The Girl Who Sleeps in Her Shoes

Five years later

My name, on the lease, is Joy Hart.

It's a good name. My mother chose it, in a bus station in Albuquerque, from a list in her head, and she said it was the name of a girl who would have a lucky life. She is Ellen Hart. We are mother and daughter, from Kansas originally, formerly of Tulsa, Spokane, Duluth, Rapid City, and a town in Nebraska whose name I have trained myself to forget. We are, according to the paperwork, a widow and a minor, with a small pension from a late husband and an aunt we call every Christmas. The paperwork is good. A man in Albuquerque made it, in the back room of a tire shop, for eleven hundred dollars, and my mother, who had never in her life told a lie bigger than I'm fine, handed over the money without a flicker.

We have moved six times in five years.

I count them the way other people count birthdays. The motel in Tucson. The trailer outside Tulsa, which lasted four months, until a man in a blue pickup parked across the road for two nights in a row. The second-floor walk-up in Spokane, the one with the radiator that clanked like a drowning man. The farmhouse in Duluth where it snowed in October. The apartment over the hardware store in Rapid City. And this one, in a river town in Nebraska that is mostly a grain elevator, a Casey's, and a Lutheran church, where nothing has happened since 1953, which is why we chose it.

I am eighteen years old.

…

I should tell you what it is like, because people always imagine.

They imagine a chase. They imagine headlights in a rearview mirror and a briefcase of cash and a revolver in a glove compartment, a long straight road shimmering with menace. It's not like that. It's like living in a house where the roof is a quarter-inch too low. You don't hit your head. You just never stand all the way up.

I wake at 3:07 every night.

The alarm is on a cheap drugstore phone, with a speaker the size of a dime, and the label on it hasn't changed in five years: Word of the night. I set it, the first week in the first motel, with a hand that shook so hard I had to hold my wrist, and I have not once turned it off. I have woken to it in six states. I have woken to it with a fever, with the flu, and once, in Duluth, after a car accident, in a hospital bed with a cast on my arm. I wake without opening my eyes. I lie for exactly seven minutes in the dark with my heart pounding. I listen. And at 3:14, when nothing has happened, I let my breath out, and I turn on my side and try to sleep.

Nothing has happened. Not once. Not in five years.

I sleep in my shoes.

I put them on at night, in the bed, under the covers, laced and double-knotted, the way another girl might wear socks. I have gone through eleven pairs. The current ones are black, cheap, with a rubber sole that squeaks, and the cat sticker long since peeled away. I keep a bag beside the bed with a change of clothes, a bottle of water, a flashlight, a hundred and forty dollars in small bills, and a scrap of paper with an area code and four digits of a number I can never finish. I put a chair under the knob. It is a wooden chair, because the metal ones slide. I have left a hundred chairs in a hundred rooms, and my mother has bought me another.

I have not been to a movie since I was thirteen. I don't go to parties. I do not, if I can help it, stand with my back to a door.

I got my GED at sixteen, by mail, from a school that did not require me to be anywhere. I work three nights a week at the front desk of a nursing home, where it is very quiet and nobody asks who I am, and where, between midnight and four, I sit in a pool of yellow light with a paperback and listen to the old people breathe. They like me. They say I'm a calm girl. I think it is the one place in the world where my kind of watchfulness is called by a kinder name.

My mother's hair went white in the second year.

It happened in a single winter. She was thirty-nine; she is forty-three. It went gray first at the temples, then silver, then in a wide pale streak from the forehead back, like a badger's, and then there was no color left in it at all. She does not dye it. She says it would feel like lying. She has the narrow, careful face of a woman who counts her steps, and she has stopped editing books, because she cannot bear to be in one place long enough to be found, and now she does bookkeeping for the church, and washes dishes at the Legion on Fridays, and takes in sewing. She hums while she works. She hums, all day, a flat, wandering, tuneless song, as though it were a way of keeping something outside.

On the kitchen wall, over the table, where another family would have a clock, we have a calendar.

It is blank.

I stopped marking it the second year. My mother noticed, and said nothing, and the next day hung it up again.

…

I read the newspapers in the library.

It is the thing I do instead of living. I go on Saturdays, to the little brick Carnegie building two blocks from the river, and I sit at the microfilm reader in the back where the light is bad. I do not read about us. There is nothing about us. The fire at Cedar Terrace was a one-day story, and the fire in Tucson was a smaller one, a gas leak in a rented house, a family of three miraculously saved by a dog, which, to be fair, was a pretty good story. I read it once. I do not read it again.

I read about the others.

It took me two years to see the pattern. I was looking for something else. I was looking for a name. I was going through the Cleveland papers, the old ones, the regional dailies, and I kept running into a word in the small type at the back, in the columns of local news that nobody reads. Missing. A fourteen-year-old girl from the Fairhill neighborhood, last seen walking to a bus stop. A boy of eleven from Lorain Avenue. Two siblings from a rooming house on East 55th. Another. Another. A tiny blue number in a tiny box, in the corner of the metro page, every fall: Juveniles Reported Missing in Cuyahoga County.

It's going up.

