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Just outside her daughter’s room, the attic door was cut into the wall. The realtor had called it a jib door, a thing she’d looked up and found to be not quite accurate. The jib door images that shebrowsed had been of doors purposefully and beautifully hidden, cut into moldings or bookcases.
But their attic door was more visible. It was built of the same vertical boards that paneled its wall. This made the vertical sides of the door seamless with the wall itself, but the cut at the top was as obvious as a normal door. Although in the rest of the house the hinges had heavy iron strapping, the attic door’s hinges were of a different type, visible only from the attic side. She’d guessed that the door might have been half-disguised in this way because the original owners hadn’t wanted to be reminded of the closeness of the people they’d enslaved sleeping above, but also had been too thrifty to bother with completely hiding it. The attic door didn’t have a handle but could be pulled open and fastened shut by using a small, hard-to-notice hook and eye. The door always blew open when someone lifted that hook, the strange top-floor air pressures wrenching it open. There was a dent on the wall from where the hook always hit.
You really ought to put a doorstop there to keep it from slamming open, patch the wall.
Doorstops, things to fix, what does it matter? Think of things that matter.
Has he found the basement yet? Likely.
The basement door was obvious in the entryway. She wouldn’t be able to hear him open that door, not from the hidden place.
Too bad. You could lock him in the basement. It’s got that heavy bolt so the kids don’t go down there. Can’t lock him in the attic. The hook would rattle out the minute he threw a shoulder against it.
She scolded herself over the fantasy.
Think of real things. A real plan. There has to be something. There’s always something.
Except when there isn’t.
She closed her eyes and pictured the house.
A rectangle, a triangle. Four windows on the left, four to theright, another above the door in the middle. Panes hatched like tic-tac-toe boards. In the center of the roof, a square stub of chimney. An idea of a house.
Yes, the house looked just like a child’s drawing. Just like a house should. In her mind’s eye there was a little curlicue of smoke snaking out of the chimney, drawn in gray crayon. To the children, to her, the house was a place elementally, reassuringlyhome.
She mentally sketched the house from a bird’s-eye view, carefully labeled it, the grounds, viewed the floors in cross section, flew higher and higher in imagination to get a better perspective.
The rectangle of the old house. The square of the kitchen addition behind it. The rectangle of the modern addition attached to the kitchen. The long driveway that curved from the street, around the trees, past the side of the house to the garage doors in the addition all the way at the back.
She flew higher still, squeezed her eyes tighter, bracketed and labeled the distances.
Two hundred feet or so down the driveway to their street. Take a left, pastures upon pastures upon fields and then the woods, and then, only after maybe two miles, a farmhouse. So instead take a right out of the driveway, follow the road up the hill, the winding street. A football field or so past the driveway was the first house. Two hundred feet after that, another. Who lived there? In the first house, a nurse. She lived alone, and often worked night shifts.
Heading for the nurse would be a risk. How far was the next house?
You don’t even know who lives there! Why don’t you know them? You had plenty of time to introduce yourself before lockdown. You met the nurse, then the other neighbors weren’t home. Why’d you never go back?
Too shy, too awkward, too nervous.
Focus.
She drew out the geography in imaginary pencil lines.
Yes, the houses get thick and thicker that direction. But even the nurse’s house isn’t exactly close in this weather. Plus there’s the hill to walk up. And then, if he looked out any window at the front of the house, he’d see you. Or at least see your tracks. Be able to follow. The road won’t be plowed yet. Through the snow there, you’d be so exposed.
And if you try to travel as the crow flies?
She itemized the dangers. The thick snowdrifts of the fields. The twisted bramble of the woods, filled with crawling, dormant vines of wild grape, the thorny, tangled greenbrier. The ubiquitous New England fieldstone walls traced irregularly through the forest, so difficult to climb over given their loose rocks. And there were streams, blanketed by drifts but still running underneath the ice and snow, soundless and undetectable.
Impossible. Impenetrable. Impractical.
She swiveled her mental map. Behind the house was the yard, the kids’ slide and swings. Behind that, the graveyard marking the transition from grass to trees. Beyond the graveyard, through the woods, the trail.
That’s it. That’s the way.
The path through thewoods.
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