A memory: in the new house there was a tunnel, very narrow and straight, without forks, that one could pass through and find on reaching the far end that one had returned to the tunnel’s entrance. She does not remember the tunnel’s location in the house—any place she tries to picture the entrance, the bathroom closet, at the end of the hallway, in a back corner of her parents’ bedroom, seems equally likely as any other, and also impossible. Each time she passed through this tunnel she found, upon reaching the far end, that she did not have the courage to exit, and would instead shimmy herself backwards to return to the original entrance. Only once did she gather up the courage sufficiently to come out the other side, to find herself, yes, in the same room, the same house, she had started from. Her family did not stay in the house long. In those days, they were always moving—it had something to do with her father’s business, which she would learn many years later had not been entirely on the up and up. Although was he her father? He looked almost the same: it was only that there was something off about the teeth and the eyes. At times he waited a beat too long before laughing at one of his own jokes. And she had once been confronted, as they were crossing a shopping center parking lot to return to their car, by a girl who looked almost identical to her, same red hair, same freckles gathered mostly on one side of her face, who claimed she had stolen her family. Her parents pulled her away from this interloper, hustled her and themselves to the waiting car. They seemed shaken. As they drove away the girl remained where they had left her in the middle of the parking lot, fists at her sides, tears streaming, face twisted in fury. For years after that confrontation, and even into her adulthood, living now several states away, she worried that this girl would find her again. The nature of the threat, though mysterious, was precise: not that this girl or, later, young woman would carry out violence against her, but that she, when confronted by this young woman, would not know how to answer her. For a time in her twenties and thirties she could not sleep without taking a pill each night. She would find herself haunted, not by the girl, but by the family this girl must return to, to whom she did not belong, mother and father each wrong in subtle and imprecise ways (freckles, for example, gathered on the wrong side of a face). And then sleep, like a tunnel, would open up before her and she would pass through it, never quite certain if she would return and if so, to where.
Originally published by ergot., 2023
James Tadd Adcox's work has been published in Granta and X-R-A-Y and is forthcoming in Iowa Review. He's a founding editor at the literary magazine Always Crashing and author, most recently, of Denmark: Variations, a collection of sixty sets of instructions for variations on the play Hamlet.
