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The week after New Year’s always felt like a mistake, like the calendar overreached and no one had the nerve to admit it. Christmas lights were still up in some windows down Shawan Valley Drive, blinking halfheartedly, as if they hadn’t gotten the memo that the man in the red suit had gone back home. The radio stations, however, stopped playing holiday music overnight, like someone pulled a plug, and the neighbors hadn’t caught up to the media. Their Christmas spirit was still struggling to live, even if just for a little bit longer. Even the snow struggled to be there, gray at the edges, trampled, broken up into green and brown patches of slightly exposed grass, already forgetting itself.
Kat was laying on her bed the day after Christmas. An almost empty mug of coffee stood abandoned on the window sill, wallowing in its dregs. She didn’t have the language yet to call what she felt depression. She only knew that moving even to grab the cup and bring it to her mouth felt like swimming through oil. Moving anything, even just to walk, meant moving with an unknown and relentless weight that bore down on her body. Time began to stretch in a way that made each hour feel punitive. School would resume soon, but she could handle it. She’d learned how to be present without arriving anywhere, and she’d do it again: sit at her desk, copy her notes, hand in her assignments, and no one would really notice; or, if they did, they’d mistake her depression for adolescence, which was convenient for everyone.
For now, she only had to be present to herself, as much as she was able, in her own room. It was narrow and practical, like everything else in the house, with beige walls, a twin bed with a comforter her mother had chosen because it wouldn’t show stains, a desk with a single drawer that stuck unless you lifted it just so, a bureau for her modest collection of clothing. There was nothing frivolous, nothing that suggested excess or joy or risk.
The Christmas gift sat beneath the desk, still in its box.
It was a coat: navy blue with a wool blend. Sensible. Her mother had presented it with a look that said this is what love looks like. Kat had smiled the way she was expected to smile and had put it on immediately, sleeves a little stiff, shoulders a little tight. It shouldn’t have mattered much that her parents didn’t know blue was her least favorite color, or that wool made her itch, but it did. The itching felt like proof; a small, constant reminder that comfort was never the point.
“You will grow into it,” her mother had said.
Kat had nodded, already understanding the double meaning. It was time for her to grow up and stop expecting toys and other childish things, time for her to grow up, and put on your big girl coat, and move on.
Christmas morning had begun without ceremony. No one woke anyone else. There was no rush, no anticipation. Kat came downstairs on her own, the house already fully awake, already practical. The living room looked staged rather than festive, the fake tree positioned carefully so it didn’t crowd the furniture. The lights were on, but only because the room needed light, not because anyone wanted a festive glow.
Her parents sat on opposite ends of the couch, the space between them filled with a silence that pretended it was comfortable. Her father read the paper he read every day, the pages folded just so, as if this morning was interchangeable with all the others. Her mother held a mug of tea, untouched, cooling as she stared at nothing in particular.
There wasn’t any music. There was no coffee brewing, no small indulgences. The kitchen remained exactly as it always was, clean and uninviting, like a room that didn’t expect you were going to stay long.
Presents were opened efficiently: one at a time, no wrapping paper torn, only peeled back and folded into neat piles. Socks. A book her mother had approved because it was “good for her to read it.” The coat. Her father received a new wallet. He had gotten one last year. Her mother received a cardigan she had asked for.
“Ver nice,” her mother said, lifting it up out of the box. She nodded approvingly. “Thank you, dear.”
Kat also said thank you for her few gifts. She meant it, mostly. Gratitude had been trained into her early, and nothing she had received was anything less than she expected.
They ate breakfast late and without appetite. It was the same meal they always had: toast, eggs, nothing sweet. The table conversation stayed on safe topics: weather, schedules for the new year, what still needed to be done before school started again. At no point did anyone ask Kat how she felt. At no point did anyone mention joy, or Jesus, for that matter. Kat wondered what the point of it all was. By the afternoon, Christmas had begun to feel like one big over-stuffed fruitcake that had gone stale, and all the fruit in it was bitter.
Kat retreated to her room with the excuse of homework she didn’t need to do. Downstairs, she could hear her parents moving around each other, the low murmur of voices that never quite rose into either argument or excitement. The house absorbed the day and gave nothing back. At five o’clock, while the sky was still faintly lit, her mother took down the tree. There wasn’t an announcement, no pause, just the quiet removal of ornaments, the careful wrapping of lights, the branches stripped bare with methodical precision. By dinner, the corner of the room was empty again, as if Christmas had never been there at all. Kat looked glumly at the corner where it stood from the stairs, unseen, and understood something she wouldn’t have words for until much later on: after Christmas is over, time stops pretending it has a purpose, and the year just moves on.
