The Anomaly(46)

Normally I’d just go back to sleep,” she went on. “I was good like that. My brothers had already worn out the needing-to-be-nursed-back-to-sleep routine. By the time I came along my parents were done with that crap. On this night I’m talking about, I tried, but it didn’t feel right. Something about the house, about the world…it just didn’t feel right.

“So I got out of bed. I figured I’d go to my parents, get one of them to come tuck me in. Though when I was on my feet I remembered it would have to be Mom, because Dad was away in San Francisco. Which was fine—she was better at it anyway. So I left my room and padded along the corridor and into their room. Went up to her side of the bed. I got real close to it before I realized…she wasn’t there.

“The bed was mussed up—my dad’s a bear for remaking the thing every day, and I’m the same now. Takes two minutes, and it’s so much nicer. But when he was away, my mother didn’t bother. So I couldn’t tell whether she’d been in bed and gotten up, or hadn’t made it there yet. She had a little clock radio that my brothers and I bought her for Christmas. It said it was 1:20 a.m. Which was very late. I knew sometimes she’d stay up when Dad was away, though, watching a movie. So maybe that was it. But it meant going downstairs to get her. I kind of didn’t want to do that. I was awake enough now that the house felt big and dark and weird. And awake enough that I’d remembered my brothers weren’t at home, either. One was at a birthday sleepover, the other on a seventh-grade trip to Yosemite. So it was just me and Mom. Earlier, at dinner, that seemed cool, and we’d joked about being girls home alone. But now…I really wanted her to be there in her bed. I didn’t want to have to go find her by myself in the dark. But I also knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep now without being tucked in. You know how it is when you’re a kid. Things like that become nonnegotiable. So…I went downstairs.

“They’ve downsized now, but our house back then was a big place. And very quiet. I went down the stairs anyway. There was a little light to see by because they always left a couple small lamps on. I went to the living room. She wasn’t there. I went to the kitchen. She wasn’t there. And then I thought, duh, she’ll be in the family room, watching TV. But she wasn’t.”

She looked at me. “She wasn’t anywhere.”

“You mean…What do you mean?”

“She wasn’t in the house. At all. I looked in every room. She wasn’t there. I even looked in the garage, though I found it pretty scary even in the daytime. She wasn’t there, either. She wasn’t anywhere. I was alone in the house.”

“Christ. So…what did you do?”

“What could I do? I freaked the hell out. But very quietly. I checked every room again. Upstairs and down. I started crying. I kept searching, getting more and more scared. I tried to work out what I’d done wrong. I finally wound up sitting halfway up the stairs, curled in a little ball. Knowing I was alone now, and she was never coming back. That none of them were.

“Dad had gone first. Then my brothers—they were part of it, too. Part of some plan they’d kept secret from me. Then tonight, my mom had left. What I’d thought had been my family was not. They had all gone. And so I sat and cried as quietly as I could so nothing would hear and come get me, feeling like I was in a dark and lonely cave, wondering what was going to happen. Because slowly I realized maybe they hadn’t abandoned me after all, but something had come and gotten them—or gotten my mom, at least. A monster in the dark. Who’d taken her, and sooner or later would come back for me. After a while I even thought I could hear it. Smell it. Coming closer. And closer. Hidden in the darkness. Standing over me.”

She hugged her arms more tightly around her knees. “And then…I heard a sound outside the house and the door unlocked and my mom walked right in. I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. I stared down at her. She didn’t look like my mom anymore. Because she hadn’t been there, you know? That world was dead and gone to me now. That world and those people. This was something that just looked the way my mom used to. Some stranger, letting herself into the house.

“Maybe this was even the creature, I thought, in disguise.

“But then she saw me sitting there and came running up the stairs and I said I thought she’d gone forever and she hugged me so tight it hurt and said she’d never ever leave me and then made me warm milk and took me to my room and tucked me in and slept there in bed with me, right through the night.”

“Where had she been?”

“My uncle—he’s my dad’s brother—lived ten miles away up the coast. He’d gotten home late, and only when his ride had driven away did he realize he’d locked himself out. My mother didn’t have to explicitly explain that he was drunk. Didn’t happen all the time, but, well, it did once in a while. We kids were used to it. He was fun when he was drunk. And responsible enough to stay away from his car. So he walked back down to the highway and found a public phone and she drove up there with spare keys to his house, and came back. She considered waking me before she went, thought she could get away with it, decided not to. She called it wrong. That’s all.”

“Christ, Moll. I’m sorry.”

“For what? I survived a nonevent.”

“It evidently doesn’t feel that way.”