Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 15: Now

I tiptoe onto the back porch and down the steps behind Liza and Marcus, moving silently and sticking to the shadows like a child playing flashlight tag.

I'm not sure why it feels like I'm sneaking around.

After all, they came over for a visit and left without seeing me. Reasonably, I could be chasing after them to catch up and say hello.

But that's not what I'm doing.

The way Marcus looked at Liza in the kitchen strummed something inside me that I'm afraid to ignore. I don't have a plan for what I'll do if I reach them and Marcus tries to hurt Liza in front of me. The idea that I could intervene against Marcus physically is laughable, but I could shout and wave my arms around, anything to give Liza time to run away. Maybe just making my presence known will be enough to dissolve his rage.

Or he could hurt us both.

Liza's indignant voice reaches my ears across the yard. "I'll bet you would've liked to meet the baby." The word "baby" is barbed with the bitterness of repeated use.

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

Whatever instinct compelled me to follow behind them was clearly wrong. Marcus might be angry, but Liza doesn't seem to be in danger. If anything, from what I've overheard, she's the one lashing out at Marcus.

The two beams of brightness emanating from their flashlights bounce around in the darkness, illuminating various segments of hardened grass. When the patch of woods that divides our two yards rises into view ahead of us, I decide to turn back.

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

I stop, too.

The words of the Dolans' conversation are indecipherable by the time they reach my ears, but I can hear tension in the timbre of their voices.

I creep closer, approaching the edge of the woods. My boots land noisily in the layer of dead leaves that covers the ground here.

I freeze. They must have heard that.

No, Liza and Marcus are still talking animatedly. I can just manage to make out the shapes of their bodies among the gnarled, grasping tree branches.

I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.

That's odd. I'm only wearing one earring. I reach up to my other ear to confirm it. My right forefinger and thumb find a pointy little bird.

My left hand, though, tugs downward on an empty earlobe. I'll hunt around 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. "...just so ungrateful," Liza huffs. I take a few

steps in their direction. "It's really fucking cold out here," Marcus answers

impatiently. "Come on, let's keep walking."

Wait a minute. Who is Liza calling 'just so ungrateful'?

It must be me. She must be annoyed that I hid from them. But what can she possibly think I'm being ungrateful for? Her lousy lasagna, or whatever food "experiment" she brought over to poison us with this time?

Liza continues talking as if she hasn't heard Marcus's plea to pick up the pace. "I mean, at this point, I'm just ready to give up. How long am I supposed to pump myself full of these hormones and keep track of cycle after cycle? I can't..." her voice cracks and fills with tears, "I can't keep trying after this."

I've known about the Dolans' desire to have a baby for as long as we've been neighbors. They brought it up on the first day we moved in. Liza has never understood my ambivalence about having children. Every time it's come up in conversation, she's declared her commitment to having a big family.

And if the issue was loaded before I got pregnant, after she heard the news it became almost impossible to be around her. Throughout my pregnancy, she acted as if she blamed me and my uninvited fetus for her suffering. If only she knew how hard I, too, wish that she were the one with a baby now.

"We have some good options left," Marcus offers, his breath puffing into the air above Liza's head.

I am frozen, feeling starkly outside of the scene I'm watching. Their voices are laced with a vulnerability that I haven't been invited to witness, and of course now it's too late to announce myself.

Thankfully, their footsteps start crunching along again and soon, the two figures disappear into their own backyard.

I am alone in the woods. At soon as I have that realization I feel disoriented, even though I've traversed this path dozens of times before. My eyes have almost adjusted to the blackness of the night, but nothing looks familiar.

I sense the dark presence of the Dolans' small storage shed looming ominously in front of me. I can make out the double doors and their wrought iron handles, secured with a deadbolt. When I've walked past the shed in the daytime, it has never struck me as anything but nondescript and functional. Now, it draws the surrounding landscape toward it with an inevitable darkness that hums from within its weathered walls.

The shed's warped shingles seem to inhale and exhale among the trees, slowly and deliberately. I'm suddenly overcome by the distinct sensation that someone is in there, waiting.

I take a step backward, then turn and sprint as quickly as I can back across thelawn, up the porch steps, and into the house, away from the Dolans and thewoods and the shed.