The days between running up to New Year’s stretched long and unstructured, a hallway with no doors. There wasn’t any school to attend, no homework to complete, no friends calling to fill the hours. The phone stayed silent. Everyone else seemed to disappear into families that wanted them or places that made sense. Kat stayed home.
Her parents treated the week like a logistical inconvenience. Her father worked irregular hours, leaving early and returning late. Her mother kept busy with errands that didn’t need running and lists that didn’t need making. They spoke to Kat only to confirm where she was, not how she felt. Upstairs. In her room. Fine.
With nothing to measure the days against, they all began to blur together. Morning arrived without meaning. Night followed automatically. Kat slept late, and then not at all. She drifted from her bed to her desk to the window, staring out at a neighborhood that looked paused, as if everyone were holding their breath for something to begin again. She was just holding her breath for something to begin at all.
She found some solace in a television set she discovered in the hallway closet, a small cube she could place on her desk. There was no doubt her parents wouldn’t mind. It would keep her out of their hair.
The game show hosts spoke to her without requiring anything back. The soap stars didn’t notice her silences or ask her to fill them. News anchors didn’t make her eat inconvenient meals with them or watch her push around her eggs on a plate every morning. She kept the TV on all day, with the volume low and the flicker constant. Talk shows bled into reruns, reruns into news. People laughed at things that didn’t feel funny. Commercials promised relief in small, affordable doses.
On New Year’s Eve, she watched the ball drop alone.
Her parents went to bed before eleven, citing the morning and having to prepare for a normal work week. Kat watched the festivities in the living room with the lights dimmed, the television glowing too bright against the darkness. She sat cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of detergent, counting the seconds with strangers who seemed impossibly alive.
Ten. Nine. Eight…
The crowd on the screen roared, already celebrating a future Kat couldn’t picture herself entering. When midnight arrived, the cheer rose and fell without touching her. No one kissed. No one hugged. The house remained quiet, unchanged, and utterly indifferent to a single shift in the calendar.
Kat waited a moment, just in case something was supposed to happen. It felt like it was supposed to. There was all that talk about the big change, about societal collapse, about computers shutting down. But nothing happened, and she went to bed slightly disappointed.
New Year’s Day arrived flat and gray. Kat ate toast standing at the kitchen counter and returned to her room for one more day. It wasn’t often she longed for school, but tears lingered at the edges of her eyes when she thought about leaving the house and having something to do, anything to do, even if it was high school. She flicked the television on for another morning of zoning out: one last hurrah, when the news came on, and she saw the girl appear on her television screen.
Caroline Garcia was from downtown Baltimore. Her photo showed a girl of no more than nine years, freckled, with reddish-brown hair pulled into uneven pigtails. She was last seen a week before, walking towards the bus stop after visiting a friend on Kilmore Ave. The anchor’s voice softened around the details, as if his volume could substitute for care. She never arrived home. The camera lingered on the photo, longer than necessary. A banner appeared beneath the image:
NINE-YEAR-OLD BALTIMORE GIRL GOES MISSING
Kat leaned forward without realizing she had moved. Something about that face was familiar, but she couldn’t pinpoint it. The timing of it all unsettled her, and she felt a pang of guilt for having any negative thoughts about her own Christmas. Many times it’s a lot worse for a lot of other people. Caroline’s face stayed with her after the television moved on.
Even as school finally began again the next day, Caroline wouldn’t leave her side. Kat watched the segment again each night. And the night after that. She memorized the girl’s face. She learned the street where she disappeared. She could picture the row of houses, the narrow sidewalks, the way the city pressed in. She didn’t know why it mattered so much, only that it did, and that she was sure she’d seen the girl before, walking down her own street, which was only one street over from Kilmore Ave.
Kat stayed in her room a lot after realizing that the girl had walked right past her house. She stopped eating lunch at school. She told her mother she wasn’t hungry at dinner, which was technically true. Hunger had begun to feel like a rumor, something she remembered from another life. At night, she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, counting the faint cracks in the plaster, tracing them into maps. She thought some more about the girl from the Inner Harbor, and about the coat packed away, untouched in a box under her desk. She thought about how Christmas had ended not with celebration but with cleanup, with the stripping away of any evidence of its joy. She thought about how a little girl could be cleaned up in just the same way.
January seemed to stretch out in front of her forever. There was no ritual for the after, no instructions for what you were supposed to do once hope packed up its decorations and left. Kat understood, dimly, that this was what adulthood might feel like: an endless series of days where nothing terrible happened but nothing good arrived either. Maybe that was all there was to look forward to.
