She rinsed the toothpaste from her mouth and checked her teeth, running her tongue over the enamel. “Well, did you get rid of it?”
The mouse, right. He had nearly forgotten the mouse given their son’s peculiar reaction to the hidden drawing. “I put down some traps.”
Moving on in her preparations for bed, Holly took up the brush and ran it through her hair, counting the strokes, the numbers passing stealthily through her lips. “Not where Jack can hurt himself?”
“Of course not. One in the back of the closet and one between his desk and his old toy box.”
Like a marionette on a string, she tilted her head so that her long hair spilled to one side, and she brushed the flow of it. “Make sure you check on those traps. I can’t imagine anything worse than a dead mouse in the room for a couple of days.”
He had stopped looking at himself and now squeezed behind her on his way out of the bathroom. “Not that there was any sign of it. No droppings, no shredded tissues on the floor.”
“I didn’t see it,” Holly said, “but I sure heard it in the desk drawer. Jack’s not going to step on a trap in the middle of the night?” She turned and followed him into the bedroom. The small table lamp was the last one on in the house, and Tim imagined how it might appear to those out on the sea, a tiny pinprick of illumination against the blackness of the night, one small star upon the shore. If there were a man out there in the cold, he would be drawn, surely, to any sign of life.
“No way he can step on the one in the closet, and I’m sure he doesn’t go near that toy box anymore. Why do we keep it, anyhow? It’s probably full of nothing but baby things and stuff he’s outgrown.”
Holly folded back a triangle of the covers and bedsheet, but rather than climb in, she sat on the edge of the mattress as though trying to remember some unfinished task before going to sleep. “How was he at the psychiatrist’s?”
“Same as ever. Lots of questions, few good answers.”
They slipped into bed and lay flat on their backs side by side, and Tim turned out the light.
“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know why we keep going to that guy. Jip is never different afterwards, just gets a different pill.”
“To keep Jack under control.”
“That’s just it. Maybe keeping him under control is what’s keeping the problem alive. Maybe if we trusted him, Jip could make it on his own. Without the pills. Everybody is on something these days. It’s a racket. Overprescribing, masking the problem.”
“I can’t have this argument again,” she said. “I’m tired.”
“I’m just saying that maybe there’s less than meets the eye. Take the Weller boy. He’s shy, introverted, but you don’t see Nell rushing off for a pill.”
“Please”—her voice cut the darkness—“don’t hold up Nell Weller as your example.”
Without another word, Tim rolled away from her and into the privacy of his thoughts. She said nothing either, but he could hear her breathing, steadily and in sync with the ticking of the alarm clock. Longtime combatants on this matter, each could not find sleep easily, and an hour passed in wary détente.
Just past midnight, he heard her calling his name softly from a faraway spot on the opposite shore of his consciousness. She laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Tim, are you awake? Did you hear that?”
Halfway between sleep and dreaming, he opened his eyes in the darkness of the room and struggled to orient himself. Familiar objects, shades of gray, began to take shape, and he became aware of his wife’s entreaties. “Listen,” she commanded in a hoarse whisper, and he strained to discover what she had heard, but he could find no stray sound.
“There’s someone in the house.”
He heard nothing.
“Something’s walking around.”
“Are you sure it’s not Jip, going to the bathroom?”
She cricked her neck toward the bedroom door and looked at the gap where it met the floor. “The hall light’s not on. He’s afraid of the dark and always turns on the light.”
Fumbling for the table lamp, he nearly knocked it off the nightstand and had to grab the base to stop it from rocking. In the burst of light, he blinked and then hoisted himself against the pillow. She was already up, the quilt pooled across her lap, her feet twitching under the covers.
“It was on the roof,” she said. “Footsteps crossing from one edge to the other, and then they stopped.”
“Could be a bird,” he said.
“Like a man’s.”
“But they stopped?”
Her face was flushed, and she frowned at him. “I didn’t wake you up at first. Thought it might be my imagination. But now it seems like it’s in the house. Listen.”
They held their breath and did not budge. Beyond the door, a board creaked, the sound of a foot upon the stair. He swung his legs over the edge and stood.
“Shouldn’t you have a baseball bat or something?” she asked.
“Where would I get a baseball bat?”