The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

CHAPTER ONE

1993

I was at home, grounded for stealing cigarettes from Johnnie's corner store, on the day my baby brother, Paul, was eaten by the house at the end of the street. Paul was eight and I was thirteen. I wasn't there when it happened but it was my fault anyway.

The house, the old McIntyre place, had been abandoned for twenty years when Paul and his friends Richie and Jake snuck in through the back door. They weren't supposed to get hurt, none of them. It was only a dare, a childish thing. I couldn't have known what would happen.

Neighborhood teenagers had used a certain broken window on the side for years, had smoked and drank and gotten inside each other's pants in the dusty, rat-infested living room of the former residents. Those kids always said the place was creepy, that there were bloodstains on the walls. Some of them claimed to have heard noises upstairs, but this kind of talk was mostly dismissed. There was always someone in every group-usually a boy-who wanted to terrorize the girls into squeezing closer, and saying there were noises upstairs was an easy way to do that.

Nobody ever said the house was dangerous-that is, beyond the obvious fact that it was an old, rotting house. More than one kid needed an extra tetanus shot after going in there, but nobody died. Nobody died until Paul.

I should probably say that nobody died because of the thing in the house. Because somebody had died there, that's for sure. Seven somebodies died there, and they'd died in such horrible ways that no one had wanted to live in the house ever again. Which was why it was abandoned and rotting. Which was why it had become the perfect place for the kids in the neighborhood to have a little thrill of danger without actually experiencing it.

Except for Paul and Richie and Jake. Three went in and two came out and it was my fault.

It was a rambling three-story frame house, unusual in an area that had mostly two- or three-flats made of brick or greystone, canted a little to one side like there was subsidence beneath. Chicago was built on a swamp, so the subsidence kind of made sense, except none of the other houses in the neighborhood tilted that way. As far as I knew, no one ever went up to the third floor. Most kids don't even like to go into their own attics, never mind the attic of a building that had holes in the stairs.

One time Scott Gunther tried to go up those stairs on a dare and his leg went through the third step. His pant leg tore all the way up to the hem of his briefs and he was pretty embarrassed about that when they yanked him out. The two other boys who'd dared him were laughing until Scott's eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed. That was when they realized the broken wood in the step had carved a deep jagged line in Scott's flesh from his ankle to his thigh and he was bleeding out while they laughed. Scott was a few years older than me, and he never wore shorts again because the little kids would ask him about the scar.

The neighbors across the street, the Rileys, said they heard Paul and Richie and Jake screaming sometime around 3:30 p.m. Mr. Riley was watering the front lawn and listening to the Cubs game on the radio. Mrs. Riley was clipping coupons from the weekly circular at her kitchen table. The window above the sink was open. She told me later that she heard the three boys over the sound of the game and the traffic on the street, even though the kitchen was in the back of the house like most Chicago apartments.

There was an ear-splitting scream, high-pitched and terrified, and Mr. Riley shut off the hose. Mrs. Riley stood up from the kitchen table, her scissors still in her right hand, and went to the front of the house and opened the door.

"Carl, did you hear that?" she called, and she told me her heart felt like it was about to burst right out of her throat, the sheer unnaturalness of the sound spiking panic through her.

Carl stood on the lawn, the hose sprayer in his hand, his head cocked to one side. Mrs. Riley remembered the crack of the bat followed by Ron Santo's voice lamenting a Cardinals run, and then, she said, "It was pure pandemonium."

The boys were yelling and crying loud enough to be heard all up and down the block. Mrs. Riley rushed out to the front lawn wielding the scissors. Mr. Riley dropped the hose and ran across the street, pushing open the rusting metal gate.

Mrs. Riley said that she stood there, holding the scissors and not knowing what to do. The Majewskis came out onto their porch holding hands, their faces terrified. They lived to the right of the Rileys, on the first floor, and they were both in their seventies. Mrs. Majewski was so pale that Mrs. Riley was worried she might faint on the spot. Mrs. Majewski wore a pink flowered housecoat and her carpet slippers, and her hair was white and fine and fluttering in the breeze. Mrs. Riley thought she looked like a dandelion with a bent stem.

Ted Dobrowski, who lived on the other side of the Rileys, rushed out his front door. He was in his mid-thirties, divorced, and had one fifteen-year-old son, Alex, who was known as a Problem Child around the block. Ted wore his Sandberg jersey and he held a can of Old Style.

"What the hell, Sheila?" he said, staring across the street at Carl, who was trying to open the front door of the McIntyre place.

There were boards tacked over the frame to keep anyone from going inside. The boards were covered in faded citations that had, as far as anyone knew, never been followed through on. Maybe if the city had done what they were supposed to do and torn down the property years before, none of this would have ever happened.

Ted dropped his beer on the lawn and ran to help Carl.

"Should we call the police?" Alice Majewski said, her voice quavering.

The screams were louder, more frantic, and mixed with the hoarse cries of Carl Riley and Ted Dobrowski calling, "Hang on kids! We're coming!" and the crack of the bat and cheers coming from the radio.

Sheila Riley said the men got the boards off and Ted Dobrowski ran at the door like a linebacker, shoulder first and legs low, and the door flew open as if by magic.

