“Promise me.” His voice vibrated with more urgency than I had come to expect after seventeen years of marriage.
“I can’t imagine it’ll happen again.” When he scowled, I hastily added, “But I promise.”
Sam’s lips parted as if he were about to speak, but instead, he stretched past me to switch off the light.
We climbed into bed. In the dark, his breathing rasped, and I mimicked his rhythms to steady my own. Reaching for him, my fingers grazed his back just as he turned away from me, toward the wall. The cold medicine dragged him into sleep within minutes.
There will be other nights, I thought, with the certainty of a long-married wife.
As I lay there, listening to the monitor with the blackness pressing in, the quiet that usually settled me instead seemed a presence, waiting, watching. Later, I would wonder if it was my intuition warning me of what was to come—of what, in fact, already had begun.
4
Having dreamed of large insects, even larger men, and bassinets filled with mud, I awoke groggy and with a headache. When I reached across the bed, the sheets on Sam’s side were cold.
I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand and groaned when I saw the time. After a fitful night, it seemed I had nodded off just in time to oversleep. Setting an alarm hadn’t been a priority the night before.
When I swung my feet onto the carpet, I caught the glint of copper on the edge of the bed frame. I reached down and picked up the object that had drawn my attention, not metal at all, but paper. I placed it in the center of my palm, studying it. It was an origami dog no bigger than a business card, which I guessed had fallen from the nightstand.
The paper dog, with its folded ears and tiny legs, made me smile. It reminded me of the early days of my relationship with Sam, when he would leave gifts like this in unexpected places. A mosaic tile on the back porch. A sketch on my dashboard. Once, he had created a remarkably detailed landscape from coffee grounds spilled on the counter.
It had been a while since Sam had created art for me, even something as simple as a dog of folded paper. Too busy, he said. We were both too busy—for art, for sex, for anything beyond the needs of our kids, his students, my patients.
My smile faded. I put the origami dog on my nightstand. Then I got up, put a fresh bandage on my scratch, and followed the sound of chaos to the kitchen. I stopped in the doorway, watching, but had only a second before I was spotted. Leo, wearing earbuds and a scowl, stood quickly. “Dad said we needed to let you sleep.”
Before he could say more, his backpack caught the edge of the bowl Sam had been using to scramble eggs. The plastic bowl clattered to the floor, its contents splattering the cabinets. Our Chihuahua mix, Boo, skittered over to investigate the puddle of slime, sneezing when he inhaled egg, and Sam nudged the dog aside with his foot.
I grabbed a roll of paper towels off the counter and started sopping up the mess, while Sam retrieved a fresh bowl and eggs. I turned my attention to Audrey, seated on a stool at the counter. “Did you take your medicine, Peanut?”
Before she could answer, Leo took out one of his earbuds. “I need to go to school.”
“Agreed. School’s important.”
Leo rolled his eyes. “I mean, like, now.”
Audrey gasped, her eyes widening. “But you’re not dressed.”
“I’m dressed.”
“Nooooooo.” Audrey sighed as if her brother were the six-year-old. “You’re normal dressed, not Halloween dressed.”
She hopped down from the stool and twirled, showing off her black cat costume. Judging by the wrinkles, Audrey had worn the costume all night beneath her pajamas.
“See. I’m a princess cat, only not yet because my tiara’s still in my bedroom. What are you going to be?”
“Late for my workout. Can’t someone drop me off and then come back?”
“Yes, because that’s reasonable,” I said. “We’ll rearrange our schedules because you’ve changed your plans at the last minute. Besides, we only have one car for the time being, remember?”
“So that’s a no?”
I pointed at an empty stool. “That’s a ‘sit.’ I’ll take you after you eat.”
Leo slumped back on a stool while I slid three slices of sourdough in the toaster.
Sam’s eyebrows furrowed as he studied me. “How’re you doing? Get any sleep?”
“Some.”
“About the car, take mine. I’ll grab a rental and a new booster seat for Audrey, after I call the locksmith.”
“You’re not going in?”
“Think I’ll take another day.” Sam hadn’t missed work once the previous school year, but before I could think too hard on that, he said, “Audrey’s medication is running low. I was going to stop by the pharmacy, unless you’ve already refilled it?”
I started to say that I had picked up the prescription the morning before, but then I remembered: my purse. Audrey’s medication was one more thing I needed to replace.
“I can get it.” After I canceled my credit card and stopped by the DMV. My headache intensified.
Sam slid scrambled eggs on three plates, and I added toast to each. He gestured—did I want eggs?—but I wrinkled my nose. I wasn’t big on breakfast, and that morning, I felt even less like eating than usual.
As my family ate, I returned to the bedroom to get dressed. My hands trembled as I buttoned my shirt. Understandable, but still I sank to the edge of the bed. The night before, the man on the trail had been enraged. He hadn’t so much asked for my identity as spit out the question as if it were sour on his tongue. Worse, he had followed it with a warning: Let her die, and I’ll let you live. Had the woman survived? I didn’t know, but I had made every effort to save her, which I guessed would void his offer of mercy. And this man—rabid and merciless—had my address. My keys.
The door swung open, and Sam walked in. He grabbed a small chunk of yellowed plastic from his dresser then sat beside me on the bed. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “You seemed distracted last night.”
“You had just been attacked.”
“You sure that’s it?”
Someone who hadn’t been married to Sam wouldn’t have noticed the pause, brief as it was before the familiar smirk shifted into place. “Of course,” he said. I wondered if he had read my lie a few seconds earlier as easily as I read his now.
Sam slipped into his mouth the piece of plastic he had been holding. “I wanted to give Audrey a preview of what I’ll be wearing tonight.”
“Wait. I thought Leo was taking her trick-or-treating?”
He fake-leered at me, exposing zombie teeth. When he went to kiss me, I pulled away.
“I thought the undead were sexy,” he said. I suspected he was playing up the lisp, but I found my smile anyway.
“Vampires are sexy,” I clarified. “Zombies are . . . zombies. So why isn’t Leo taking Audrey trick-or-treating?”
“He made plans with Tyler.”
“When did he make these plans? Did he tell Audrey? Please say you made him tell her himself.”
“Yesss,” Sam lisped. “He told Audrey. Now about this vampire favoritism . . . It’s easy to be sexy with dress clothes and the ability to hypnotize the lasses—”