This Must Be the Place: A Novel by Kate Racculia Page A

to see.
    Harryhausen yawned in his sleep. Arthur scooped both hands around Harry’s giant belly, up and off the box, and dropped him on the love seat. Hugging the shoebox to his chest, he bolted back into the bedroom and shut the door. He knelt and was just about to slide the box beneath the mattress (the better to dream beautiful dreams) when a light caught his eye—a light outside, through his window.
    He froze. He heard Harry digging under the edge of the door, growling, trying to get in.
    There it was again—a white dot that swung back and forth in the trees outside his window. He crept to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes.
    Someone was in the trees outside. Someone—he saw a hand on a branch, a leg through the waving leaves—had climbed the tree outside his window at 4:30 in the morning. He squinted and saw another hand, holding a flashlight. A flap of fabric, light-colored. Maybe the hood of a sweatshirt.
    There was a whip crack and then a body appeared in mid-air, a magic trick falling to earth. Arthur watched as a broken branch and a boy hit the ground fifteen feet below. The branch bounced. The boy—a teenager, in a hooded sweatshirt, thin as a rake—landed with a grunt and rolled to his side, moaning and coughing. The moaning told Arthur he was at least alive and, given that confirmation, Arthur felt no particular need to call for help. He was watching a movie: a movie he was part of, but a movie nonetheless. It was too early for secondary characters to die senselessly. This little stunt was clearly just this character’s introduction.
    The boy stood and rolled his head on his neck. He opened his eyes to gaze longingly to the left of Arthur, at the other end of the house. Arthur stared at the boy and felt like he was watching himself, had traveled fifteen years back in time to witness a moment he had never been brave enough, in high school, to attempt: an alternate history playing out before his eyes. The boy blew the house a kiss and staggered away in the dark.
    “Did you see that, Amy?” Arthur whispered. “What do you think . . . what do you think it means?” He sat back on his feet and laid his palm flat on the lid of the shoebox. Then he closed his eyes and flipped the box open, stuck his hand inside, and fumbled until his fingers closed around something small, something paper and delicate, that felt right.
    Arthur opened his eyes. Between two fingers he held a cookie fortune.
Someone
, it said in tiny red letters,
from the past will return to steal your heart
.
    Arthur spoke and knew it to be true. “The boy is in love with Mona’s daughter,” he said, and slumped forward. He was asleep before he hit the floor.

4
Dinner at the Darby-Jones
    Arthur Rook didn’t go to dinner for four days. During that time, Oneida saw him come out of his room only once, to ask for a cup of laundry detergent—which was particularly odd, because he didn’t ask to use the washing machine. When she told Mona about his strange request (which she had complied with, because, after all, she was a good landlady’s daughter), Mona gasped, pressed her hand to her throat, and said, “Dear God. You know what they say about strange men who drink laundry detergent.”
    Arthur appeared, like the ghost that supposedly haunted the third-floor broom closet, to all the tenants of the Darby-Jones in turn, in increasingly odd anecdotes they discussed over dinner. Anna DeGroot was the first to see him, on Sunday afternoon. He came up behind her when she was locking the door to her room and, without even introducing himself, asked if she could direct him into town. “Scared the absolute crap out of me,” Anna said, jabbing her fork in the air for emphasis. “And I really didn’t know what to do with the question. Did he want a ride? Did he want to walk? If that was the case, did he understand that town was about two miles away?”
    “So what’d you tell him?” Mona asked.
    “I offered him a ride, of course.”