But sometime between year seven and eight, something happened. I’m not sure what, exactly. But Child Protection showed up, and they asked me questions without my mom around, and I said something—I said something troubling, about the kids on TV, and how dangerous it was for them, playing in the woods. Something that made them realize that neither of us had left the property since soon after I’d been born.
I was temporarily removed, just for forty-eight hours, but my mother went into a fit. It was not the best reaction, truly. I remember this well, because it was the first time I’d been away from home. Sometimes, when I walk into a new place for the first time, that same feeling overwhelms me, and I remember disappearing into myself—trying to scream, but finding no air.
But even then, even when her daughter was taken from her, even when she did not know where I was, even then, she did not leave the house. She did not try to find me.
She waited for them to return me, and then she fought hard to keep me.
But that was how I knew she wouldn’t leave just because I wasn’t home.
She couldn’t.
It was impossible.
—
Ryan had made himself at home in the kitchen, gotten me some juice, looked at me sideways, and pushed me into a chair anytime I’d stand and start pacing. I felt numb and removed, like I was still floating above my body somehow. This was really not how I imagined my first date with Ryan going.
Hey, remember that other time we did something? Where we sat silently in the kitchen while I tried to figure out what happened to my mother? Right. Good times, part two.
Ryan looked through the pantry and ate a cookie before sliding one in front of me, too.
He took out his phone, and that’s what jarred me back to the present. “We should call the police,” he said, “if you think…something happened. We need to call.”
Something happened. Yes, something happened. But what? The what changed everything, and I couldn’t make a decision until I knew.
It was such a delicate balance, and I needed him to understand. It felt like a confession, though, and I was so used to keeping these things to myself, for myself. But he was waiting, tapping his fingers—listening. I took a deep breath. “If I call the police, I won’t be able to live here anymore. And she needs me here.” And I need her. “Just…I need to look around. I need to figure out what happened first.”
He put his phone on the counter, like a concession. He didn’t ask one of the thousands of questions he could’ve asked based on what I’d told him. Instead, he ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face. “Okay,” he said. “Other than the alarm being off, was anything else different?”
“No,” I said, and then I felt my eyes growing wide, drying out, the buzzing in my ears. No, no, no.
The doors were all locked when I left, but my window…
I pushed back from the table, the chair abruptly screeching against the tile, and ran to my room, my hands brushing the walls, realizing why I’d felt that chill—why it was colder in my room, like something had happened here. Not my mother’s anger.
The window.
It was ajar, and the grate was pushed open, when I was sure I’d left it closed. “Oh God,” I said.
She could’ve pushed it open looking for me, or…someone could’ve gotten in.
If something had happened, it could’ve started right here, in this room, because I’d left the window unlocked.
“What is it?” Ryan asked, standing in the entrance, his arms braced against the doorjamb, tension leeching from me to him.
But it was something more—something I could feel starting up again, so familiar it was almost welcome, the one thing I understood. The way the hairs stood up on my arms, the goose bumps on my legs, the nausea in my gut. The reason Jan wrote that article about me.
These were the things that had hurt my mother: the chemical burns on her back, the man who had taken her. It’s why, Jan thought—and wrote—I couldn’t bear the scent of anything chemically acrid.
Was there something here, then, that my body understood? Something passed along to me from my mother? Fears were learned, but they were also inherited. Natural selection. Run from the lion. Jump away from the tiny, poisonous insects. They exist for a reason—we survive because of them.
So what was it about a hollow, empty room? What was really to fear here? The night air, the scent of pine, all things I was familiar with.
The scars on her back, a man who held her—all of this changed her.
I remembered how she’d spend the days watching the news, reading through articles, focusing on all the horrible things that people were doing to each other.
She’d read them out loud, and she’d ask me: You are trapped in a trunk, what would you do? Or There’s a mass shooting, how do you escape?
She taught me to find the fears. She taught me to see them everywhere. It was our most basic instinct.
What had she taught me to fear about this moment?
It wasn’t Ryan, or the night, or the chill. It was none of those things.
It ran deeper. Simpler. The empty, hollow room. The empty, sterile house. The emptiness.
That I was alone now.
The only thing possibly worse: that I had brought it upon myself.
—
I wandered around the room, slightly untethered, vaguely aware of Ryan following behind me. I saw the room in a new light—the mess, the drawers pulled open—and pictured, instead, someone crawling inside the unlocked window. Not my mother looking for me, but a stranger. I reached for the grate through the window, which was slightly ajar. Not quite how I’d left it.
Ryan reached for my arm. “Talk to me,” he said.
“I snuck out,” I said. “I left this unlocked. This is all because of me.” One way or another, it came back to this decision.
She was unreasonable, I’d thought. An unlocked window grate wasn’t a big deal. Lightning wouldn’t strike twice.
But I was wrong. I was so wrong.
He moved closer, put a hand on my shoulder, closed his eyes for a moment, as if he was steeling himself for what came next. “Look, Kelsey, I’m going to say it again. If you believe someone came into the house, then we need to call the police.”
Spoken like someone who had never been forcibly removed from his home.
I shook my head, unable to make a decision. I’d never had to before. I did what my mom, or Jan, told me to do. I feared what she feared. I loved what she loved. And the one time I made a decision for myself—sneaking out—I paid the consequences.
I wanted to sink into my bed, feel the familiar comforter, the four walls, the spiders crawling across my skin. All of it, if it meant knowing my mother was down the hall.
“Kelsey,” Ryan said. “You have to do something.”
There was a fifty percent chance it would be the wrong thing. Either way, I was the one who’d have to suffer the consequences. Not him.
“Let me think,” I said, holding up my hands.
My mother didn’t have a cell phone to call—there was no reason. She never left. She had her computer, and the landline, and the alarm system.
“Okay. If I can get the alarm back on,” I said, “then she must’ve turned it off herself, or it was an electrical surge, and we wait. If I can’t…then someone cut it, and I’ll call. Okay?”
“Sure,” Ryan said, sounding slightly less than sure.
The idea was taking root—that there was some sort of electrical surge, taking out the alarm system and the phone line. Frying anything on the grid. I just had to reboot the system. It had happened once before, in a really bad thunderstorm, when I was little. I watched my mom come down to the basement, after the backup generator had kicked on a few moments later, and reboot the alarm system.
I felt like I was tracing her footsteps, following the path to the basement, to the circuit breaker.
“Hold on,” I said. I flipped everything off—the house going dark, and momentarily cold, and in the basement, our breathing seemed too loud. I listened for any other sounds. I was sure, in that moment, I’d hear someone breathing through the walls, if they were here.