Page 9 of Twice
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We settled into a small Colonial-style house and I started wearing long sleeves again. I watched television. I snacked on Scooter Pies. Everything from Africa felt like a dream. Someone in our church offered my father the old Baldwinpiano my mother used to play, and he put it in the basement. I spent a lot of time down there, trying to remember the hymns she had taught me.
It took some time before I repeated my “magic.” My mother’s second death was an unsettling memory, and I was in no hurry to go through something like that again. I hadn’t told anyone, not even my dad. Part of me wasn’t sure it ever really happened.
Then, a few months after we’d returned from Africa, I experienced it again. I was on my way home from school, me and my walking buddies from the neighborhood, Stewie, Sandy, and Paul. It was a gray afternoon, and a cold rain was falling. We passed a small, rickety A-frame home with faded brown shutters and a muddy swath of dead leaves covering the grass.
“Witch’s house,” Sandy mumbled.
We called it that because every now and then kids in the neighborhood would spot a crouched, white-haired woman staring out through the flimsy screen door. The legend was that one Halloween she had pulled a trick-or-treater inside, and when he came out, he was never the same. I have no idea if the story is true. We were just kids.
Suddenly, Stewie blurted out: “Yo, Alfie, I dare you to knock on her door.”
The others joined in.
“Yeah, Alfie!” “Do it!” “Don’t be scared, Alfie!” “C’mon!”
I looked away. My mother’s death had dealt a huge blow to my confidence. I found it hard to engage with people,especially neighbors who whispered, “They never should have gone to Africa.” I missed my mother terribly, the long, meandering conversations we had over peanut butter crackers in our kitchen, and the way she rubbed my hair after kissing me good night.
Without her, our house was unbearably silent. At night, my father would stare at the black-and-white TV. I would lie on the couch and cover my eyes with the back of my hands. Sometimes my heart would begin to race and I found it hard to breathe. I coughed and choked. My father would ask, “What’s wrong, Alfie?” But I didn’t know myself. I just wanted to stop feeling scared all the time, worrying that another bad thing was going to happen.
That day at the witch’s house, it seemed to come to a head. I was tired of being frightened and I didn’t want the boys calling me chicken all the way home. So I accepted their challenge and moved slowly toward the door. I stopped a short distance from the screen, not wanting to be snatched if the witch suddenly appeared.
“Hurry up, before she sees you!” Stewie whisper-yelled.
“Or kills you,” Sandy added.
They laughed. I quickly lost my nerve.Why had I agreed to this?I leaned forward at the waist. My entire body was trembling. I stretched toward the door, squeezed my eyes shut, and made my fist knock. Once.
Then I ran away.
I ran as fast as I can ever remember running, my feet making wide leaps over the street puddles. Tears were streamingdown my cheeks. In my mind I saw my mother’s face, lying on her deathbed, looking at me as if I were pathetic. In the distance, I heard the cackling laughter of my three friends, and Stewie shouting, “There’s no one home, stupid!” By then it was too late. I had shown my true colors, and they were the yellows of cowardice.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I dreaded having to face those boys again. I so wanted to erase what happened at the witch’s house that for the first time, I considered what my mother had told me. (This is something you’re going to be able to do the rest of your life. Get second chances.) If that were true, I was ready to try.
I replicated what I’d done on the night my mother died. I wished the day had never happened. I tapped my thighs. I even mumbled the words “stupid, stupid,” in case I needed to repeat everything exactly.
The next morning, when I awoke, the cold, drizzly weather was the same as the day before, and when we walked to school, the boys were wearing the same clothes and none of them said anything about the incident. In class, we covered the same pages in the history book. We took the same spelling test.
I was stunned. Everything was repeating itself. I moved through the day in blinking wonderment, knowing exactly what was going to happen and watching it unfold.
Even the walk home went as it had previously gone, right up to the moment when Sandy mumbled, “Witch’s house.”
Which is when I changed the story.
“Let’s see if she’s in there,” I blurted out.
The others gaped at me.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are you scared?”
“No way,” Paul said.
“Nuh-uh,” Sandy said.
“I dare you,” Stewie said, crossing his arms.
I glared at him, anger and excitement mixing in my gut.
