Page 90 of Nightwatching

They sat in distanced silence for a little while, each sipping their coffee, thinking about her father-in-law spitting accusations. About the twists and angles of the stairs. Falling bodies.

She surprised herself, blurted out, “I can’t stop thinking about it—him all alone. Maybe he was trying to call for help. Could hear me moving around upstairs. Paralyzed. He must have been so afraid. It would have been torture.”

“You don’t know that’s how it was. He was probably unconscious the whole time.” Flatly, the sergeant added, “It’s not your fault.”

She was sure that he knew as well as she did that of course it was her fault, because there was the possibility that she’d had, for a little while, the power to make everything different.

She quickly wiped the corners of her eyes with a sleeve.

“Your kids at school?”

“Yeah.”

“How’re they doing?”

“Not great. They don’t seem to understand he’s gone. They keep thinking they see him. Out the window by a tree he liked, or in the woods. They have nightmares. It was all so quick. So unreal. They wouldn’t let us see him at the hospital. We had to say goodbye over the phone. It was like watching a TV show. Not getting to hold him, say goodbye to…someone so important. They recommended a counselor through school. A grief counselor. They meet over the computer.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “And you? Bad dreams and all that, too?”

She shrugged. “I get sleep paralysis sometimes.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“You wake up, can’t move. Some people see a figure, like a darkfigure, in the room. After a while it disappears. And slowly you get so you can move again.”

“Well, that sounds gawd-awful.”

The sergeant’s eyebrows were knit, his expression a mix of pity and revulsion.

“It doesn’t happen often,” she lied, bothered by his reaction and falling into the old habit of hoping that saying something out loud might make it true. “Hasn’t happened in a long time.”

“Are you one of the people who sees a figure?”

She lied again. “Sometimes. Not always.”

“What does it look like?”

“Just a man. The silhouette of a man.”

“But frightening?”

“Yeah. Frightening.”

The sergeant gave another slow look around the old house, let his eyes catch on the blood still staining the gaps in the floorboards. His gaze tripped up the steep steps.

“It’s really common,” she said, feeling a need to reassure him, reassure herself, that such a thing was normal, that she was normal, that there were no ghosts, no living shadows, in the world. That sometimes things fell, sometimes they were lost, knocked askew, broken. That anyone would imagine strange things, things appearing, vanishing, after feeling death so close, after seeing death perched hungrily on someone they loved.

“They think maybe that’s where all those alien abduction stories come from,” she told him. “Why those stories are all so similar. You know…can’t move, can’t speak, see figures with glowing eyes, then all of a sudden you’re back in bed again? That story. Just people with sleep paralysis. Not little green men beaming them into spaceships and doing experiments where they can’t move or whatever.”

“Huh.” The sergeant nodded. “Interesting.”

They sat in silence. She thought about the swept-clean path, the movement behind the trees. The way the children’s voices lilted with hope when they suggested Daddy might have been watching, might have done this or that. The way objects seemed to travel lately, as if their property, their land, their house, were subject to a different gravity.

“I guess there are simple explanations for most things,” she mused. “Even the ones that at first glance are the strangest.”

“Yes.” The sergeant rubbed his chin heavily. “I tell myself that all the time.”

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