The Invited(14)

“Turn it off!” Helen ordered.

“What? Why?”

“Because,” she said in her best are you an idiot or what? tone, “whatever’s out there will know we’re in here.”

She realized how foolish she sounded. Her fear was getting the better of her.

He gave her a really, Helen? look and left the light on, reached for his glasses. During the day, he wore contacts, but they were now soaking in their little plastic holder by the tiny bathroom sink.

“Helen, what you heard, it was only an animal,” he said in his most soothing voice.

“An animal screaming? It sounded like someone being fucking gutted, Nate.” If he’d heard the noise, there was no way he’d be this calm.

He put a comforting hand on her arm. “Probably a fox. A fisher, maybe. They make horrible screaming sounds.”

“That’s not what this was.”

“I’ll find an audio file online and play it for you in the morning,” Nate said. “You’ll see.”

Off in the distance, an owl called, seemed to say Who cooks for you? over and over.

“That’s a barred owl,” Nate said, excited. “Is that what you heard?”

She blew out an exasperated breath. “No, Mr. Science. That’s an owl. I know what a damn owl sounds like! What I heard was something or someone being tortured.”

“I bet it was a fisher. I’ve never heard one, but from what I understand, it’s a terrifying cry.”

He turned out the light, set his glasses back on the shelf, and lay down.

“What?” she snapped, incredulous. “You’re going back to sleep? Seriously?”

“It’s three thirty in the morning, Helen. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”

Nate had this uncanny ability to sleep no matter what. He’d be out in no time, and once he was asleep, it was nearly impossible to wake him. Alarms never worked. He proudly said that he once slept through a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in El Salvador when he was on a research trip in grad school.

    Helen just wasn’t wired that way. She was a terrible insomniac, especially when in a new place. And now that there was something out there screaming, her chances of falling back to sleep were slim. And it was probably best that way: one of them had to stay awake in case whatever was out there came back.

She lay there in the dark, listening to the wind, to Nate’s gentle snoring. The owl hooted again. But no more screams. How, she wondered for the thousandth time, had she ever let Nate talk her into this? She remembered Jenny teasing her, saying, “Think of all you’re giving up! And for what?”

Now here she was, lying awake in bed, listening for the sounds of a mysterious screaming animal—just the sort of thing Jenny had warned her about.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to imagine what it must have been like here when the settlers first came. When there were no electric lights. No internet to research animals that made terrible sounds in the middle of the night. When she couldn’t sleep, she thought about history. Of research she’d done, of facts she knew about the past, because somehow, looking back always made the present seem not so bad, no matter what was going on.

She imagined a woman who might have come to settle in these same woods three hundred years ago, listening to the sounds for the first time: the crack of breaking twigs, the forlorn call of an owl, the wild and terrifying screams of some unknown creature. Had that woman’s husband slept beside her, too, snoring and oblivious? Had she cursed him quietly in the night, wondered how she ever let him talk her into such a thing? The thought made her smile, feel not so alone.

Around 4:30, Helen gave up on sleep and scooted down to crawl over Nate’s feet and out of bed. She pulled on the robe hanging from a hook on the door and walked down the narrow hall into the kitchen. The trailer was small and cramped and smelled like mice. It was basically an aluminum shoebox with tiny louvered windows, dark wood paneling, and an iffy electrical system. When you turned on a light, others dimmed. The linoleum floor was peeling up (they’d covered it with throw rugs where they could), and the fake wood paneling on the walls was buckling. There was the closet-sized bedroom that barely fit their full bed, a tiny bathroom, and a living room and kitchen that were really one not-so-big space. The kitchen was galley style, with old metal cabinets that were rusted through in places. Helen had tried to brighten them up by sticking contact paper on them, but it peeled and hung like bits of unattached skin.

    When they’d first come to clean out the trailer (Nate carrying her over the rusty threshold like a silly newlywed), they found it full of stuff: ratty old furniture, food in the cupboards and fridge, clothes piled on the shelves in the bedroom; there was even a toothbrush at the sink.

“Anything worth saving?” Nate asked once she’d been over the place with her careful historian’s eye. In addition to loving research, Helen adored old objects and spent a lot of time visiting estate sales and flea markets. What she was drawn to most were the small personal things—old tintype photographs, letters written in smudged and faded ink. Nate didn’t understand her obsession with these objects or her reasons for buying them. “It’s not like you knew these people,” he said.

“No,” she said. “But I do a little bit now, don’t I? Now that I have a piece of their story.”