In all things, I blame the husband.
Women who sleep with teenage boys, women who shoplift collectibles, women who lock their children in basements. Yes. Their rotten husbands drove them to it.
My mother said this was the result of having a perfect father. A knight. A prince. A hero who made every other man look small, ruinous.
And that is why, when the kidnapper cracks open our new skylight like an oyster and slithers in, landing dripping wet in my daughter’s bedroom, I don’t blame the defective latch, the alarm system, or the thin bronze shell of the new tin roof. The dotted line of fault doesn’t lead to my architect or contractor or engineer, whose chosen materials proved too delicate for my most paranoid calibrations. No. I know everything they could conjure or specify is no match for the muscle of conviction.
And oddly, lastly, I do not blame my intruder. And that explains everything that follows, doesn’t it?
I am angrier at my flawed ambitious husband than the man who crouches among my daughter’s stuffed animals, who stops to listen for a moment before He decides to snake toward her bed. I am angry before I even know the truth: of why our home, our tin roof, and why, why, Sam’s favorite daughter. Who needs facts? My shaking body knows what it knows. That Sam is the one who leaves me alone at night with my anxiety attacks and my children and the thunder ripping open the sky, the lightning slashing our trees to toothpicks while the sounds of the storm cover the squeak of a criminal’s ladder unfolding against my house.
I stand at the top of our stairs with the portable phone in my hand, my thumb on the button that should produce dial tone, and doesn’t. Now there is no other sound but pounding heart and pouring rain. He is here, and He is smarter than I imagined.




* * *



I should have been happy. It was summer and the renovations were nearly complete. The shifting estimates, the money tussles, all behind us. In the end, I had what I wanted, my maze of hickory floors and cage of pale earth walls. But in the kitchen, my new French windows rattled in their open frames, as if they knew something foreign was already roaring across the crisp gardens and green backyards. The wind pushed through the screens and across my oiled teak island, upending the linen napkins in their silver holder.
When the wind picked up, I headed first to my windows. They were beautiful in the Show House; opened wider, left less to the imagination, than any windows I’d ever seen. I kept leaving the Show Tour to return to the corner where they’d been installed, running my hand over the wood frames as if they were furniture. The Anderson Windows rep teased me: Back to visit your open window? Now I had them, and I couldn’t close them tightly enough. As I pulled in the last latch, defending against the grassy air, two fat raindrops hit my arm. I didn’t even stop to wipe them off.
I walked from room to room, battening down the hatches. I kept checking the burnished latches in my daughters’ rooms upstairs. Re-locking, re-tucking. A mother or a warden? Jordan, my baby, was curled into her Raggedy Ann, blond silk hair against bright red yarn. Next door, Julia’s mop of curls were almost indistinguishable against our Maine coon cat, Willis. Across the hall, Jamie was asleep with her finger holding her place in her book. I slipped it out of her hand, put a Kleenex in as a bookmark, went back downstairs. I was wearing a path on the new Berber carpet, but couldn’t see it yet. My footprints would appear to me later, with enough time and close attention, like the shape of things only visible from the sky.
As the storm came inland, I gathered candles, matches, flashlights, laundry to fold, old mail to open, and spread it out in the den. I sat alone on my twelve foot suede sofa and bit my nails in front of movies I knew the endings to. I let myself worry during the commercials. Every flash and boom in the sky was an assumption: that the lightning would find whatever was metallic and brittle in me.
When my nails were gone, I folded the laundry and packed my briefcase for Monday. I’d already assembled the girls’ backpacks. I wrote a note for the babysitter, Elizabeth, about picking them up from Reading Camp and taking them swimming. I opened mail from a week earlier. In the foot-high stack of catalogs, I pulled out the familiar blue Tiffany book. It was smaller than the others, modest considering its contents. On the back cover, a man in a gray suit with beautiful hands holds a turquoise box behind his back. It is like a poem, that photo. The curve of his thumb, the stripe of his suit. I tear it off and add it to my briefcase so I can look at it later. It joins a reporter’s notebook, an old award certificate from American Reporting, scraps of articles and scribbles, a story about child labor that is only in my head. So says Michael, my executive producer. Claire, he says, breathing it, coaxing it long past its solitary syllable, you’re not in a third-world slum, you’re in the suburbs. You need to learn the difference between a lead and a hunch. But there is no difference in the shiver as it travels up your spine. How can they be told apart? Michael has never worked in a top-three market, never worked overseas like I have. He only knows one shade of evil, and I know a hundred. What I call experience he calls paranoia.
