Courtney #2
slowly down the gravel drive, the crunch of it like walking on snow. I stand at the window, staring outside, searching for
Reese, thinking of her out there somewhere, alone in the darkness.
The police car comes to a stop just outside our cottage. I wait for the officer to get out, but he doesn’t. Instead, he lowers
the window, kills the engine and turns the headlights off. He rests his elbow in the open window and I realize that he’ll
be there all night, that he’s been sent to keep us safe, as Detective Evans said.
All of a sudden, the officer turns. He sees me staring and he stares back, his eyes beady black pools.
I wonder why I should feel any safer with a complete stranger just outside, watching over us.
The police continue their work at Emily and Nolan’s, even after dark.
They will be there most of the night, Detective Evans said, and I should feel safer knowing that too, but I don’t.
Elliott makes dinner, a box of macaroni and cheese that the five of us sit around the small table and share, still not finishing
it. I sit there watching Wyatt, across from me, line the tines of his fork with the elbow noodles, never eating them. “You
need to try to eat, Wyatt,” I say gently, watching as he gazes slowly up from his plate, his cold, hard stare holding mine
so long that eventually I look away and start gathering dirty dishes for the sink.
We get ready for bed early in the hopes of a break from reality and to surrender ourselves to sleep. Wyatt and Mae don’t have
any pajamas of their own and so they borrow from Elliott and Cass, but still they don’t fit. It seems strange seeing Wyatt
in Elliott’s shorts, which he has to tug on the elastic waistband of, tying it so they don’t slip off. I start to turn away
as he takes his own shirt off, until a big black bruise on his chest catches my eye and I look back.
“Do you mind?” he asks, glaring.
“Sorry,” I say, turning fully away, not asking where it came from because I’m embarrassed I got caught staring at his chest.
Cass and Mae ask to sleep in the bedroom with me, and I say yes, of course. Neither of them is doing well. Cass’s sadness
seems to come and go in waves—one minute, she’s seemingly fine as if she’s forgotten, and in the next, the memory of what
happened slams into her like a wall and she starts to cry—while Mae is lost in a mental fog, tired, barely speaking, her body
heavy as she shambles into bed.
Wyatt sleeps on the sofa bed, which Elliott pulls out as I search the cottage for extra sheets and a blanket, finding a threadbare set in a musty dresser drawer. Elliott takes the loft, which isn’t made for a man his size, but he manages to shinny himself up there and fit.
“I miss my mom,” Mae confesses, which are maybe the first words she’s spoken since Detective Evans left hours ago, so that
they take me by surprise. I can’t see her face in the darkness, but I imagine, from the quivering of her hushed voice, the
way her chin and lower lip tremble as she fights tears.
“I know, honey,” I say, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling her into me. “I miss your mom too.” My throat is tight.
I take a breath and ask, my voice lowered, “Do you girls understand what’s happening?”
I should have had this conversation before. I shouldn’t have let the whole day go by without speaking to them. Cass knows
a thing or two about death. She had a classmate die last year from acute myeloid leukemia, but this seems different—worse—because
Emily and Nolan didn’t die of a disease. They were murdered.
Mae’s voice breaks as she says, “Someone hurt them.”
“Yeah,” I say, struggling to keep my own voice under control, “someone did. Someone really bad. And Detective Evans is going
to find out who.” I hesitate, steeling myself before I ask, “You know that they’re not just hurt though, right, honey? You
know that they’re dead?” Mae lets out a soft moan. I feel her nod against my arm, Cass, on the other side, crying. “You understand
what that means? That they’re not coming back?”
Mae’s tears, when they come, are overflowing, choking her. “I want my mom,” she sobs again, coughing, gasping for breath this
time, her body convulsing.
“I know, honey. I know you do.”
She cries herself to sleep, keening and then whimpering for hours for Emily, until her body succumbs to exhaustion. Even when she sleeps, she moves restlessly in bed and I wonder what her dreams are about.
All night, I lie awake. I don’t sleep. I don’t dream. I stare at the dark, cavernous opening that is the bedroom doorway,
waiting for someone to come through it and kill the girls and me.
It’s not unsubstantiated. It’s justified. It could happen.
If it happened to Emily and Nolan, then why not us?
Every time I close my eyes and try to sleep, I see it happen. I watch it play out. I see someone in the woods just outside
our cottage, standing tall, thin, featureless like Slenderman, unnoticeable in the darkness and in the trees. I watch him
advance slowly, slipping unseen past the police officer. In my musings, he walks with confidence and poise. He steps out of
the trees, quietly climbing the deck steps, picking the lock to the front door. Coming in. Killing every single one of us,
one at a time, while the rest of us watch, paralyzed, helpless.
Time moves by in slow motion. I check the time on my phone. Midnight. One o’clock. Sometime just after two, I hear a faint
sound coming from somewhere in the house. I slip out from under Cass’s leaden arm, which is flung across my chest. I sit up
in bed, holding my breath, listening while my mind goes to the worst things it can think of: to someone circling the house,
creeping around the periphery of the cottage to find a way in, and I wonder if Elliott remembered to close all the windows
like he said he was going to do. I wonder if he remembered to lock them. The windows have sash locks. I know because our first
night here, I went around the cottage unlocking and throwing them all open for fresh air.
But what if Elliott missed a window or if he didn’t slide the lever all the way into the catch?
I lift the covers. I rise from bed, moving across the wood floors in my bare feet, scared and wishing that Elliott wasn’t all the way upstairs. It seems like whenever I need him, he’s not here.
I stop before the bedroom door. I set my hand on the doorframe, summoning the courage to step out and see what the noise is.
It’s Wyatt. When I come out of the bedroom, I find him sitting up on the sofa bed, the soft glow of his phone lighting up
his face, making it ghostly.
“Can’t you sleep?” I ask, whispering, relief brimming over as I step out into the room with him.
“Nope.”
“Do you need anything?” I stand there, waiting for a reply that doesn’t come. “Wyatt,” I ask again.
He looks up, his face inscrutable in the dark, and I’m not sure if he’s going to tell me to fuck off, to break down and cry,
to ask me to stay and keep him company, or something else.
His eyes drop again to his phone.
“What is it, Wyatt?” I ask. “What are you looking at on your phone?”
They rise back up.
He says, “I know where Reese is.”