But there she was, still in her bed, a lump buried under her pink-and-white quilt, a barricade of stuffed animals around her.
She wriggled under the covers but did not speak.
“Olivia?” I called, staring at the lump, suddenly filled with the totally irrational fear that it wasn’t my daughter under there. “What’s going on, Liv?”
The lump held still.
Not Olivia. Not Olivia. Not Olivia.
I told my brain to shut up. I was feeling raw and used up. I hadn’t really been able to get back to sleep after finding my mother in the living room. I kept replaying what she’d said
You’re the one in danger.
It’s always been you.
I stepped into Olivia’s room now and paused beside the bed. I could see the slight rise and fall of covers—Olivia breathing.
But what if it wasn’t her?
I shook my head, told myself I was being silly, that my nightmare and my mother’s nighttime wanderings had spooked me. Just the fact of her being here in my house, the way it made my childhood world andmy adult world collide, had put me on edge. The world was off-kilter. Frightening.
I wasn’t normally a person who spooked easily.
I ate up horror movies, got a little thrill from the jump scares, but rarely actually jumped. I’d always found horror movies cathartic: you went into the theater and faced the terrors and blood and gore there on the big screen and came out feeling this rush because you’d confronted your fears and survived. Watching and reading horror made me feel brave in a way I don’t in real life. Mark hated thrillers and horror. He preferred grand historical epics and feel-good romances. And of course he was a sucker for Hallmark Christmas movies, which he admitted were sappy and formulaic. “But that’s what’s comforting and satisfying about them,” he’d explained. “You know exactly what you’re getting; you know the couple will end up together in the end, the business will be saved, they’ll learn the true meaning of Christmas.” I teased him about them all the time: the towns with the stupid holiday names and fake snow, the predictable romances, the cookies and hot cocoa, the accident-prone characters who were always falling down or literally bumping into each other all the time, and the occasional appearance of the real Santa Claus. Ridiculous.
Olivia shifted under the heavy quilt, let out a little puppylike whimper.
“Knock-knock,” I said as I counted to three in my head, then held my breath and yanked back the covers to reveal my younger daughter curled up, clutching her favorite stuffed animal, Big Dog.
Of course it was only Olivia. I exhaled in a rush.
She’d had Big Dog since she was a baby. He’d once been white, but was now a sickly gray, his fur matted, his big brown plastic eyes scratched and dull. Olivia looked pale and frightened there in her favorite pajamas with little ballerinas all over them.
I pushed aside some of the animals on the bed and perched next to her, put a hand on her forehead. “You feel okay?” Some of the kids at ballet had been out with the flu. Not what we needed right now. Thank goodness, her forehead was cool.
“I had a bad dream,” Olivia said. She pulled Big Dog tighter against her chest.
Me too, I nearly said.Me too.
But it was my job to chase away the nightmares. Not to tell her about my own.
I stroked her hair. “You want to tell me about it, little mouse?”
Her chin quivered a little. “I thought… I thought maybe it followed me. That he was here hiding under the bed or in the closet maybe, so I didn’t want to get out of bed. I thought if I stayed here and hid, he couldn’t get me.”
All the muscles in my body tightened.
I thought of my mother last night:I’m glad it’s you. Sometimes they’re not who they say they are. Sometimes they put on different faces.
My mother didn’t seem to remember any of it this morning. When I’d brought coffee in to her first thing, she’d smiled and greeted me and said she’d slept very well. I’d asked if she’d like a TV in her room so she wouldn’t have to go out to the living room, and she said she had no interest in watching television. “But you had the TV on last night,” I reminded her.
“I most certainly did not,” she said. “I was in here sleeping all night.”
“You were in the living room,” I said. “With the television on.”
She shook her head and looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “I don’t even like television, Alison. It’s for people with empty inner lives.”
Now, keeping my voice calm and level, I asked Olivia, “He who? What are you afraid of, Liv?”
