It wasn’t that Dara didn’t want to move. She did. The apartment they currently lived in was too small, too stuffy, and too surrounded by other apartments just like it. It was hard to breathe in the building.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like the house, either. She did. It was a fine Colonial Revival specimen, freshly made over and ready to make people like Dara and Alan who had spent more than a decade in stuffy apartments very happy with its spacious rooms and many windows.
In fact, it was the windows that had drawn Dara to the house the first time they had seen it on the realtor’s website. The windows, so many and evenly spaced along the front wall, their dark shutters in such wonderful contrast with the vanilla bloom of the façade, had made Dara certain she wanted this house and no other.
The problem was that moving meant collecting all of the things she and Alan had accumulated during the last five years, putting them in boxes, and then putting the boxes into a truck and transporting them the thirty-three miles that separated the apartment from the new house. Sure, they could pay someone to come and do all of this but Dara wanted to pack herself. At some point. She was definitely going to start by the end of the week. Sunday, at the latest.
“Dar, have you seen the egg slicer?” Alan called from the kitchen. Unlike her, he was packing, slowly and methodically, the way he did everything. “I’m sure it was in the bottom drawer but I can’t find it.”
“I threw it out,” Dara called back without looking up from the screen. She had a picky client who found it difficult to keep account of her expenses and income, and a filing deadline for tax returns.
Dara had already reminded the client twice that she needed to find all the business receipts she could by the 14th and send them to Dara, and the client had done just that – and then she had sent another half a dozen receipts from her travels around the world the next day. And another three the next day. The scanned copies just kept coming and the deadline kept getting closer and closer until it was here. Tax Day was next Monday and Dara had to pack her house.
“Why?”
Alan’s voice startled her out of her grim wondering just how many more receipts would Julianna be able to find by Sunday evening and what pleasure it would give Dara to inform her she had already finalised the tax return and it was too late to make changes.
“One of the wires snapped and the whole thing unwound,” she said. “Thanks for doing this, by the way. I’ll join you tomorrow, assuming Julianna doesn’t send me another hundred receipts she had accidentally found in a travel bag or something.”
Alan leaned over her and kissed the top of her head.
“Are you sorry you left banking for that?”
“Nope,” Dara said with feeling and got back to the figures on the screen in front of her.
She promised herself she would start packing next morning, whatever happens. Amazing herself – and Alan – she fulfilled that promise. By five in the afternoon, all their clothes except for a bag’s worth they’d use over the next week were packed in boxes, neatly stacked by the living room wall. On Sunday, she helped Alan clear out the kitchen cupboard and finished an old box of Cocoa Puffs, to save space in the truck, Alan said.
A week later, at seven in the morning, Dara and Alan stood in front of their new house and Dara put the key in the lock. Alan took in an audible breath next to her. She turned the key. The door opened. The smell of a newly painted, empty house engulfed them.
“Here goes nothing,” Alan murmured as they stepped over the threshold. Dara glanced at him but then the house sucked in her attention.
The renovators they’d hired had kept the original hardwood floors, as Dara and Alan had requested, and had buffed up all the other wooden parts of the house. The staircase gleamed and so did the dark wood chairs and the circle table in the big kitchen, as well as the bigger, lighter set in the dining room. The air smelled of polished wood and Dara almost leaned over the chairs to sniff them.
“Go on,” Alan said with a grin. “I know you want to.”
Dara leaned over one chair and sniffed in. Home, that’s what the smell told her. All the frustrations of last week were washed away by the wave of belonging that filled her chest. Alan and she were home and the gleaming furniture, the hardwood floors, the massive closet in the master bedroom and the stained glass window in that same bedroom were theirs. Theirs was the view out the living room window and so was the barn-like building in the back yard. Perhaps she could leave accounting and start a crafts shop or something.
“I’ll go check the stairs to the basement,” Alan said. “There was one loose step and I forgot to ask Steve if they’d fixed it.”
