Page 37 of Wrong Mail

I don't call again. I remain on my stool in the light with a wine glass and a pile of dead people. Then I turn my head slowly, giving my good ear to the hallway the way I've been taught to give it to a difficult room.

I listen so hard that my whole skull rings with it.

Nothing. The fridge. The AC. The blood in my ears. A boat far out. Nothing at all.

I let my breath out.

This is what it does, Kane says, in my head, patient as a metronome. Your body learned something and it's still trying to keep you safe with the only tools it has.

“Okay,” I say out loud, to my empty kitchen. “Time for bed.”

I close the laptop. I put the wine glass in the sink but I don't rinse it.

I go around the ground floor the way I do every night. It's a ritual now. I start with the front door, then the slider off the living room, followed by the little door from the utility room to the side return. I test each one. Locked. Locked. Locked. I say the word in my head each time like it will make it stick.

The trouble with checking is that the certainty doesn't stay. It dissolves the moment I walk away. Then all I'm left with is the memory of having done it, and that's the one thing in my life I've been taught not to trust.

Off the utility room is the door to the garage. It’s mostly David’s now. His car, his shelves, his things I never reach for. If the power goes out, that's where the flashlight lives, with the storm candles and the batteries. I haven't set foot past that door since I stopped driving.

The terrace doors off the kitchen I leave for last. The heat is still in the house. The air past the glass is dead and thick. I stand there a moment with my hand on the latch, looking at my reflection laid over the black water. I’m a woman alone in a bright kitchen at midnight. And I think, not for the first time, that a person could stand ten feet away in the dark and watch me, and I'd never know.

"Luna."

She's in her bed by the cold hearth, chin on the rim, watching me with one eye the way she does when she's decided the day is over and I'm being slow about it.

"Come on, then."

She doesn't come. She sighs, the whole-body sigh of a dog being put out, and I leave her to it and go up alone. I don't put the hall light on because I know this house in the dark. I get into bed on David's empty side.

Downstairs, Luna still hasn't followed me up. She always follows me up.

I'm too tired to wonder why.

Chapter Thirteen

There's a stranger in the room and his hands are on my throat.

I can't see him. I can only feel the weight of him over me, the thumbs settling into my throat, patient, taking their time. I can't move my arms. I can't make a sound, there's no air to make it with, and the dark is total. He leans down close enough that I feel him breathe, and he says my name like he's known it a long time.

Then the sky tears open.

Thunder comes straight down through the roof and I jerk awake.

Both hands fly to my throat, clawing at my skin, but there's no one there.

The room swings into place around me, the wardrobe, the window, the gray shape of the ceiling. I'm sitting up in a knot of damp sheets, my heart going so hard it hurts.

It was just a dream.

I sit there and make myself breathe. The rain has come at last. I can hear it now, the real rain, hammering the window on my good side. Under it, the house is dark in a way it shouldn't be. I reach for the lamp and click it and nothing happens. I look for the little red numbers on David's clock and they're not there. Then they come flooding back all at once, blinking.

00:00. 00:00. 00:00.

The power must have gone out.

The clock doesn't know what time it is. Neither do I.

"Luna." I reach over. The bed beside me is empty. Of course it is, she stayed downstairs. But I put my hand on the cold sheet, and that's when I hear her.