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“Now!”
Her daughter leaned forward and pushed the panel closed, eyes mistrustful. She watched the children disappear, watched the panel hitch into place.
Just before it shut, she whispered a desperate “I love you!”
For a moment she stayed on all fours. She felt seasick, adrift atthe separation, its violence. Tried to suppress visions of them suffocating in smoke, screaming in fire. A creeping dread rolled over her, suddenly aware of all the room’s dark corners.
She couldn’t get stable, couldn’t stop theflick, flick, flickof images tearing through her mind. So much could happen so quickly. The idea of her absence. Of their calls. Of the Corner’s claws. Of this being their last memory of her, transformed to monstrousness.
Breathe, breathe. There’s no time. Move.
She stood and came close to collapsing on her sleeping legs. She stomped to restart their circulation and staggered forward through the door to the entry. After the darkness of the hidden place, the light from the single candelabra bulb over the stairs was blinding.
You did what you had to do. For them. Stop thinking about yourself. No, no, no one is coming to rescue you. There’s no real choice. Pain and risk are coming. You’re wasting time!
She opened the tiny entry closet, squeezed her eyes shut in hope that whatever she’d heard the Corner rustle through there was warm, helpful.
She opened her eyes.
“Thank you, thank you!” she said to her husband, to her mother-in-law. “Thank you!”
Hanging in the closet was her mother-in-law’s old fur coat. Boxy-shouldered, outdated, mothball-smelling, floor-skimming mink. Or fox. Or, for all that she knew about fur coats, made of bunny rabbit.
“I’m going to donate it,” she’d told her husband, holding it up. Her mother-in-law had pressed the coat on her during that day’s care, insisting it was a gift. As though it were the kind of thing people still wore, or still valued. “It’s…immoral.”
“Well, it’s not like we bought it. And wouldn’t throwing it away be even worse?”
“You sound like my dad,” she said, thinking of her father’s piles of old magazines, broken lawn chairs, decaying, rolled-up rugs.
Her husband held the coat and smiled at the thing, a thousand memories lighting up his eyes, memories of his mother in this coat when it was new and sleek and loved. She’d sighed. Thought it ugly, impractical, unfashionable, unflattering. But knew she was powerless against the prospect of her husband’s happiness.
“Maybe you’ll wear it someday,” he said.
“Just…find somewhere it won’t get in the way.”
So here it was. Her husband had hung it in this strange, useless little closet under the front stairs. The closet was so small that the bottom of the hanging coat pooled on the floor. Waiting for the day she wouldn’t hate it. Would put it on.
Which was today.
She reached for it, hesitated.
But he looked in here. You heard him rooting around in this closet. Won’t he notice it’s gone?
No time. No time! It’s worth the risk. Because look at you. Underwear and an old shirt, drenched in sweat. Fuzzy slippers. A clammy robe. It’s going to be painful. You think you’re cold now, uncomfortable now. No, no. This has been nothing at all. If you don’t put this on. Hypothermia? Frostbite? How quickly do those happen?
She recalled digging out a snow shelter in winter next to her classmates, sweating away in fourteen-degree weather, the sun setting and the feel of that sweat-drenched shirt under her coat. She’d been unable to sleep, her soaked base layer wicking away every bit of warmth.
“Well, of course,” her mother told her. “You’re lucky you didn’t get hypothermic keeping on wet clothes like that. Don’t those teachers pay attention to anything? Don’t they know anything?”
She stripped off the robe, used it to wipe the line of sweatbetween and under her breasts, her stomach. Thought a second and took off her drenched T-shirt. Left on only the underwear.
She threw the robe and T-shirt into the closet and closed it. On went the coat, heavy and reeking of mothballs. The inside was silky and clung to her damp skin. It was too long for her, ending about an inch past her feet. Her fingers were swollen with nervousness, and she fumbled with the buttons through the stiff fur, managing to fasten three of them. She paused, opened the closet again, yanked out the robe and wrapped it around her head like a turban, hoping it would help keep her warmer. Instead it upset her balance. She threw the robe back in and closed the closet.
You’re wasting time!
“Ninety percent of success is preparation, the rest is perspiration,” her grandmother’s voice instructed.
No sounds came from upstairs.