“Probably,” Dara said, distracted by the rays of the still rising sun that flooded the kitchen and made the dust in the air dance. “Didn’t we get a list of all the repairs done?”
“Yes, and the step wasn’t on it.”
Or it was, and Alan had simply missed it, as he tended to miss insignificant details. This was a strange quirk for a video game designer, especially one as good at his job as Alan was – which had made it possible for them to afford this house. With one last look at the dancing dust, Dara followed her husband to the basement.
The door was at the end of a short hallway that connected the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and the bathroom. Alan put the basement key in the door and turned the handle. The door spun on freshly oiled hinges revealing a concrete strip and the first two wooden steps leading down. Alan reached out to the switch on the wall.
“Hey, what’s this?” Dara said and bent over to look at the end of the concrete strip. “Oh, that’s adorable.”
“What is?” Alan asked.
Dara squatted in the corner and touched the floor.
“There’s a hand print here,” she said. “How cute is that?” She put her own hand over the faint print in the concrete. The fingers were slightly stretched, as children did when their parents took their palm prints. Small children lived with their fingers stretched, eager to grab as much of the world as they could before life, parents, and school tamed them.
“A print?” Alan sounded vaguely confused. “There was no print when I last came.” He squatted next to her. “Well, what do you know.”
“It’s really faint,” Dara said. “Easy to miss. Must be really old.”
“Yeah, probably,” Alan said and traced the outline with the tips of his fingers. “I guess it’s a good sign, right?”
Dara looked up from the hand print and smiled.
“Definitely.”
If someone had told Dara she could unpack and get settled in a new house in less than a week she would’ve laughed and laughed and laughed. Yet by their second Saturday in the new place Dara felt it like her own.
“It’s like something I’ve been waiting for and I finally got it exactly as I wanted it,” she told her friend Lilly when Lilly called to check how the big move was going.
“If you weren’t telling me this yourself, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Lilly said. “What happened to the picky girl I used to know and love? You’re boring now.”
“I got a real life,” Dara said with a chuckle.
“Oh, well, I still love you,” Lilly stated and asked when it would be a good time to come see the house for herself. Dara suggested lunch next Monday.
After she hung up, Dara made her way to the master bathroom. She had finished with her work for the day three hours earlier. She was blissfully free and alone to do as she pleased. And what she pleased right now was a bubble bath.
She started the water, made it hot but not too hot, tested it, poured the bath foam, mixed it with a hand as she liked to do, and stood from the tub to wipe her hands. As she reached for the towel hook she missed and the towel fell. Dara bent over to get it and stopped. There was a vermillion tile fringe at the bottom of the wall and in it there was one tile that was different from the others. There was a small hand print on it, faint like a shadow but clearly there.
“Can you see it?” she asked Alan three hours later. A sharp bout of pain informed her she had been biting her lower lip far too aggressively. “Can you?”
“I can see something,” Alan said and pulled his head from underneath the sink “Not sure if it’s a print. It looks a bit like one,” he conceded.
Dara exhaled.
“So I’m not crazy,” she said.
Alan stood up and grinned.
“Yes, you are,” he said. “But not about this. It’s probably a tile defect. That’s why they stuck it down there at the bottom where no one can see it.”
“Yeah, probably,” Dara said, the tile in question drawing her in, sucking at her attention until she gave up and looked. From her spot by the toilet, she couldn’t see the print. The tension she hadn’t until now noticed build up in her neck and shoulders drained away. “Okay, what’s for dinner?”
That night, the extra glass of wine Dara had drunk with dinner made its presence known. Navigating in the dark to avoid waking up Alan, Dara berated herself for drinking that glass. Now she’d never go back to sleep and would be a zombie the next day. When she opened the bathroom door she caught herself half expecting the hand print to glow in the dark.
“It’s not a print,” she murmured as she settled herself on the toilet. “It’s a tile defect.”