Kat began to think, not for the first time, that a joyful life, if one exists, was a mistake. She was a mistake, in fact, and had simply lasted too long. Maybe all of life was like that: one chaotic and insignificant mistake. The thought didn’t arrive dramatically. It slipped in like a suggestion, like a practical solution. If Christmas was over forever, if the world only moved forward into grayer versions of itself, then what was she meant to do with all this excess feeling?
She had no words for her despair; it was only an amorphous weight that sat on her limbs and held them down.
On the floor below, her parents moved around each other with care, their careful footsteps echoing around the house, but it was her mother’s bedroom that Kat’s mind was preoccupied with. The door stayed closed most of the time, but she knew what was inside. She had catalogued it unconsciously over the last few years, during her darkest moments. Everything was meticulous, of course, and cleaned five times over. Beside the usual bed and bureaus, there was a nightstand with a drawer, and inside that drawer, medications. Once, when her mother had opened the drawer to get her some pills for a headache, Kat saw the orange bottles lined up. Another time, when she had wondered about her mother’s phone calls with hushed voices to what she thought was a doctor, Kat had snuck in to see what those medications were: anti-depressants, mostly.
That final night, she lay awake listening to the house settle in around her. Pipes ticked. A distant car rumbled to life. The hum of the refrigerator kicked on. She imagined Christmas as a place you could be exiled from. Not punished exactly, just… sent on, forced to live in the after, and now she was in it. Though the holiday wasn’t much to look forward to before, at least it had been something. At school, mostly, there had been a buzz. Now, looking forward, there was nothing.
When Kat finally got up, her body moved without ceremony. There were no tears, no self-talk, just the strange calm of someone who decided what she had to do, as she walked down the hall and stood in front of her mother’s bedroom door. On the other side of it was judgment, the kind her mother specialized in, the kind that came dressed as responsibility and made everything about control. The shuffling continued downstairs, and she was pretty certain she could get in and out without too much noise, but if she got caught…
Kat turned the knob anyway.
The room smelled like perfume and clean laundry. It was her mother’s predictable world: organized, safe, sheltered, as if chaos could be kept out with enough tidy surfaces. She crossed over to the nightstand and opened the drawer. The orange bottles were there, waiting, just as she remembered. Kat took them with hands that didn’t feel like her own, and as she stepped back into the hallway, she thought, with a sudden, sharp clarity that felt almost like prophecy: If I’m wrong, I’m wrong forever. If I’m right, no one will know. There was nothing else to do but sneak back out of her mother’s room, make her way to bed and fall asleep, with the pills tucked safely under her pillow. She wasn’t quite ready yet.
At school the next day, the halls smelled like wet boots and cafeteria bleach. Translucent brown slush dappled the yellowed linoleum floors. Fluorescent lights made everyone look tired, even the kids who still had reasons not to be. Kat moved through it all like a ghost. The pills were in her pocket, and though she didn’t know exactly why she kept from taking them, it felt better to have them around, like a friend you wanted to be with but didn’t really want to talk to.
Teachers said her name and expected her to answer. Friends, if she still could be said to have them, asked lazy questions that were really just noises.
“You good?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
Everyone around her let her keep the lie because everyone was tired, and it was January, and nobody wanted another relational responsibility.
Kat wanted to tell someone about Caroline Garcia, and there were a few times, especially around Mrs. Dent, her math teacher, that she came close to doing so, but when the bell rang and everyone filed out of class, she lingered only for a moment before moving on with everybody else. She couldn’t bring herself to find the correct opening. There was no way to say, I think I know where that girl is. She could hardly say it to herself.
When she got back home that afternoon, she went straight to her room, and as she removed her coat to throw it on her bed, she fingered the bottle in its pocket, just to make sure it was still waiting patiently. She did her homework with the television on low, not because she cared about the assignments, but because she couldn’t bear the silence. Silence had begun to feel like a trap door. The thought came to her that maybe, if she took those pills, there would be too much silence on the other side. Maybe it’d be too quiet. She found herself pushing down the anxiety and telling herself that whatever was there to meet her was probably better than what she already had.
Kat didn’t remember falling asleep, but she dreamed a crowd of little girls and boys met her in a dark and musty room, lit only by the candles in their hands. Her nostrils rebelled against the acrid smell of mildew. The children stood close together. None of them touched one another or looked at their companions, but Kat could sense they were aware they weren’t alone; they were certainly aware of her. It was her they were looking at. Some children were small enough to still carry softness in their faces. Others were a bit older, their expressions already worn thin by time and suffering and a life that had asked too much of them too soon. They were quiet, ordinary, dressed in the kinds of clothes children wore every day: hoodies, sneakers, coats that looked like they were picked up at any neighborhood store.
