The Fading (2 page)

But of course he’s all right.

In a minute … I’m so tired I could sleep for a month.

Eyes closed, she could feel him there, suckling, the small but growing weight of him in the basket of her arms.

But that shape in the window …

Groggily she glanced down to see if his eyes were narrowing with the fulfillment of his midnight meal.

He wasn’t there.

Her thickened nipple stood glistening in the moonlight, still warm from his mouth as a single drop of milk fell slowly into
the air over her lap and was absorbed into … nothing. Her arms were empty, but her panic was still a distant thing, slowed
by the dreamy unreality of the vision and lessened by her crushing fatigue.

What a strange dream. My boy is gone and my body has turned to gold.

Against her will her eyes closed again. She must have gotten up, set him back in his crib and sat back down, too tired to
return to bed. This had happened before, on those nights when she didn’t want to leave him. Not out of fear, but the love
of watching him sleep. She would drift off in the chair, sometimes reading a mystery novel that always wound up face down
in her lap, and wake
just before the sun began to cast its morning blue into the room.

The wet pressure at her nipple, which had ceased some time ago, grew more insistent. The weight in her tired arms became real,
as real as the whetted smack of his lips, as real as the hardening edge of his gums clinging to her.

Becky found the lamp switch and clicked soft yellow light into the room. Her eyes scrunched in reflex against the glare, but
not before she once more glimpsed the emptiness in her arms and the glossy bud of her breast still shining with saliva and
the fine beads of milk he had left encircling the darker ring where his mouth should have been. She forced her eyes open wide
and snapped forward in the chair.

He’s gone, he’s gone …!

Noel was there, of course. His mottled blushing forehead, the tiny squib of his nose, his narrow chest and his hot plump belly
within the mint-green terrycloth jumper. He was here.
Here
. For a moment her mind raced with the knowledge that something was wrong. Something had happened to him, to them, and it
wasn’t normal. Something had come between them while she dozed, taking him away, only now he was back.

She arched from the chair and turned toward the window, where she had seen the little man in the white suit and top hat. The
window was dark, closed and latched, empty but for the outline of their backyard.

But something was here. It came inside and took Noel away.

But that was silly because … what could it be? What
could have happened to make her think her child was here, then not here, then here again? Either she had, sleepwalking, put
him back in his crib and then fetched him again. Or she was simply confused, half asleep, letting her imagination run away
from her.

The phrase
sleep deprivation
came back to her. Dr Roose had warned her about this common symptom of early motherhood. That’s all it was, that’s all it
could be. She was tired. Her mind had slipped, the way it had slipped a few days ago when she went to unload the dishwasher
and put half of the cups and plates away before realizing they were still dried with mashed potatoes and apple juice.

Noel continued to rap at the food source with one bunched fist. His color was robust, his eyes drooping. She felt his forehead
again, then her own. No, there was nothing wrong with him. As for her, she needed another six hours of real sleep.

‘Don’t you do that, Noel-baby,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you try to get away from Mommy ever again.’

She stayed with her son until almost five a.m. In the morning he was fine and she was relieved. Her protective nature had
pulled one over on her sleepy mind. After a month or so, she had forgotten what she had seen (the face in the window) and
not seen (her son where he was supposed to be). Noel was growing, changing, becoming more of a handful every day. There were
a lot of sleepless nights. A lot of strange dreams, but none featuring a small man in a white suit and top hat.

There would be more episodes in the months and
years to come. Some as short as twenty seconds, others as long as sixteen minutes, and many which happened in the middle of
the night. But by luck or fate or perhaps even his parents’ need to deny the barely glimpsed and totally unexplainable phenomena,
almost three years of his life would pass before anyone noticed the arrival or departure of Noel’s fleeting affliction.

This first eyewitnessed account was also the moment in Noel Shaker’s life when, with some regularity, terrible things began
to happen.

Becky was washing dishes in the kitchen inside the house on 7th Street, her back to the breakfast table where Noel sat spearing
cold scraps of toasted oven waffles drowned in syrup. John had left for work half an hour ago, so it was probably 9.15. She
was tired, but not unhappily so. She was a dutiful and doting young mother but never resented the nature of her fragmented
days, the diapering, cooking, laundry, cleaning, crying, colds and flus, naps, tantrums, readings, baths and, very rarely,
time alone with her husband. Without John’s or her own parents nearby, she was alone in her motherhood but never felt lonely.
She had Noel.

