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Her daughter flinched lower and lower with each noise, a turtle drawing its head incrementally into its shell.
She leaned down to where she thought her daughter’s ear mustbe in the dark and quietly breathed, “It’s all right, you’re very brave.” The girl clung to her. She nuzzled her daughter’s hair where she knew the gloss of black met the shock of white that framed one side of the girl’s face. She greedily smelled the honey shampoo her daughter liked, and underneath it the thick baby musk of scalp and oil and skin that hadn’t yet been scrubbed away by age.
When does that smell fade? Maybe for a mother, never. And he wants to snatch it away.
Next came the thudding muteness of steps on her son’s carpeted floor, vibrating like a distant earthquake. That strange shuffle in the air, was that him opening the closet? That rattle—he might have bumped into the side table that didn’t sit level.
You’re grinding your teeth.
She opened her mouth wide to stretch her pained jaw. She rolled her head to release the creeping tension in her neck. It was useless with the pounding knot dizzying her.
A distantwhoosh. A vague rolling noise. She couldn’t identify these sounds, and she strained to hear better, to understand.
Her daughter breathed slower now. Calmer. Up and down, in and out. Listening.
She was flooded with gratefulness that they were here, hidden in this little den, instead of out there, with that intruder standing over her daughter or her son, like he would’ve otherwise been this very minute. Using that vague weapon. Other weapons.
But now you’re trapped.
Her chest felt as though it were being crushed by some enormous hand.
You’ve trapped them.
The walls moved closer.
There was no other choice. No other choice but to hide.
She stretched and searched to hear anything more.
Maybe somehow things didn’t creak and he walked out. Out of the room, out of the house, gone, gone, gone.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. If wishes were fishes we’d eat and not die.
BOOM.
They all three startled like deer, flanks jolting to stiffness. The little girl cried out weakly, dove her face deeper into her mother’s robe.
The man was immediately above them. The sound was a foot on the same step that had made such a racket under her daughter’s only a few minutes ago. An eternity ago. Inside the hidden place, it was like a thunderclap after a just-missed lightning strike, overclose and deafening.
Had he heard her daughter’s thin wail? The man stood still, soundless.
And then there was light. On went the single candelabra bulb that hung in the little chandelier dangling at the top of the stairs. Maybe he’d turned it on to avoid hitting his head again. Maybe without her familiarity with the stairs, with only the cloud-choked moonlight through the windows to guide him, the man had been taken aback by that first booming sound, surprised by the unmodern shallowness of the treads.
The light dripped through chinks between stair steps and risers. Fell through cracks here and there around wood knots. Flowed brightest of all through the vent, the one that had been connected to the dangerous, burnt-out heater her husband had proudly torn out. The vent they’d left lodged in the stair riser, because why not? Even though there was no heater, even though it was just a window into the hidden place, might as well let air circulate. Might as well be sure the useless space didn’t get moldy, become a problem. A pain to patch, anyhow, if you don’t really need to.
The light seemed to her an awful, world-ending thing. It hurt the way light did when a quick sweep of curtain woke her, drawing an arm up to shield her face like a black-and-white movie vampire. Hiss and burn.
Will he be able to figure it out, now that the light’s on? Will he be able to see us?
The rectangle of light through the vent splashed onto the edge of the blanket. Slowly, watching her hand shake so heavily she could barely pinch its corner, she pulled the blanket toward her so that the light illuminated only brick and dust. Nothingness.
She could feel her daughter’s fear, the shaky heaving the girl was silencing against her, against her soft robe. Her son’s heart beat like a tiny caught bird’s. He was crying. But quietly.
Quietly enough?
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Down he came. Each footstep a press on her heart, her lungs. Her stomach twisted, bubbling and sloshing so loudly she was certain it would give them away.
