WEEKENDS—Chapter Twelve

Frank was watering the driveway again.

Late afternoon light flattened the block. The hose hissed, and water ran in thin silver lanes toward the gutter, foaming where it met the curb. Frank paced the length of the slab with a metronome’s patience, lips moving like he was counting, eyes on the hairline fractures that spidered from the expansion joints. He wore a white T-shirt with a coffee stain shaped like the state of Michigan and soft shoes that made no sound.

Ruby and I watched from the sidewalk like we were kids again, waiting for an adult to look up and tell us we’d been caught.

He saw us without seeing us, a flick of his eyes as he carried the water back to the top of the drive. He shut the spigot halfway, let the hose spit and cough.

“You’re back,” he said.

“We never left,” Ruby said.

Frank smiled without teeth. “That’s one way to say it.”

The porch light glowed its tired orange even though the sun hadn’t dropped. A moth beat itself to death against the glass and fell, legs still pedaling.

“We want to talk,” I said.

He coiled a loop of hose over his forearm, neat and practiced. “Folks say that when they want answers more than the talking.”

“We want both,” Ruby said.

He looked down the block toward the vacant lot. The weeds shivered. “You want the truth the way you want the weather to behave. It doesn’t.”

“Where’s Owen, Frank?” I asked.

Frank’s mouth pulled sideways, like he’d tasted something bitter and was trying to be polite about it. He bent, shut the spigot, and shook water off his fingers.

“You brought each other,” he said, “but you didn’t bring the one who started it.”

“Caleb?” Ruby asked.

He shrugged, then threaded the hose into a perfect circle and hung it on the iron hook as if the circle itself mattered.

“You come all this way to ask me about a boy who lived in this house,” Frank said. “Is that it?”

“He still lives here,” Ruby said.

The smile dropped. Just a fraction.

“You should go,” he said. “Sun’s going down.”

“We’re not leaving,” I said.

Frank stood there for a long second that felt like a test. Then he scratched the back of his neck and turned for the steps.

“If you’re going to break a rule,” he said, “you should already know what it costs.”

He went inside. The screen door clicked. We stayed on the walk and listened to the house take him in.

“Is that an invitation?” I asked.

Ruby didn’t answer. She moved first.

The porch boards flexed under our weight. Up close, the door looked soft at the edges, paint tired, the knob cold and clean. Ruby put her knuckles to it like she might knock, then pushed. The latch gave with a small wet sound. We slipped in.

The living room smelled like old fabric and something sweeter rotting under it. A chair faced the window at an angle that let someone watch the street without committing to being seen. On a side table sat a bound stack of index cards held by a rubber band gone brittle, numbers penciled on top. The carpet was clean in obvious squares where furniture had been moved and moved back.

“Frank?” Ruby called. Not loud. Not timid. A voice that expected to be obeyed.

From the kitchen: “If you’re going to wander, be useful. Bring the hose in. Coils get stiff when the nights turn.”

We didn’t move. The house exhaled and waited.

Ruby tilted her head. The hallway on the right was dim. A runner rug swallowed our steps and sent us past pictures without faces, frames that held the outlines of men on boats and women at church picnics whose eyes had fogged with silvering. The hum of a freezer kicked on somewhere below our feet and turned the air dense.

At the end of the hall the basement door sat flush with the wall, painted the same color like camouflage. The knob wore a soft polish, years of hand oil giving it a shine. Above it, three shallow gouges showed where something with hard edges had scraped once, twice, again.

Ruby touched the marks with two fingers. “You see this.”

“I do.”

“Tell me not to.”

“I can’t.”

She turned the knob. The door opened an inch and stopped against a chain. Through the gap came cool air and the smell of damp wood and copper. Ruby slid her hand through, found the latch by feel, and the chain fell against the frame with a small clatter that sounded ten times too loud.

We froze. No footsteps. No voice.

We went down.

