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A pull of despair tugged the back of her tongue.
You did everything right, didn’t you? You locked the doors. The windows.
What did you do to deserve this?
But she knew better than most that deserving had little to do with getting. She was sure almost no one got to give permission for the worst things that happened to them.
The man stood patiently in the splash of weak light. So awfully, jaw-achingly patient. She watched as he listened for even the lightest sounds of life. She watched him choosing his next steps.
2
In her son’s dark room, she keenly felt the presence of the door behind her to the top landing of the front stairs. Once upon a time, they’d been the home’s only stairs. On the other side of that landing was the door to her little girl’s bedroom that they kept bolted from the landing side for her safety.
Her mind’s eye saw each of them as a component in a schematic. Her son here, her daughter asleep in her room. The man waiting at the top of the stairs that led down to the kitchen. He stood between her and the modern addition attached to the back of the old house. Between her and her bedroom, her office, the garage. Which meant he stood between her and her phone on her bedside table. The car in the garage. The gun locked snug in its wall safe. The bullets for that gun hidden high in her husband’s closet. Between her and her computer, set up in the guest room that doubled as her office. There he stood between her and all possibility of help and aid and rescue and communication and strength.
She felt a need to claw at something.
Hold still, hold still! He’ll see you.
In wonderment she realized she was soaked completely in sweat. A viscous amphibian flop sweat that let the cold cling to every bit of her skin with aching pressure. Already the dampness of it soaked into the T-shirt and underwear she’d worn to bed. It made the robeshe’d thrown over herself as a barrier against the house’s perpetual winter chill stick to her, clammy.
The man fished something out of a pocket on his immense chest. He let it dangle from a hand. An oblong object, heavy yet loose, a slight swing to it.
SLAP!He swung it and it hit his other palm. The unexpected noise, the weight, the reality, the implications of the unidentifiable weapon he held, swept the tension from her knees so that she had to fight to stand.
That the man wasn’t wearing a mask turned things all the more surreal in this new world where everyone did. And him here, doing this, with his face exposed?
But he was wearing gloves. White plastic gloves that glowed from the dim shine of the night-light.
Fingerprints matter but not if we see his face, because he’s going to kill us.
She shook her head so quick and tight she heard the ocean.
Stop that! Don’t be ridiculous, calm down, think clearly.
No. You are thinking clearly. This is serious. There are stakes. Everything is at stake. Don’t pretend otherwise. Look at him. No mask. Gloves. Dry sneakers. Weapon. He’s prepared. He will hurt them. Hurt you. Anything else is a fantasy. You know it. You know the lines he’s crossed already. Being nice, thinking positive—no.
With a wave of despair she saw it was already over. What could she do but offer up a soft neck and pretend she was elsewhere? There was no way to fight him. No weapon, no help. Two small children and her short, weakened, waifish self. There was no way to win, defend, protect. She folded inward with the hopeless acknowledgment that she’d done the calculations, sketched out all the options, and was simply not equal to the task.
The fear of pain, the terror of what he could do, was anunbearable anticipation. The surging panic in her frozen body turned her into a live wire stripped bare but unable to release a charge.
This is the part of the movie you aren’t allowed see. What’s about to happen is what forces them to cut to black.
The man leaned back and cracked his spine like a runner preparing to start a race. The peculiar weapon seemed to pull at his hand with a limp heaviness.
The wide face slowly turned as the man looked away from her toward the hall of the modern addition. His shifting weight made the floor groan beneath him.
Still wishful, still deeply hoping that she was slipping into madness, that it was all imagination, she told herself,That’s a nice touch, brain, remembering how the floor creaks right there.
He took one step, then another. She blinked in disbelief as he moved away from her. He went down the hall of the addition before walking through the door of her bedroom and disappearing.
Because he turned away from instead of toward her, a razor-thin hope zapped and fizzed to life at the base of her neck.
Do something.
She was awake in the middle of the night because of her son. He’d woken her as always in a most disturbing way. Scratching a fingernail along an eyelid. Poking his thumb into her ear. Deftly pulling out a single hair. Tonight, he’d pinched her nose shut until she woke with an inward gasp, batting hands pathetically at empty air. She’d followed her little boy down the hall, his tiny, capable body barely visible in the deep darkness. She knew better than to ask about the nightmare that had caused him to wake her. Her son had almost always already forgotten it. All that was left was the feeling of horror, a residual strangeness, a need to have someone else awake. Tonight, as usual, she’d lightly scratched his scalp to soothe him to sleep.
The little boy’s nightmares had started a few weeks after lockdown began.
