The Fading Read online

  Sometimes she drove Noel to Crossroads Mall and browsed for an hour without buying anything, except for that giant stuffed frog he threw a tantrum over in Nuestetter’s and would not let go of. That stupid beautiful frog was larger than her son and had cost more than any dress she owned, but he wasn’t spoiled, rarely clamored for new things. When he wanted something he wanted it badly, squalling in a wounded manner that convinced her he had made a deep personal connection to the object, and so she had caved in and bought the frog.

  She felt safe here. Her life was gentle and she had no aspirations toward career, volunteerism or social status. They were becoming more of a family every day, their solidarity strengthening with the comfort of routine, her and John’s unspoken but deepening appreciation of their lot.

  That John worked no fewer than seventy and sometimes as many as ninety hours per week moving the store from its current eleven thousand square foot space on Arapahoe to the new forty thousand super footprint in the Village Shopping Centre was not a source of stress, but a comfort to her. He had his role and she had hers.

  With the mountains so close, Boulderites could not get enough ski poles, fishing rods, climbing rope, running shoes, metal canoes and cycling gear. Richardson Bros Sporting Goods was family owned and took good care of its managers. With his overtime, John was making engineer money. He walked the floor, helped customers, was head buyer for new product, handled human resources. He was the sixth employee in a store that would soon have a hundred. People drove in from Wyoming and Nebraska to buy Finnish skis and let their sons and daughters choose from more than sixty baseball mitts. He had promised that when he got his bonus for helping make the grand opening on schedule, they would take a five-day vacation to Yellowstone. Becky wanted to sleep in a tent with her son and husband. John wanted to have a campfire and teach Noel to fish. Noel wanted to feed the bears donuts.

  ‘Mommy, guess what!’ he cried from the table.

  ‘What’s what?’ She knew what was coming and smiled despite herself.

  ‘But guess what!’ He liked to warm up to it, never said it on the first try.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chicken butt!’

  ‘You’re very funny today, aren’t you?’ She adjusted the water from hot to warm (to keep her cuticles from splitting) and added more detergent to the swamp of plates and forks and Noel’s favorite tractor, which had gotten dirty yesterday. He liked it shiny red and wheels polished before each play session.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Are you going to tell jokes like that next year at preschool?’ She turned and raised one of her dark eyebrows at him. The boy could look so serious for a two-and-a-half-year-old. Was he contemplating the question, or the prospect of pre-school?

  ‘I prolly will, Mom,’ he said, nodding thoughtfully.

  Becky burst out laughing. He stared, admiring her, she thought, or maybe admiring his ability to make her happy. His plate was as empty as it was going to get. Becky walked over, soap bubbles dripping from her left hand, and ate the last bite of his blueberry Eggo. She flipped a drop of foam onto his nose and he covered his face, scolding her. She took his plate and the rubber fork to the sink.

  He giggled again, differently, as if gripped by a fine surprise.

  She heard the chair legs squeak along the vinyl flooring and then felt Noel’s little hands dragging across the backs of her legs as the sound of his sneakers pattered out of the kitchen. She hoped he was going to try the potty again on his own, but his determination to go like a big boy seemed to alternate weeks, so she never knew.

  ‘Where you off to, Noeller Coaster?’

  ‘Closet!’ his voice came back from the hall.

  Becky gazed into the backyard, rinsing the last of the plates, pulling the plug. A robin danced in the grass, bobbing for worms. Closet could be for clothes, but he was already dressed and wearing his shoes. Probably he had stashed a toy in there. Or was inviting her to play hide and seek. The gray water made a sucking sound down into the drain, the mounds of suds dissolving to reveal his tractor. She ran a sponge around the chunky tires and white metal rims, rinsed it and set it on the dish rack to dry.

  How many seconds or minutes of silence will pass before an attentive mother senses her child is testing the leash, has gotten into something he shouldn’t be into? For Becky the answer was usually no more than a minute, but it was morning and the front screen door was locked and she would have seen him in the back, so perhaps two or three minutes passed before she noticed the stillness that had settled in his absence.

