Her overcoat hung on a hook by the front door, and Holly struggled to fit her robed arms into the sleeves. “Stay inside,” she said to Jack, catching the irony of her admonition as she stepped over the threshold.
The air on her bare legs and wet hair chilled her quickly and crept up through her slippers and gripped the soles of her feet. Almost immediately she regretted her decision to leave the house. Tim should be out here in the cold, protecting them, looking for burglars or whatever strange thing was attacking their home. Where is that man? Where was that Father Bolden to protect her with his faith? She murmured a prayer from her childhood as she skirted the perimeter, creeping in darkness, listening for the whistle of cannon fire, watching for the madman with a maul, and shaking with anticipation. The thought of confrontation alarmed her. She had no weapon, not even a baseball bat, and she must have been a fearsome sight in her overcoat and slippers. Perhaps her attacker would perish with laughter. Windblown clouds passed between the moon and the landscape, creating patches of light and shadow on the beach and against the house. In the intermittent exposure, Holly inspected the siding for damage, but the blows had not so much as scratched a shingle. Where she had expected gaping holes with splintered edges, there was nothing. In the quiet of the night, the ocean, to which she had been long accustomed, fell and rose like a child’s respiration.
Baby’s breath. When Jack was a baby, Holly used to hold him against her chest and sit out on the deck summer afternoons until she and the child breathed in rhythm to the tide. That first magical year when she could not get enough of him, before they fully suspected there was something wrong, before all the doctors, before all the talk of personality disorders. He was simply a baby. Asleep, he would leave a warm slick of perspiration against her skin, wet as a seal, face muzzled against her breast, his tiny fists working toward his mouth. Her baby. She missed him, wanted him to be outside with her, an infant in her arms or the toddler who held one of her fingers in the vise of his fist. Just as she looked for him in the windows, light pouring into the night, a shadow crossed the rectangle of glass and then a second shadow in pursuit. Jack was waving his hands above his head as though trying to scare away someone inside with him. Someone, she thought, that had been banging against the side of the house trying to get in. A man, a murderer, a monster.
Rays of panic pierced her, and she scrambled through the pillowy sand, desperate to reach him. A hand reached out and grabbed her as she turned the corner, the monstrous thing that had been pounding to enter the house, but turning in the half-light, Holly realized it was only the sleeve of her coat snagged on the cyclone fence that ran along the border between the house and the beach. She tugged and stumbled free, falling into the sand and beach grass.
When the thing did not pounce upon her, when it did not swoop from the sky trailing a long tattered black shroud, when nothing overtook her but her own sense of the absurd, Holly laughed, sprawled on the ground. She had found nothing banging at the siding, no wolf at the door, huffing and puffing to get in. She convinced herself that Tim had come home, and that explained the second figure in her living room. All a misunderstanding, jangle of nerves. Picking herself up, she brushed the sand from her palms, certain that there was no one else inside with Jack, no maniac in a hockey mask, that indeed the only madness came from her own strung-out imagination. A relieved laugh, a laugh to stop from crying, a laugh she was afraid would never end.
Through the fir trees, a pair of headlights appeared small and distant as Tim’s Jeep snaked along Shore Road, returning home at last. If that was Tim on the road, she thought, who was the second shadow? Abandoning her search altogether, she hustled inside the house, pulled off her coat, and hooked it by the door. “Were you walking around while I was outside? I thought I saw someone here with you.”
Serene as a Buddha, Jack sat on the couch just where she had left him, still tuned in to the nature program, a gang of grizzlies catching salmon as they laddered their way up a stream. His expression had not changed. He seemed not to have moved. She ran her fingers through the frost clotting her hair and kicked off her slippers under the Christmas tree.
“You saw no one? You heard nothing?” she asked, and he nodded without looking at her, though she could not tell whether he had been unaware or was consenting to a conspiracy. Dashing from room to room, she confirmed the house was just as she left it. At the foot of the stairs, she listened for a stranger hiding above, and she called once and was embarrassed by the echo of her voice. Every time she passed him on the couch she noticed Jack’s stare, as though he was daring her to ask again. He looked as though he had snatched the truth in his mouth and it was still squirming behind his teeth.