This is Thomas coming into the room while you are sleeping, your eyes probably moving back and forth in a dream. He thinks he should wake you. The dream seems disturbing. It’s no wonder, of course, that you’re in turmoil. When he picked you up from the hospital a few nights ago you were almost catatonic, only telling him in a monotone voice how you fell in the woods on a stick after you and Chris stopped at a rest stop, and you ended up with a hole in your leg that required ten stitches. You probably passed out for a minute, you said, and that’s when Chris’s car was stolen. The doctors wanted you to stay in the hospital longer, but you refused. You said you wanted to get home and be with your children. This is you turning your head left and right on the pillow, and it sounds as though you’re trying to talk in your sleep but can’t make the words come out. Thomas lies down next to you and puts his hand on your shoulder. “Annie?” he says, and you wake up so suddenly he thinks it’s impossible that you were just sound asleep. You turn to him and hold on to him and he holds you back. It’s been a long time since you’ve turned to him and wanted to be in his arms. He kisses you on the top of your head and smoothes your hair away from your face. “Bad dream?” he asks. “I didn’t talk in my sleep, did I?” you ask. “You tried to, but nothing came out. What are you afraid of saying?” Thomas asks, and you notice how he’s been looking at you the whole time, not turning away as he usually does or picking up a magazine to read at the same time you talk to him. “Keep waking me up if you think I’m about to talk in my sleep, okay?” you ask. “Sure,” Thomas says. He begins to rub your back, and it feels good, a little of the tension you’ve been feeling is worked out with his hands. You’ve always liked Thomas’s hands. They’re strong and big and when he holds your hand, his hand nearly covers all of yours. Maybe this is all you have wanted for so long now, just to have Thomas hold you and run his hands on your back and look at you. You think of Paul, and how you have not thought of him for a few days, ever since the killer. You do not feel yourself wanting to be with Paul or have him kiss you. You want to be as far away from Paul now as you can be.
In the periods during which you half-slept and dozed and dreamed fitfully, you considered moving from your home. You and your family would move to another state, another country. The killer would not travel to find your daughter thousands of miles away, would he? You picture living down by the equator. Your children could go to the local school. They would become fluent in Spanish. They would become dark from the daily sun. They would become unrecognizable to people they once knew. They could surf in the waves every day. They could eat fresh fruit and fish. What was the point, really, of living here? Things were hard here. The summers were bug-ridden. If you spent any time outdoors, your skin would raise in welts from deerflies. From time to time you would find your fingers at your scalp, feeling crusted blood from insect bites. In winter the roads, muddy from fall rains, dried in rigid ruts that grabbed your tires and made your car drive in hard frozen tracks other vehicles had left, and you had no choice but to follow them. You could see your children living down there by the ocean. Everyone so heavy on land, taking to the water and racing down the clear faces of waves. Your daughters learning to be ocean-brave, paddling far out, ignoring days of jellyfish tides, and jumping from cliffs to the blue depths far down below. Thomas and you sleeping with the French doors open and a breeze skimming over you both as you slept naked and still in a white-sheeted bed.
Your leg is still sore, but you can walk on it now, almost run. There was a point, after the killer left you and after you walked on it for what must have been a mile, that you could not even feel your leg. The man who stopped for you looked more like a killer than the killer. He wore dirty striped overalls and no socks. You could see the hairs at his sharply boned ankles. He asked what in the world you were doing walking so far off the main road at night. You just asked him to take you to the hospital, and he nodded and drove. The glove box slammed open every time the tires hit a bump, and he repeatedly reached his arm over your wounded leg to close the compartment.
After Thomas leaves the room to go start some dinner, you wish you had gone with the girls to practice, to experience the nothingness of the swim team again. What would be better right now than entering the facility and sitting with the other parents in the bleachers and watching your daughters swim and talking to the other parents about swimming, schooling, and food? You would even be glad to see the dancing hippos. You would wave to them as they jogged in the lane with their foam belts attached to their huge waists. You get up to help Thomas. At first you are light-headed and afraid of blacking out and seeing the killer’s face when you do, but when you regain your balance you go downstairs and help cook the dinner. The girls are at the table doing homework, and you would like to turn off the lights, because anyone from the outside standing by your house in the night could see your girls plain as day, considering you don’t have curtains in the windows to obstruct the view. You shepherd them away from the table. You send them to study in the back of the house, where they cannot be seen from the road. They object. They want to know why. You tell them you need the table to set out plates and forks and knives. “Take these books, take your calculators, and go,” you say. They complain about your orders, they make nasty faces, they imitate the words you used in a singsong disrespectful tone, not caring about your leg. That night, when it’s time for bed, Thomas turns to you and hugs you again, holding you the way he did earlier in the day. You hug and hold him back. If it were only this, you think. How easy it is just to hold him. If this were all you had to do and nothing else, not worry about the killer, not worry about the throat of your daughter meeting the blade of that same knife that was thrust into your leg. Why was it so hard just to make the effort to turn and hold Thomas before? You feel as if you could hold him forever now. You do not want to turn your head away from his chest.