Page 52 of Nightwatching

Maybe your voice isn’t working. Maybe you aren’t hearable through your lips, filled up with blood.

“Can you sit up?” the neighbor asked. “I can barely hear with you talking into the floor.”

He reached a hand to help her and she extended her own, but again he withdrew it. She vaguely wondered if he was more afraid of the blood or the whitened skin of her hands and wrists. She pushedherself up until she sat against the wall. She swiped at her swollen lip to try to clean it. Touched her eye and immediately snapped her hand away from causing herself such pain.

“Someone broke into my house. My children are hiding there. I need help.”

“I’ve got the police!” the woman called out as she came back down the stairs, pointing at the cell phone in her hand. “They said they’re coming. They want to know who she is.” The woman stopped short. “What’s wrong with her skin?”

“She said someone broke into her house. That her kids are still there,” the neighbor said.

“Ooooohhhh!” The woman’s eyebrows shot up. She repeated this into the phone.

“What’s your address, hon?”

She gave her name, her address.

“I think—I think he followed me.”

“What?”

Both the neighbors rushed past her, the man locking the dead bolt before they each sprung to one of the narrow windows on either side of their front door, cupping hands around faces to peer outside into the storm.

Her feet stuck out at strange angles from the coat. Their skin looked like the fur of the mountain lion, partly torn away, bloody at the skinned places.

She leaned against the wall for support so she could make her voice louder, hearable.

“They have to get to the children, my kids, they’re hidden, they have to go to my house, please!”

“She says the intruder might have followed her,” the woman said into the phone. “But I don’t see anyone. Do you see anyone?”

“No,” the neighbor agreed. “Nobody.”

“Someone’s in my house,” she repeated.

“We don’t see anyone,” the woman told the phone. “But it’s hard to see anything in the dark with all the snow.”

They seemed so close; their voices hurt her ears.

“Did he do…that…to you?” the woman asked, looking at her.

“He’s going to start a fire,” she said. “He’s going to smoke—”

“Did this man who broke in do all”—the woman pointed her finger at her, waved it in a circle—“that?”

“I’m gonna get the first aid kit,” the neighbor said. “Google hypothermia, yeah? See what we should do?”

“I’m putting you on speaker,” the woman said into the phone, “so I can look up hypothermia. To see if she has hypothermia.”

She licked her lip and tasted iodine. The neighbors’ manic energy, their excited discombobulation, increased her sense of exhaustion, her need for sleep.

“I hid my kids,” she told the woman. “I hid them from the Corner. The man in the corner.”

“You hear that?” the woman said to the phone she was simultaneously typing into. “She’s really out of it. She’s talking gibberish. And her face is all messed up, like someone hit her. And she’s barefoot. In a fur coat.”

“A fur coat?” a tinny voice said from the speakerphone.

“Yes,” the woman told the voice. “Just showed up in a fur coat, but barefoot in the snow and all beat up.”

---