Lena
TWENTY-THREE
A shriek wakes me from a dead sleep, and I’m on my feet and out the door before I can think.
When I fling open her door, Opal’s already sitting up, arms out, illuminated by her nightlight. “Mama!”
I race to her and pull her into my arms. Dario’s footsteps follow down the hall, and when he gets to the door, I wave him off. No sense in both of us not sleeping.
He lingers for a moment, then goes back to bed.
I smooth her hair and ask, “What’s wrong, baby?”
But she just sniffles and cries a little. Finally, she says, “There was a ghost.”
I knew we shouldn’t have watched that Scooby-Doo. She loves that dog, though, so I didn’t have the heart to turn it off. But my baby doesn’t like supernatural things, and I did worry it would be too much for her.
Should have listened to my instinct.
“Remember how the ghost turned out to be a man in a costume?”
She nods, still sniffling.
“That’s all it ever is. People think it’s fun or useful to scare other people, but it’s always only a man in a costume. Ghosts aren’t real.”
“But… are you sure?”
I smile and nod and kiss the top of her head.
“It’s always just a man. All the problems in the world are always because of some man pretending to be something he’s not.
Pretending to be scary, pretending to be strong, they all play games, and that’s all it ever is.
That’s why the police took him away in the end, remember? ”
“Yeah.” She yawns.
“How about I stay in here for the night? I’ll keep watch.”
“Okay.” She scoots into the sheets, and I lie down in the narrow bed beside her and take her hand, and she falls back asleep in minutes. Her breathing evens out. Her grip loosens.
I don’t go back to sleep myself. All that adrenaline doesn’t let me. I’m still awake at three forty-seven when the power cuts.
It simply stops, and the apartment goes black in the way real darkness is. I’m glad Opal’s room has the good light—her window faces the city, so at least the city lights give me enough to see where I’m going when I get up to check the breakers.
Somewhere in the apartment, there’s a sound that is not the building settling. Probably another resident getting up to check their breakers too. Without the power on, I’m sure I’ll hear all kinds of things. Amazing how climate control softens the sounds of the outside world.
The floor is cold under my bare feet. I find the wall with my hand and move toward the doorway. The hallway is absolute dark. No windows there, so no city light. I had run to Opal’s room, so I didn’t think to grab my phone, and now, I have no flashlight. Lucky me.
But even in the dark, I see movement. I whisper, “Dario?”
Someone slams into me from the left, and then I’m fighting to reach for the wall, but a hand grabs for my arm and yanks me off-kilter. I tumble to the floor, with him on top of me.
We grapple in the pitch black. I try to roll him off of me, but he pushes me back down, and a fist knocks into my jaw. For a second, I can’t think. But my body reacts, kicking, hands grabbing for anything soft.
Nothing soft to grab. The man is lean and muscular beneath his thick sweater.
I grab for his throat, his eyes. But he grabs both of my hands in one of his, pinning them overhead. And then his free hand clasps around my throat.
“Mama!” Opal’s voice from her doorway.
Something surges in me, and I kick again and again, and I don’t stop. I’ll never stop.
“Fucks’ sake,” he grunts.
“Get off my mama!” A beam of Opal’s little flashlight cuts through the dark, frantic and swinging, and I hear things hitting the wall, and one of them bounces off the man on top of me.
“Goddamnit, kid!”
She screams at full volume, “Dario! Dario!” and another book knocks into the intruder’s head, distracting him.
I can see just enough of his face to know where his eyes are, and I jerk an arm free to scratch him there.
“Fuck!” He grabs at his face.
I suck a breath in and shout, “Get back in your room!”
But another book comes flying at him anyway. He snarls at the pain, and I claw at his face. He snaps, “I’ve got a gun! Stop fighting me!”
“The fuck I will!”
He reaches down, but I grab that arm. It takes two tries—the flashlight is swinging everywhere and, God love Opal, she’s still throwing things and screaming at him to leave me alone, adding, “You’re just a man! You’re not a ghost!”
I get his arm, but he’s got the gun—I see the shape of the barrel in the flashing light.
I go for it with both hands, fingers locking around his wrist, using my full body weight to twist and drive. I have to get the gun.
He’s bigger and stronger. I’m angrier.
I pull his arm up as best I can and find his arm as I twist into him, and bite down.
The gun fires.
I can’t hear a thing. Not the man, not Opal. There’s weight on me. Too much. Can’t breathe. I go still for half a second—I’m not shot, I’m not shot, I’m not shot, am I shot?
No. The first sound I hear is a miserable manly groan.
And Opal’s shriek.
I get out from under him and run to her. My hands are shaking. My ears are still ringing. “Baby, are you okay?” I use her flashlight to check her.
No wounds. Just terror.
Another flashlight beams at us. I move to get the gun from the man—
“It’s me,” Dario says as he runs to us.
I flash the light up at him, and he grimaces from the brightness, but he keeps coming. Moving fast, very fast, and he’s bleeding from somewhere above his eye, and his shirt is torn at the shoulder. More blood on the lower half of his shirt.
A lot of it.
He sweeps the light over me. Over Opal in the doorway.
“Are you hurt?” He says it to me. His voice is controlled, but his eyes are wild.
“No.” My voice comes out rough.
He goes to Opal. He crouches to her level, the way he always does, and says something I can’t hear over the ringing in my ears, and she launches herself at him, and he catches her and holds her against his chest with both arms. I watch his face over her shoulder in the beam of the flashlight.
What’s in his face, I have never seen there before. Something broken open.
I look down at the man on the floor in the flashlight beam. The gun is two feet away from his hand. Still too close for my comfort.
I walk steadily toward him, waiting for him to lunge for the gun. But a pool of blood spreads near him, and he only makes an occasional groaning sound.
Too alive for my comfort.
I make it to the gun and pick it up, and he still doesn’t budge. I pocket the gun and roll him onto his back.
Ed Esposito.
I stare at him for a moment, then I look at Dario, and what passes between us in the flashlight beam in the hallway doesn’t require any words.
My hands are shaking. I don’t feel it. I only know because the light trembles. There’s something warm and sticky on my forearm that I’m not going to look at right now.
Dario crouches with Opal for a moment longer—says something to her too low for me to hear, and she nods, and he smooths her hair back from her face the way I do when she’s scared, and she lets him—and then he stands and comes to me.
“The arm,” he says, meaning the warmth I didn’t look at.
“It’s fine.”
He quietly says, “You’re okay.”
I nod. But I can’t stop staring at Ed.
I kick him in the ribs.
He groans again. Too alive.
I kick again, and I keep kicking. I drop my heel on his chest, then go back to more kicking. Words come out of me. Words I don’t ever want to hear out of Opal, so I never say them around her.
Tonight, I make an exception.
Dario doesn’t stop me for a while, but then his hand is on my arm. He motions toward Opal, who has watched it all. “Go sit with her. I’ll handle this.”
I’m panting. All at once, pain comes in. My body aches. My head… throb does not begin to describe it. My hand hurts like when I fell off a pool ladder and broke it as a kid. And my toes tell me I might have broken them on Ed’s bony fucking ribs.
“Yeah. Okay.” I hobble to my daughter, take her in my arms, and we go to the couch. We don’t say much.
What is there to say?
Dario drags Ed to his office. A few minutes later, he has the power back on. Then he brings Opal her stuffed bunny before vanishing into his office again.
She clutches the animal tightly, and after a few minutes, she asks, “Did I help?”
I choke back a sob. Can’t let her see me lose it. “Yes, baby. You helped a lot.”
“He wasn’t a ghost. He was a man, playing a game, right?”
“That’s right. And we won.” I hope that’s not a lie.