Nightwatching

In a flashback, the mother remembers attending the trial of the drunk driver who killed her mother. Though she was only nine, specific trial details remain fixed in her memory. She remembers that her grandmother came with her and that the man was balding and had a large stomach. The proceedings felt clinical and unemotional, considering they were trying the driver for manslaughter, which erased her mother from her life. She also remembers that the defense tried to imply that her mother was somehow at fault because she was driving a rental car out of state. During the three-day trial, the mother’s grandmother frequently expressed her displeasure with the proceedings. However, it became clear that the man on trial held status and influence in the town, and in the end, he only served a nine-month sentence. Just one month after he was released, he caused his own death and that of his wife in another drunk driving accident. Though her grandmother saw it as justice, the mother disagreed, because it didn’t bring her mother back. Her mother’s death and the trial’s outcome left a mark on the mother as she learned that “[s]ome things are unfixable. The world can snap in half” (153). She discovered that evil doesn’t always look like a devil; sometimes it can look like an innocuous, balding man.

In the narrative present, a man answers the door and is immediately shocked to see the mother collapsing on the floor, covered in blood. The man tells his wife to call 911 while the mother explains her situation. The mother claims that the intruder followed her, but the man and woman don’t see anything outside. They struggle to understand her story because she is shivering and drowsy with hypothermia. They wrap her bloody hand in a towel and try to explain the situation to emergency services over the phone. Not fully understanding what the mother is saying, the woman lays the phone on the floor so that the mother can speak to the 911 operator directly. The mother explains that they need to go to her house, but the operator struggles to understand her. Meanwhile, the man and woman comment on the mother’s blotchy skin, and the woman even asks if she is “contagious.” The woman brings her a hot drink and tries to remove her wet clothes to prevent further hypothermia, but the mother withdraws like a wounded animal. The mother still wants the police to go to her home first, and when she asks if the woman gave them the address, the woman states, “They say they’ve been there before” (163). The mother becomes increasingly incoherent and thinks she is in the hospital.

The sergeant and a boyish officer arrive at the neighbor’s house but have trouble understanding the mother’s story. Her badly injured face and her hypothermia make it difficult for her to speak clearly. The officer explains that he sent a car to her home, but they can find no evidence of a forced entry. The neighbor worries that the mother’s husband has injured her, but the police officer says, “It wasn’t her husband” (167). The mother tells the sergeant about the intruder and states that he is carrying a weapon, but he struggles to make sense of her story. Concerned about hypothermia, the sergeant tries to remove her wet coat, but the mother fights him, fearful of them seeing her naked body. When he opens the coat, the sight of her thin, marked body shocks the neighbor. The neighbor understands the need for privacy and takes her to a room where she can change into borrowed clothes.

The mother explains to the sergeant that she hid her children behind the wall and tells them where to find the hidden key to access the space. When their demeanor changes, she realizes that they suspect her of hurting the children. The mother replays in her mind all the times she accidentally hurt her children, like stepping on their toe or their hair getting caught in her clothing. However, she also laments that her children have hurt her too, especially when the experience of childbirth ripped her body apart. The sergeant suggests that they take her to the house so that she can show them where to find the children. The mother is relieved but is too weak to walk, so the sergeant must carry her.

The sergeant carries the mother inside the house, and the other officers follow them to the office and open the panel to access the secret place. She calls to the children in her weakened voice and briefly considers the horrifying possibility that the Corner has taken them. The sergeant enters the space with a flashlight and beckons the children to emerge. The children call out to their mother, and the police rush into the space. She realizes that they still suspect her of harming them. Her mangled face frightens the children, but she assures them that everything is well, then vomits on the carpet.

The mother has always been shy, but when she met her husband in an art class in college, he didn’t mind her quiet nature. They quickly fell in love, and it wasn’t until after they married that he began to comment on her social awkwardness. Halloween arrived seven months into the pandemic lockdown, and the children were disappointed that they couldn’t go trick-or-treating. The mother had the idea to let them wear their costumes and drive around the neighborhood to look at decorations. Her husband praised her for the clever idea, and she felt that the moment healed something in them after the brokenness she had felt since her father-in-law hit her. On the way home, her husband noticed the beauty of the fall foliage and told her that he would be up early the next day to fly and photograph it before it was gone.

The following day, she heard him leave the bed and listened to a sound downstairs that she assumed was him closing the door. She slept in and looked forward to a day at home alone to complete her tasks without her husband needing her help with his to-do list. When she descended the stairs, her husband was on the floor in a puddle of blood. After she called 911, the ambulance arrived, but due to pandemic protocols, she wasn’t allowed to ride with him to the hospital. She watched as they loaded him onto the gurney, blood coming out of his mouth. She told him goodbye and said that she loved him.

In the present, the mother awakens in a hospital room. The doctor tells her that she has a head injury, hypothermia, and frostbite, and her feet are bandaged from surgery. Everyone is masked, and she is disoriented. When she tries to rip out her IV and falls out of the bed, the nurses sedate and restrain her. She awakens at intervals, but the pain meds make her feel woozy, and she struggles to stay lucid. The sergeant is there when she wakes up. He tells her that the children are with her father-in-law. She immediately tries to remove her restraints and begs him to send them elsewhere. He assures her that her father-in-law cares for the children and attends to their online schoolwork, but she worries that he will try to take them from her. The mother reminds him that her father-in-law hit her, but he states that she never filed charges and that his behavior was consistent with someone whose wife had just died.