The thought was perfectly simple and it made all the sense in the world, yet Dara couldn’t digest it. She had to check.
“Dar?” Alan’s voice seeped through the sleep blanket wrapped tightly around Dara. “Dar, what are you doing here?”
Dara forced her eyes open and as she did, her body began to send messages. She was cold and she was stiff. She was not in her bed.
“What the hell?” she croaked through a dry throat, propping herself up on an elbow that felt like it was a hundred years old. “What am I doing here?”
“You don’t know?” Alan said and reached out to help her stand up, his face scrunched up in concern and something else that looked a bit like fear. “Are you okay? Did you faint?”
Dara shook her head, almost expecting to hear the brain inside slosh around like porridge gone bad.
“I got up to pee and… I don’t know what happened then.” She had been looking at the print, her brain told her. She had been so absorbed in this she had lost track of time and she had eventually fallen asleep. On the bathroom floor, by the sink. Her left knee cracked when Dara stood.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m okay.”
Alan was studying her face with the expression he usually had when he was trying to solve a problem, the fear now gone, replaced by the small, deep wrinkle that dug in between his eyes when he did that. The wrinkle pointed at Dara.
“We should go see a doctor,” he said eventually. “You may be fine now but we don’t know what happened there. You won’t tell me you just fell asleep on the floor, will you?”
Dara shook her head again. She didn’t want to lie to her husband and maybe she wasn’t. Maybe he was right and she had fainted instead of falling asleep. Maybe it was a good idea to go to the doctor.
“You’re very healthy, Dara.”
Dara stared. The doctor had a slight smile on her face. Her left earring, a small golden bud in the shape of a simplistic flower, stuck out of the earlobe a little and Dara itched to tighten the back.
“Are you sure?” she said instead.
Doctor Dulaney’s smile widened. Her loose earring caught a sunray when she inclined her head slightly.
“I am sure. Your bloodwork is fine, your blood pressure is normal, everything I checked is within all norms. Do you not feel healthy?”
Dara shrugged. The earring shone.
“I feel fine but I may have fainted in the bathroom. Shouldn’t you do a scan or something?”
“Scans are for when we have reason to believe they can tell us something we need to know,” Doctor Dulaney said. “You mentioned you recently moved house. This sort of thing is more stressful than we usually realise. It may cause certain, shall we say, episodes.”
“Or I just fell asleep on the floor,” Dara murmured. The earring on Doctor Dulaney’s ear kept drawing her eyes. The most simple of simple studs in the shape of a flower of the sort that a four-year-old would draw. Nothing remarkable.
“I thought I might be pregnant,” Dara said. “I’ve read weird things could happen when you’re pregnant. But I’m not,” she said after a busy moment trying to decide whether she should sound sad or relieved. She couldn’t.
“You’re not,” Doctor Dulaney confirmed with a nod. “Are you trying for a child?”
“No,” Dara said and shook her head for emphasis. “We haven’t really thought about it, not yet. We just bought our first real house, you see, and we’re settling in.”
The doctor smiled again. It was the smile of someone who understood perfectly because she had been there.
“I see. Well, I think it was either a random blood sugar slump, which happens to healthy people sometimes, or you were really tired and just fell asleep in the bathroom. But if this happens again,” The doctor’s voice took on a stern note, “Call me and we’ll do more tests. Once is random but twice may require closer attention.”
“Okay,” Dara said and stood from the chair she’d occupied for the last ten minutes. “Thank you, Doctor Dulaney.”
“You’re very welcome.” The doctor stood to see her off. “I always like to tell patients good news.”
When they reached the door, the doctor opened it and gave Dara one last parting smile. Her left earring caught the sun again and shone in Dara’s eyes.
“Goodbye,” she managed through a throat that was suddenly the size of a drinking straw. Doctor Dulaney’s earrings weren’t the shape of flowers. They were the shape of miniature hands.
