The Shadow Year Read Free

lived up the block, two years younger than me and two years older than Mary, had been struck by a car on Montauk Highway one night in late spring. The driver was drunk and swerved onto the sidewalk. According to his brother, Teddy was thrown thirty feet in the air. I always tried to picture that: twice again the height of the basketball hoop. We had to go to his wake. The priest said he was at peace, but he didn’t look it. As he lay in the coffin, his skin was yellow, his face was bloated, and his mouth was turned down in a bitter frown.
    All summer long he came back to me from where he lay under the ground. I imagined him suddenly waking up, clawing at the lid as in a story Jim had once told me. I dreaded meeting his ghost on the street at night when I walked George around the block alone. I’d stop under a streetlight and listen hard, fear would build in my chest until I shivered, and then I’d bolt for home. In the lonely backyard at sundown, in the darkened woods behind the school field, in the corner of my night room, Teddy Dunden was waiting, jealous and angry.
    George came up the stairs, nudged open my bedroom door, and stood beside my bed. He looked at me with his bearded face and then jumped aboard. He was a small, schnauzer-type mutt, but fearless, and having him there made me less scared. Slowly I began to doze. I had a memory of riding waves at Fire Island, and it blurred at the edges, slipping into a dream. Next thing I knew, I was falling from a great height and woke to hear my father coming in from work. The front door quietly closed. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. George got up and left.
    I contemplated going down to say hello. The last I’d seen him was the previous weekend. The bills forced him to work threejobs: a part-time machining job in the early morning, then his regular job as a gear cutter, and then nights part-time as a janitor in a department store. He left the house before the sun came up every morning and didn’t return until very near midnight. Through the week I would smell a hint of machine oil here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.
    Eventually the sounds of the refrigerator opening and closing and the water running stopped, and I realized he must be sitting in the dining room, eating his pile of spaghetti, reading the newspaper by the light that shone in from the kitchen. I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that’s when it happened. There came from outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore the night open wide enough for the Shadow Year to slip out. I shivered, closed my eyes tight, and burrowed deep beneath the covers.

A Prowler
    When I came downstairs the next morning, the door to Nan and Pop’s was open. I stuck my head in and saw Mary sitting at the table in the kitchenette where the night before she had made cigarettes. She was eating a bowl of Cheerios. Pop sat in his usual seat next to her, the horse paper spread out in front of him. He was jotting down numbers with a pencil in the margins, murmuring a steady stream of bloodlines, jockeys’ names, weights, speeds, track conditions, ciphering what he called “the McGinn System,” named after himself. Mary nodded with each new factor added to the equation.
    My mother came out of the bathroom down the hall in our house, and I turned around. She was dressed for work in her turquoise outfit with the big star-shaped pin that was like a stained-glass window. I went to her, and she put her arm around me, enveloped me in a cloud of perfume that smelled as thick as powder, and kissed my head. We went into the kitchen, and she made me a bowl of cereal with the mix-up milk, which wasn’t as bad that way, because we were allowed to put sugar on it. I sat down in the dining room, and she joined me, carrying a cup of coffee. The