she was missing, this glorious feeling would end.
They would come and find her and drag her back here, chastise and punish her,
and take the whole of Rheanna away from her.

“Don’t think about that now,”
her 3V voice said,
rebuking her for poisoning her few moments of liberation.

Yeah
, Elizabeth thought.
Relax
.
Enjoy it
while you can
.

“Don’t think about them and their bitching at one another
and Skinner and his holier-than-thou attitude and that brownnosing bitch Debbie
Maselic,”
continued the 3V voice.

Skinner was Mallus, she thought to herself. But for now
she’d beaten him.

“Don’t even think about Michael right now. Try to enjoy
the sunshine for a change.”

And what a beautiful day it was! The early fall breeze was
actually
cool
, a refreshing oasis after the muggy Texas summer. She
rounded the corner of her house, well out of eyeshot of the front door.
Elizabeth stood still for a moment, letting the ticklish warmth of the sunshine
wash away the sterile cold of her bedroom. She looked around at the cul-de-sac
of houses, then turned her eyes upward again to look through the branches of a
pine tree and straight up at the most pleasant sky she had ever seen. It was
the purest blue, and the most cottony of clouds floated above. They seemed to
invite her to come and rest on their billowy softness, promising to take her
away to a place without parents and webschools and worries.

She brought her eyes back to the houses around her again
and, though they might not be the rolling hills and valleys of Rheanna, this
sun was
really
warm, this sky was even
more pleasing
than
Rheanna’s, and most importantly, this adventure wasn’t
programmed
.
Elizabeth smiled at the clouds, promised to take a rain check on their offer to
float her away, and set off down her street to see what she could see.

She wandered around most of the day, careful not to be too
obvious about playing hooky. Elizabeth knew it was silly to even worry about
that. Her parents would find out she wasn’t in school anyway, and her mom had
probably
already
discovered she wasn’t in her room. Still, perhaps from
some need to feel guilty, she kept to the neighborhood’s side streets, avoiding
the main streets in town.

Elizabeth walked toward Second Street, an older paved road
that had almost crumbled to gravel. She walked past most of her own
neighborhood before she realized she’d done so.

The houses she passed seemed old to her, but then everything
seemed old and worn down to her young eyes. The house they’d bought. The
neighborhood. The tire-worn street they lived on. The smell of the air in
Hampshire. Even
that
seemed old.

Her thoughts turned to Old Suzie’s house and how it
terrified her with its smell of ancient decay. Even though she’d only been
inside in her dreams, she knew the air in there smelled like the breath of the
dead—moist and foul. The paint of the house’s exterior was cracked like her
mother’s hands in winter. But the whole town seemed that way. Maybe not as old
as that house, but old all the same, cracked and peeling and hunched over. Old
and worn out and tired of living.

As she turned onto Second Street, she saw an old lady bending
over rosebushes in her front yard. The old woman waved at her.

(come on in for dinner, honey, I ain’t had a child for
dinner in
ever
such a long while)

Elizabeth waved back and noticed how the old woman stooped
when she returned to pruning her flowers.

snip
– snip

Taking the dead blooms off.

The old woman looked like the mimosa tree that drooped in
the middle of her own yard. Elizabeth looked at the two of them, the tree
silhouetted behind the woman, and her 3V voice laughed, saying,
“The
Hampshire Hunchback.”

That wasn’t very nice
, she chastised herself.

“Oh, puh-leeze.”

She walked on down the street and past the old high school,
which was mainly used as a community recreation center now. Local kids of all
ages still played sports there, and there were still statewide football,
baseball, and basketball teams that competed against one another. But instead
of school mascots, there were city and township teams now, still pretty much
scaled into the A-system that once determined which teams played each other based
on the size of the school’s enrollment. The sports facilities for old Hampshire
High were kept in pretty good shape by city taxes, but the rest of the school
had largely fallen into disrepair. Though sometimes, for nostalgia’s sake, the
town would show old movies in the auditorium.

Elizabeth walked around town for most of the day, just
looking around and glad to be away from her computer screen while it was still
daylight. She stopped at a convenience store to grab a sandwich and a Coke.
When she came out and started walking again, she noticed a dog out of the
corner of her eye.

She was startled by it at first. The dog was not quite
collie and not quite shepherd, but a deep silky brown, almost-black furred
beauty that stood straight on all four legs, ears perked up, its bushy brown
tail wagging gently in the air. It stood looking at her intently, and that made
her stare back and stand stock-still.

“Don’t ever try to pet a strange dog,” she remembered her
mother saying a long time ago. “Strange dogs bite you.”

The collie-shepherd just stood and stared back at her, as if
to say,
I see you too and I’m not sure I trust you either
. Elizabeth
took another bite of her sandwich, and the dog seemed more interested then,
raising its head a little and sniffing at the air. She looked into its eyes,
past the intelligence evident in them, and even from where she stood she could
see large, brown pupils set deeply inside pumpkin irises. It was almost as if
the dog had been carved from dark wood, so shining and perfect were the hues of
its coat. All save for a patch of white that arced up from its belly and spread
across its chest to disappear under its chin.

