The summer heat came into Mara Voss's bedroom through the window screen and lay down on top of her like something with weight and intention, and she was awake at midnight because she was almost always awake at midnight, and because of the silence.
She had been lying there for forty minutes cataloguing it.
This was something she did — cataloguing. Her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Paulette, had once called it a gift and her mother had once called it unnerving and Danny Cooke had once said, with the particular accuracy of someone who knows you better than is comfortable, that Mara noticed things the way other people breathed: constantly, automatically, without any real choice in the matter. Danny thought this was excellent. Danny thought most things about Mara were excellent, which was one of the reasons she kept him.
The silence tonight was wrong in a specific, textured way that took her a while to locate.
It was the dogs.
Harlow's Creek, Indiana was a town of modest and reliable sounds: the freight train that came through at 4:15 in the morning and shook the loose pane in her window, the Marchetti's screen door three houses over that never quite latched and spent all summer applauding itself in the wind, old Earl Dumfries mowing his lawn at six a.m. every Saturday as though neighborliness were a form of revenge. And underneath all of it, continuous and familiar as her own pulse: the neighborhood dogs. The Hendersons' German shepherd, whose bark was low and authoritative and carried three blocks easily. The pair of beagles behind the Cooke house that managed to sound simultaneously mournful and outraged at everything they encountered. The small white dog whose name Mara didn't know and whose hysteria about squirrels, moths, and what appeared to be changes in barometric pressure provided a kind of ambient soundtrack to every Harlow's Creek night.
Three nights now. Three nights of nothing.
Not the dogs-are-asleep kind of nothing. The dogs never all slept at once; that was the point of dogs, Mara had always thought — they took shifts, covered each other's frequencies, maintained a kind of distributed surveillance over the neighborhood dark. This was a different nothing. This was the nothing of animals that had decided, collectively and without discussion, to be very quiet and very still about something they could sense and she couldn't.
Mara sat up in bed and pulled her knees to her chest and looked at the ceiling.
The wallpaper in her room was yellow-and-white stripes that had gone to yellow-and-gray over the years, peeling at the seams along the top of the wall in long, unhurried curls. She had measured the longest curl when she was nine and recorded it in her notebook: fourteen inches. She had measured it again at the beginning of this summer and it was almost twenty. The house was doing what the town did — not collapsing, exactly, but releasing its grip slowly, letting go of itself one small adhesion at a time, as though whatever had held it together had simply gotten tired and wandered off.
Her mother was asleep in the living room. Mara knew this without checking. She could hear the television — Johnny Carson's monologue murmuring through the wall, punctuated by the canned laughter that her mother seemed to find more reliable than the real kind. The gin would be on the coffee table, the ice long melted to a thin cold skin on top of the remaining liquid. Her mother had a relationship with ice: she always fixed a proper drink, always added ice, and then drank it slowly enough that the ice was always gone before the drink was, as though the melting ice was the part that actually mattered and the rest was just maintenance.
Mara didn't hold this against her. This was something she had decided at age nine and reaffirmed periodically. Her mother had married a man who turned out to prefer the inside of a truck cab to the inside of their house, and this was a reasonable thing to fall apart about, and gin was a reasonable mechanism, and at least her mother was a quiet falling-apart, an undemanding one. She didn't cry at Mara. She didn't rage. She sat in front of the television and let the gin soften her edges and she never once asked Mara why she was still awake at midnight on a Tuesday in June, which meant Mara could be awake at midnight on a Tuesday in June and do whatever she needed to do.
What she needed to do right now was think about the dogs.
She got up.
The floorboards in her room had their own topography of sound, and she had memorized it years ago — the squeak by the closet door, the two-note groan in the center of the room, the safe path along the wall to the window that was nearly silent if you kept your weight on the balls of your feet. She took the safe path. The curtain moved when she got close to the window, some barely-there breeze acknowledging her presence, and she parted it with two fingers and looked out at Clover Street.