  ‘Noel?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Noel?’ Louder, but with no real edge.

  This time he answered. ‘Hi, Mommy!’

  He sounded far away, in another room or outside. Had she left the back door open? Maybe John had gone out to fetch a tool from the small shed this morning and forgot to shut it. She wiped her hands and walked, not hurrying, into the hallway beside the kitchen. To the left was the only bathroom, a wide alcove that contained the washing machine and dryer, and then the two steps down to the mud room. The door to the backyard was closed.

  Becky hurried to the front door, detouring briefly – Noel wasn’t in his room, his bed was still made, and he wasn’t hiding in his closet – and found it shut and locked, too. She leaned against the front window to scan the yard anyway. The mailman, Dave Linderman – who played softball with John and seemed to think hand-delivering a package constituted a license to flirt with her – was walking by and two steps later disappeared behind Mrs Ryeberger’s unruly towering hedge. Dave would have stopped if he had seen Noel playing alone in the yard, but better safe than sorry.

  Becky stepped out, pacing the lawn, checking the sides of the house, peering north and south along 7th Street. The sun was bright on Mr Millward’s parked red Dodge truck a ways down. Directly across the street, the Elkinsons’ bay window was black with shade from their massive weeping willow. Noel had left his trike (it was a yellow plastic motorcycle with a six-volt battery under the black rubber seat and four wheels as well as manual pedals, but Becky called it his trike) halfway up the narrow sidewalk, but he wasn’t sitting on it. He wasn’t out here. Couldn’t be. She’d just heard his voice calling to her from inside the house.

  She went back inside, stopped in the living room and turned in a circle, chewing her lower lip.

  ‘Okay, enough!’ she barked, surprising herself. She turned and walked back into the kitchen. A little softer. ‘Where are you, hon? Noel? Noel?’

  He didn’t answer this time, but she thought he might have giggled. She heard someone giggle. It came to her faintly, from behind a wall. Hide and seek. Great. Why had she taught him this game? What was so fun about it? Her fear lessened somewhat, but its aftertaste left her in no mood to play games.

  ‘I know you’re in here,’ she said, and her voice rang hollow.

  She looked in her closet, but there were no little legs protruding from behind the rows of her dresses, nor were his blue and orange rubber-toed shoes standing among her sandals and hiking boots.

  ‘Noel. Come on out, now. Mommy’s not in the mood …’ her voice trailed off as confusion, then mild shock, then outright terror blossomed up through her throat. She had wandered back into the hall, to the front of the house, and taken another look through the screen door’s upper pane of glass. Noel’s yellow trike was not on the sidewalk. It had been there less than two minutes before. Now it was gone.

  From the north side of the house, filling the morning air with a beastly rumble, came the sound of a car engine. A large car or truck, revving and shifting through the gears, gaining speed as it moved down 7th, toward her house.

  Becky shoved the screen door and stumbled diagonally across the lawn.

  His body didn’t feel different, but now everything was different. One second he was wiping bubbles from his nose and the next he couldn’t see his hand. The smell of syrup was at his fingers, but there was nothing there, here, not even the usual blur that was the tip
of his nose. He watched the place in the air where it felt like his hand was, and down, down, until he felt his fingers fall on his leg … except that his leg was gone too. Both legs, and his swinging feet. The sheer crazy surprise of it made him dizzy. He could see right through to the chair and he felt like he was floating.

  Noel squirmed forward and to his delight his feet stopped him from falling. He stumbled back, his butt sliding the chair across the floor. He ran toward Mommy, thinking, Look, look what happened! I hiding, I hiding! but something made his voice stop inside him. He sensed already there were two ways to go with this new thing. He could tell her, or use this time (it wouldn’t last long, he sensed) to play hide and seek. Mommy was always good at finding him, even though he knew sometimes she pretended it was hard, but this time would be different.

  He couldn’t help teasing her, though, brushing his hands against her legs as he ran by. It was a dare, a clue, but she didn’t turn around.

