AllFreeNovel
Share Us
You think you hide your fears from your children,but they absorb them like they absorbed your blood.
“Does anyone get any sleep in this house?” her husband complained. On his fingers he counted out the issues. “Sleepwalking, night terrors, insomnia, nightmares, too warm, too cold, too wet, too thirsty. Too tired!”
“Well”—she yawned—“at leastyoudon’t have any trouble sleeping.”
“That’s true,” he said. “I’ve got the mama wall protecting me. Why wake lame old Dad when you can wake the mama bear? Bring out the big guns?”
“Who are you calling a ‘bear’? And that’s the first time anyone’s ever called me ‘big.’ ”
Her husband shot her his charming, hooked smile. “The little mama, then. Better to wake up the little, tiny,attractivemama.”
So her son would wake her, never her husband, and she’d follow him silently through the darkness, bundle him into bed,Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. She’d brush the black hair away from where it stuck to his long lashes, away from the corners of his already-sleeping eyes. And she’d be left wide awake sitting at the end of his bed, waiting to see if the absence of her touch woke her little boy, as it so often did, requiring she repeat the process. Then she’d pad back down the hall, lie down, and stare at the ceiling, wondering at the strange new fearfulness of the world. Thinking of the things she’d done wrong. Of the things she might have been able to control if she’d thought far enough, carefully enough, ahead. She would imagine other worlds where things had gone differently. Better. Worse.
It’s not your fault.
It’s all your fault.
The man disappearing through her bedroom door was like waking from her little boy’s dream. A nightmare shuffling off, leaving behind an uncannily empty quiver of air.
Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.
Her skin cracked. Her teeth unclamped.
What are you going to do?
She had a vision of waking the children, pulling them into the snow out the old front doors down the stairs behind her, a five- and eight-year-old, both barefoot, in pajamas, her in a robe and slippers, because shoes, coats, the car, everything—everything!—was on the other side of the house.
He’d catch us. Easily. Immediately. Crossing the house or, if we tried to run, through the snow. And it’s so far to the nearest neighbor. Half a mile? At least. At least! And in this storm. And through those drifts. Record cold, they said. Record snowfall.
No time, no time. Do something.
She was briefly awed by the realization that for the first time in a long time she felt alive, and even more astonishing, she desperately wanted to stay alive. But her surprise was paired horribly with deep fear. Fear of the man’s kinetic violence. What he might do with that strange weapon. Fear of that potential energy released on her children. Fear of pain. She had never dealt well with pain.
Does anyone?
Then, a possibility. In the gripping swirl of her animal frenzy, adrenaline and helplessness, she remembered the hiddenplace.
3
Later, she’d think of it like being possessed. When she saw the man go through her bedroom door, when she remembered the hidden place, it felt as though she’d been plucked out of her body. She watched herself from the outside, confused by her own actions, thinking,Hey, look at what she’s up to. You couldn’t do that.Yet despite the remove, she still felt her hands shake. Still tasted acid terror.
She watched herself put the sippy cup her son used for bedside water into one robe pocket, shove Fuzzydoll into the other. Watched herself carefully fold the blanket back, lift the sleeping boy in her arms. He stirred, then relaxed against her body. His small, pudgy legs dangled free, head solid on her shoulder. He breathed familiar mama sweat in and out, arms loose and trusting.
Her son smelled like drool. Like warmth. A smell unique and universal. “I love you,” she whispered muffled into his hair as she held him, already hurrying to her daughter’s room. “I love you.”
She slid open the sleepwalking bolt on the outside of her daughter’s bedroom door and went in. Her daughter was snoring. Flash of the girl as a baby, she and her husband suppressing giggles over a series of massive farts, of honking snores, all coming out of such a tiny, angelic little infant.
“Takes after her father,” she’d whispered with a teasing grin, and her husband had put his hands on his hips, released a blasting snoringnoise, and said, “Better believe it!” She’d nearly woken the baby with the sudden bleat of her laughter.
She sat on the girl’s bed. With her son resting on her lap, she reached out and touched the little girl’s shoulder. Her daughter immediately rolled over, balling her fists to rub both eyes roughly, the same way she always did.
“Mommy?”
“Shhh, shhh, angel,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair too fast, too feverishly. “Quiet. Please. I need your help. We need to go downstairs. Down the front stairs.”
Her daughter looked up, big eyes confused and searching.
No comfort in your hands, your voice. Can’t be helped.
