But I am done with leaf-catching now. I lie down on the grass, face upward, and open my mouth as wide as I can. Gathering raindrops is a decidedly passive pursuit.
“Dean, c’mon,” I say. “Catch the drops in your mouth.”
“I already caught like a billion,” he says.
He heads for the house. The rain falls in a mass, with a clamor like the sound of a restless crowd, so that I barely hear the screen door slam behind him. My mouth fills with raindrops, and I laugh when I realize I am essentially drinking the sky. The storm intensifies. Lightning splits the air, followed instantly by a deafening crack of thunder that shakes the earth under my back. Only the wind has lessened, as if to make room for the deluge. All the leaves but one hold fast to their branches. This last one, a defiant red, weaves and twirls toward me like an aerialist struggling to remain graceful through the bombardment of water.
“Elliot,” calls my mother. She is standing behind the screen door, next to my brother. I can just make out the puff of her hair, surrounding her head like a little cloud. Her voice is an urgent mixture of anger, love, and fear. “Come inside, please.”
The thunder rolls again, and again the earth rumbles in response. I feel it along my spine like the heartbeat of the world. The lone leaf pushes on through the storm, bravely persevering through the last of its acrobatics until it is just above me. Once there, it takes a final bow, turns a shapely pirouette, and lands softly at the center of my chest.
“Now, Elliot,” my mother calls again.
That night I see the first of the monsters. The rain has passed, my parents and Dean are asleep, and the world is silent. I lie awake in bed, staring at the closed door of my room. I’m thinking of the thunder and the awakening of the trees, and how the storm has left my senses heightened, so that as I gaze at the brass knob of the door I can see—even in the near darkness—that it is turning. Slowly and smoothly it rotates back and forth, as if whoever is trying to enter isn’t entirely sure how to use it. I suspect Dean—then recall that, though he may not be much smarter than a doorknob, he does in fact know how to operate one.
There is a click, and the door slowly swings open. Its bottom edge drags over the shag carpeting with a quiet rustle. The hallway beyond is empty. No Dean. No anyone, or so it appears at first. But then I notice a patch of darkness that is deeper than the surrounding night. Its edges are fuzzy and fluid, but it is roughly the size and shape of a person, like a shadow without an attendant body. It glides into my room and stops. Though it has no discernable features, I can tell that it’s smiling at me.
I immediately think of it as a monster, not knowing what else to call this faceless incarnation of night. Yet the label doesn’t really fit. For one thing, I’m not afraid, not even a little. More importantly, the shade just isn’t monstrous. In fact, it proves perfectly friendly, even polite. After a respectful pause, it bows deeply from the waist, one dark arm at its back and the other unspooling before it in a way I’ve only seen in movies. Maybe it’s British, I think.
When it completes its bow, the shade begins an elaborate pantomime, leaping and rolling silently through the room, lunging out with its arms in all directions. It takes me a while to realize that it’s imitating my brother’s style of catching leaves, doing its best to exaggerate what is already high melodrama. Though I find it funny, I don’t allow myself to laugh or even smile. I lie motionless in bed, keeping my breathing as shallow as possible to minimize the rise and fall of my rib cage. My stillness seems to confound the shade. It stops and taps its foot, then breaks into a new impression, this one of me—knees bent, arm shooting out like a frog’s tongue hunting flies—all with such a theatrical seriousness that I find it even funnier. Yet I remain unmoving. Again and again, from one act to the next, the shade changes the performance. I stay frozen throughout. I don’t want to disturb it. I realize that I am, in fact, afraid. Not that the monster will hurt me, but that it will go away.
In the morning, at the breakfast table, everything is so normal I almost doubt the shade visited me at all. My father begins weekdays with coffee and the telephone, which means that Dean and I begin them with cereal and silence. The phone hangs on the wall next to the refrigerator, and the cord is just long enough to reach my father’s seat on the opposite side of the room. It stretches directly over my mother’s chair, taut as a tripwire, cutting off the table from the rest of the kitchen. But my mother doesn’t sit much anyway. She hovers on the other side of the wire like a hummingbird, pouring more coffee into my father’s mug or dispensing cups of fruit to me and Dean that we pretend not to see. Each time she crosses back to the table, she bumps the telephone cord—inadvertently, I think—and each time my father rolls his eyes in annoyance.
There is a total of maybe thirty minutes during which my family gathers in the kitchen each morning, and my dad is on the phone for the first twenty of them. He runs a shoe store, and though the store closes for business at the end of each day, my father never seems to. I like listening to him. He has a deep voice that rolls from his throat, unless he’s annoyed or angry, when it comes out in short bursts like punches. As a rule, he doesn’t say much, so I hungrily take in every word of his morning phone calls. They are always work-related, and almost always problem-related, which is another reason I listen so intently. If I can understand some of these problems, maybe I can help figure them out, give some advice, and then my parents will be worried less and happy more. It’s not that I offer up suggestions right there over my Cheerios. At nine years old, I don’t presume to have all the answers, but I hope to someday. For now, I take in the sound of my father’s voice and do my best to catalog the issues for later examination. On most days, that is. Today all I can think about is the monster.
When my dad is done with his call, my mom takes the phone from him and hangs it back up on the wall, freeing herself from the tripwire. She sits down lightly—I’m not certain her butt actually touches the chair—then nibbles on a piece of toast and tries to engage my father before he leaves. We know it won’t be long before he does—ten minutes tops, five if his face is red after his phone call, which means something in particular is troubling him.
“Everything okay?” my mom asks. Her first question is always the same.
“Everything’s fine,” says my dad. His response, too, never changes, red face or not. He adjusts his tie—needlessly, since it’s already as straight as the part in his hair. Then he unfolds the newspaper and spreads it over the table.
In the precious minutes before he folds it back up and leaves for the day, the rest of us will compete to siphon some of his attention away from the news. My mother and Dean are much better at this than me, effortlessly offering up whatever comes to mind.
“Can you believe that storm yesterday?” says my mom. “Pretty late in the year for thunder, if you ask me.”
“What if I don’t ask you?” says Dean. He grins, pleased with his cleverness. It’s not a bad wisecrack. I wonder who he stole it from.
“Well,” says my mom, “if you don’t ask, I won’t tell you.” I can’t decide if she didn’t get the joke and this is her sincere reply, or if she did get it and this is her comeback. She rolls her eyes and glances at my father, but he doesn’t seem to be listening. He raises the newspaper before him and turns the page.