Death was pretty mundane, thought Kat, as she studied them. They’re just like everybody else. They didn’t float. They weren’t translucent. They just stood there and stared, as if she had shown up underdressed to a party.
“We know who you are,” said one of them, a small, golden-haired boy of about eight. His blue eyes were full of sadness.
The others murmured in agreement. They all knew who she was. Somehow Kat got the feeling that they expected her to know them, too.
She felt a tightening in her chest as she moved among them. She couldn’t have named a single one, not with her waking mind, and yet deep down inside she knew them. Not their names, not their faces, but their weight, their absence, the way the world had continued without noticing the shape each one of them had left behind.
Some studied her closely. Others stared past her, toward something behind her that she couldn’t see. A few looked tired. Another few looked peaceful, their faces resigned to whatever fate had met them.
A girl of maybe nine or ten moved forward, with freckles and her hair pulled back unevenly. She didn’t speak, but Kat understood her anyway.
“Caroline,” she said.
Kat broke through the surface of her dream, and she found herself groggy and barely conscious, her body heavy in a way she didn’t recognize. The room swayed slightly. Her mouth was dry. Her thoughts felt distant, muffled, as if traveling through water. She lay there for a long time, staring at the dark, trying to remember what she was doing before she had closed her eyes. The dream clung to her, not as images but as feeling: the sense of being expected, of being seen, of being needed for something she didn’t yet understand.
She was less sure, suddenly, that death was what she needed.
The certainty she’d felt earlier—the clean, logical calm—had thinned. It hadn’t disappeared, exactly, but it no longer felt like an answer, more like a door she wasn’t meant to walk through yet. All she knew was that those children hadn’t looked relieved to see her, but they had looked patient. They were waiting for her to join them, and maybe, she thought dimly as sleep threatened to pull her under again, the pills weren’t the best idea after all.
Later, this would bother her more than the rest of it. She would replay the night in fragments, searching for a moment of transition, some cinematic fade-out that would explain how she crossed from intention into absence, but there was no clean line, no curtain closing, just a thinning of her world.
She remembered sitting on the edge of her bed with the bottles open on the desk, the labels turned outward like they were trying to introduce themselves. She remembered thinking, absurdly, that she should put the caps back on so her mother wouldn’t know right away. She remembered lying down because standing had begun to feel unnecessary. After that, memory dissolved into sensation: neither pain nor peace, but something flatter. There was a dim pressure, like being underwater without drowning, suspended in darkness. Sounds arrived without meaning. Her own thoughts lost their edges. The room receded until it felt very far away, as if she were shrinking inside herself, folding inward, becoming small enough to be overlooked. And then she found herself in that crowded room of death, with all the other little girls and boys who waited for her, and after waking and sleeping a couple times more, her body shut down for good.
The final time awareness returned to her, it seeped back in slowly. There was a smell first, sharp and sterile. It smelled nothing like her room, nothing like home, clean as that was. Sound flooded her ears: a rhythmic beeping, patient and mechanical, pulsing beside her.
Kat opened her eyes.
The ceiling above her was white and unfamiliar, punctured by a fluorescent fixture that hummed faintly. She blinked, and the world swam, then steadied. Her mouth tasted wrong: bitter, dry, like she’d been chewing on coins. She tried moving and discovered her body felt both heavy and distant, loaned out to someone else and returned improperly assembled. Tubes flowed into her wrists, attached painlessly there by medical tape.
“Hey,” someone said softly.
Kat turned her head.
Abbey sat in a chair beside her. She looked the same as always: too thin and too pale. Her dark hair was pulled back the way she used to wear it when she didn’t want it in her face. She wore a gray sweater Kat recognized immediately. “You’re awake.”
Kat stared at her, unblinking. The room tilted again, not from dizziness this time but from something deeper and more disorienting. Reality was shifting for her along with everything else. Her throat worked, but no sound came out at first. When she tried again, her voice was hoarse and small.
“Am I dead?”
Abbey smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It was tired, the kind of smile you give when a child asks the wrong question, because they don’t know how to ask the right one. “If you were,” she said, “you wouldn’t be asking me that. Believe me, you’d know.”
Kat swallowed. Her chest felt tight, constricted, like it was bracing for something even more shocking. “Then how are you here?” she asked. “Aren’t you…dead?”
Abbey looked down at her hands folded neatly in her lap. For a moment, she didn’t answer, but when she finally spoke, her voice was gentle. “I forgive you,” Abbey said. “I want you to know that.”
