When the Lights Go Out(73)

I make my way along the brick paver patio and toward the front door. There I climb the steps to the front door. Nearly ten of them, each tread precariously thin. At the top I pause to catch my breath. I breathe in, holding the air in my lungs. Absorbing it. Letting it fill my cells and bob through my bloodstream like a buoy at sea.

Two sidelights flank the solid mahogany door. I see my bedraggled reflection in each as I stand with my hand on my heart, gasping for air. My hair stands every which way; my skin is a bloodless white, deathly pale. There are purple bags beneath my eyes.

I knock on the door. It’s a knock that’s uncertain at first, but one that becomes more certain with each second that passes by. Once, twice, three times I knock. There’s no reply.

Before I know it, I’ve knocked twenty-three times, each knock progressively louder, so that by number twenty-three, the knock is a pound. I raise my arm again but before I can bang once more, the porch light switches on. It startles me, the abruptness of it. Though after all this time, it’s anything but abrupt.

Suddenly I’m no longer trapped in a black hole but instead doused with a bright white light that makes me go momentarily blind. For a whole six seconds after the front door opens, I see nothing. Just blotches, spots, dots. “Who’s there?” I ask, voice still breathless, knowing it can be one of two people standing in the doorframe: the man in the attic window or Ms. Geissler.

“It’s three in the morning, Jessie,” she says to me. Her words are tired and annoyed. It’s Ms. Geissler, who, unlike me, had apparently been sleeping, spared from a night of insomnia, unlike me.

My eyes focus to see her wrapping a red cotton robe around herself, tying the belt into a bow and patting down her hair. “What’s the problem, dear?” she asks, her eyebrows scrunched up. “Is everything all right?”

“He’s here,” I say quickly, taking two small steps toward Ms. Geissler, bridging the gap from her to me. She takes a step in retreat.

“Who’s here?” she asks. And I say, “Him. A man. Upstairs.”

And it’s the blankness of her expression that gets me upset, that makes me snap. That and my overwhelming fatigue, my persistent irritability thanks to a lack of sleep. “You know who I mean. You know exactly who I mean,” I say roughly because I know he’s here, in her home. She has to know that he’s here. She has to know him, because why else would he be here? “The man in the window upstairs. The one who’s been watching me. He’s here.”

She presses a hand to her heart. Gasps, “There’s a man here? In my home?”

Her face goes white. She makes an offhand effort to peer over her shoulder and into the vacuous foyer as I take another step forward, one that gets my toes just inside her home. But only my toes. She resists, grasping the door hard and putting a foot behind it. She nearly shuts the door in my face. I lose balance, stumbling back onto the concrete stoop.

“I saw him in the window,” I tell her, pointing at the staircase behind her. “Upstairs. A man in the third-story window,” I say, and at this she relaxes visibly and smiles. She shakes her head and tells me that there’s no one in the third-story bedroom, her voice so sure that for a second I believe it. She says again that no one’s been in that room for months. Not since the squirrel incident, and then I think she’s going to rehash it for me, the whole story about the squirrels inhabiting the third floor. I know now that it isn’t true because there were never squirrels in that room but rather a man, my father, who she’s been hiding from me all these days.

“The attic ladder,” she tells me this time instead, “it’s a pulldown thing,” at which, like a mime, she grabs for an imaginary string over her left shoulder and pulls. “Broken for a couple of months. Wouldn’t you know it,” she says, “the exterminator managed to break the darn thing. I just haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed.”

“But I saw him,” I insist, and she says quite simply, “You must be mistaken. There’s no one there. Because how would anyone get up there, Jessie, without a ladder?”

It seems so sensible, the way that she says it. And for a fraction of a second, I doubt myself as she hoped I would do. But then his image returns to me—him standing there in the window, looking out at me—and I know that she’s lying. That she’s keeping him from me. Hiding him from the world just as Mom has always done.

“Let me in,” I insist, pushing the door against the weight of her, and she says to me, “Now, now, Jessie. You had a bad dream, that’s all,” but of course this can’t be true.

“You were dreaming there was a man in the room,” she says to me. She reaches out a hand to mine but I pull briskly away. “Just a bad dream, that’s all. It will all be clearer come morning.”

“I know what I saw,” I tell her, voice cracking. But her face is suddenly so pacific, so kind, and she asks if I’d like for her to walk me back to the carriage home so I don’t have to go alone. It’s dark out, she says. Hard to navigate the way. “But not to worry,” she tells me. “I know this yard like the back of my hand,” and she reaches for my arm to lead the way home. She winks at me and says, “And besides, I have a flashlight.” And there it is, in the pocket of her robe. She flicks it on as if this conversation is over, as if she’s put my worries to rest and now I can go home, feeling assured that there’s no man in this home. No man watching me.