Tony Barbosa
In the woods behind Tony Barbosa’s house, the autumn leaves screened out so much daylight it seemed like dusk had already arrived. The paths through these woods had been his happy place for all the years he and his wife, Alice, had owned their house, and never more so than in October and November, when neighbors set fire to raked leaves during the day and the scent of their wood-burning stoves lingered on the chilly air at night. Alice had never been fond of autumn, had no real love of Halloween, and felt uneasy anytime he cajoled her into walking the trails that meandered through their woods. Too creepy, she said. He should have realized the first time she’d said it that their marriage would run into trouble.
He wiped a sheen of sweat off his brow and let out a breath.
Tony and Alice had enjoyed about two years of smooth sailing before they hit their first rough seas. The births of their two children had kept them afloat for a long time, but circumstances had become so difficult that he worried they were sinking now.
“Sinking,” he said quietly to himself. “Or sunk?”
“Dad?”
He turned to see Chloe headed toward him down the path, a big cardboard box that looked even bigger in the arms of a girl so short. Chloe had inherited big brown eyes and thick hair from her dad, but the diminutive stature she got from her mom.
“You talking to yourself back here?” she asked.
“First sign of madness,” he admitted. “But you’re not really crazy until you start answering yourself back.”
“You’re only half-crazy, then. Good to know.”
Tony felt the twinge of melancholy he always got when he looked at his now-seventeen-year-old daughter. She was a good kid—smart and confident and ambitious. Her mother’s daughter, really. Tony wished he could take credit. He and Chloe had been close until she turned twelve and decided her parents were idiots. The teenage animosity had lasted for years but had finally dissipated over the summer. Now she was just trying to navigate the sometimes whiplash-inducing back-and-forth of her parents’ relationship.
She set the box down. “What’ve we got here?”
“Open it. Let’s find out.”
Chloe tore into the box like it was Christmas morning instead of Halloween, but in the Barbosa house, October 31 was just as important as December 25. Sometimes even more so. During what Alice lovingly referred to as their daughter’s “hormonal years,” prepping the Haunted Woods every October was the one thing that had brought Tony and Chloe together. Barbosa’s Haunted Woods had taken on legendary status in town, enough so that the neighbors tended to get a little miffed about the traffic it brought to Parmenter Road.
When it had drawn mostly people from their own neighborhood, they’d all loved it. But now that the Haunted Woods brought people from all over town, dozens of cars clogging the street just as trick-or-treat was wrapping up for the night, some of the Barbosas’ neighbors weren’t as thrilled as they once had been.
Now it didn’t matter anymore. Tonight would be their swan song.
Chloe pulled a bunch of Bubble Wrap out of the box, digging deeper. “Hey! This is cool.”
She revealed a thin, almost skeletal hand and what appeared to be some kind of face mask, and at first, Tony didn’t recall having ordered them. With all the haunted attraction props they had accumulated over the eleven years they’d been doing this, he had plenty of skeletons and scary masks. Then Chloe stood and walked to the nearest oak tree, and it clicked for him. The rough pattern on the arm and the mask were imitation bark, the gray-brown hue meant to match the trees. When Chloe held the demonic tree face in place and the skeletal evil-tree arm up to the side of the oak’s trunk, Tony grinned like a little kid.
“That is going to freak people out,” he said. His most glowing review. After all, that was their great ambition.
They’d been putting the whole display together as a team since Chloe was six. She had loved it even then, never scared of the terrifying props. Her little brother, Rick, was thirteen years old and in the eighth grade, and he still refused to even walk through the Haunted Woods. Once it had been fear that drove the kid, but Tony thought now it was simple disinterest. Either that, or Rick thought of the Haunted Woods as “Dad and Chloe’s thing,” with himself and his mom on the outside.
And maybe that was okay. Tony and his daughter had Halloween and scary movies and the Haunted Woods, but Chloe had zero interest in going fishing with her father and brother. As a first-generation Portuguese American kid growing up in Quincy, on Boston’s south shore, Tony had gone fishing with his father, Silverio, almost every Saturday morning from the time he could hold a fishing pole until the day he got married. When Ricky had been born, Tony’s dad had been first to the hospital, beaming with pride. A machinist, he’d worked his body to ruin to support his family and always seemed exhausted to Tony, but that afternoon, holding his grandson in his arms and crowing about the day he would be able to take both his son and grandson fishing, Silverio Barbosa had never seemed more vividly alive.
Less than a year later, cancer had taken him. He had never taken his grandson fishing.
But even now, with Ricky a teenager, old enough to demand they call him Rick, Tony took the boy fishing on Saturday mornings. Sometimes they settled into silence, enjoying the solitude, and sometimes Tony reminisced about his dad and his childhood and tried to share what little wisdom he felt he’d acquired in his life till now.
So if Rick didn’t want anything to do with the Haunted Woods, wanted to leave that to his sister, that was more than okay. It was nice for Tony and Chloe to have something just for themselves, especially since Chloe was older, and while her grandfather had shown up at the hospital after her birth and pronounced her the most beautiful child he had ever seen, Silverio Barbosa had never declared any intention to one day take her fishing. Born in another time and another culture, he viewed that as entirely something the men did. Tony sometimes wondered if he had done the wrong thing, excluding Chloe from his fishing excursions with her little brother, but when it started, he had viewed it as time to bond with Rick and time for Alice to bond with Chloe.
He didn’t know what was right. He just tried to do his best by the people he loved.
This year had been a little different. It would be the last time, the end of the Haunted Woods, so he and Chloe had tried everything short of physical violence to get Rick involved and excited. He had made excuses, his disinterest clear. In the end, Tony didn’t mind—this thing had always been his and Chloe’s, and it seemed right that it would end that way. He hadn’t explicitly told her this would be the last one, but she lived in the same house, had eyes and ears and a little intuition. She knew how long he had been out of work before he’d finally found a new job in August, knew not to answer the phone to avoid the bill collectors. Tony and Alice casually mentioned to neighbors that they were “considering downsizing,” so maybe people wouldn’t realize they hadn’t had a choice. Chloe could see the writing on the wall.
“How many of those did we order?” Tony asked, admiring the tree demon again.
“There are three sets,” Chloe replied, studying the contents of the box. “The eyes glow—there’s a switch. If we get some soft blue lights angled just right and put them on those trees at the third bend in the path—”
“With one of the fog machines—”
“It’ll be perfect.”
Chloe had a smile full of mischief. Her eyes gleamed with delight that matched his own. People came to Barbosa’s Haunted Woods, donated money to whatever charity Tony and Chloe had chosen that year, and took a walk along the path that would scare the crap out of them.
“Happy Halloween, kid,” Tony said.
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