Fall back

She cups her eyes shut with one hand and counts backwards from ten, loud enough for us to hear the seconds. This is what I see when I play those days back in my head. Her leaning against the banister, morning kissing the midnight of her nap dress through stained glass. Him clad in the bone white of our living room drapes, his face woven into the threads. Me tip-toeing to the kitchen, crawling into its brick laid mouth, closing the door with a clink.

“Nine…eight…seven…”

We hid wherever we could fit, thinking she would look someplace else.

“Six…five…four…”

We took our places the way you do in a movie. The whole house was our set. Darting back and forth from room to room, vanishing like ghosts right under her nose.

“Three…two…one…”

I held my breath until her voice trailed off in time with the tick-tick-tick of the grandmother clock standing in the foyer. Tall as a tree with gingerbread trim made from hand-carved birch and a thatched roof. It chimed on the hour, every hour. Like a peal of church bells on Christmas Eve. The sound thrummed in my ears like a heartbeat.

It was the little things that gave me away. A cough. A sneeze. The air hissing out of my teeth. I wanted to scare her good. Just once. She always saw us coming, what with those eyes in the back of her head. The ones she gave Mom.

The sound of her flip-flops slapping the wood grain of the floorboards inch their way closer, closer as a hand reached for me. She pulls me out with one arm; then another. Oma knits her fingers in mine, morning streaming in behind her as she yanks me towards the door with both hands. Fresh from the oven. I smell like burnt grease and day-old bratwurst. She rolls her shoulder until it pops. I’m getting big, she says.

Oma sets me down, tussles my soot-stained hair, scuffs the back of my neck like she did when I wound her up.

“Do you have a hole in your head?” she asks me.

Oma sighs a big sigh, tsk-tsking me in the kitchen. She wipes streaks of grease onto her apron.

She trots me into the den where her hands tickle the drapes hanging by the bay windows. Xander yanks them free, races around the room wearing them from head to toe. Oma chases him around the room, chanting, “I gotcha, I gotcha, I gotcha!”

“What am I supposed to who with you two?” she asks us, hands on her hips.

If she could’ve kept us on a shelf with G.I. Joe and Buzz Lightyear, she would have. When we grew up, we spent Sunday nights trying to scare her.

Oma breathed movies. Not the kind Mom would let us etch into our eyelids on a school night, anyway. Whatever we flipped on was chill so long as someone had to get ginsued. If no one died, she wasn’t watching it.

We started her off slow. First it was Little Shop of Horrors. Then it was Child’s Play. Poltergeist is part of her DNA.

The three of us were planted on the couch most weekends watching someone lose their head to a chainsaw or running full-tilt from a zombie. She got the punchlines sooner than we did. She’d shout pointers to the cast like they could hear her through the glass.

Oma would bathe in the glow of the TV, explaining the plot as it played out to whoever was there—the chairs stacking themselves, the kid-eating tree, the magic closet that takes you to hell. She watched it on loop near the end until it was just white noise to kill the silence.

Nothing got to her. She elbowed me in the ribs when I crawled out of my skin watching Evil Dead.

Finding her a new scare was a bitch. We probably showed her six trailers before we sniffed out a winner. She’d sit there making a face and crossing her arms, reading the queue aloud, waving her hand at the caravan of seen it.

“Why are you showing me this crap?” she’d say. “How old is this? No.”

One night, we conjure something up.

“You got anything new?” she asks.

Xander and I do a mental fist bump. We pop on that Hansel and Gretel reboot. What a waste of an HBO trial. The iffy script, the pseudo-English accents, the glacial pace of a second act. Color me disappointed.

“Needs zombies,” Xander mutters.

It goes there with the gore, though. The rest? Long stretches of nothing in between…scares? Surprises? As for Hansel, that kid made me wanna drop him off in the woods.

Oma loved it. Loved it loved it.

“That old lady is creepy!” she says. “She’s not right!”

The moment witchy dearest sheds the Golden Girl guise and bares it all got her a bit hot and bothered. “Those can’t be real,” Oma says.

She slapped her thigh, laughed with her whole face when Gretel uses her powers of whatever to move that stick thingy in the air and serve up witch du jour. Oma just about lost her dentures.

We would stay up for as long as it took Mom to roll in from the hospital, the headlights of her Prius ripping through the blinds. The jingle of her house keys sent us running upstairs straight to bed. With this bug going around, the state has her working graveyard shift. We didn’t see her until sunrise after cases started surging and the world shut down. It hurt to breathe those first few months. No way to know who caught what. No way to know if one of us tracked it into the house.

Xander and I let her pull the trigger when we popped something new in her queue. One night, I hand her the remote to do the deed.

“Press the center button,” I say. “The purple circle.”

She stares at it like it’s a Rubik’s Cube. We had to wrap the thing in masking tape, exposing just the ON button. She sits there mashing it, her shoulders level, aiming at the screen like she’s playing Duck Hunt.

The TV goes out. The Timex on the mantle starts flashing midnight. There we are floating in the glass, our reflections staring back at us. Nothing to do but make dinner at that point, so we mosey on over to the dining room.