Their house, nestled between North Boulder Park and the first ridge of the foothills in Boulder, Colorado, was a warm green
cocoon. Nine hundred square feet with two small bedrooms and a sun porch shaded by a weeping willow, the cherry tree back
by Noel’s sandbox yielding its stony fruit for the first time this summer. The great expanse of grass and baseball diamonds
and playground of North Boulder Park was half a block from her front door and she took him strolling there for hours.
Between nine a.m. and four p.m. traffic was almost nonexistent. A decent amateur photo of the block taken at sunset would
serve nicely in the dictionary beside the word bucolic.

Sometimes she drove Noel to Crossroads Mall and browsed for an hour without buying anything, except for that giant stuffed
frog he threw a tantrum over in Nuestetter’s and would not let go of. That stupid beautiful frog was larger than her son and
had cost more than any dress she owned, but he wasn’t spoiled, rarely clamored for new things. When he wanted something he
wanted it badly, squalling in a wounded manner that convinced her he had made a deep personal connection to the object, and
so she had caved in and bought the frog.

She felt safe here. Her life was gentle and she had no aspirations toward career, volunteerism or social status. They were
becoming more of a family every day, their solidarity strengthening with the comfort of routine, her and John’s unspoken but
deepening appreciation of their lot.

That John worked no fewer than seventy and sometimes as many as ninety hours per week moving the store from its current eleven
thousand square foot space on Arapahoe to the new forty thousand super footprint in the Village Shopping Centre was not a
source of stress, but a comfort to her. He had his role and she had hers.

With the mountains so close, Boulderites could not get enough ski poles, fishing rods, climbing rope,
running shoes, metal canoes and cycling gear. Richardson Bros Sporting Goods was family owned and took good care of its managers.
With his overtime, John was making engineer money. He walked the floor, helped customers, was head buyer for new product,
handled human resources. He was the sixth employee in a store that would soon have a hundred. People drove in from Wyoming
and Nebraska to buy Finnish skis and let their sons and daughters choose from more than sixty baseball mitts. He had promised
that when he got his bonus for helping make the grand opening on schedule, they would take a five-day vacation to Yellowstone.
Becky wanted to sleep in a tent with her son and husband. John wanted to have a campfire and teach Noel to fish. Noel wanted
to feed the bears donuts.

‘Mommy, guess what!’ he cried from the table.

‘What’s what?’ She knew what was coming and smiled despite herself.

‘But guess what!’ He liked to warm up to it, never said it on the first try.

‘What?’

‘Chicken butt!’

‘You’re very funny today, aren’t you?’ She adjusted the water from hot to warm (to keep her cuticles from splitting) and added
more detergent to the swamp of plates and forks and Noel’s favorite tractor, which had gotten dirty yesterday. He liked it
shiny red and wheels polished before each play session.

‘Yep.’

‘Are you going to tell jokes like that next year at preschool?’ She turned and raised one of her dark eyebrows at him. The
boy could look so serious for a two-and-a-half-year-old. Was he contemplating the question, or the prospect of pre-school?

‘I prolly will, Mom,’ he said, nodding thoughtfully.

Becky burst out laughing. He stared, admiring her, she thought, or maybe admiring his ability to make her happy. His plate
was as empty as it was going to get. Becky walked over, soap bubbles dripping from her left hand, and ate the last bite of
his blueberry Eggo. She flipped a drop of foam onto his nose and he covered his face, scolding her. She took his plate and
the rubber fork to the sink.

He giggled again, differently, as if gripped by a fine surprise.

She heard the chair legs squeak along the vinyl flooring and then felt Noel’s little hands dragging across the backs of her
legs as the sound of his sneakers pattered out of the kitchen. She hoped he was going to try the potty again on his own, but
his determination to go like a big boy seemed to alternate weeks, so she never knew.

‘Where you off to, Noeller Coaster?’

‘Closet!’ his voice came back from the hall.

