Sounds in the Night

I heard something downstairs. First my eyes sprung wide open and then my heart flew out my chest and across the bed where in the illumination of my alarm clock it danced about like a happy cocker-spaniel.

My first thought: Jennie's back!

Then I realized it was three in the morning. My heart slumped its curly blond cocker-spaniel head. No, it wouldn't be Jennie.

But what could it be that made that noise, that rattling of glass (did I actually hear it?) at three in the morning? Jennie had been gone now for three weeks and four days... It wouldn't be her...It wasn't her!

My heart started prancing again, this time with ears back and shackles raised and perhaps a deep growl low in its chest. There was someone downstairs.

I peeled the covers back and stood while listening to the faint ticking of the empty house. I considered putting on my pants. I then amused myself that it still could be Jennie come home to me, apologetic and forgiving and ready to make amends, and maybe, if this was the case, I should remain in my present state of raw nakedness. In the end, before I decided anything else, I decided to put on my pants. Jennie had not come home. Jennie was never coming home. She had told me so herself when she threw her keys at my head!

Good bye, good bye, good bye, and go to hell, we had said.

I scooped my pants up off the floor and put them on quickly, listening as I did so--hearing only chirping crickets from outside in the night.

It was probably nothing, right? But maybe it was not nothing, maybe it was something? Someone, not Jennie, but someone else, in the house now? Downstairs in the darkness? Creeping up the stairs?

With a solemn in-take of breath I opened the bedroom door. Tiny squeaks mimicked each of my footsteps as I tiptoed along the hall carpet to the railing. I leaned over to look down the stairs at the barely visible first floor landing.

Everything below was a dark shadow, unmoving.

I stood there for some time, I'm not sure how long, but it was until I started to shiver from the cold air. That's when my breathing stopped and a lucid realization entered my cloudy head. A draft! There was a window open! I could just barely feel the ominous, foreign breeze...

I thought about my golf clubs, a hammer, a butcher knife, the fireplace poker; something—but everything I could use for a weapon was downstairs. I tiptoed straight back along the hallway, not turning, but carefully backing slowly into my bedroom with the same squeaking floorboards amplifying my every step.

I closed the door and locked it and immediately went to the phone. Someone was in the house. I knew when a window was open in my own damn house! I dialed 911. Nothing happened. I pressed the button down and tried again. Nine One One. Nothing. I pressed the button down and held it down and waited for almost longer than I could bare before I let it go. I listened again—the phone had no dial tone. I stood there with the phone to my ear hearing only the impotent sound of muted silence and my own breathing in my ear.

My heart was pounding in the center of my throat. Where was my cellphone?
It was on the coffee-table on top of a stack of unpaid bills.

It was downstairs too!

Then I heard the dreaded sound of floorboards squeaking very lightly outside my door. I thought about crawling out the window. I even thought briefly of crawling under the bed. I stood there. Frozen. The door nob was turning and I stood there watching it, first it turned one way, then the other.

A lone fingernail began tapping lightly against the wood. It was a long, burgundy-red, index fingernail if I was any judge. My heart did somersaults of cocker-spaniel joy. I opened the door with a feigned sleepy look on my face and found her standing there with a phone bill in her hand.

“You're home,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered.

We stared at each other without expression.

Then we softly said hello.


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