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Who is he? You can’t know, because you can’t even see him. Not fully. Didn’t see his face, so shadowed in the dark upstairs.
The man moved, vanishing from her view out of the vent grate. She heard and felt him open the door to the small closet next to the stairs and rummage through whatever was hanging there with a swishing noise. Apparently done, his sounds traveled toward the playroom. There was a waterfall clatter of Legos swept aside by the sweep of the door. Aclickof the light switch, and they were again thrown into darkness.
She recognized the sound of toys kicked aside. Over the last twomonths, detached and finding it difficult to care about much at all, let alone how clean the house was, she’d stopped making the children tidy regularly. As a result, the playroom had grown well beyond the bounds of its usual mess. She knew the frustration of stepping on toys, of trying to navigate that room. But the man’s passage through that child’s space was different. For her, indifferent annoyance. For him, seething indignation.
A smash. Something bursting into pieces against the wall. Something else fractured into the floorboards with a crunch.
“My creations!” her daughter breathed.
Yes, probably.
The man had most likely destroyed one or more of the special, oversized Lego constructions her daughter kept assembled around the perimeter of the room. The castle that tapered and widened again, the ship peopled with fantastical creatures, the spiral rainbow stairs that climbed high as her daughter could reach, tiptoed on a stool.
She imagined these flights of imagination leveled. Felt a surge of impotent anger as she remembered the quiet hours her daughter spent, head tilted, chewing her lip, building and enlarging and spinning the pieces out of patient fantasy.
It was an evergreen pain, knowing that things that took so long to build had been, could be, so easily destroyed.
She drew the children closer.
“They’re things, and things can be fixed,” she whispered. “I’ll help you fix them. Shhh.”
“That wasn’t Daddy,” her daughter said so low it might have been meant only for herself. “I thought it might be Daddy.”
Her throat tightened with longing, with the illogical hope her husband might somehow come home through the storm to rescue them.
Don’t cry.
“It’s not Daddy,” she agreed.
“That is a big man.”
The pit in her stomach cratered deeper. She urgently needed to use the bathroom, to expel everything, her whole churning gut.
You’ve been thinking of yourself as the lone witness. But you’re not. You’re not! The way they stared at the ceiling, tracked those footsteps. Remember how they hopped to, right into the hidden place?
You’ve been hoping you’re just crazy, all this time, part of you has still been hoping you were just losing it. Closing your eyes and wishing it away.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “Mommy’s here. Shh.”
How nice it would be, to be crazy instead of correct. For it all to be a psychotic break. To have her husband come down those stairs. She’d pop out of the hidden place, relieved—elated!—to meet his look of confusion. She’d watch his expression transition into horror as she babbled explanations. How could she lock her children away behind walls? Frighten them in the middle of the night? She faded warm into picturing those plodding, everyday consequences. Anger, and psychiatrists, and divorce, and a padded cell. How lovely, how comforting, to live in that alternate reality a moment, where her mind had unhinged and there was no danger of violence from anyone but herself. Those stakes were so low! So beautifully low.
Reality can be more disorienting than dreams.
“Mama?” Her son’s voice had a watery sound, quaver of suppressed tears.
What a brave boy. The best boy.
“Mama, you said monsters didn’t exist.”
She lowered her head, feeling a great weight descend. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Ilied.”
5
Finding herself walled into her own home wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to acclimate to a new reality, wishing that her own mind was the problem.
Nearly two years before, her husband hung up a call with his parents and told her, “My mom has cancer.”
She felt as though she’d stepped out of herself. She blinked at him stupidly.