Becky gazed into the backyard, rinsing the last of the plates, pulling the plug. A robin danced in the grass, bobbing for
worms. Closet could be for clothes, but he was already dressed and wearing his shoes. Probably he had stashed a toy in there.
Or was inviting her to play
hide and seek. The gray water made a sucking sound down into the drain, the mounds of suds dissolving to reveal his tractor.
She ran a sponge around the chunky tires and white metal rims, rinsed it and set it on the dish rack to dry.

How many seconds or minutes of silence will pass before an attentive mother senses her child is testing the leash, has gotten
into something he shouldn’t be into? For Becky the answer was usually no more than a minute, but it was morning and the front
screen door was locked and she would have seen him in the back, so perhaps two or three minutes passed before she noticed
the stillness that had settled in his absence.

‘Noel?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Noel?’ Louder, but with no real edge.

This time he answered. ‘Hi, Mommy!’

He sounded far away, in another room or outside. Had she left the back door open? Maybe John had gone out to fetch a tool
from the small shed this morning and forgot to shut it. She wiped her hands and walked, not hurrying, into the hallway beside
the kitchen. To the left was the only bathroom, a wide alcove that contained the washing machine and dryer, and then the two
steps down to the mud room. The door to the backyard was closed.

Becky hurried to the front door, detouring briefly – Noel wasn’t in his room, his bed was still made, and he wasn’t hiding
in his closet – and found it shut and locked, too. She leaned against the front window to
scan the yard anyway. The mailman, Dave Linderman – who played softball with John and seemed to think hand-delivering a package
constituted a license to flirt with her – was walking by and two steps later disappeared behind Mrs Ryeberger’s unruly towering
hedge. Dave would have stopped if he had seen Noel playing alone in the yard, but better safe than sorry.

Becky stepped out, pacing the lawn, checking the sides of the house, peering north and south along 7th Street. The sun was
bright on Mr Millward’s parked red Dodge truck a ways down. Directly across the street, the Elkinsons’ bay window was black
with shade from their massive weeping willow. Noel had left his trike (it was a yellow plastic motorcycle with a six-volt
battery under the black rubber seat and four wheels as well as manual pedals, but Becky called it his trike) halfway up the
narrow sidewalk, but he wasn’t sitting on it. He wasn’t out here. Couldn’t be. She’d just heard his voice calling to her from
inside the house.

She went back inside, stopped in the living room and turned in a circle, chewing her lower lip.

‘Okay, enough!’ she barked, surprising herself. She turned and walked back into the kitchen. A little softer. ‘Where are you,
hon? Noel? Noel?’

He didn’t answer this time, but she thought he might have giggled. She heard someone giggle. It came to her faintly, from
behind a wall. Hide and seek. Great. Why had she taught him this game? What was so fun about it?
Her fear lessened somewhat, but its aftertaste left her in no mood to play games.

‘I know you’re in here,’ she said, and her voice rang hollow.

She looked in her closet, but there were no little legs protruding from behind the rows of her dresses, nor were his blue
and orange rubber-toed shoes standing among her sandals and hiking boots.

‘Noel. Come on out, now. Mommy’s not in the mood …’ her voice trailed off as confusion, then mild shock, then outright terror
blossomed up through her throat. She had wandered back into the hall, to the front of the house, and taken another look through
the screen door’s upper pane of glass. Noel’s yellow trike was not on the sidewalk. It had been there less than two minutes
before. Now it was gone.

From the north side of the house, filling the morning air with a beastly rumble, came the sound of a car engine. A large car
or truck, revving and shifting through the gears, gaining speed as it moved down 7th, toward her house.

Becky shoved the screen door and stumbled diagonally across the lawn.

His body didn’t feel different, but now everything was different. One second he was wiping bubbles from his nose and the next
he couldn’t see his hand. The smell of syrup was at his fingers, but there was nothing there, here, not even the usual blur
that was the tip of his nose. He watched the place in the air where it felt like his
hand was, and down, down, until he felt his fingers fall on his leg … except that his leg was gone too. Both legs, and his
swinging feet. The sheer crazy surprise of it made him dizzy. He could see right through to the chair and he felt like he
was floating.