Dara managed to walk out of the clinic without collapsing on her numb legs, crossed the parking lot and got into her car. She leaned back in the seat, closed her eyes and breathed in. She breathed out. The numbness began to subside. It was a coincidence, that was all. There was no way Doctor Dulaney had anything to do with the prints Dara had found in the house. She’d been the family doctor for eight years now and never before have there been signs of anything unusual about her on the rare occasions either Alan or Dara had had to go see her.
Dara opened her eyes and met the gaze of a bird sitting on the hood of her Volvo. A bird of prey—hawk or falcon. Or maybe a buzzard. Dara knew nothing about birds of prey, she had never seen one so close in her life and she had no idea if sitting on cars was normal for these birds. Not sitting. Birds didn’t sit. They stood, like this bird, which was staring directly at Dara, unblinkingly. The outline of its yellow-black beak was unnecessarily sharp, like an ultra HD movie frame. The black tip of the beak pointed at Dara’s forehead, she realised as she stared back at the bird.
“At least you don’t look like a hand,” she murmured and forced herself to start the engine. The hum had to scare the bird away because Dara was not getting out of the car to do it.
The engine purred to life. The bird shifted from one foot to the other and stilled. It looked like it was waiting for something. Or marking Dara for someone. The latter thought made Dara’s hands go cold and her breath get stuck in her throat.
“Get out!” she tried to yell at the bird. It came out as a croak. “Come on, push off!” she tried again. This time it sounded a little better. “Go!” she yelled and waved her hands at the buzzard, if it was a buzzard. In response, the bird spread its wings.
The underside of these wings was mostly white, rimmed with black around the edges of the feathers. Where the feathers weren’t white, closer to the bone, they had a golden-brown pattern, a spatter of little dark dots on the white. Only they weren’t dots, Dara discovered with blossoming dread that filled her chest with ice but without much surprise when she leaned in to take a closer look. They were miniature hands.
Dara had no recollection of getting back home. All she remembered was that at one point she was sitting in her car, staring at the tiny handprint pattern on a bird’s body, and then she was home, the garage door rising smoothly to take Dara and her car into its maw. Dara turned the engine off and, for a while, sat where she was, the garage wall a gray blur in front of her.
“Everything is going to be okay,” Dara told the wall. “I’m not crazy. I’m fine.” She took the door’s handle with a firm hand and it obediently clicked open. Dara got out, closed the door and glanced around before striding confidently to the far wall where a bunch of unpacked boxes sat, waiting patiently for their turn in the limelight.
Next to the pile of cardboard, there was a small black toolbox with bright orange hinges. Dara kneeled in front of the box and opened it. After rummaging inside for a second or two, she pulled her hand out tightened around one of the three basic tools Alan kept in the box. He wasn’t much of a handyman but if there was an urgent need to tighten a pipe until the plumber came or pull a nail out of the wall, he had the tools for that – and he had the tool for driving a nail into the wall, whenever Dara came home from one of her random walks with a new piece of art to hang in the living room. She squeezed the cold handle of the hammer tightly and walked out of the garage and into the house.
The tile with the hand print crumbled into a satisfying pile of terracotta after half a dozen strikes with the hammer. The sight of that pile injected a dose of fresh new life into Dara. She grinned at it and almost jumped to her feet, brushing tile dust off the head of the hammer. It was a beautiful hammer and Dara hadn’t felt better in weeks. She leaned over the sink to rinse her hands and froze. In the upper left corner of the sink, at the very edge where it met the wall, there was a small gray spot, the size of a dime. It was in the shape of a hand print.
“It’s an age spot,” Dara murmured and reached out to touch it. She tried to rub it off. The spot stayed where it was. “Just an age spot,” she said and kept rubbing.
