The Purple Polka

The year I turned twelve, my mother lost a baby in the linen closet of our apartment. It was a small, windowless room that smelled of detergent and old cardboard, and after that day, we never used it for anything but storing the vacuum and a pile of mismatched towels. We didn’t talk about it, not really. We just closed the door and went on with our lives, but something in that house changed. It started with a draft that followed you from room to room, and the feeling of being watched even when you were alone.

Our apartment was on the third floor of a pre-war building on the edge of the city, with tall ceilings and radiators that clanked like bones. The hallway to the bedrooms was narrow, and the kitchen window faced a brick wall, so even at noon, the place was dim. My mother worked nights at a hospital, and I often found myself alone with the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock. It was on a Tuesday, at 2:37 in the morning, that I first saw him.

I had woken with a dry throat and padded to the kitchen for a glass of water. The moon was hidden behind clouds, and the only light came from the streetlamp outside, casting long shadows through the blinds. As I passed the front door, I noticed something small and pale by the mat. I froze. A boy, no more than three years old, stood with his hand on the knob, as if he were trying to turn it. He wore pajamas—blue with little stars—and his face was turned away, but I could see the curve of his cheek and the dark hair that curled at his neck. I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. I just stared until he vanished, like a candle blown out.

The next morning, I told my mother. She listened, her face pale, and then she went to the calendar on the fridge. She traced her finger over the dates, her lips moving silently. When she turned back to me, her eyes were wet. ‘His due date,’ she whispered. ‘It was exactly two years, one month, and two days ago.’ But I had already done the math. I had been awake for hours, thinking. And I knew that the boy I saw was not an infant. He was a toddler, old enough to reach a doorknob. He had aged in the span of a single night.

I didn’t sleep well after that. I started hearing things—the patter of small feet in the hallway, the faint giggle from the bathroom where my mother kept his tiny ultrasound pictures in a drawer. I would wake to find the front door unlocked, even though I had locked it the night before. And then, about a month later, I found the paper.

It was in the crafts closet, a closet we never used anymore, filled with dried paint and dusty boxes. I was looking for a pair of scissors when I saw it: a piece of construction paper, bright purple, lying on the floor as if it had been placed there. On it was a series of dots, perfectly aligned in a grid, drawn with a purple marker. The dots were neat, precise, and there were exactly sixty of them. I counted twice. I took it to my mother, and she held it in her hands for a long time. ‘He drew this,’ she said softly. ‘He’s trying to communicate with us.’ I wanted to ask her what the dots meant, but she just smiled and told me not to be scared. ‘He only wants to be a part of the family,’ she said, and she tucked the paper into her pocket.

But I was scared. I was terrified. Because every time I looked at that grid, I saw a pattern, and the pattern seemed to be counting down. Sixty dots. Sixty days. I didn’t tell my mother, but I started marking the days on my own calendar. And I began to notice other things. The boy was appearing more often now, sometimes in the corner of my eye, sometimes standing in the doorway of my room at night. He was always just out of reach, always watching me with eyes that were too dark, too knowing. And he was growing. He was now the size of a four-year-old.

I tried to talk to my mother about it, but she would just wave her hand and say, ‘He’s our boy. He’ll always be a part of us.’ She had even bought him a toothbrush, and a small set of clothes that hung in the linen closet. The door to that closet was always slightly ajar now, and the smell of detergent had turned to something sweet and rotten, like flowers left in water too long.

On the sixtieth day, I woke at 2:37 in the morning to the sound of the front door opening. I crept to the hallway and saw him there, standing in the frame, his hand on the knob. He was taller now, maybe six years old, and he wore the same blue pajamas, now too small. He turned his head slowly and looked at me. His eyes were pure white, and he smiled with too many teeth. ‘I’m home,’ he said, and his voice was like the sound of a needle scratching a record.

I ran to my mother’s room, but her bed was empty. The sheets were cold. I searched the apartment, my heart pounding, and found her in the kitchen, standing by the window. She was facing the brick wall, her back to me, and she was humming a lullaby I didn’t recognize. ‘Mom?’ I said. She turned around, and her eyes were white too. They were empty, like the boy’s. ‘We’re all together now,’ she said, and she held out her hand. In it was the purple paper, but the dots were gone. It was blank.

I heard a noise behind me and spun around. The boy was there, standing in the hallway, and the lights flickered. He was holding a crayon, purple, and he was grinning. ‘I drew it for you,’ he said. ‘A map. So you can find the way home.’ And then he pointed toward the linen closet, where the door was now open, and inside, I could see the pink and red shape of a baby, floating in a dark fluid, its eyes opening and closing, its tiny hand reaching toward me.

I don’t tell this story often, because I’m afraid that friends won’t want to come over. I’m afraid that they will see the boy too, or my mother, who now sits in the living room with her eyes white, humming that lullaby. I’m afraid they will follow the dots on the wall, which have multiplied, covering the wallpaper in a purple polka pattern. And I’m afraid that one day, the boy will be old enough to leave the apartment, and he will walk out into the sun, and he will be free. And I will be left here, counting the dots, wondering if I am the only one who can still see the truth. The construction paper is gone, but the pattern remains, and I know now that it was never a message. It was a countdown. And the countdown is over. I am the only one left who remembers the way things used to be. I am the only one who still screams, but I do it silently, so he won’t hear me.

I have taken to sleeping with a nightlight now, but the glow only makes the shadows darker. Last night, I saw him at my door again, and he was holding a small hand. He was leading a child, a girl with my mother’s eyes. And then I realized that the family was growing, and that I was the only one who would ever see them. I am the only one who knows that the purple dots are not just on the paper. They are on my skin, appearing one by one, a constellation of fear. And I wonder, as the boy grows and the paper fades, if I will be the next one he takes. The next one to stand at the door, hand on the knob, ready to go home. The next one to draw the pattern for someone else. The last one to remember the light.