On the television, Hugh Grant carried Sandra Bullock through traffic. I couldn’t find the scissors—art project? School poster?--so I opened a Neiman’s package with my teeth. Inside the white tissue were three floral bathing suits for the girls and the pink silk nightgown I’d ordered to surprise Sam. Ordering from catalogs as if I believed in the vibrant possibility of that paper world.
The gown looked impossibly skimpy in my lap. What movie was I not watching when I ordered this? I slipped off my tank top and shorts and pulled it on without bothering to close the shutters. The bodice was as tight as a pair of hands. My necklace of baby rings nestled just above the v neck, as if pointing to where it was a size too small. But the silk brushing against my legs, across, between, was intoxicating after my cottony week. I fell into it like a hotel bed, allowing myself. My head settled in at the end of the suede couch and the storm found its rhythm, down a notch into steady rain. I slept.
They’d installed the new skylights the day before and all the dark corners of the house were flooded with light. The final touch. Sam hadn’t seen it yet; he was off somewhere again, gone three or four days—I couldn’t remember which-- to somewhere. Golf outing, conference, convention. They all involved sport masquerading as business. His clients’ pharmaceutical names, those half-words, blurred together in my memory the same way the names of the luxury hotels did. He told me, but I couldn’t absorb the information. Was that a true telling? When I never really grasped where he was or who he was with? I knew all I needed to know: that someone was serving him steak and fetching him fresh towels, and I was home sorting his socks.
At two a.m. something hits the roof and I wake up. Shaking, I go to the kitchen and wrestle with the childproof bottle of Xanax. It’s hard for me to open things; even after a year of physical therapy, my hand still doesn’t work right. The wind picks up, flinging small branches on the new tin roof above me. Bronze with flashes of green, the roof is beautiful but noisy. The price you pay, I was told too late. The squirrels thought it was a slide. The rain, a timpani. The new skylights are even louder. They treat me to a drum solo at the top of the stairs. The pill finally gets swallowed through my tears. I’m not the kind of person who can live in a noisy house.
A small but hard noise makes it way through my sniffing. Half-click, half-squeak. I look up, as if the answer is written on the ceiling. It comes again, and with each breath, I replace negative thoughts with positive ones. I stand at my farmhouse sink in the house that was never a farm and actually say my thoughts out loud, whispering into the new curved faucet/microphone. People don’t break into houses on nights like this. It’s the storm. It’s the wind. It’s squirrels on the new tin roof, I repeat. Squirrels on the new tin roof. As I say the word ‘tin’, something above me, bigger than me, snaps, then shatters. Not squirrels, I know in my bones. It sounds like glass, broken glass.
The portable phone blinks on the other side of the room. The tongue and groove is silent as I move to it, but my limbs rattle in their sockets. The scissors are not in their Lucite holder with the markers and pens. I move past the laundry by the table in the hall, eyes scanning ahead. Where are the blue curved handles, the sharp steel points? Later, I will kick myself for the weapons I walked by: pointed pencils, heavy vases, poisonous sprays. I turn my engagement ring and diamond wedding band backwards, into my palm, and continue up the stairs, as if I’m entering a subway at night.
On the landing, I stare into Jamie’s bedroom across the jungle of stuffed animals against one wall. I smell rain, damp cotton, leather. His boots, I will think later. His damp shirt. He is silent and hidden, but I imagine He can hear me shaking in the doorway, molars like maracas in my mouth. Finally I make out the contours of His face and eyes, human skin among the plush bears and cloth clowns and nylon-lashed dolls that line Jamie’s floor.
I shake but do not gasp, do not scream. Of course He is there; I expected Him, I heard Him coming for years, each night when Sam left me alone with my obsessions. I turned every creak of wood into a footstep, every flying branch into a burglar, every click into the release of the safety. I conjured Him, fear by fear, bone by bone until He showed himself. Mine.
He is younger than He was in my nightmares.
The plush zoo muffles our sharp breathing, my heart pounding. There is a man in my daughter’s room. I don’t dare cast my eyes in her direction, don’t want to point her out to Him. I feel her sleeping, hear her soft breathing, out of rhythm with His and mine. I look only at Him.
It is beyond intimate: past sharing a bathroom, past putting your child’s bloody finger in your mouth. He stares at me. I stare back. Fear, meet Regret. Regret, may I present Fear.
He moves, but not toward me. Holds a finger to His lips, a warning, and glides soundlessly, on cat burglar feet, to Jamie’s canopy bed.
“No,” I cry, but it comes out mangled and small. A croak.
He scoops her up and though she is groggy, half-asleep, she looks oddly comfortable draped in His arms. Her sweet face, still flush with dreams. Her shiny auburn hair. Sam’s hair.
I drop to my knees and utter the only fearless words I have ever spoken:
“Take me,” I say. “Take me instead.”
I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t completely relieved when He did.