Half an hour later, with fingers pulsing with pain, Dara stopped rubbing and took a step back. The age spot was exactly where it had been half an hour earlier and it was exactly as big as it had been when she’d started trying to remove it. Dara bit her lip and bent over to check the pile of terracotta that had previously been a tile. That would make her feel better. She had beaten that one. The moment her eyes fell on the place where the pile had been, hot, bitter panic exploded in Dara’s chest. There was no pile. There was only the row of reddish-yellow tiles, one with a spot resembling a hand print on it.
The panic burned through her body, scorching everything on its way. It lasted a few seconds, her heart rate shooting up to what felt like two hundred beats per minute, her whole body vibrating. Then her heart calmed down and the vibrating stopped. With a hand that hadn’t been this steady since before she started drinking coffee when she was seventeen, Dara picked up the hammer.
At first she held it with the flat end pointing towards her but after a moment of consideration she turned it around. She took a deep breath and looked at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. She raised the hammer and aimed. She had to do it right with the first blow. Tightening her grip on the handle that the heat of her body had warmed, Dara struck with every ounce of strength she had.
Alan set the glass on the table – or he tried to but missed by a quarter of an inch and the glass tumbled to the floor.
“At least it was empty,” Alan mumbled and bent over to pick it up and refill it from the bottle of vodka on the coffee table. “Here’s to Dara,” he said and raised the glass with an unsteady hand in no specific direction.
“To Dara,” said George, college roommate-turned-best-friend who had taken the first flight out of Texas after Alan had called him with his tragic news.
“Psychosis,” Alan said, staring at the centre of the table. “That’s what they said it was at the hospital. Probably. Likely. Could have been schizophrenia. They made me feel guilty about it. Me. Because I didn’t notice anything strange. Would you have noticed anything strange? If your wife was having a psychotic episode alone in the house while you were at work, would you have noticed?”
George took a small sip from his glass and cupped it in his hand, barely resisting the urge to prop his feet on the coffee table. The sofa was too soft for his spine, the table too low but Alan had led him here instead of the kitchen where George had glimpsed a perfectly good kitchen table with matching, hard-backed chairs.
“No,” he said. “I’ve heard these things can come out of the blue. You couldn’t have done anything, man.”
This wasn’t true and George knew it. His wife was a therapist and he’d talked to her before getting on that plane to Massachusetts. There were always signs, she’d told him, but then she’d added that these signs took time to manifest. It couldn’t happen in a matter of days, going from normal to full-on psychotic and suicidal. Drugs, George had suggested. Maybe, Lisa had agreed. Drugs could lead to psychosis. Armed with that knowledge and the genuine desire to help his friend, George had got on the plane.
“I thought she could be taking drugs, you know. Dara, who didn’t even drink more than a glass of wine with dinner and she didn’t do it every day.” Alan scoffed and brushed at his cheek. “Anything to explain this… this mess. Did I tell you she was seeing hands everywhere? I talked to Dr. Dulaney. Dara went to see her after she fainted in the bathroom. The doctor said she’d been fine while they talked and then she’d started as if she’d seen something horrible.”
“Did the doctor ask her about it?” George said and resisted the urge to shift even though the pain that had sunk its teeth into his spine almost immediately after he’d sat down was biting deeper. He was too tall, that was his problem. Sitting in an office for nine, sometimes ten hours a day didn’t help, either. George swore to Lisa at least once a month that some day he’ll quit insurance altogether, buy a boat and travel the world. She was welcome to come with him.
Alan shook his head.
“She said Dara had looked at her horrified as if Dulaney had turned into a monster or something. And then she’d left.” Alan sipped from his glass, realised it was empty and reached for the bottle.
“Sounds like there was nothing you could’ve done,” George said. “It’s a real tragedy but you can’t blame yourself.”
“You know, I think she wanted a kid,” Alan said, briefly meeting George’s eyes before pinning them again on the centre of the table. “That hand print we found on the doorstep of the basement may have set things off. She said there was another one in the bathroom and that’s where she fainted and then that’s where she…”
George shifted slightly but the pain got worse instead of better.
