A family came with a fat white dog, and we thought it might be a wolf at first, because none of us had ever seen a dog quite like that, but it wasn’t a wolf at all. Its eyes were rounder, gentler, and its paws much smaller. Husky, we heard the little girl tell a visiting friend. We kept an eye mostly on the little girl as she was home during the day. Sometimes she rode the husky around like a horse. None of us agreed on how we felt about this, whether it was charming or cruel.
The family was small and quiet. A mother, a father, an older brother, and a little sister. They walked around in silence, read books, and did work in silence. The mother drew pictures of buildings. The father would leave during the day and come back at night. When he came back, he spent long hours in front of a computer. Sometimes he would type, but mostly he would read or watch. Screens were difficult for us. There was a space between us, and it distorted the writing, though we speculated about it. Every member of the home had headphones. When they watched television, it was on a low volume. The dog only barked or whined in moments of extreme duress, like when he hadn’t been let outside in too long. He began to whine when he noticed us, and once or twice, he growled or even barked. This was of primary concern for the quiet family.
“Maybe it’s a ghost.” The older brother suggested. The little sister quickly played along. The mother and father rolled their eyes and said nothing. We sat at the extra seats around the dining table left for guests and did not weigh in. No one asked for our opinion. That night, we followed them to bed. The dog was confined downstairs and watched from the bottom of the stairs, whining helplessly.
Each evening, we observed a different room of the house. Sometimes, we found the older child sitting intently before a computer screen. After our first encounter with this practice, we moved on—there was not much to see beyond the brightness of the screen. The mother and father slept on the far ends of their too-large bed and did nothing but sleep soundlessly, without even a whisper of a stir. The little girl slept fitfully under our watch, often tossing and turning and mumbling in her sleep. Sometimes she would wake up crying quietly, but we had no means to console her. Once she woke up and screamed, disrupting the quiet of the home so violently that her mother took her out of the house the next morning. When they returned that afternoon, the little girl was off-kilter, and exhaustion lined her little face. We wondered collectively, as we did all things, if this could have something to do with us. Our observation of the little girl let up.
Not so many days later, an old woman came by and took the little girl out. We feared she might not come back, but at the end of the day, she was returned. The old woman had eyes the same shade of blue as the father and a nose that was shared by him and both children. She shared only terse words with the mother. The little girl left happily with her each day for a week.
On the fourth day of that week, with nothing better to do, we watched the mother sketch her building pictures for hours. Our interest waned until, at last, something unexpected happened. A car pulled into the driveway. An unfamiliar man stepped out. He wore no uniform, and his vehicle was nondescript. We waited anxiously by the door for him to come inside. From the sidewalk leading to the house, he paused and looked at us, eyes widening for a moment before he blinked and looked away. The husky waited anxiously at the door.
The mother let him inside and almost immediately, they were in the throes with one another. He wrapped his long arms around her small body, and they kissed. This was a development that shocked and titillated us, and we continued to watch excitedly as she led him up the stairs. We did not follow into the bedroom. We were not so voyeuristic. The mother of the quiet children and wife of the quiet father was not so quiet for some time after this. The man left as quickly as he arrived and well before the old woman and the little girl returned from their outings, or the brother from school, or the father from work.
For the rest of the week, the little girl and the old woman would leave in the morning, and the mother and the new man would tussle around in the afternoon. It was in the midst of this one day that the phone rang. We waited anxiously beside it for the mother to come down and answer. She came in a bathrobe, her hair disturbed and cheeks flushed.
“Suspended?” She hissed into the receiver. Suspended where? We wondered. Somewhere high up, no doubt. No, the older child had done something bad at school. She needed to go get him immediately. The new man left in a hurry when given the news. So quickly he forgot his jacket and left it crumpled unceremoniously by the door where the mother had pulled it off him. We stayed by the jacket, awaiting its discovery.
The mother returned with her son, and the two of them were, as usual, quiet. She told him calmly they would discuss things when his father came home from work, but he ought to go upstairs and wait for him. Around his eye was purplish, and he had a red stain beneath his nose. He shuffled toward the stairs but paused near the front door. We were all huddled around where the jacket lay, watching him with bated breath as he approached it. The mother kept the house quite immaculate. Who would leave a piece of clothing just lying around? He picked up the jacket.
The only person in the house it might belong to was the father, but we processed both problems with this theory alongside him. Firstly, the father was a small man, and this jacket was quite large. Secondly, the jacket was leather, worn, fashionable, and much too cool to belong to his father, who was impartial to business attire and sweaters and didn’t own anything that might be described as cool. The boy slipped his bruised knuckled hand into the jacket pocket and slid out a wallet. We encircled him, hovering so close it was a shock he did not notice us there. As he opened the wallet and examined the face on the identification card, we jittered with intrigue. At first, he looked confused, but then his face turned pale and his brows furrowed. Recognition alighted on his young, marred face. And disgust.
Our excitement piqued as the mother came storming in, her stomps near-silent despite her face painted red with anger. She hadn’t heard him climb the stairs as she’d commanded. When she rounded the corner into the foyer, she stopped, staring at the jacket and wallet in his hands. The two of them, per the tradition of the house, were utterly silent. Anything said between them was said in the twisting of their faces, and neither could nor wanted to wrap their mouths around words. After a few moments of this stand-off, the older child ran up the stairs, clutching the jacket and wallet in his hands. The sound of his bedroom door slamming and a lock clicking shut echoed through the house. The mother stood at the base of the stairs and stared after that sound for a long while.
That night, the quiet house was not very quiet at all, and we fed happily on the noise.