“So, I don’t even have to tell you?”
She shakes her head, “Not unless you want to.”
Minutes later, Judy’s fluttering about, setting up a tripod in front of me with a light bar attached to the top. Even though she’s the most calming influence I’ve ever encountered, I still pick at my cuticles with a sense of foreboding.
“OK,” she sits back down in her red leather chair on the other side of the birch coffee table, “I want you to close your eyes and start moving them back and forth at a steady pace, along the light, while you think about that night. Pretend you’re watching it play out on a movie screen. Just breathe and concentrate on your eye movements while replaying the events in your mind.”
I do as she says and close my eyes, tucking my hands under my thighs so I don’t make myself bleed all over her ivory sofa. I take a deep breath and begin shifting my eyes back and forth behind the pink shadows of my eyelids.
Right…left…right…left…right…left…right…left…right…
It’s dark, but it shouldn’t be. Suddenly, he comes out of nowhere and I feel him grabbing me…dragging me…I’m fighting, arms and legs thrashing, screaming…
Left…right…
He holds me down. It hurts. He’s bigger, stronger, and no matter how hard I fight, I can’t get away. He’s so quiet at first, he doesn’t say a word, just shakes me like a wolf clutching a rabbit in its jaws. Why is he doing this?
Left…right…
He’s holding me down, now. I can’t move. Then he takes out the gun. I hear it…then I see it… and then I feel it. Cold, black metal on my skin, in a place where it’s not supposed to be. This is going to be worse than death…
Left…right…
He’s clenching my hair. All my muscles are on fire. I barely have a voice anymore. With my last breath, I scream his name.
Left…right…
And then, finally, I hear his voice.
●●●
It’s never loud in our house, and I’m reminded that’ll change with every twitch and bump deep in my belly. But I’m looking forward to it. After so much quiet, it will need to be loud, every corner filled with the echoes of new life. Screaming, whether happy, painful, sad, or scared—it means you’re alive. It means you’re not dead yet.
I usually enjoy the silence, lost in my own worlds jam packed with dramatic storylines and characters who feel like they’re my best friends. But right now, the silence is too loud. I don’t like when I can hear the subtle ring in my ears that’s only detectable when no one else is around, when it’s really quiet and I don’t have my characters to distract me.
I texted him about the cut wire, more so just to let him know. Even if my text gets through, I know he can’t do anything about it. I haven’t bothered calling my internet provider yet. Maybe I prefer to remain cut off right now. Maybe I need to sit in the quiet and concentrate. Sometimes I need to force myself to slow down, or else I fall back into my old patterns of avoiding uncomfortable scenarios.
The sun sets around 8:30 in the evening, so I know it’s late by the time I finish making notes in my outline for my next book. The spiral bound pages are covered in my purple handwriting, detailing the plot of the first book—a series that’s set in a small town not so different from the one I grew up in, where not everything is as it seems.
I’ve become an expert in that now—noticing things that are slightly off, peeling away the layers to find out what darkness lies just beneath the surface. Imagine if I’d been this perceptive for the last 25 years instead of the last one...
There’s usually music playing, whether from the speaker on the buffet behind the dining table or my headphones, but tonight the house is silent. I am silent. It’s the only reason I can hear the soft footfall of something in the grass just outside the window behind me. I hear it over the faint scratches of my writing, and my hand stills as soon as I detect it.
I hear sounds like this all the time, usually from whichever animal decides to pass through the yard at any given time, especially when the trees are fruiting or the garden is producing. The sound in the grass isn’t why I give pause, though, it’s the sound of the first plank of wood on the right side of the porch bending under an unknown weight that draws my eyes to the east wall.
Motionless on the far side of the cream sectional, I flatten my hand on my paper and stare at the wall. My pulse quickens and I hear a low rushing against my eardrums as I become more alert.
There’s a pause. Then the second plank bends, and then the third.
Sodapop sits on the back of the sofa, his feet curled under him. As soon as I look up, his head swivels and his eyes dart to the wall. He tenses, staring at the same spot as I am. He hears it, too. His shiny black ears twitch as he concentrates, trying to decide if there’s anything worth giving chase just outside the window.
The floorboards don’t creak per se, the wood is still too new for that, but very few things in this world are totally silent. Hunters—predators—rely on the distractions surrounding their prey to hide their presence. There are tiny sounds associated with the body moving; feet stepping over terrain, fur and clothing brushing against skin, limbs swaying with a gait, even a turn of the head. Just like any other night, it could be a raccoon, a deer, a coyote, or even a black bear wandering through.
That is, if a raccoon, deer, coyote, or black bear cared at all about how loud their footsteps are.
These are slow…sneaking…searching…stalking…
It moves across the porch, blending in with the swish of the night breeze through the forest and the whir of the fan at the top of the vaulted ceiling. My eyes move with it, tracking each footstep as it crosses in front of the window, the blinds shut to conceal it…and me.
Maybe it’s not an animal. Maybe it never was. Feet smaller than a bear, but bigger than a deer…
I shift my gaze across the living room to the bookshelves in the corner. There’s a black spotlight sitting on the very top. We usually use it for scaring off nuisance wildlife, but it’ll light up the entire yard all the way down to the road. I set my notebook down on the cushion, stand up, and slowly move across the room to the bookshelf. Gripping the spotlight in one hand, I take a step toward the front door.
But I hesitate. What am I doing?
I strain to listen and hear another soft footfall, and then another. I slowly reach up and slide the spotlight back onto the bookshelf. Even if I knew someone was out there, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t scan the porch, watch the beam of light move over railing and furniture, only to land on the face of an intruder, standing there, just silently looking back at me. My heart would stop and I would die of fright. Me and my baby would die of fright right here on the living room floor.
No, I know my limits. I’ll wait for daylight to do something like that.
Instead, I feel for my Glock, still tucked in the back of my shorts, and slowly make my way back to the sofa. I sit on the edge of the cushion, listening. Minutes pass, and there’s nothing else. The faint flexing of the floorboards, the soft footfalls cease, and it sounds like I’m alone again.
Sodapop is still looking at the wall, but his eyes are scanning it instead of focusing on a fixed point. His lean muscles relax under his silky fur, which makes me feel better. I sink back into the sofa cushions and adjust my waistband. Running my fingers along my waistband beneath my navel, I do inventory; I can bike 12 miles over rough terrain and I can run a 10-minute mile through the woods, even now. It’s a mantra for when the anxiety starts creeping in, before I can remind myself—and convince myself—that I am strong and I am the one in control.
It works like a charm, because I’m not who I was a year ago. I’m inside my house and nothing ever happens on my property without one of us knowing about it. I settle back into the sofa and immerse myself back into whichever world I’ve decided to create tonight. My heartrate slows, the tunnel vision fades, and it’s just me and Soda.
Maybe a half hour later, he stands up and saunters across the back of the sofa toward me. He makes a point to jump right onto my paper and then onto the floor. He continues across the floor toward the front door, headed for his daily nighttime jaunt. Right on schedule. As soon as he gets to the front door, he turns around and meows for me to let him out. I rise and trudge across the living room to the door, reaching for the deadbolt.
But before I can twist it, I give pause. Routine and structure are invaluable to someone like me. But, still, sometimes they can make you do very idiotic things. The human brain on autopilot is dangerous.
