Rise: How a House Built a Family(79)

Three. I had three.

The walk back to the stairs was dark. My tears hadn’t stopped. I wasn’t sure they ever would. I found my phone on the carpet at the top of the stairs. It was still connected.

Going backward with one hand and my knees, I moved down the stairs. “Officer? Sophie?” But even I could tell my throat was squeezing my voice to a squeak. Like a little white mouse. I sat on the floor at the bottom, holding Hershey and crying against her side. “Sophie?” I said again, and this time someone heard me.

“This is Officer Bradley. Am I speaking with Cara?”

“They’re all okay. My kids. They’re all here.”

“We got ’em! All good!” he shouted. “Kids accounted for. Get him out of here. We got the kids.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stracener said from a distance, and then he must have taken the phone from Bradley. “We have a Hamot officer pulling into your driveway now. He can come in and sit with you for a while. Call someone for you.”

“No,” I said. They hadn’t sent the officer to sit with me, they had sent him to check my kids’ beds because they thought I was too weak, too small to do it myself. “I don’t want him to come in.” I was still crying, and there was no way to pretend otherwise when my nose was completely blocked.

“Are you sure? Can I call someone to come over? You might not want to be alone.”

I steadied my breath. “I’m not alone. My kids are here.” Lights were drawing and redrawing a blue line across the dining-room wall. “We’re just fine.”

“Call if you need anything. We’ll do whatever we can,” he said.

I hung up, wondering if I had thanked him or only thought the words. My head was still scattered and my thoughts couldn’t find a straight line to anything. The clock on the oven said it was 4:31, and I was having trouble finding oxygen. Someone had sucked it all out of the house.

The police lights switched off before the car backed out and hung a right toward town. A deep breath took the very last molecule of oxygen and used it up. I lurched for the door and pulled it open, sucking in gulps of fresh oxygen and starting to cry again.

My forehead throbbed with sharp pains on either side like someone had accidentally left a couple of steak knives in my skull. When I leaned down to rub the worst spots near my temples, I saw something on the welcome mat. Hershey sniffed at it and pulled away with a little sneeze.

One of the kids had left a glass there. But why would they do that?

I picked it up with my left hand, because I was afraid if I moved the right one from my temple my brains would shoot out. Water sloshed over the lip.

Water.

A dark figure floated in the glass. A little dead mouse. My hand shook badly enough to drop it, but somehow I held on long enough to lower it back to the welcome mat.

“Better you than me,” I said, but I meant Better you than my kids. I couldn’t just stand there thinking about all the might-have-beens. All the what-ifs. Adam had been at the house and walked right up to the front door while we slept and I’d never known it. I had the feeling he was trying to tell me I was lucky this time. He could have hurt me if he wanted, he could have made us all take a dive. But I had been lucky. We were all so lucky.

I flapped my left arm against my leg like a wounded bird. Hershey abandoned the trail she was sniffing through the yard and leapt over the glass to get inside. She leaned against my thigh and put her nose under my hand. A subtle hint that she was open to some attention.

“Good girl. Keep an eye out, and don’t let him in. He has no right to be in this house. No matter what.” I rubbed her head, gave her three solid pats on the ribs, and laughed when the hollow echo made me jump.

She went with me to check all the downstairs doors and windows, and then to push the dining-room chairs in front of the doors. I hadn’t worked out yet what I would tell the kids. If I was going to start barricading the doors, I would have to tell them something. When I was in the kitchen sorting through the knife drawer for just the right one to keep on my nightstand, I realized how ridiculous I was being. The chairs and the knife weren’t a bad idea, but they would be useless tonight. After driving his car into the river and claiming that a body or bodies were in the trunk, Adam wasn’t going to be sneaking around my house for a while. He’d earned himself a trip back to the state hospital, where slipping pills into the potted plants wasn’t going to be as easy as it was at Ivana’s or Sophie’s.

I closed the knife drawer and put the dining-room chairs back under the table. Being realistic and cautious was smart. Being paranoid and irrational was not only stupid, it was dangerous. Adam might have suggested that I was slow and stupid all these years, but I was starting to believe he was wrong.

The thudding in my temples had slowed, but it had worked like a bilge pump, draining every last bit of energy from my limbs. I wanted to go upstairs to get Jada, to carry her back to my bed and sleep with one hand on her tummy. But my fear wasn’t the sort of energy she needed to feel. Besides, I could barely lift my feet to move across the den toward my room. When I reached the bed I rolled into it, my arms and legs leaden weights.

I never would have imagined I could sleep after the terror of thinking I had lost the only things that mattered. But my body separated into two parts, half drifting into the early-morning sky and half sinking deep into the earth. My dreams started out fractured and chaotic but settled into a rhythm that woke me shortly after sunrise as though it were music.