He shifts to asking her about the break-in. Her face is swollen and painful, which makes it difficult to speak clearly, but she explains that the intruder is the manager of the café nearby and that he was after her daughter. She does her best to describe the man physically, but she begins to fall asleep. When she wakes up, the sergeant is gone, and the nurse is there to take her blood. The mother asks to be untied and requests more pain meds, but the nurse refuses to accommodate either request. The mother asks to call her children, but the nurse says that the father-in-law won’t speak to them. The nurse removes the bandages from the mother’s feet, and the mother reacts violently at the sight of her mangled toes. The nurse calms her and explains that the doctors debrided the dead tissue and removed her toenails, but her feet should recover eventually. The nurse empathetically listens to the mother describe the home invasion and tells her that she is brave for risking her life to save her children.

Returning to the flashback of her husband’s death, the mother remembers being covered in her husband’s blood; she had to shower and change clothes before going to the hospital. By the time she arrived at the hospital, the doctor told her that her husband was brain dead. Due to a COVID-19 surge, she and the children were not even allowed into his room to say goodbye; the staff let them see him on a video call. When the mother told the children that their daddy had to leave them, they didn’t understand because they could still see his body. She signed the papers for his organs to be donated, and they returned home, where the police were still investigating the scene. She gave them all the details about his plan to leave early for a flight. The investigator left her a number for a forensics cleaning service, but they weren’t accepting clients due to the pandemic.

Because she and her father-in-law were not on good terms, she asked the investigator to notify him about the accident. It took several days to remove the blood stains from the wood floor and the wooden table. The children returned to their hybrid school schedule, and she fell into a torpor of just getting through each day. When she called her father to tell him, he offered to visit but quickly rescinded when he remembered the pandemic. She cried and said she wished her grandmother was still alive.

In the present, a psychiatrist meets with the mother in the hospital and speaks bluntly with her about her depression and grief. Instead of grilling her about the break-in, he confirms that the mother has experienced significant trauma and posits that this is affecting her mental and physical health. He encourages her to cooperate with the police so that they can catch the intruder and she can reunite with her children. The psychiatrist makes the mother feel calm and seen, and they agree to continue meeting after the hospital discharges her.

The sergeant returns and reports that they haven’t caught the intruder, and he doesn’t work at the café. She anxiously asks him to video-call her children since her father-in-law won’t answer her. The children are happy to see their mother but are frightened by her battered face. Her son says, “Grampy says the monster’s a pigment” (218), and she reminds them that the intruder is not a monster or a ghost—just a man. Her son adds that the police claim that the man doesn’t have feet, which confuses the mother. She promises them that they will have a special Christmas together once she leaves the hospital. Her father-in-law abruptly ends the call, and she cries.

The sergeant returns to ask for more details about the break-in, and he records the interview. Absent the fog of the pain meds, she feels more lucid and calmly recounts that the man broke into the house to get to her daughter. She explains the sing-song tone he used and describes how he called himself a wolf and her a little pig. She describes their strange interaction with the man at the sandwich shop. The sergeant is curious about her husband’s perception of the interactions, and she explains that he thought the man was creepy but didn’t witness the man touch her daughter’s clothing. The sergeant points out that she said the man went to her room, not her daughter’s. He says, “It’s a pretty extreme thing to assume he was after a little girl” (225), suggesting that she overreacted to the man’s actions at the café. He also suggests that because the man was wearing a mask in the café, she may have misidentified him. His questions make her doubt herself and her memory, though she remains confident in her answers to him.

The mother wants assurance that her children are safe, and the sergeant, who appears annoyed, confirms that they are. She recounts every detail of the home invasion, and whenever the sergeant questions her decisions, she feels guilty for her perceived failures and doubts herself even more. The sergeant doesn’t understand why the man would be speaking aloud to them, and he questions how she injured herself so severely if the intruder wasn’t chasing her. He asks if she uses prescription drugs or if she had been drinking that night. She stopped drinking after she drank too much one night after her husband’s death and nearly fell down the stairs, but now, she only tells him that she didn’t drink that day. Soon, the pain sears in her head, and she loses focus on the line of questioning. She helps the sergeant to draw a map of the house and to trace the man’s movements. After pushing her pain button, the mother falls asleep. She wakes up alone and remembers that the sergeant listed her phone as one of the valuables confiscated from the house, which means that the Corner didn’t take it, even though she thought she saw it in his pocket.

After her husband’s death, a local art gallery wrote an article about him and his work. They interviewed her father-in-law, who not-so-subtly suggested that his wife killed him. The article incited gossip in town and created a demand for her husband’s photographs. The mother sold his artwork to the gallery, to which she signed his name, hoping to support herself and the children without his income. Soon afterward, strange occurrences began happening in and around the house. Items went missing, and the daughter claimed that someone was watching her from the woods. Animals near the house also acted strangely. One day, her son fell from the swing, and she discovered that the swing was unbolted. She blamed it on the children, but they swore that they didn’t do it. The mother also began having sleep paralysis. She would see a male figure in her room but couldn’t move or speak after waking from the dream. The children believed that their father was causing the mischief, but the mother maintained that ghosts aren’t real.

The sergeant visited her after her husband’s death, and when he saw how thin and pale she was, he became concerned for her well-being. He asked about her relationship with her father-in-law, and she shared the story of him hitting her in the face. She is unsurprised to learn that her father-in-law told the police that she must have pushed her husband down the stairs because they were having trouble in their marriage. However, the investigators ruled her husband’s death accidental based on his injuries, the testimony of the children, and her reaction to finding him. She was surprised when he told her that her husband had been regularly communicating with his father, though he had told her that they weren’t speaking. She described the night paralysis and the uncanny things happening inside the house but insisted that these things were typical and expected. Internally, she was trying to “reassure herself that such a thing was normal, that she was normal, that there were no ghosts, no living shadows, in the world” (249).