The words landed with unexpected force.
Kat frowned. “For what?”
“For pretending you never knew me.”
Kat felt something crack open behind her ribs, and tears surged upwards into her eyes. They began spilling onto her cheeks. “I didn’t know where you were going,” she said. The words came faster now, urgency creeping in. “I ran, because . . . because I couldn’t face it. It wasn’t you—”
“I know,” Abbey said. “That’s why I forgive you.”
Kat shook her head. The beeping machine beside her bed suddenly seemed too loud. “I thought you were dead.”
Abbey met her eyes then and held them. “I am, Kat,” she said. “I know it’s another thing you don’t want to believe, but I am. Not the way you think of it, though. Death isn’t really like any of us think.”
Kat tried sitting up and failed. Her arms trembled by her side uselessly. Abbey stood and came closer to her, placing a hand on the bed rail. Her presence felt solid, real, warm.
“Why am I here?” Kat asked. “Why aren’t you here instead?”
Abbey’s gaze drifted toward the far wall, where a small clock ticked with deliberate indifference. “You didn’t finish.”
“Finish what?”
“Looking,” Abbey said.
Kat’s mind scrambled, trying to assemble meaning from the pieces she held. “I wanted to tell people. I did. I just couldn’t bring myself to.”
“I know,” said Abbey.
Kat stared at her. “How do you know?”
Abbey’s mouth curved again, that same, sad, knowing smile. “There are places people don’t like going: basements, crawl spaces, you know, the undersides of things. They don’t go because they can’t see in those places, and people want to see, they want to figure things out before they take a step. But that’s not really what life’s like, is it? It’s not really what death’s like either. Sometimes you have to look, even when you’re pretty sure you’re not going to like what you find.”
Kat’s pulse quickened. Her fingers curled up the thin hospital blanket. “So what does that have to do with you, with us?”
Abbey leaned in closer. Her voice dropped. “You need to look in the basement.”
Kat’s heart hammered so hard it hurt. She whispered, “Whose basement, Abbey?”
Abbey straightened up, her expression sharpening slightly, like someone remembering a boundary she wasn’t allowed to cross. “You already know, Kat.”
She felt the tears gathering again. “I didn’t want to do it,” she said again. “I didn’t want to run, Abbey. I just didn’t know how to stay.”
Abbey reached out and brushed her fingers lightly over Kat’s wrist. The touch was brief, almost reverent. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I came, to help you not to run.”
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Abbey’s hand withdrew just as the doorknob turned, and Kat’s mother entered the room. Her face was composed in the way it always was when emotion threatened to complicate logistics. Her coat was still on. Her purse hung from her shoulder. She took in the scene with a single glance, her eyes flicking from Kat to the machines to the empty chair beside the bed.
“Honestly,” her mother said, exhaling sharply. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put us through?”
A nurse followed her mother in, placing a gentle hand on the doorframe like she was bracing herself for impact. “She’s just waking up,” she said, carefully. “It might help to give her a minute.”
Her mother waved the suggestion away. “This is what she does,” she said. “She gets dramatic. She wants attention.”
Kat stared through her mother, at the space where Abbey had stood moments before. The room felt charged, like the air after a lightning strike.
“Kat,” her mother said, sharper now. “Are you listening to me?”
Kat opened her mouth. What she wanted to say was: There’s something in the basement. What she wanted to say was: I tried to tell you. What she wanted to say was: Someone forgave me. Instead, she said nothing.
The nurse moved closer, her voice low and steady. “She’s been through a lot,” she said. “Let’s focus on getting her stable.”
Her mother sighed, the sound heavy with inconvenience. Kat closed her eyes. Behind her lids, a spiral formed with a dark dot at its center, a place beneath the house where the world kept its secrets. And somewhere between life and whatever came after, Abbey was waiting for her to make the right choice.
And yet, as she nestled into sleep, blissfully aware of the ability to sleep in a place that wasn’t home or anywhere near her parents, she knew she wasn’t going to make that right choice. She was glad to live, sure, and she was going to be glad that whatever she planned had failed, like almost everything else she tried to do in life. But if she was going to stay alive, she would have to stay sane, and that meant disappointing Abbey all over again. Maybe the thought stayed buried deep down, but it was there, peering up from the abyss. She wasn’t going to look. She was going to keep her head down and get the hell out of that house and out of Baltimore forever.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS
Awesome. Well done!! I'm up to date! Still some mysteries to sort out here, but I am enjoying this.
This is astounding in its beauty and authenticity. I can’t wait to read more.