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“Here, Mama.”
She stayed low, stretched out her arm, and flailed blindly to protect herself from any other unseeable things that could hurt her.
“Don’t stand up,” she whispered. “Try and stay still. Snuggly. You don’t want to hit your head like Mommy did. Here, let’s wrap up in the cozy blanket.”
“Snuggly.” “Cozy.” Yes, calm, safe words. How can you speak so quietly and be heard?
The children flanked her. She wrapped her arms around them and brought them close.
“Ow, Mama.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Calm down, be gentle, you’re scaring them.
Scaring them more.
“Mama’s here, Mama’s here,” she whispered as they snuffled.
I’m here. You’re here. This is real.
“No more whispering now, okay? No more crying. We have to be quiet as mice.”
She thought of the loudscritch-scratchsounds of rodents in the attic.
“Quieter than mice,” she said.
Together, buried behind the wall, absorbed into the ancient empty place, they sat and listened.
It felt to her that things were settling around them. The dust, the house, the darkness. At first, there was only the pulsingthwap, thwap, thwapof blood in her ears, of blood hammering the growing tenderness of the knot on her head. She blinked, disoriented by the fireworks of her eyelid undersides, how there was more light when her eyes were closed than when they were open. It made her remember touring a cave with her mother as a child, a roadside attraction somewhere along the highway. The guide had turned out his light to this kind of darkness and given a speech. Before too long, he’d said, such lack of light would cause your eyes to die, retinas zapped by disuse. “Bullshit,” her mother had muttered to her in the complete blankness of that darkness. The profanity had made her smile, feel so adult, so much smarter than the guide. But in this particular moment, this particular place, losing her ability to ever see again felt like a certainty.
Three blind mice, three blind mice.
The pained throb of her head expanded outward, and she resisted the urge to touch the bump. The quiet grew thicker around them as the sound of her blood abated. The hitches of the children’s crying slowed. It was difficult, so difficult, to resist the urge to crush them close again.
Babies, my babies.
It’s so cold in here. Need to wrap the blanket around the kids better. What’s that lump? The sippy cup in your pocket, right, yes. Can you lean back? Feel around a little. The floor is cold, but with the blanket—
Then, the footsteps began again. Together, the three of them stiffened and drew in their breath.
When did the footsteps stop? How did you not realize that? He’s been quiet. Listening?
Her son let slip a “Mama!”
“Shhh.”
The little boy buried his head against her, fuzzy and familiar in the robe. Nosed himself to deafness between her arm and middle. She pulled the blanket up around his shoulder awkwardly. That her little boy so clearly, so incorrectly, thought she could protect him, that he felt safer the closer he was to her, stabbed her in the heart.
How is it possible all they have is you?
Boom.Crick. A long crackle traveled from behind them, crossed above them. Yes, she knew these sounds. The origin of each noise, each weak spot, was clear in her head. The thousands upon thousands of everyday sounds were burrs, picked up and stuck to her memory during her innumerable overnight trips to the children’s rooms over the last two years.
Don’t wake them. Don’t step here or there, close the door like so, watch out for that hinge, careful of the latch.If you wake them up, you have to get them back to sleep.
The man had left her daughter’s room and was walking to her son’s room. He’d stepped on the patched upstairs floorboard above the living room that always gave an empty echo. Then he’d put a foot on the long, thin board that ran nearly the width of the house. Every time she stepped on it in the hall, she’d hear it buckle ten feet away. On moving in she’d woken her son a handful of times before muscle memory set in. Trained by the house to avoid its weak spots.
It felt repellent to be able to track him this way. To feel him walking over things that were hers, triggering memories of creaks and middle-of-the-night mother’s missteps.
