I was in the entryway now. M? I said. M? Is that you? The doorknob rattled and I felt how cold it was suddenly in the apartment, too cold for the summer when the nights should have been long and cheerful and we should never be alone. The whispering started now from the other side of the door and I thought, Yes, now, I should open it. M? I said, but I couldn’t reach out, couldn’t lift my fingers to the lock. The light switched off in E’s room. Click. I heard it and now the dark itself was cold and I ran back down the hall to E’s room and I felt the thing skipping behind me. I felt the lightness of it, how quickly it could move. I threw open the door and threw myself onto her little bed and under the covers and found her there, warm and fast asleep. B was all alone out there, the beds were lifeboats maybe, in a cold ocean, and I couldn’t be in two places at once. I shook her a little, but she was asleep and kept sleeping, asleep in a way that made her gone, that had taken her somewhere else. E, I whispered, but she wouldn’t wake.

There was a soft clicking in the apartment, like the light in the kitchen being flicked on and off and on again. I had my head under the blanket and couldn’t see. Perhaps it was playing with me. Perhaps this was all a sort of game. Click. Click. The light in the hall flicked on, flicked off. I wasn’t cold anymore but sweating under the blanket. I couldn’t drop my hands down from my eyes. The light in the bedroom flicked on. Click. I found I couldn’t scream, could only open my mouth with the scream stuck inside it. Bang. Something hit the shutters on the little window in E’s room. Bang bang bang. The light clicked off.

I threw off the blanket and started banging on the window myself, from the inside. E’s body bounced lightly on the mattress but she didn’t wake. Still, she was elsewhere. Then the thing was behind me in the room, bang bang bang, I shoved my fingers into the metal slats and tried to lift them up but the window was shut tight. We were stuck. Help, I screamed, Help help help, but no one could hear my voice, the apartment rushed in to eat it up and I could hear how quiet we were despite my desperate noise.

Soft behind me, like a dancing partner, something came and slid a cold hand up my arm and touched my bruises, and another hand went gently like a couple dancing slowly in the moonlight and like hush-now-it’s-all-fine around my neck.

B screamed, loud and wailing, in his normal hungry-baby voice and I was alone again in the apartment with nothing there.

I ran fast to him like any good mother in the middle of the night and picked him up and cuddled him and lifted up my shirt and slipped my nipple into his mouth and he sucked a little and fell back asleep and didn’t seem bothered that I was shaking and soaked in sweat. He had more red marks on his cheeks, a rash of little kisses. I set him down in his crib and whispered I love you and sweet dreams and all the things that good mothers say over the soft heads of their sleeping children. Then I crawled into the guest room and over to the garbage side of the floor. I didn’t want to stain the beautiful white sheets, the eiderdown, all still in their bags and waiting for a bed. The bed that would make the whole room fantastic. Beautiful and perfect, whites and blues, a whole island stocked with little jewelled soaps and smelling of sea salt and cotton.