Don’t ever try to pet a strange dog
, her mother
warned again.

The dog’s brown-orange eyes entranced Elizabeth.
So intense. So intelligent. So kind.

“Would you like a piece of my sandwich?”

The dog’s ears perked up at the sound of her voice, and it
turned its head, curious. She broke off a piece and held it out in her hand.
The dog sniffed the air again and wagged its tail slowly, interested.

“Hungry?”

It looked away then, as if teasing her and saying,
I
might be
.

“Come here.”

The dog turned back to her and sniffed again. Then slowly it
padded over, warily, eyes moving, as if looking for the trap beneath the food.

Elizabeth knelt down, and at first the dog stopped.
A-ha!
I knew something was fishy about you
, its stance seemed to say. But then,
as Elizabeth held out the piece of sandwich, the dog’s hunger trumped its caution,
and it came closer.

“Go on,” she said. “Go on, you can have it.”

(strange dogs can bite you)

As it got closer, Elizabeth could see its fur was almost
black, though really just a deep mahogany brown made up of many colors, but
lighter around the eyes and muzzle. It was large for a collie but short for a
shepherd. It came close enough to get a good sniff of Elizabeth’s hand and the
prize she held.

“Go on.”

The dog put its nose right up to the piece, and Elizabeth
readied herself to snatch her hand away at the first sign of her mother’s being
right.

But the dog opened its mouth and Elizabeth, reacting by
instinct, placed the sandwich on its tongue and pulled her hand away carefully,
slowly. The dog chomped once, twice, and swallowed. It opened its mouth to pant
and seemed to be smiling gratefully, at ease already with its newly discovered
food source.

“Well,” Elizabeth said. “Aren’t you the friendly thing?”

The dog stared at her again, panting.

“Want some more?”

Pant-pant.
What do you think?

Elizabeth broke off another piece, and the dog took it more
easily. She rubbed its head this time, and it accepted the praise gratefully.

“Whatever it takes to get another bite, huh, boy?”

Pant-pant.

“Hey, are you a boy?”

Elizabeth stood up and walked around the dog, which followed
her with its head and eyes.

“It’s hard to tell with all that fur!”

Pant-pant.
I won’t freeze this winter, human
.

But the dog wagged its tail, and that gave Elizabeth the
peek she needed.

“Why, you’re a girl!” Elizabeth delighted herself with the
revelation. “Here,” she said, “I’ll split the last bite with you.” She broke
the last part of the sandwich in two, took the first bite for herself while the
dog licked her lips, then handed the second bite down to her new friend.
“Pretty good, huh?” she mumbled around chews.

I’ve had better
.
Pant-pant.
But not today
.

Seeing no more food in the offing, the dog turned and walked
away.

“Hey . . .” began Elizabeth dispiritedly.

The dog turned and looked back, wagging her tail slightly,
panting her smile.

“Where are you going?”

But the dog turned and walked on, stopping after a few steps
and glancing back at her.

Elizabeth started after the dog slowly, so she wouldn’t
scare her. “Okay. Let’s make a game of it,” she said to herself.

“This isn’t nearly as much fun as 3V.”

Oh, shut up
.

The dog turned back once more without stopping this time,
making sure that Elizabeth was ten or fifteen steps behind, then walked on down
the sidewalk. As the wind picked up and the late afternoon breeze cooled down,
the collie-shepherd picked up her own pace, her long fur flowing with the
breeze. Elizabeth had to trot to keep up. Pretty soon the dog was playing a
game with her, disappearing around corners. When Elizabeth made it around, the
dog would be waiting there expectantly, looking up with her eyes shining. She’d
get down on her front paws in front of Elizabeth, butt in the air, ready to
pounce. As soon as Elizabeth started to giggle, the dog would jerk away and
trot farther down the new path, and they played hide-and-seek around corners
till it was almost dusk.

“Where are you, girl?”

Elizabeth followed the dog up a gravel driveway. She was ahead
to be sure, but the failing daylight made it difficult for Elizabeth to spot her.

“Dog?”

She stopped and looked around, trying to find her new
friend, but daylight was almost gone. Noticing the time, Elizabeth delighted in
the thought that her mother must be frantic looking for her right now.

“A-ha!”

She spotted the dog standing in a dilapidated doorway. The
old mosquito netting of a screen door askew on its hinges bounced lightly in
the soft breeze. The dog looked tuckered out, but not quite ready to give up
the game yet.

“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “Here I come.”

She walked past the brown rows that echoed an old garden
long since abandoned, up the gravel driveway, and onto the back porch. The dog
darted inside. Elizabeth stopped, not sure if she should go in or not. Looked
innocent enough. No one lived here anymore. The partially opened screen door
creaked on its one good hinge. Elizabeth cringed at the sound, but that and the
quiet crickets of the evening were all she could hear.

Pant-pant.

Almost all she could hear.

“There you are,” she whispered. Elizabeth sidled inside past
the screen door and was instantly struck by just how dense and thick a house
without lights can seem after the sun goes down. “Okay, girl, it’s pretty dark
in here. I can’t see like you can.”