The stairs were narrow. My shoulder brushed raw plaster on the way. The bulb at the bottom was on a pull chain. Ruby gave it a tug. A low-watt light woke and made a small circle on the floor, as if the house were letting us borrow just enough sight to make a mistake.

It wasn’t a horror movie basement. No jars of teeth. No altar. Just a workbench with a coffee tin full of screws, a mower that hadn’t run in years, two laundry baskets stacked inside each other with one sock at the bottom like a flag of surrender. Against the far wall, a second door had been framed in where a shelf should have been. New wood, newer paint, a seam along the floor where caulk had been pushed and smoothed with a finger and left to cloud.

Ruby stood still as a picture. “He sealed something.”

“Someone,” I said.

We stepped closer. The paint near the knob showed a faint crescent where a hammer claw had tested the surface and then stopped. Scratches feathered out from the jamb at knee height, shallow at first and then deeper as they climbed, like someone learning how to ask.

Ruby went to the workbench. A small ledger lay there, half under a rag. She slid it out, careful. The columns were neat: a date, a time, a temperature, a symbol I didn’t recognize repeated and rotated like it had learned to mean different things. In the margin of one page, written smaller: water at sundown, crack three one-thirty-seconds, nothing tonight.

I picked up a second notebook. It was full of lists of numbers. Next to most numbers was the same word: hold.

“Measure the cracks,” Ruby said, reading over my shoulder. “Keep the water running. Keep the noise down.”

The room had a sound then that hadn’t been there a second before. A low, soft tap on the other side of the door. Three counts. A pause. Three again. Not pleading. Not angry. Patient the way a tide is patient.

My hand found the edge of the bench to anchor itself.

Ruby leaned close to the seam. Her breath fogged the paint. “Owen?” she said.

The taps stopped. Something moved—a shift in weight, the sound of skin on wood made small by distance and time. Then a voice, thin through material and years, close enough to be in my ear, far enough to be in someone else’s dream.

“Are you there?”

My throat closed. Ruby’s eyes went bright and hard. “We’re here,” she said. “We’re right here.”

It was quiet long enough to make quiet into a shape. Then, almost a whisper of a whisper: “He said you’d come.”

The paint on the plank trembled. Not with force. With attention.

“Who?” Ruby asked. Her voice tried to be gentle and failed. “Who said?”

Silence again. Then the smallest scrape of fingernail on wood. A sound like writing without letters.

“Open,” the voice said, softer.

Ruby’s hand went to the knob. I caught her wrist. We stood there, a hinge of bones and fear, listening to each other breathe.

“You can’t,” I said, and it felt like telling a child not to touch a stove that had been glowing for years.

From the top of the stairs came the sound of a footstep. Not heavy. Not sneaking. A footstep that knew exactly which boards would speak and which wouldn’t.

“Find anything useful?” Frank called down, conversational.

Ruby pulled her hand back. I let go.

“We’re talking to him,” she said.

Frank’s foot hit the second tread. The third. “That’s what he wants.”

He appeared in the light, face as calm as a photograph that never learned to age. He didn’t look at the door. He looked at the ledger in Ruby’s hand, then at me, then at the chain we’d dropped.

“You kept him down here,” I said.

“I kept the door shut,” Frank said.

“He was a boy,” Ruby said.

Frank’s eyes flicked to the seam at the floor where the caulk clouded. “He isn’t,” he said.

“We heard him,” I said. “We hear him still.”

Frank nodded like he’d been waiting for us to catch up to a basic fact. “That’s the problem with keeping a thing out. It learns your name while it waits.”

“What did you do?” Ruby’s voice sharpened, the kind that can cut rope.

Frank rubbed his thumb over his other palm, as if reading Braille. “You ever notice how time slips in this house? How your watch runs different when you stand on the second stair? You can keep time still if you do it right. Keep the cracks measured. Keep the water running. Don’t let the light in. You can hold a summer in a jar if you make yourself the jar.”

“You held a child in a jar,” Ruby said.

Frank didn’t flinch. “I kept the door shut. I counted. I watered. I told the house when to breathe.”

