Nobody By John Briggs I went to the door. The tall neighbor boy was there. Excited. He leaned in, pulled me toward him, whispered in my ear and ran off. I heard mom's feet on the stairs. And then her voice, "Just who do you think you are, young lady, answering a door in your nightgown?" I told her what he'd said, and she pulled me out onto the grass. It was a hot night. But nobody was on their lawns. Just our lane with its shrubs and hedges and the lights in our neighbors' windows. It felt weird. I'd been inside most of the houses, but when I looked in their windows on summer nights and saw the furniture and lamps, the pictures on the wall, I always started to wonder what it looked like inside. We prowled around the grass. It felt wet and chilly on my feet. Mom spotted him first under the front hedge. The tip of his black shoe gleamed in the streetlight. His face and hands were blurry in the leaves. You could tell by the way his head was he was dead. Mom hissed. "What nerve." She was furious. The two of us lifted him up to carry him inside. It surprised me how light he was, like a kid or something empty. When we got him in the house I could tell he was nobody we knew. He had on an old fashioned black suit. His face looked old, a face like somebody important. His shoes were polished bright. Maybe he was an ambassador or a butler. We laid him on the couch but he was so tall his feet stuck off the end. Dad got home the next night from his trip. I was in the kitchen and heard him turn on the news. When I came in dad was in the living room trying to prop the man's feet up on the back of the couch. He sat at one end of the couch, but the man's polished shoes kept slipping down and hitting him in the neck. "Look at this," he said. "Try to find out what's going on in the world and you have to put up with a corpse." Several nights I heard mom and dad in the bedroom arguing about him. Dad wanted to call the authorities to take him away. But mom said it would set a bad example for me. She thought we had to look after him ourselves, plus if we did call anybody, they'd suspect he belonged to us. She was sure if we just waited somebody he really belonged to would show up and want him. Dad moved the TV around so he could watch it from the chair when he came home. But I could tell he wasn't happy with the arrangement. So the man lay there on our sofa with his shoes getting dusty. Like dad always said, mom is the socialite in our family so it was pretty hard on her having to keep her friends out of the living room. After a while she just stopped entertaining. One time when I was alone with the neighbor boy he told me we were getting a reputation. I remember one night, after everybody was asleep, I went down to the living room and sat with the man in the dark. Just the streetlight coming in the window, I could see his eyes, which were always open, dark-centered like he was concentrating on a really deep point. I thought he looked so old when we first found him, now he looked young. He never changed, of course. He was like a person you only knew from a snapshot in your family album. I don't know why, but sitting there in the dark, I took hold of his hand, which felt cold and soft and very large. I almost imagined him breathing and almost expected him to sit up and tell me who he was and why he'd been lying there under our hedge. Of course he didn't. I didn't feel sad about him, really, more confused. Later on I went up to bed. One day after he'd been on the couch a long time a woman came to the door and demanded to know if we had found a body. Mom told her the only bodies we had were our own, and slammed the door in her face. I was surprised she'd forgotten her idea about somebody showing up who would want to take him. She did make one attempt to get rid of him. She talked dad into going down cellar one winter to bury him under the floor. But before he could finish the hole, dad caught a cold and got a bad complication. That was after I left. Eventually mom got over being mad at me for going away to have my own life and she used to write me little things about him, like about the burying and how they tried to move him into my old room on the bed until mom couldn't stand it because she said he made her feel creepy every time she passed the door to know that there was somebody in my room who wasn't me. Now she never mentions him in her letters. I guess he's still there, though, back on the couch, looking younger all the time with dad still coming home from his trips and having to watch the news around him. And sometimes I still think about him, wondering who he is and remembering the feeling of his big, soft hand in mine.