  ‘Where you off to, Noeller Coaster?’ she said.

  ‘Closet!’ he answered, running into the hall, but he was going to trick her. She would think he was in the closet, but this time he would hide in Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom, behind the curtains. He could probably hide right in the middle of the room if he wanted, but somehow that didn’t seem like much of a game. He swirled into the heavy blue drapes, the dry smell of dust and sun-warmed cloth tickling his nose. A few minutes passed before she called out again.

  He couldn’t remember the last time this had happened, but he knew it had happened before. It didn’t feel as strange as it should. It felt like a dream, or like Uncle Charlie visiting. It was something that you never thought about until it happened again, and then it was a neat surprise that changed everything. He wondered why he couldn’t do it more often, and he guessed it was just one of those things like learning to walk or remembering to use the potty. It took some practice and maybe someday, when he was a big boy, he would be able to do it whenever he wanted.

  He could hear her searching his bedroom now and he shivered with excitement. When she got close and he yelled Boo! she would be so surprised. Time seemed to stretch on and on, his whole world slowed.

  In the vague but instinctual way children grab at complex thoughts, Noel wondered how come he never saw Mommy or Daddy this way, changing, disappearing. They never talked about it and he didn’t think they had a name for it. Maybe the very thing this was, whatever it was, also happened to be the reason he never saw Mommy or Daddy doing it – because there was nothing to see. People were either there or not there, in the room or in the other room. Probably there were lots of times Mommy and Daddy did it in front of him and he didn’t even know.

  She entered the room. He held his breath and forced himself calm. He could see her outline on the other side of the curtains, her tall curving body as she paused, looking around, looking right at him. He wanted to yell Boo! now but he also wanted to make it last as long as possible, because, once she knew, the game would end. And maybe he resisted showing her because there was something thrillingly powerful when he was like this. For the first time he could remember, he had an advantage on Mommy, a trick that would help him win the game.

  Mommy was in her closet now, pushing her dresses around. The hangers were sliding and tinkling, and she was huffing and puffing around the room, right past the curtains and the window light warm on his back, the sun shining through his back, inside him in a way that made no sense but made him feel light and free.

  By the time he decided to follow her and give up because he sensed she didn’t want to play the game any more, she was opening the front door and there was his trike on the sidewalk and that was a whole new idea. The outside, the open freedom. The screen door swung back and he turned sideways and skipped out behind her just in time, watching his steps. He didn’t find it strange that his shoes and the rest of his clothes were hidden like he was. His clothes were just a part of him and, whatever this was, it was powerful enough to cover everything.

  He came to a halt on the sidewalk and blinked in the bright morning light, waiting for her to see, and something about being outside made it more real than before. The way Mommy was playing along, her face changing as if she were about to scream – it was almost too much for him to watch.

  The trike! He would ride it and she would see it and then she would know he really was here! Mommy would be amazed at what he could do, and then she would lift him up and laugh, kissing him, and probably by then he would be back, all normal again. He lifted one leg over the seat and got his feet on the pedals. But when he looked back, Mommy was inside and the screen door was latching.

  Now he was outside. Alone.

  Noel knew this was bad, something Mommy and Daddy told him he was never ever ever allowed to do. But it wasn’t his fault, really. And he knew better than to play in the street, where the cars were. He wouldn’t do that. He just wanted to show her the trick using the trike, so he pressed the button under the rubber handles and the yellow motorbike jerked to life and began to hum, pulling him down the sidewalk.

  He turned right, where the sidewalk split both ways, so he could look back at the front window and see Mommy inside. Watching the ground unspool as the engine tugged him along. Careful not to steer into the grass. And when he looked up from the handlebars and front wheels, Dimples was waiting for him. Dimples was back, playing outside, too! He was waving at Noel from just a little ways up ahead, smiling, laughing without making a sound and clapping his hands without making a sound, and Noel knew that Dimples was proud of him for doing something good, and he forgot all about Mommy right then.