“What print?” he asked, swallowing a wince.
“A hand print, a tiny one. Some previous owner who put the concrete strip there decided to leave a mark.”
“And there was another one in the bathroom?”
Alan shook his head.
“No, Dara said there was but I didn’t see anything. A tile under the sink was kind of chipped or defective or something, not that you could really see it unless you were looking, and Dara claimed it was a hand print.” He gripped his head. “George, my wife was insane and I didn’t notice it at all.”
George squeezed his shoulder.
“You couldn’t have noticed it. It happened too quickly. And you’re not a professional.”
“No, I’m not,” Alan said. “But I should’ve sensed something, noticed something.”
“Where did you say the bathroom was?” George had found a way out of his own situation. He could stretch a bit. “I want to have a look at that tile.”
Alan barked out a laugh.
“You can’t, man, Dara smashed the bathroom. Before she smashed herself.”
Cursing himself, George tried again.
“And the basement step? Is it still there?”
Alan nodded.
“Yeah, that one’s there. Down the hall, last door on the right.”
George almost jumped up from the too soft sofa and headed out of the room and down the hall, as instructed. As soon as he walked out of that room his back felt better. And he really did want to see that hand print. Perhaps Dara had really wanted a kid although on the rare occasions the families had got together she’d never struck George as the maternal type. More of a career lover and connoisseur of things like arts and fine dining. But he could be wrong. People changed. Biological clocks ticked.
The last door on the right looked surprisingly new. Alan had probably changed the old one when they’d moved in. It was made of light wood and when George stepped closer to it he caught a whiff of fresh varnish. He opened the door and instinctively looked down, at where the concrete strip was supposed to be. A moment later the sight in front of him dragged his eyes up again.
“Alan!” George had meant it to sound like a perfectly calm call but it came out almost like a scream, for some reason. There was nothing scary here, Alan had just given him wrong directions, which was totally forgivable given the circumstances. “Alan!”
George had taken root by that light-wood door that smelled of varnish and couldn’t move. But at least his back was grateful.
“Yeah?” came from the living room.
“Could you come here a second,” George said glancing at the door to the right of the one he had just opened. That one looked more like a basement door. This room that he was looking at right now was most definitely not a basement.
“What is it?” Alan said as he walked unsteadily down the hall. “Wait, what’s this?” he added as he walked up to the last door. “Where the hell did this room come from?”
It was a small room, more of a closet than a full-sized room. There were half a dozen paintings on two of the walls – monochrome graphics showing impossible structures and neat patterns.
“What is this?” Alan murmured, stepping closer to the paintings.
“You didn’t know about this room?” George asked. Besides the paintings, the room was quite empty, save for a high-backed armchair in one corner and a small table beside it, with a coffee cup and a book on it. George walked over to the ensemble and peeked into the cup. It was empty.
“Escher was Dara’s favourite artist,” Alan said and traced the glass over the nearest painting with the tips of his fingers. “She loved the birds the most.”
George turned to see the painting Alan was touching. It had two flocks of birds, a black and a white one, flying in opposite directions. It had a wide white frame and there was a smudge on that frame, in the lower right corner.
“Sharp Objects,” Alan said. He had reached the armchair and the table and had picked up the book. “Dara loved Gillian Flynn.” Alan rubbed his forehead with the base of his palm as though he was trying to dislodge something stuck in his brain. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“It’s a boat,” George said. He spoke the word quietly but Alan heard it.
“What?”
“There’s a boat here,” George said, feeling himself grin and unable to stop. “A little boat.”
The smudge on the frame of Escher’s “Day and Night” indeed looked like a boat. A small upward-pointing crescent with a vertical line in the middle.
“A boat,” George said, mesmerized, before turning to glance at Alan. “You know, I think I’ll stay a couple more days, make sure you’re all right. Okay?”