Every year, a little. Not a flood. Nothing a person would see on a chart, unless the person was looking. But I am always looking, and I made the chart, on graph paper, and drew the line, and it climbs from left to right like the tail of a kite. It climbs fastest in a ring of streets around a single neighborhood on the East Side. The streets run down the hill from a place I know. The streets all run down from Cedar Drive.

I know what it means. I think I do. I think there are children being moved through that building like water through a pipe, and I think someone has been paid, and paid again, to stop the pipe from being seen. I think that when we ran, the pipe kept running. Two hundred and sixty-one children in five years.

And I sat in a brown library in Nebraska in a gray cardigan, eighteen years old, with a ballpoint pen, and did nothing.

That is what I cannot forgive.

I could say, what could I have done. I could say, I was thirteen, I was a child. I have said it. I say it every night at 3:09 in the dark. It does not help. Because I did know something. I knew something nobody else in the world knew. I knew that a man named Desmond Voss was a fact. I knew that a hat has a stain and a cough has a name. I knew there was a box. I knew it was not in the closet; I knew it had never been in the closet, not really, that the shape in the dust was a shape left deliberately, a note. And I got on a bus.

We got away, said my mother, on that bus.

She has said it ever since. It is the last thing she says before she turns off the lamp. We got away, June. We got away. And I lie in the dark in my shoes and think: No. We got out of the way. It's not the same.

…

It rained the night it happened. That's all I'll say about the weather.

It was a Tuesday, late in October. The river was up. The rain had begun at dusk and settled in by nine to a steady roaring downpour that drummed on the tin awning over the back stairs and ran in sheets down the windows of the apartment. The streetlights had a halo. The gutters sang. It was the loudest rain I had ever heard, a noise like gravel poured over a drum, and the whole upstairs flat vibrated with it.

I was in the kitchen, at the table. I had a paperback open that I wasn't reading. My mother had gone to bed an hour earlier, and the bedroom door was open a crack, and I could hear her breathing, slow and deep, in the quiet between gusts.

I had my shoes on. I always do.

I was looking at the clock. It was 11:52. I was thinking, as I think every night, that in three hours and fifteen minutes it would be the time, and that I would be awake for it, and that I would sit up and listen and hear nothing, and that it would be fine.

Then I heard it.

I thought it was the rain. That was the first thought. A loose gutter, a branch, some trick of the water on the awning. A soft dull knock, three times, quick, one-two-three, from somewhere below me. Like a knuckle on wood. And then a pause. And a fourth, longer, slower, drawn out and deliberate, a single heavy sound with a hollow bottom, like a fist laid on a door and held there.

Knock-knock-knock. Knock.

I did not move.

I sat with my hand on the page. Rain hammered on the roof. The faucet dripped. I heard my own blood in my ears, a roaring tide, and I thought, three short and one long, and something old and cold and enormous turned over in my memory, like a fish in deep water. I knew it. I knew that knock. I had heard it somewhere, in some other life, in the dark, with the smell of lavender and flour. A game. A game somebody played with me when I was small.

Knock-knock-knock. Knock.

It came again.

It was on the back stairs. On the door at the bottom of the stairs, the one that led to the alley. Not loud. Not urgent. Just patient. Whoever it was, was in no hurry at all.

I stood up. The chair legs scraped. I crossed the kitchen on the balls of my feet, in my squeaking shoes, and went to the window above the sink and parted the curtain with one finger.

The alley was black. The light over the stair had burned out in September and the landlord had not fixed it. I saw the rain, falling in slanting silver wires through the beam of the streetlamp at the end. I saw the dumpster, the railing, the pale blur of the door at the bottom of the stair. I saw no one. There was no one on the step. There was no one in the alley. There was only the rain, and a little pool of dark water collecting in the corner of the landing.

And a smell, if I imagined it, thin and sweet and rotten, like the rind of an orange.

I went back into the bedroom.

My mother lay on her side with her face to the wall and her white hair spread across the pillow, and her breathing had changed. I knew without being told that she was awake. She had been awake for a while. I sat on the edge of the bed. She turned to look at me, in the dark, with her enormous eyes, and her hand came out from under the quilt and found my wrist.

She closed her fingers around it, hard. She held on, exactly as she had held it in the dark on the seventeenth floor, five years and six states ago, with the same grip and the same trembling, as if I were the last firm thing on a sliding floor.

Neither of us spoke.

Outside, the rain came down. The knock did not come again. We sat there together in the black, mother and daughter, with the clock ticking over toward three, and I knew that I could not tell if it had been a man or the weather, a friend or an enemy, a ghost or a warning, and that I would never know, and that the not knowing was the whole of our lives now.

I held her wrist.

I listened.

At 3:07, the phone began to buzz.

…

THE END — Ending 2 of 5: Wrong Direction.

You ran, and you were right to want to. Distance feels like an answer. But the man who wanted what Ida hid never needed to chase you; he only needed to wait, and to let you build a life on the idea that the dark was behind you. You are alive. So is she. And every night, at 3:07, you both wake to find that you never left.

Go back to Chapter 22 to choose differently.