Remember, you learned this as a child, from picture books: What does the bunny see? What does the bunny smell? And so on. Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Five. But some people have more. Some people can sense when rain is coming. Some mothers of soldiers swear they sensed a chill, an arrow of foreboding, hours before the telegram bearing the unthinkable news arrived. I believe them. There are bonds that surpass the capacity of modern science to explain.
Then there are the curious solutions that nature devises, to counter a deficit. My great-aunt, deaf from childhood, could sense vibrations, could determine the location of a sound, through her feet. She would curl her toes, bony and freckled, onto the warped boards of her front porch, then she’d jerk upright and point, a full thirty seconds before the rest of us heard the mail truck rumbling up the drive. One sense falters; the others sharpen.
So it is at night.
At night it is the sense of sound that will save you.
By which I mean, you could not see the man’s shadow outside, waiting. Could not touch it, as it slipped to the back cellar window, where the black was absolute, where the moonlight did not reach. You could not smell his fingertips as they closed around the doorknob. Could not taste his sweat beading, salty and glistening, under wool.
No, but you could hear the glass shatter.
You could hear the bolt scrape as it slid back. Hear the floorboard creak, protesting the weight of the foot that should not have been there.
I was asleep when he came.
? ? ?
AT FIRST, I thought it might be Will returning. Will, having turned around, having decided he wanted to stay the night after all.
I lay suspended, halfway between dreaming and awake. My pillow was warm. I would make him apologize. He would have to grovel. Then I would scoot over, let him slip naked between the sheets, let him curl against me. I made a purring sound, turned beneath the blankets. Hurry up, silly boy. What was taking him so long? Why had he made such a clatter letting himself in? Why was he not padding up the stairs? And something else was nagging, some detail not right, swooping and buzzing at my sleepy brain like an insistent insect.
At last I caught it: Will did not have a key. Will could not be in my kitchen. I sat up.
Listened.
I had imagined this moment. Every woman who lives alone must harbor her own private night terrors. In my nightmares these confrontations always unfold in black and white. Grainy, like a Hitchcock movie. Me, willowy and bearing a distinct resemblance to Ingrid Bergman, my floor-length white satin dressing gown cinched in a bow around my waist. Something—not a specific noise so much as a nameless but urgent sense of menace—routs me from bed. I slide on fur-trimmed, kitten--heeled mules and light a cigarette (still channeling Ingrid here). Inhale for courage. Then Ingrid/I crack my bedroom door, flick on the hall light, tiptoe to the landing, and call down in a throaty, trembling voice—the trembling voice is key—Is anyone there? Around this point in the dream I usually snap awake. I never see the intruder’s face.
The reality, when it came, was less elegant. My hair in tangles, my breath sour from last night’s wine. In reality there was no time to tiptoe. Certainly no time to light up a smoke. And no power on this earth that would tempt me from the safety of my bedroom, toward the yawning, dark mouth of the stairs.
From below, a thump. Someone unfamiliar with my house, bumping softly against a table or chair. Someone moving in the living room. Out of my bed cross the room slam the door turn the lock. But the lock on my bedroom door was useless. Flimsy, the keyless kind that spins inside the door handle. A determined child with a paper clip could pick it in ten seconds flat. Something to brace the door, then. Against one wall leaned an antique, mahogany chest of drawers stuffed with jeans and sweaters. My house was built a century before people decided they needed closets. I leaned in and shoved. Slipped. No traction on the waxy floor. Under the bed were a grotty pair of UGGs, suede ankle boots, the ones I wore to bring in the newspaper and roll out my trash bin. Yank them on, hurry up, push, the chest gouging tracks into the floor.
There. The chest was square against the door. I pricked my ears.
All was still.
Nothing but the wind rustling leaves outside my window. My heart slamming in my chest. Whoever was downstairs did not want to be heard. Adrenaline shook my hands as I cast about for my cell phone. Please, God, please, God, let me have carried it upstairs last night. Not on my desk. Not on the nightstand. I found it in the pocket of my jeans, slung over the back of a chair. My fingers would not cooperate, kept mashing wrong buttons, backing up, fumbling. Finally, ringing. A second went by. Two. Enough time to curse the burglar-alarm panel, winking green on the wall. Mocking me. I had been so upset after the fight with Will that I’d stormed off to bed without remembering to turn it on.
The 911 operator was calm, told me to slow down and repeat my address. I tried. Croaked out my cross street, spelled my name: C-A-S-H-I . . .
I was spelling when the stairs creaked. Specifically, the second stair. Then the fourth. I know every loose board. Whoever was climbing was taking the stairs two at a time, and stepping smack in the center, not sticking to the quieter, more stable edges. Whoever was climbing no longer cared if he was heard.
“He’s upstairs,” I whimpered into the phone. “Please hurry. How long—”
“Ma’am, an officer will be right with—”
“No, now! You need to get here now!”
I threw the phone down. Trained my eyes on the crack at the bottom of my bedroom door. The intruder did not turn on a light. On the top step he seemed to hesitate, then he began moving toward my closed door. He was panting. Winded from the stairs. No more than a dozen feet from me. Only the door and that chest of drawers separating us. I could whisper and he would hear every word.