The taller of the women saw me and came over with a friendly but guarded smile.
“Can I help you?”
I started to answer and stopped, having spotted Christine on the far side of the room, in pigtails and an orange jumper. She and two other little girls were working on a block fortress with high walls and turrets. I plotted my course through the toys and crafting supplies to her play area and then over to the door at the back of the room, behind which I assumed I would find a second staircase. There was no time for explanations. I would grab her and run. The women would chase me, but I would be faster, and I doubted that they’d engage me physically. After all, Christine wasn’t their child. The men surveilling the church might present more of a challenge, but I’d elude them somehow, and when we finally reached a quiet spot, I’d sit Christine down and tell her what was happening. The ladies at the daycare weren’t bad people, I’d explain, but they didn’t know how protect her. Not like I could protect her. She might not realize it, but she was in terrible danger, and I was the only person in the whole world who could keep her safe. I pictured her serious little face taking this all in, then tilting up to ask an obvious question: Where’s Mommy?
The entire right side of my head was vibrating. I put my hand up to quiet it. I still hadn’t spoken to the tall woman, who was looking increasingly worried.
Across the room, Christine’s dark eyes locked onto my face. Having been separated for so long, I expected her to shout Daddy! then rush over and leap into my arms. But she stayed where she was, watching me, as one watches a line of thunder-heads on the horizon. The quietness of that transition, from innocent play to dread, brought with it a sudden and terrible revelation.
I was the threat. These women were here to protect Christine from me.
“Cathy,” the tall woman said sharply, not taking her eyes off me, and I wondered if she might not put up a fight after all. The other woman, who’d been crouched beside a little boy in a paint smock, got to her feet.
I raised my hands and backed towards the door.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
Neither of the women responded, an inaudible note of alarm passing from them to the children, who, along with Christine, had begun to watch me. The tall woman reached for a smartphone on a desk. I wanted to say something to Christine, to tell her that I loved her, that I was sorry, but she wouldn’t have heard. I was in another time, another place, the distance between us unbridgeable. The woman punched at her phone. I hurried out of the room, jogging down the hall, taking the stairs up to the foyer by twos. Out on the street, everything was moving too fast, sunlight crashing off every reflective surface. The tall woman appeared in the doorway behind me, the phone at her ear. I jammed on my sunglasses and ran for the bus stop. The panel van was gone, the sniper nowhere to be seen. A bus rumbled up and I jumped on, flinging a handful of change into the coin box. As the bus pulled into traffic, I stayed on my feet, averting my eyes from the other passengers, waiting for the wail of sirens to come. No squad car pulled us over. No SWAT team stormed the bus.
Eventually, I grabbed a schedule from a pouch on the wall and followed the route of whatever bus I was riding to its end point. The airport. I thought about the things I’d left behind at the hotel. Nothing essential. Nothing that couldn’t be replaced. A chime sounded and a young man climbed off, leaving an empty seat near the back of the bus. I steadied myself against the sway of the vehicle and made my way down to the spot he’d vacated, settling in for the ride.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The yard was thick with weeds. A realtor’s sign lay on its side in the grass, where a storm or vandals had knocked it. I climbed out of the taxi and stood on the sidewalk before a property that I now owned. Eileen had let me buy her out. We hadn’t had any interest since we’d listed it anyway, the market having cooled dramatically the moment we put it up for sale. “Whatever you can afford,” she’d said on the phone, and I could tell from the resignation in her voice that she just wanted to be rid of me. She was buying me off. The lawyers would work out the details. Once the transaction was complete, I wouldn’t hear from her again.
My legs felt weak as I fiddled with the front gate and approached the house. My old key (I’d been carrying it around for decades) still fit the lock. I remembered to give the door a little nudge at the same time as I twisted the key to unstick the deadbolt, then wiped my shoes on the doormat and stepped inside. The house smelled different, a mustiness having replaced the dense, bready aroma that used to greet me when I came home from school. Most of Dad’s things had been put into storage, but the rotary phone remained, wired directly into the house. I picked up the receiver and listened to the dead line, then hung up and went upstairs to inspect the bedrooms. The floorboards creaked under the dingy shag carpet. The doors to both my room and Eileen’s were ajar, but Dad’s was shut. I gripped the knob and eased it open. His room was just as empty as the rest of the house, the space smaller than I remembered it. I stepped across the threshold and felt strangely embarrassed, as if observing a loved one naked in sleep. I backed out of the room and shut the door.
The bathroom hadn’t changed: the pedestal sink, the blue tub. I made sure the water was working, then sat on the edge of the tub. I wouldn’t have any furniture for a couple of days. I’d arranged to have Dad’s old things delivered to the house later in the week. In the meantime, I would have to sleep on the floor. I took out my smartphone and checked my email. No one had written to me in months. I googled locksmiths and called the first one on the list.
“A1 Security and Locks,” a man answered.
“Yes, hello,” I said, using the same intonations Dad had always used when conducting business over the phone. “I’m just wondering how soon you can come out to change the locks on my house.”
Within days, I’d restored the house to its previous condition, the furniture back where I remembered it, the pictures remounted on the walls, the closets and dressers filled with Dad’s old clothes—slightly large, but wearable. When the security company came out, I had them install a state-of-the-art security system with a glowing panel by the front door and discreet video cameras around the perimeter of the house. The following week, I had a landscaping company tear up the front and back lawns, replacing them with no-maintenance rock. I determined exactly what groceries I was going to need and arranged for them to be delivered by the neighbourhood grocer on a weekly basis, the winter shovelling subcontracted out to the grocer’s son-in-law. By the time the snow hit the ground, I’d settled in. I paid my last smartphone bill and disconnected my account. All my transactions from that point forward would happen in writing, through the mail.
My plan was to write twelve hours a day. I had a computer, a printer, and a large store of ink and paper. When not at my computer, I read or paced through the house, making a circuit of every level—up and down the stairs, speaking the voices of my characters. The leaps in time stopped, but my sharpened senses gradually began to detect something new: echoes from the past, lingering in the house. The first time I caught a glimpse of Dad walking down the hall with wet hair and a towel around his waist, I’d been terrified, thinking his ghost had come back to haunt me, but when it happened again a few days later, I realized that his movements had been identical, that I was watching a specific moment in time replayed. The following week, I spotted a much younger version of my sister playing on the living room floor with a toddler that it took me a moment to recognize as myself. Before long I was seeing ghosts every day. Eileen and me wrestling on the couch. Dad writing angry letters to the government. Mathilda standing guard at the window. My mother—a shimmering suggestion of a woman—sweeping up and down the stairs. Once I’d grown used to them, these echoes were more consoling than frightening, as I knew that similar echoes must have resonated through Meredith’s house; that in spite of everything, I was and always would be back there, lying beside Christine’s crib, listening to her soft, regular breaths. But mainly, I tried not to think about the family I’d left behind, focused instead on a new project, a children’s book about an orphaned girl named Penelope, who lived under the protection of creatures from another dimension. By the spring, I’d completed the book and immediately began work on a second, with the same protagonist. After some searching, I found a publisher who agreed to print the series, while accepting my two main conditions: that I would write under a pseudonym, and that I would make no public appearances of any kind.