Harlow's Creek at midnight was not a dramatic landscape. This was one of the things Mara had always found quietly threatening about it — the way it looked completely reasonable at every hour, as though nothing unusual had ever or could ever occur on these particular streets. The streetlight at the corner of Clover and Route 9 had been out for three weeks (she had written to the county public works office about this; she had not heard back). The lawns were summer-shaggy, alternately cut and uncut in the particular irregular pattern of a neighborhood where standards and circumstances were in ongoing negotiation. The Cooke house, visible from her window if she leaned left, had the downstairs lights on still, which was unusual.
Mara leaned left and confirmed the lights, and then she looked at the street and saw Danny.
He was walking down the center of Clover Street, which was unusual in itself — Danny tended toward sidewalks, toward the established paths of things, because Danny was someone who found the world basically welcoming and felt no need to move through it sideways. He was wearing his basketball shorts and the red t-shirt that said CUBS across the chest and his sneakers, but the sneakers were untied, the laces trailing and dragging on the asphalt, and Danny never left the house with untied laces because untied laces were, in Danny's considered opinion, how you wrecked your ankles.
She watched him.
He was moving slowly. Moving was almost the wrong word — he was proceeding, in the steady and purposeless way of water finding a level, not looking left or right, not pausing, not doing the shoulder-check that every kid on Clover Street had been taught to do at crossings since kindergarten. He crossed Route 9 without looking. The road was empty, so this was not immediately catastrophic, but it made Mara's stomach go tight in a way she didn't have a word for yet.
She pressed her forehead against the screen and the wire mesh left a grid of impressions against her skin and she watched Danny Cooke walk south on Route 9, and south on Route 9 was where the quarry road was, and the quarry road was where it was, and it was midnight, and the dogs were not making any noise.
She thought: I should go after him.
She thought: He's probably sleepwalking.
She thought: People who sleepwalk should not be woken up suddenly, you could give them a heart attack, she had read this somewhere.
She thought: That might not be true.
She thought: His sneakers are untied.
She stood at the window until she couldn't see him anymore and then stood there a while longer, looking at the dark segment of Route 9 where he had been, as though she could locate him by attention alone. The night air smelled of cut grass and something under that — something mineral and wet, a smell she didn't know well enough to identify, that came and went with the barely-there breeze.
Below her, in the living room, the television shifted from Johnny Carson to something with different canned laughter, equally reliable, equally one-sided.
Mara stood at the window for another seventeen minutes. This was not a number she'd calculated; it was a number she arrived at later, working backward from what she did next and how long it had taken. She stood at the window and she watched the street and she waited for Danny Cooke to come back down it, heading north, heading home, sneakers still untied, some comfortable explanation already forming in his mouth for whatever half-dreaming thing had taken him outside in the first place.
He didn't come back.
She thought about walking south on Route 9 herself. About how it would feel, the asphalt warm from the day's heat under her feet, the streetlights cutting their yellow circles in the dark at intervals. She thought about the quarry road, which was gravel and ran a quarter mile off Route 9 through a stand of scrub oak, ending at the chain-link fence that the Harlow Quarry Company had installed in 1961 when the quarry shut operations and which every kid in Harlow's Creek had been over or under or through at some point, the fence being primarily a formality at this stage of its existence.
She thought about what was behind that fence in the dark.
She got back in bed.
She lay on her back with her eyes open and her hands flat on her stomach and she breathed through her nose, in and out, and she thought about how she would explain to herself, in the morning, what she had and hadn't done tonight, and what order she'd list the reasons in.
The dogs stayed quiet.
The freight train came through at 4:15 and shook her loose window pane, and the sound of it was so normal, so expected, so precisely where it had always been on the timeline of an ordinary Harlow's Creek night, that Mara felt something in her chest ease almost enough to let her sleep.
Almost.
She watched the ceiling get gradually lighter as the night made its grudging adjustment toward morning, and she thought about Danny's sneakers, dragging their laces on Route 9, and the way he'd walked without looking anywhere, the way water walks, and the smell that had come through the screen that she didn't have a word for yet.
By the time she thought of the right word — the word was ancient, which she knew from books was a real and specific word, not just a feeling — it was six in the morning and the birds were starting, and her mother was still asleep in front of a television that had long since shifted to static and been left there, and Danny Cooke had not come home.