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“No.”
“Don’t lie!”
“I didn’t!”
“Me either. Really, Mama!”
“Maybe it was Daddy?” her daughter asked.
The fine hairs on her arms crept with a macabre hopefulness that mirrored her daughter’s tone, filled with wistful longing.
Maybe he was trying to fix it. He always fixes things.
“Daddy would have never done something that might hurt you. Don’t do it again. Please.”
Sleep was elusive, every creak and whine of the house startling her to wakefulness and then wide-eyed worry about the next day, and the day after that, and everything she should have done better. After the incident with the wine and the stairs, she didn’t dare drink to help her sleep. Alone in the house with the children, she’d never take a pill. When white noise failed to do anything but annoy her, she tried earplugs, which made it easier to drift off yet still let the sound of the baby monitor through.
When she managed to fall asleep, there were only three ways she woke up.
First, to the children, sleepwalking, poking, frightened.
Second, eyelids snapping open, mind wound tight with terrifying questions and dark answers:How long can you believably keep forging his signature? Is there a way to print more photos without anyone catching on? Are the children ever going to be okay after this? Will they remember him? How are you going to be able to do it, all this, all on your own? How can you get through this, again, again! You’ll never feel normal again, you learned that much from your mother.
And third, she’d wake up after a bout of sleep paralysis. Prior to her husband’s death, she endured the disorienting horror of these episodes only once a year or so. But now she’d regularly wake, unable to speak, move, or even blink, her eyes peeled to track the shadow man who walked across the room, a not-her-husband man who got in on her husband’s side of the bed, voice slippery through the sound of her hammering heart as he said, “This has to happen,” before vanishing. Only then could she at last move again. And despite the recurring nature of these nightmares, only then was she able to understand the shadow man had been a dream.
So as much as she wanted, needed, to sleep, sometimes the inevitable terror of waking meant she didn’t sleep at all.
In late November, two deer stood in the snowy pasture, stock-still and staring into the forest. One spread its front legs slightly and hissed in a way she didn’t know deer could. They waited, then together ran in the opposite direction of whatever they’d hissed at. She went outside and looked into the woods for the source of their misgiving. Saw only the weave of leafless branches.
“Where’s your hat? The new red one? If you’re going outside, you need a hat.”
“I dunno, I lost it.”
“First your mittens, then Monkey, now your hat? You have to take care of your things.”
“I do, Mama, I do! They just keep disappearing.”
Everything felt askew. Everything seemed touched by invisible hands.
She knew that on the surface she was doing things. Signing photos. Emailing former clients, desperate to increase her workload. Bringing the kids to and from school, trying to keep things as normal as possible for them. But she also recognized new hollows and bones emerging from her body as though she were a drying lake. Her skin hung differently from her face. Her sleeplessness darkened her reflection, making her mind buzz. It was as though grief were a thing she’d swallowed, a parasitic worm that didn’t allow room for food, for proper functioning, for anything but itself.
The sergeant showed up at the door again a month after her husband died. She made a pot of coffee as he sat at the kitchen table. She noticed he picked the chair farthest from the stairs.
She considered telling him about all the strangeness. Maybe there was something there. But, a missing hat, the baby monitor switched off, the carabiner unscrewed, hissing deer?
No, you’ll sound crazy. And even if you didn’t, none of it is much of anything.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes and no,” she said. Seeing his concern she smoothed her hair, forced a smile, and asked, “Do I really look that bad?”
He shot her a panicked glance. For once she found him completely readable. He thought she was being coy, flirting, and was clearly horrified.
This was the first thing that she could remember thinking was funny since her husband had called the scarecrow witches “a cool crew” on Halloween.
“Not bad? Just, um. You look tired.” He cleared his throat, avoided her eyes. “You know, mywife”—he said the word so pointedly she suppressed a grin, thought,Yes, you must look very, extremely, super-duper bad—“mywifeswears by this one kinda tea to help her sleep? I’ll have to ask her about it for you. She’s real good with all that stuff. The herbal medicines? Essential oils and things? Does her own research. No chemicals and all that.”
She felt her expression going flat. She wondered if the sergeant understood the code of the things he was saying, understood he was letting her know their worlds were irreconcilable.