“And when you stopped?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He looked at the seam instead, the way a man looks at a fence after a dog has learned where the weak plank is.

Behind the door: a new sound. Not a knock. A steady pressing, wood answering with a small complaint. The bulb above us dimmed like a thought forgetting itself and then brightened back, proud of remembering.

Ruby stepped forward again. “Owen, listen to me.”

“Ruby,” Frank said, and the name in his mouth sounded like a tool’s name. “If you open it, you won’t get the boy you think you’re rescuing.”

Ruby didn’t look at him. “What did you do to him?”

Frank tilted his head, a tick like he was listening to music we couldn’t hear. “Nothing to him,” he said. “I did it to the house. The house did the rest.”

He shrugged. It was small and honest in its way. “You kids wanted a stage. I gave you a set. You knocked and it answered.”

Ruby turned on him then, the full weight of years in her shoulders. “You kept him here and told yourself a story about heroics.”

Frank’s face softened, which made him crueler. “Ask your friend who ran back. Ask him what he saw me bring inside.”

Trevor’s name felt like it had been spoken without sound.

The pressing at the door eased. Three soft taps again, as if the thing on the other side were patient enough to let us finish.

“Open,” the voice whispered. “It’s cold.”

Ruby’s hand rose before she knew it. The knob waited. The seam drew a thin gray line across the floor.

“Stop,” Frank said.

She stopped. I watched my own hand come up, not to help her turn it, not to stop her, just to prove to the room that I still had hands.

“We’re coming back with people,” Ruby said. “With the police. With anyone who will listen.”

Frank smiled at that. Not kind. Not mean. A man listening to a forecast that didn’t include rain when he could smell it. “You brought the police once,” he said to me. “They left. They like doors that stay doors.”

“Not this time,” Ruby said.

The bulb buzzed and popped once, a tiny insect kiss. I smelled hot dust and an older smell under it that made the small hairs on my arms stand up.

From the other side of the door, the voice tried again. Softer, like it was practicing how to be softer.

“Don’t leave.”

Ruby closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, they were dry and cruel in service of something good. She placed the ledger back on the bench as if it might shatter. Then she took a step back.

“Tomorrow,” she said to Frank. “We’ll be here in the morning.”

Frank nodded as if we’d agreed on trash day. “I’ll coil the hose.”

We went up the stairs. Frank didn’t follow. The house felt heavier by the time we reached the hall, like it had taken a deep breath and decided to hold it. When Ruby opened the front door, the porch light blinked twice. A moth hit the glass and fell, then got back up to try again.

On the porch, Ruby stopped. Her hand shook for the first time all day. “If he’s right—if opening it means we lose whatever’s left—”

“We already lost him,” I said.

“I don’t know if that helps.”

We stood there while the neighborhood arranged itself for evening. Across the street, a screen door shut. Someone laughed on a phone and then caught themselves and went quiet. The vacant lot let the wind comb it once and lay down again.

When we stepped off the porch, I felt it in the boards. Three small thuds, spaced like words: wait, wait, wait.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t have to. The house was looking at us.

At the curb, Ruby turned. She was about to say something when the living room window threw a shape. Just a flutter, a figure crossing the doorway beyond, small and thin with a weighty backpack that dragged one shoulder low.

Ruby’s breath hitched. Mine stopped. The shape paused at the edge of the frame and then slid out of sight, like a fish learning the far side of the glass.

“Tomorrow,” Ruby said, her voice made of two materials at once. “We bring everyone.”

“Everyone who’ll come,” I said.

She looked down the block toward the gym, toward the apartment over the party store, toward a thousand doors that had learned to keep quiet. “We’ll make them.”

We started walking. Behind us the orange light kept humming. The hose hung in its circle like it knew a circle was a kind of promise. The sun slid lower and the house let itself be a darker color.

Halfway to the corner I realized my palm stung. I opened my hand and saw three pale crescents where my nails had dug in. Three marks. Small. In a row.

I wiped them on my jeans and told myself the pain meant I’d been there.