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“Why, Mommy?”
Why, why, always why, all they ever ask is “Why?” Why can’t they just do what you say? Why can’t they just listen?
She wanted desperately to lie. To shield the girl from fright. From reality. But she stood up, holding her boy tight, and heard herself say, “There’s someone in the house. Someone bad. We’ve got to hide. Now.”
The girl’s face started to crumple into crying.
“No, no!” She managed to grip the girl’s shoulder. “There’s no time for that.”
Her daughter nodded and lifted back the blanket. The covers had pulled her long red nightgown up to her thighs, showing skinny legs and bulbed knees. The patches of white skin where the pigment had faded from the girl’s feet and ankles appeared luminous even in the storm-thinned moonlight. On standing the nightgown fell into place. The girl clutched her tattered Pinkbunny to her chest.
She swallowed a fresh lump of fear at seeing her daughter’s beauty. The girl had a willowy loveliness that hovered at the edge of that awful, quaking bridge leading out of childhood.
It’s a problem.
This was not a new worry, but in these circumstances it was more urgent, more manifest. More terrifying.
A big problem.
Her daughter trailed her to the landing, softly closing the bedroom door behind her.
She hardly ever used this stairway, because she so rarely needed to go from her husband’s office or the other front room they used as a playroom up to the kids’ bedrooms. But the children often used it to go from their bedrooms to their playroom, and signs of them were everywhere. Clouded moonlight through the window at the top of the stairs and the transom panes above the door below allowed for a dim visibility. A Lego knight stood proud on the railing. A stuffed bear was face-planted in a corner, had clearly fallen from lounging on the windowsill. A ribbon wove in and out of the banister rungs. These things stabbed her in the heart as if her children had been lost, as if she’d already failed to protect them, and these objects were all that was left of them.
Her skin prickled in the cold air that wafted up the stairs. The blizzard blasted frozen bits of its violence through the gaps around the old doors below. She watched herself and was shocked to find that tucked somewhere in the folds of her memory was each weak spot on these little-used stairs, each place that might make a noise. Carrying her son, she stepped on light slippered toes from strong spot to strong spot on the treads, a kind of dancing descent, even deftly stepping over the loudest stair.
How strange, how strange, how’d you do that? That’s not something you can do.
But her daughter’s foot landed squarely in the middle of the first step. The noise of it surrounded them, an echoing doom.
With the bedroom doors to the landing closed, with the lowsound of the wind scraping through the house, maybe the man hadn’t heard it? How close was he now? There on the other side of the house, he must have immediately seen her covers thrown back, her empty place in the bed, the phone on its charger.
He might be moving this way already to find you. Or he’s searching downstairs, thinking you fell asleep on the couch.
“Quiet, so quiet, step to the side of the stairs, tiptoe,” she whispered at her daughter. “It’s okay, angel, you can do it!”
“Okay, Mommy.” The little girl descended carefully, avoiding the middle of each stair.
Yes. What a good kid. What a brave little girl. The best little girl.
They took a right at the bottom of the stairs and went into her husband’s office. He liked its dark moodiness. She preferred her setup under the blindingly bright overhead lights of the guest room. Out of every window was snow. Drifting, blowing, collecting.
She laid her son gently on the armchair in the corner, and he curled into a warm ball, still asleep.
In the darkness she groped at the wall around the fireplace to find the panel that hinged inward when you pushed it just so.
It’s here, isn’t it? Wait—it’s lower. Now, how do you do this?
On her knees she padded fingertips around the panel until she pushed at the just right spot in the just right way. It swung open to walled-in emptiness.
The space was irregular. It began behind the beehive oven set into the living room fireplace and ended under the stairs. She tried to map it out of her memory but couldn’t recall its dimensions well. Not quite three feet wide. Tall at the back, low near the entrance where the front stairs made up its ceiling. Maybe nine feet long.
She’d been inside only once. The sellers showed them the hidden place the day they closed on the house. They demonstrated how to push open the panel with a firm press on its bottom left corner. Howto hook your finger on a slightly warped part of the top left to yank it closed. A special, secret gift.
This reveal of the hidden place had relieved her. In that nearly three-hundred-year-old part of the house, her mathematical brain had measured the rooms, and aside from a little sagging, a little bowing, each had the same dimensions as the room immediately above or below. The rooms were so identical stacked above each other, so even, there was something unnerving about it. Something unexplainable and hard to pin down that tipped all that rationality into the irrational.
When the sellers opened the panel, she’d understood. The massive center chimney branched out its messy flues, efficient as the veins and arteries of a human heart. The home’s long-dead builders had disguised this unbeautiful, suspiciously animal anatomy by walling in the twisting brick. This left behind a pleasing, even column—and empty space.
She remembered from history class the way early Americans rooted out the native, the organic, the wild. They breathed the ash of the Pequot and understood it as a reminder of their own anointment. They watched witches go limp and knew their acts righteous because God permitted them. Old New England preached efficiency and thrift, but those ideals were secondary to purity. And purity requires waste.
