the old barn (the beginning)

I never saw the man who tried to kill my family and me.

I only heard him — his low voice, his rumbling laughter, his crazy cries. It’s many years past that now, and I am alive and mostly well, but sometimes, in my head, I can still hear him, and I am in that summer and I am in that place and I am that 7-year-old girl again.

We were in Pennsylvania, visiting grandma and grandpa. Their house was white with red shutters and wood floors and a huge spread of grass on the side. As we drove up to the house for the first time, I gazed, confounded, at the large crimson shutters framing the windows. High secret doors, they seemed to me, or magical doors, even. Our house certainly didn’t have magical doors. Questions buzzed in my head: Where did they lead? And who were they for? And how did you reach them? I wondered and wondered, the whole time I was there, never figuring it out, never even asking, thinking perhaps these were questions that should not be asked. Just in case they really weren’t high and secret doors. And if they weren’t, I didn’t really want to know, anyway.

The house’s wood floors mystified me, too. Slick and gleaming, they could endure hours of sock-footed sliding, but then suddenly creak and groan like an arthritic old man rising from a chair. They were capricious; moody, almost. I never knew how they might respond to my presence. We just had carpet at our house and carpet was predictable.

While the shutters and floors were mysteries to me, it was the grass that mesmerized me most. I never knew people could have that much grass. It rolled and curved before me, a vast army of perfect emerald blades, with faraway edges I couldn’t even see. What kind of people had grass like that? Where did it come from? What made it so green? Our house didn’t have grass like that; it had a yard full of those white rocks with sparkly flecks that sometimes caught the sunlight, but mostly sat there looking stupid and hurting my feet when I walked barefoot which I wasn’t supposed to do. Maybe it meant grandma and grandpa were somehow very special, all that perfect grass. Sparkly white rocks were not special, I knew that. In one blink, I fell in love with that grass and my poor dented feet itched to sink deep into the dark greenness and disappear.

In the middle of the dark green stood two trees, sturdy and tall. I didn’t know what kind they were and I still don’t. I didn’t care. It mattered only that hanging between them was a perfect wooden swing, swaying and beckoning to me. My siblings had no interest in the swing, an apathy I could not fathom, but that simply meant I never had to share or wait my turn. I knew it would be empty when I raced out the door to play and my heart would pound with anticipation. We had a relationship, this swing and I, an understanding. It knew what I needed and freely gave it. It wasn’t just a swing to me. It was solace. It was my friend. Oh, I spent endless hours with my friend, pumping and pumping my pale legs skyward as high as I could go, soaring past this branch, that branch, til the earth held no part of me anymore. My hair was long that summer and blindingly blonde and it rippled behind me in wild golden ribbons. I loved that feeling of the wind tearing at it; feeling that with every upswing I was winning, outrunning something huge. And then, at the apex, the fall, the collapsing, hair flicking at my face, stomach crashing and giddy inside me. I was delirious. And free. I sang little songs. I chatted with God. I gazed at the high secret doors. And the swing held me; I was safe.

And I didn’t think about the school bus. And I didn’t obsess about the school bus.

My school bus.

The school bus that, earlier that year, had crashed down a hill one afternoon while lumbering us all to the safety of our homes. That’s what it was supposed to be doing, anyway, but a boy in the back of the bus had cried out — something, I don’t remember what — and the driver, distracted, took the turn too tight, and we’d plunged down a steep hill.

Many times that year, my first grade year, I had heard kids screaming, playing on the playground, carefree. It was background noise, really. The usual soundtrack to grade school life. But not that day. Not this. The sound of the kids on that bus with me was high and loud, so loud. Apart from the sudden, sweeping wails of “Mommmmmy!!!” no one even sounded human. They were wild beasts screeching all around me, each one louder than the next. The bus joined the bedlam, too, cracking, moaning, roaring. My ears were bursting from too much sound. We flopped like rag dolls against the seats, the floor, the ceiling; we yowled like animals against the sudden shift of the earth. Everyone, it seemed, but me. Throughout it all, I couldn’t make a sound. Even then, in that moment, I was still the shyest girl in school, unable to utter a sound, make my presence known, lodge a protest to the silent invisible God who watched us breaking. My mouth was open, I remember. I know that. Even now, I can hear my loud jagged breaths. But I was just a kid. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as waking horror that can rob voice and thought and sound. I tumbled loose and heaving with the rest of them, but inside me, something froze. The muscles needed to push out the faintest sound were frozen. There was so much shrieking, for so long — so long — and I wanted to shriek, too, thrust the terror out of my body. My mouth was open, ready for it, even, but I just panted and wheezed instead.

Tears rolled. Soundless. I was terrified and I was mute.