  Noel didn’t know if Dimples was really Dimples’s name. But he looked a lot like Dimples on Dimples’s Fun Party Club, with the white face and red mouth and big round red nose and even the neat top hat Dimples always wore when he was in the Fun Party Club House where he lived on TV. This Dimples was wearing the same kind of suit, but black instead of white like the one he wore on TV, with his bright yellow suspenders.

  Something else was different about this Dimples, though. Maybe he was Dimples’s baby brother or son or something, because he was a lot smaller than the Dimples on TV. This Dimples was like a miniature Dimples, about as tall as Troy, who lived on the other side of the park and rode a big kids’ bike with cool wheels. Troy was eight. Eight seemed old enough to do lots of things Noel couldn’t do yet. Like riding a real bike and running faster and playing by himself in the park.

  But even though he was about the same size as Troy, this Dimples seemed older, like Dimples on TV. He sometimes had a real serious face, like Daddy after a very long day at the store. Noel hadn’t seen Dimples since his Turning Two birthday party, when Dimples was on TV singing to all the other kids whose birthday was the same day, but also right there in the living room beside Noel, too. That had been strange, because Noel hadn’t seen Dimples step out of the TV (and the other, really tall Dimples was still in the TV, even after this Dimples was in the living room, standing in the corner watching Noel play dinosaurs on the floor while Mommy napped on the couch before the party), so he guessed it couldn’t really be the same Dimples.

  Just like today on the street, Dimples hadn’t made any noise on Noel’s birthday, but he put a finger to his lips and made the shushing sign before pointing to Mommy on the couch, reminding Noel not to say anything or else they would wake Mommy up and Mommy needed her sleep. Noel remembered all the funny hand signs Dimples had done on his birthday, pointing at Noel right before he covered his eyes. Playing Peek-A-Boo, the way Noel played it with Mommy, and finally he realized what Dimples was trying to show him that day on his birthday.

  That Noel had done it again, he had disappeared.

  He’d looked down and saw Dimples was right. He couldn’t see his legs or his arms or the new green shirt and matching green pants Mommy had gotten him for his birthday party. His clothes and shoes had vanished, and when he looked up in surprise Dimples was no longer standing in the corner.

  He had moved across the
living room faster than a blink and now he was standing right in front of Noel and holding his finger over his lips. He was still smiling with lots of yellow teeth, but his eyes were scared, wide and shaking and red inside his white chalky face as he stared down at Noel, warning him not to wake up Mommy. Noel got scared then, afraid he was the reason Dimples was sad and scared. Noel wished he could make Dimples happy again, the way he sometimes made Mommy happy for no reason at all, because when Mommy or Dimples was sad, Noel was sad, too.

  Noel couldn’t remember how long it lasted on his birthday. He only remembered being fascinated by Dimples’s red eyes and his strange huge smile. He must have fallen asleep on the floor, because, the next thing he knew, Mommy was shaking him awake and Daddy was home from work early with a gigantic wrapped present with a red bow, which when he opened it after eating cake turned out to be his trike.

  The trike he was riding down the sidewalk now. Dimples was about one house ahead of him, laughing and rubbing his belly and waving for Noel to follow. The small old clown’s mouth moved and, when Noel concentrated hard enough, he understood every word, even though his friend wasn’t making a sound.

  Hurry, Noel, hurry on this way, my little buddy! You can do it! Let’s show Mommy what a big boy you are!

  This seemed to be making Dimples very happy, the way Noel was riding the trike farther and farther down the street, following Dimples as he tugged at his suspenders and danced a little dance into the middle of the road. Noel steered the trike to the edge of the sidewalk and the front left wheel rolled over the curb, hanging in thin air for a moment, and Noel’s tummy fluttered as he realized he was about to crash. He yanked the handlebars the other way just in time, keeping the trike upright. A little farther along there was a dip at the end of Mrs Fryeberger’s driveway. Noel aimed for it, understanding that if he used that dip he wouldn’t fall over sideways.