The problem was, Lydia soon discovered, that being alone all night gave her ample time to think—not only about her seven-month vacation coming to an end, but also about the one thing she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about: That Night.
Lydia started fifth grade about the same time that Tomas started his prison job, and during the first week of school, Mrs. Wahl, the busty PE teacher with a platinum lid and satin jogging suits, took special pity on her and set aside time after school to train her in the art of personal hygiene. Ever since moving to the mountains, neither she nor Tomas had shown much interest in taming her tangled hair, and coupled with the forehead scar and the fresh jump in her eyeballs, she’d begun to look wilder than she really was. (In the mirror alone at night, in fact, she sometimes sensed a petrifying resemblance to Carol O’Toole.) But taming her appearance was the least of her worries. Because Lydia was the new kid in town, her classmates tended to either study her every move or want to kick her ass. She didn’t quite understand if these scabby mountain kids were supposed to be her friends like Raj, like Carol—god: Carol!—but she never had the luxury of sorting such questions out. When they circled her in the weedy lot behind the playground and interrogated her about where she got that forehead scar, she couldn’t tell them the truth, of course, and before long she felt like a permanent balloon had been inflated between herself and everyone else on earth.
—welcome to your new life, she’d tell herself.
Each day Lydia managed to survive the ride home on the school bus, and once there she’d open all the curtains and wake up her father. They’d eat pancakes or eggs at the kitchen counter and he’d stare solemnly at the chicken clock clucking on the wall.
Then he’d begin ironing his state-issued shirt and polishing his black ankle boots. She sometimes watched him getting ready and wondered if he was an imposter. Ever since they’d left Denver, he’d been acting less and less like her dad. At first it was small stuff, like when he kissed her good-bye he’d look away too soon, or when she asked him questions he didn’t seem to hear her, even if it was important. He’d even begun to look different. Just after taking this prison job he’d replaced his horn-rims with big wire aviator glasses and shaved his beard clean off. With his regulation buzz cut and parted mustache, he looked less like her father and more like (face it!) a prison guard.
Although Lydia didn’t understand her father’s transformation, she knew he would never have acted like this unless things were pretty bad. Which was why she kept it all so quiet, what started happening to her during his nights away.
—You sure you’re gonna be all right?
—i’ll be fine.
—Chain the door behind me.
His car spat gravel on its way toward the prison and suddenly she was alone in the cabin. Silence surrounding her like an invitation.
The first time Lydia woke up under the cabin’s kitchen sink, the sun was rising between the cracks and Tomas was pounding on the front door, calling her name.
—Lydia!
She kicked herself out from under and sprinted down the hall. Before she slid the chain from its clasp on the door she looked around the cabin and it was empty but for her. Of course it was.
When she let Tomas in he patted her frazzled hair and glanced down upon her. He must have noticed something because he tilted her face by the chin, as if examining a shiner.
—i overslept.
—You’re late for school.
Then he scooped an ant trap from the kitchen floor and threw it beneath the sink, where it belonged.
As the months spilled forward, Lydia’s nights beneath the sink became all but inevitable. Once, twice, three times a week, while Tomas patrolled the snoring corridors of the prison, Lydia would meander through her bedtime ritual with all the enthusiasm of someone changing a toilet paper roll. In bed she’d get lost in a book and chomp through a wad of gum until she could hardly keep her eyes open any longer. Then she’d thumb the gum to her nightstand, click off her bed light, and aim straight for sleep. Sometimes it worked. But sometimes as she slipped out of consciousness, she’d hear creaking in the crawl space or jangling in the fridge. Doors opening. Milk spilling. Her muscles would jolt and she’d snap out of bed, scamper down the hallway, and fold herself safely under the kitchen sink, usually for the rest of the night.
Sometimes when Lydia was hiding in there, she believed that she could hear the Hammerman just on the other side of the cabinet door, his boots squeaking through the snowy blood on the kitchen floor. But mostly what she felt was a pervasive sense of dread and anticipation, as if she were Pippi Longstocking sealed into her dark barrel, just beginning to roll over the lip of the waterfall.
A year of this passed, then two. And then it was a Saturday morning in October and instead of being awakened by her father’s keys in the dead bolt, she was awakened by a ringing phone. She kicked her way out from beneath and snapped the phone off the wall.
—I’ve got to stay on for another twelve.
—dad?
—We could use the money. You’ll be okay at home alone?
She looked at the chicken clock clucking: five a.m.
—Or you can go to a friend’s house. Wasn’t there a girl in your art class?
—i’ll be okay here.
Lydia held the phone until its buzz went silent. The dad she’d had in Denver wasn’t perfect, but he never would have left her alone so much. Every time she thought of him as he’d been back then—the soft way he entered a room, the tilt of his head when others spoke—she felt incredibly sad, as if the dad in her memory had died that night with all the rest.
The sun was barely a dream in the east and she had the whole day and whole cabin to herself. She walked from room to room in her socks, snooping in the silence, feeling the kinks and aches of her night beneath go away. When she got to her father’s room, she sat on the edge of his mattress and opened up the gunmetal lockbox he kept under his dresser. She looked through some envelopes and snapshots, then pulled out a crumpled sheet of brown paper towel, the kind found in school and hospital restrooms. When she unwadded it—expecting a tooth fairy tooth or a lock of her infant hair—she was surprised to see her mother’s ruby ring sitting in the crumple like a flower in cemetery soil. He’d finally thrown out the gauze.
As she was packing the ring back in the box she stopped cold and turned her head and wondered if she’d really just heard a man’s footsteps in the hallway. No one was there when she peered around the jamb, but her heart was pounding. She checked the front door and it was locked, but even in the daylight the realization that it wouldn’t open until dusk tightened the silence around her. A few seconds passed and she was about to feel calm—and then of course she heard it: somewhere in the back of the cabin, an egg splattering on the wooden floor.