I glanced at my reflection in the hallway mirror as I waited. Whatever I had thought was going on at Liz’s house—nervous breakdown, drug problem, midlife crisis—would not have been able to char my skin. Not to mention what I saw happen to her face. I wiped sweat from my forehead as I remembered the mist rising. There was something dark, something evil, something demonic, in there. Whatever it was, it had a plan for me; I felt that in my core.

It was the same feeling I’d had over the past week—the panicked feeling that something wasn’t right. And if it wasn’t for that tree root and my phone, whatever was in that hole would have won.

The darkness already had Liz, and now it wanted me.

It wanted all of us.

Maybe the eighties really were back.

CHAPTER
8

The next morning, I lay in bed, afraid to look at my leg. Instead, I thought back to when we first moved to Whispering Farms.

After another sleepless night when Emily was three months old, when she had been up all night crying and our neighbors had started leaving notes under our door complaining about the noise, Mark had first brought up the topic of moving from the city to the suburbs.

After so many weeks of colic and lack of sleep, I agreed to go look at a few properties in Winchester. Mark had suggested it for the good public transit so he could take the train into work.

When we pulled up to Maple Leaf Drive, we saw groups of kids playing outside, and the driveway was lined with blooming lilacs, their scent filling the air as I walked to the front door. I felt my resolve soften like ice cream left out on a countertop. I looked down at the listing sheet and calculated that the mortgage would be less expensive than what we were paying in rent. What sealed the deal was the office on the first floor. I envisioned I’d soon go back to work, my laptop and paperwork strewn across a beautiful white desk.

The office was now our playroom.

And our long, lilac-lined driveway required the purchase of a snowblower the first winter we moved. We also discovered that in Whispering Farms, snowblowing was a sort of neighborly competition, the victor being the husband who woke up the earliest the morning after a snowfall to start on the sidewalks, earning bragging rights. Mark had never won.

I remember feeling as though a small part of me died when we packed up the last box and I watched the city skyline disappear from the rearview mirror of our rented U-Haul. I felt trapped in between two worlds, in a purgatory of my own making, one that involved leaf blowers and pressure washers.

As though the suburbs were my landscaped coffin, although I didn’t know it yet.

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