That's not my kids!.

That's not my kids!.

The house was a single-story brick place just outside Columbus, built in the late sixties, with a maple tree in the front yard and a chain-link fence that had begun to lean. Carol had left for Ohio State in August of 2007. After that, the rooms she used to fill stayed mostly closed. Martha still folded the yellow blanket at the foot of the bed once a week. Tom still left the bedroom door cracked so the hallway would not feel sealed. They ate at the kitchen table with the radio low. Martha graded papers the way she had for thirty years at the elementary school three miles down the road. Tom fixed what came loose. They had learned how to move around the empty place between them. Most evenings the only sounds were the refrigerator and the occasional car turning off Broad Street.

The first night the children stood at the far end of the street, just inside the reach of the last streetlamp. Two small figures, side by side. The girl had her arms wrapped around herself. The boy stood half a step behind her. They did not come closer. After an hour the lamp clicked off and the street went dark.

The next night they were closer, halfway up the block where the sidewalk met the neighbor’s yard. The girl cried—thin and steady, the sound barely reaching the glass. Martha came to the window. Tom told her they were not coming in. He closed the blinds. When he opened them again the sidewalk was empty.

On the third night they stood just outside the front window, close enough that Tom could see the girl’s breath on the glass. She held a stuffed rabbit against her chest—matted, one ear gone—and lifted it into the light. Martha made a small sound. Tom recognized the rabbit. Carol had left it when she went to school. It should have been in a box in the hall closet. The boy pressed one palm flat to the glass. His eyes looked red at the edges. Tom pulled the blinds and checked the locks. Martha graded papers at the kitchen table with the radio off and did not speak to him for the rest of the evening.

The fourth night they knocked. Three soft taps, then a pause, then three more. Martha was already at the door when Tom came in from the garage. The girl spoke through the sidelight.

“We’re cold. Can we come in? Our mom was supposed to pick us up. She didn’t come.”

The boy shifted his weight. “We just need to use the phone.”

Tom put his hand over Martha’s on the knob. They waited until the knocking stopped and the children walked back down the walk. Martha pulled her hand free and sat at the table with her papers. Tom locked the door and checked it twice.

The next evening he drove to the hardware store for the washer that had finally given out under the sink. He told Martha he would be back in forty minutes and locked the door behind him. When he returned, the porch light was on and the front door stood open. The children were already at the kitchen table. Martha had set out toast and strawberry jam. The boy wiped jam from the corner of his mouth and looked up.

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

Martha turned from the sink. The smile she gave him was small and tired. “They were hungry. I told them they could stay.”

“Martha.”

“It’s all right. They’ve always been ours. You just forgot.”

The girl looked up. Her eyes were still red. Martha smoothed her hair the way she used to smooth Carol’s and told her to finish her toast, then go see her room. The yellow blanket was still there.

After that the house rearranged itself. Carol’s report cards disappeared from the closet. Newer ones appeared in Martha’s handwriting. A photograph of the girl in a red life jacket replaced the one of Carol at Buckeye Lake. Martha spoke about permission slips as if the details had always been true. Tom started a notebook. He wrote down what he was sure of—Carol’s birthday, the year they bought the house, the color of Martha’s eyes. A page went missing. Martha told him he was only tired and put her hand against his cheek.

The children did other things. One morning Tom found the girl standing in the hallway at three a.m., watching their bedroom door. She lifted one hand in a small wave when he turned on the light and went back to bed. Another night he woke to the sound of the boy’s voice in the kitchen saying his name over and over. When he went downstairs the room was empty and the boy was already in bed, eyes open. On the fifth day every photograph of Carol was turned facedown. Twice he heard Martha talking to herself in the bathroom, asking questions and answering them in a different voice. The boy came downstairs one evening with a cut across his palm; later the knife was clean in the drawer and the cut was gone. The girl hummed Martha’s old tune in the dark of Carol’s room and stopped the moment the door opened. The children stood in the backyard for nearly an hour without moving, then were gone, their footprints stopping halfway across the grass. Tom found the rabbit in the girl’s hands after he had locked it away. One night both of them sat at the kitchen table in the dark and the girl said, “She still hears her.” The last thing he noticed was that they cast no shadows in the hallway at dusk.

He pushed the bedroom door open on a gray afternoon. The girl stood in front of the dresser, one arm caught in a shirt. She turned. The red rose in her eyes and she screamed for her mother. Martha came up the stairs.

“Why do you want to hurt our kids?” she said.

She went downstairs and returned with the long knife. She came straight at him. Tom caught her wrist. They struggled in the doorway. She drove her free hand into his chest and tried to turn the blade toward him. He shoved her back. She hit the doorframe. For a moment she only stared at him. Then she stepped away, set the point of the knife against the side of her own throat, and drew it across. Blood ran down her collar. She stayed on her feet long enough to take one step into the room, then folded onto her knees. Her eyes stayed open until they didn’t.

The boy ran. Tom caught him on the landing and drove him into the wall. The boy’s head struck the plaster. Tom hit him again, fist closed, then again. The boy went down. Tom followed him onto the carpet and kept hitting—face, temple, the side of the neck—until the boy stopped moving and the red in his eyes went out. Blood spread under his head. Tom stayed over him a moment, breathing hard, then stood and went back to the bedroom.

The girl was against the far wall with the yellow blanket in her arms.

“Dad,” she said.

He crossed the room. She tried to get past him. He caught her shoulder, spun her into the dresser, and put his hands on her throat. He held until her weight went slack. When he let go she slid down between the bed and the wall. One shoe came off. The blanket fell across her legs.

He stepped back and bent forward, breathing. When he straightened he moved the hair off her face. The red was gone. Her eyes were brown and still. The scar from the swing set sat at the edge of her eyebrow. Her mouth had the shape it used to hold when she was twelve. He stayed bent over her and did not touch her again.

He was still on the bedroom floor when the first cruiser turned onto the street. He went downstairs and sat on the bottom step. When the officer crouched in front of him, Tom said there were three bodies. He said the girl upstairs was Carol. He said he had killed her. He said Martha was in the doorway and the boy was on the landing. The officer looked past him, then at the blood on his wrists and knuckles, and spoke into the radio.

They cuffed him on the step. Through the car window he watched another officer come onto the porch and shake his head. Later, in the room with the camera, they asked him again. He said three. They told him they had only found two. Martha in the bedroom doorway. Carol between the bed and the wall. No boy on the landing. No second child anywhere in the house.

He set his forehead on the edge of the table and closed his eyes. The two memories sat in the same place. He could feel the girl’s throat under his hands. He could feel Carol’s. He could feel the give of the boy’s face under his fists. Both versions arrived with the same weight. Neither one left.

They moved him to a cell. He lay on the bunk and watched the square of brick change color. He tried to remember the exact moment the children’s eyes had stopped being red. He could not find it. When the square finally went black he was still awake, holding both versions of the afternoon.

Three streets over, a porch light clicked on at a house that had been dark. A woman in a sweater stood in the doorway, looking down at the two children on her step. The girl’s hair was neat. The boy’s shoelaces were tied. Neither of them shivered.

“We’re cold,” the girl said. “Can we come in?”

The woman glanced past them at the empty sidewalk, then back. The boy waited.

“Just for a minute,” the girl said. “We won’t stay long. We just need someone to say it’s all right.”

The woman opened the door wider. Warm air spilled onto the step. She stepped aside.

“All right,” she said. “Come in.”