That’s when I see it over my shoulder. There in the TV. A baby’s head staring straight through me. Bald as a newborn, coated in grime and patina.

I look at her and look at it until she blinks and turns her head away.

- - -

No one noticed my hands shaking as I flipped the skillet in the kitchen. I pat down a lick of flame, swearing under my breath. Whatever flashlights or lanterns we had were buried in a moving box. I lit the kitchen with candles from the bathroom, the scented kind that set my nose on fire. I can’t smell a thing. Not since day before last, whenever that was.

Kids from school used to talk about seeing things like that on TV sets, ghost images burned into their TVs. You know, before we were all floating squares on Zoom.

Mom moved us back to Cali to put a state between her and the old man. When Opa passed, we hit the Oregon Trail again to put the house on the market. This old Victorian place a stone's throw from the train tracks. That was before the universe turned upside down and sent us indoors to wait for The Big Poke. Our one-way ticket off Planet Hell.

The red skies above Salem bled like a wound through the bay windows. Embers the size of marbles pelted our driveway. White specks of ash showered the patio. A squad of HEPA filters were running on blast. There was just a freeway between us and the fires raging up and down the Willamette.

I snort another gallon of Flonase and switch the burner off.

Oma only ate breakfast. Mom scribbled a menu for her on the fridge. A goat cheese omelet and oatmeal splashed with cinnamon. Doctor’s orders. She got a slice of toast if she had room. Usually, she didn’t. Our Oma survived on a spoon of olive oil and the rosary.

I hand Oma her plate, hoping it won’t end up on the floor again. Her eyes shined in the candlelight like glass. Sometimes she slept with them open. I rap the table with my knuckles and let out a breath as she flutters them awake.

Her back to the living room, she disappeared into the black of her nightgown. Just hands and feet and a head. There and not there.

I double-back to the kitchen to get mine. Yesterday’s moo goo gai pan straight from the box. Xander mutters something, his eyes glued to his Nintendo Switch. His mask is peeled past his chin. An opened box of pop tarts sat beside him.

I scratch my head a bit at Oma’s plate. It’s picked clean. I ask her how she liked her food fishing for praise. Her mask is still pulled snug over her ears. The row of candles lining the kitchen shelf halves her face in shadow. She gestures to the empty chair next to me. Xander just frowns, lost in his game. I evil-eye the lab, half-expecting him to toss up a plateful.

Nothing.

Bailey just sits there, curled up beside a table leg, gnawing at one of the tennis balls holding up Oma’s walker.

She points a fork at the shadows. Scolding someone in some tongue I can’t quite catch. I do a double-take, ask her what she sees.

She waves a hand, repeats the same word over and over again, her glassy eyes fixed on empty space: Opa.

- - -

He built this house from top to bottom. From the wraparound porch circling the veranda to the turrets jutting into the air like a castle. His painted lady. His second love. He carved our grandmother clock from the oak tree he met Oma under. Their names were still carved into the side of it.

The summers we spent in his workshop, Opa taught us how to keep the mud alive. That was how we made the clay-cloth dolls in the garage. The little polymer people around the house Opa cured in the kitchen oven like his Opa did before him when our family was pulling horse-drawn wagons around Europe, he said.

We’d roll them up in tin foil and sculpt them, pat away the imperfections, each limb with a channel for their skeleton of craft wire. Quilt cotton balls for their guts. In their blueprints, they were just an oval head, lines crisscrossing their faces. Oma picked out their wardrobes. Red PJs with bottoms.

The trick was turning our dolls inside out, threading their wire bones through a joint, shoving their spine up into their heads, dabbing it down with a mess of hot glue.

Oma sewed them up the way she did that one time Xander and I thought we could fly off the roof. She worked her needle all the way down the length of the open seam, stuffing her as she went. A slip stitch. You sew back-and-forth across the folded edges, forming little ladder rungs on the inside of the fabric, pulling the thread tight at each stitch to close the seam.

“So they’re there and not there,” Oma said.

I can smell the glue and paint hanging in the air like divorce. See the rows of brushes and wire cutters and needle nose pliers lining the sandy hole board. I liked to imagine we were making little Frankensteins on that workbench.

Mine looked the part. She had the haircut of someone who survived a kid with scissors. Her skin was the shade of a grotty spray tan. The charcoal eyes followed you everywhere. My dolls all began life as hackneyed zombie girls. I could never get the nose right.

“It me!” I said, holding it aloft.

“It you!” Opa said.

“Say the magic words,” Oma told us.

We whispered them into their little ears like they could hear us. Waved our hands over the, sprinkling pixie dust.

Mom made a face like that thing was haunted when they first met. Her smokey eye situation sold you on the idea. I knew it was over if those baby blue eyes blinked.

She grabbed mine by the neck and said, “This belongs in a box.”

I worried where that thing would pop up. It would someday. A laundry hamper. The shower. Drawing smiley faces in fogged up mirrors and flickering the lights. The worst thing about a curse is never knowing where you are on the waiting list.