"And then," Sheila Riley told me, ten years later, after Carl Riley had died from stomach cancer and Ted Dobrowski's Problem Child had become my personal problem, "it was even worse. Because the door was open and there was nothing to muffle that sound-the sound of those boys in terror. Carl and Ted just stood there in the doorway, and you could tell they didn't know what to do. There was this other noise then, this almost-roar, but it wasn't exactly that. I don't know how to describe it, except it was like there was a crack in the world. And right before that crack closed up again, I heard him. I heard Paul screaming your name, saying, 'Jessie, Jessie,' over and over again."


On the day my brother was eaten by the house at the end of the street I was home, grounded and in a filthy mood.

Paul kept coming to my bedroom, trying to jolly me out from under the black cloud.

"Wanna play Monopoly?" he asked, his brown eyes and the tip of his nose peeking around my door.

"No," I said. I had my Walkman on, blasting the Black Crowes. I did not want to listen to Paul chattering. I turned the volume up as far as it would go.

I hated having to use a cassette player when all my friends had CDs, but as my mother frequently reminded me, "WE CAN'T AFFORD IT" and "WHEN YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO GET A JOB YOU CAN WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THOSE KINDS OF THINGS." She probably wasn't yelling at me all the time, but whenever she talked, it felt like she was, like everything she ever said to me was in all caps because I was "GOING TO BE THE DEATH OF HER."

Paul was her perfect child, the one who did everything right all the time. But maybe I only remember him that way because he never had a chance to grow up and mess up, never had a chance to be a teenager, to change, to make mistakes, to atone, to morph into someone new and more complicated.

His eyes and nose disappeared, but fifteen minutes later he was back again. "Wanna play Life?"

"No, Paulie," I said. "Get lost."

He pushed the door open a little farther. I remember him standing there, his black curls spiraling everywhere in the humidity, just like mine. His legs were skinny and scabbed under gray shorts. He always wore his Cubs shirt on home game days, even if that meant he wore it three or four days in a row.

"Mom told you not to call me Paulie. I don't like it," he said.

"Whatever, Paulie." I flopped back on my bed so my eyes burned a hole in the ceiling.

"Jessie, Mom said don't do it."

I turned onto my right side so I wouldn't face the door. The Walkman volume wasn't loud enough to drown out the sound of him coming around my bed. I closed my eyes, trying my hardest to ignore him. He pushed his hand into my shoulder, shoving me a little. My eyes snapped open.

"You want a black eye, Paulie?" I said, sitting up and menacing him with my fist.

"Don't call me Paulie!" he said, his tone right on the verge of whiny.

"I'll call you whatever I want, Paulie."

"I'm gonna tell Mom," Paul said.

"I'm already grounded. I don't care."

This was a lie. Mom said if I "PUT ONE TOE OUT OF LINE" I'd be grounded for the entire summer. It never pays to show weakness to a younger sibling, though. If they detect a single chink in your armor, they will exploit it.

Paul stood there, staring at me with jaws and fists clenched. He really wanted to slug me, I could tell, but Mom had told him that "gentlemen don't hit their sisters." ("What if she's being a jerk?" Paul had asked. "Not even then," Mom had replied.)

"Why won't you stop?" he said.

"Because it annoys you, Paulie. If it didn't annoy you, I wouldn't do it."

I flopped onto my back again, staring at the ceiling. A little brown house spider crawled slowly across the blue paint.

"What if I give you all my baseball cards?"

"No, Paulie. I don't want your baseball cards."

"Paulie is a baby name," he said, desperation evident in his voice. "I'm a big kid now."

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, sitting up straight with a sudden brain wave. "Prove it."

"Prove it how?" he asked warily.

"You've got to go into the McIntyre place and stay there for a half hour," I said.

I didn't think he'd actually do it. Like most of the younger kids in the neighborhood (including myself, a few years earlier), Paul thought the McIntyre place was haunted. He'd probably stand on the sidewalk, looking at the house, for the rest of the afternoon, his teeth chattering while he tried to convince himself to go in before slinking home, defeated, for dinner.

"How will I prove I was there the whole time?" he said.

"You gotta bring Richie and Jake with you," I said in another moment of light bulb brilliance. It would take extra time for Paul to round up the other two (which meant more minutes out of the house and not bothering me), and also, Richie was a tattler. If they did, by any chance, work up the guts to go inside and didn't spend the full half hour, then Richie would tell.

In fact, if they did actually fulfill the terms of the dare, Richie would tell, anyway. When his mom asked what he did during the day, he was incapable of lying to her. If Richie said that he and Paul and Jake had gone inside the McIntyre place, they'd all be in trouble, and I was feeling just vindictive enough to want somebody to be in trouble besides me. All the kids were told to keep away from the house because it was dangerous.

When grown-ups said "dangerous," they meant "structurally unsound." They didn't mean the house could devour a child whole.

I didn't think Paul would tell Richie about the dare. He wouldn't want Richie to know, because conflicts between siblings are kept between siblings, or at least that was how Paul and I were. Petty arguments were immediately turned over to the court of Mom and Dad, but anything serious stayed between us. It turned out I was right about that, although I didn't know for a long time.

"If I go in there, if I really do it, will you stop calling me Paulie?"

"Yeah," I said. There's not a chance in hell you'll do it, I thought.

He licked his lips and stood there, shifting his weight from foot to foot, looking uncertain.

"I dare you," I said.

He walked out of the room and I never saw him again.