You're Next

It was an old argument, and Annabel was right, so he muted the volume and lay morosely staring at the damn thing, unable to click it off altogether. A little plastic unit that held a parent’s worst fears. Choking. Illness. Intruders.

Usually the sounds were just interference or crossover noise from other frequencies – a charge in the air or the neighbor’s toddler snuffling from a cold. Sometimes Mike even heard voices in the rush of white noise. He swore there were ghosts in the thing. Murmurs from the past. It was a portal to your half-conscious mind, and you could read into its phantom whisper whatever you wanted.

But what if he turned it off and this proved to be the night Kat did need them? What if she awakened terrified and disoriented from a nightmare, sudden paralysis, the blowfly’s evil spell, and lay stricken for hours, trapped alone with her fear? How do you choose the first night to take that risk?

In the early hours, logic and reason seemed to fall asleep before he did. Everything seemed possible in the worst kind of way.

He finally started to drift off, but then the blowfly took another loop around the night-light, and a moment later the red bars flared again on the muted unit. Kat crying out?

He sat up and rubbed his face.

‘She’s fine,’ Annabel groaned.

‘I know, I know.’ But he got up and padded down the hall.

Kat was out cold, one slender arm flung across a stuffed polar bear, her mouth ajar. Chestnut hair framed her serious face. She had her mother’s wide-set eyes, pert nose, and generous lower lip; given her looks and whip- smart demeanor, it was sometimes hard to tell whether Kat was an eight-year-old version of Annabel or Annabel a thirty-six-year-old version of Kat. The one trait that Kat had received from Mike was at least an obvious one – one brown eye, one amber. Heterochromia, they called it. As for her curls, who knew where she got those?

Mike leaned over her, listened for the whistle of breath. Then he sat in the glider chair in the corner and watched his daughter. He felt a stab of pride about the childhood he and Annabel had given her, the sense of security that let her sleep so soundly.

‘Babe.’ Annabel stood in the doorway, shoving her lank hair off her forehead. She wore a Gap tank top and his boxers and looked as good in them as she had a decade before on their honeymoon. ‘Come to bed. Tomorrow’s a huge day for you.’

‘Be there in a moment.’

She crossed, and they kissed quietly, and then she trudged off to bed again.

The movement of the glider was hypnotic, but his thoughts kept circling back to the unresolved business of the coming day. After a time he realized he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so he went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Back in the chair, sipping contentedly from his mug, he soaked in the pale yellow walls, the raft of dolls on the floating shelf, his daughter in angelic repose. The only interruption was the occasional buzz from the blowfly, which had stalked him down the hall.

Chapter 2

Kat skidded through the kitchen, her ponytail loose and off center. Annabel paused above the omelet pan and regarded the fount of curls. ‘Your father did that, didn’t he?’

Kat shoved her stuffed polar bear into her backpack and climbed onto a counter stool next to Mike. Annabel slung the omelet onto Kat’s plate, then leaned over and readjusted her daughter’s hair tie with a few expert flips and tugs. She dropped the pan into soapy water, mopped the leak beneath the farmhouse sink with a foot-held paper towel, and moved back to finishing Kat’s lunch, cutting the crust off her peanut-butter – no jelly – sandwich.

Slurping at his third cup of coffee and watching his wife, Mike felt like he was moving in slow motion. ‘I’ll fix the sink tonight,’ he said, and Annabel gave him a thumbs-up. He noted the furry white arm protruding from his daughter’s backpack. ‘May I ask why you packed a polar bear for school?’

‘I have a report today.’

‘Another report? Aren’t you in third grade?’

‘It’s for that enriched-learning thing after class. I’m talking about global warming-’

Annabel, sarcastic: ‘No kidding.’

‘-and this isn’t just any polar bear.’

Mike lifted an eyebrow. ‘No?’

Kat pulled the white bear from her backpack and presented it theatrically. ‘This is no longer Snowball, my favourite stuffed animal. This… this is Snowball, the Last Dying Polar Bear.’ She removed her eyeglasses from their case and put them on. The round red rims added gravity to her expression. Not that she needed the help. ‘Did you know,’ she asked, ‘that polar bears will probably be extinct by the time I’m a grown- up?’

‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘From that Al Gore movie. With the melting icecaps and drowning polar bears. You cried for two days.’

Annabel said, ‘Eat your omelet.’

Kat picked at the edge. Mike gave the nape of her neck a squeeze. ‘Want me to walk you to class today?’

‘Dad, I’m eight.’

‘So you keep reminding me.’ Mike tugged his sturdy cell from his pocket and hit ‘redial.’ A few rings, and then the bank manager picked up. ‘Hi, Mike Wingate again. Did the wire hit?’

‘Just a minute, Mr Wingate.’ The sound of keyboard typing.

As Kat and Annabel negotiated how many more bites Kat had to eat, Mike waited, drumming his fingers nervously on the counter.

It had taken him thirteen years to work his way from hired hand to carpenter to foreman to contractor. And now he was on the brink of closing out his first deal as a developer. He’d taken some ulcer-inducing risks to get here, leveraging their house and maxing out a handful of loans to buy a section of undeveloped canyon at the edge of town. Lost Hills, a Valley community thirty miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, had a number of advantages, the main one being that real estate was merely expensive, not obscene. Mike had carved the land into forty generous parcels and built a community of ecological houses that he had named, uninventively, Green Valley. Not that he was a diehard ecofreak, but Kat had shown an interest in environmental stuff from an early age and he had to admit that those futuristic computer-generated photos of Manhattan flooded due to sea-level rise scared the hell out of him.

The state’s offer of green subsidies had helped the houses sell quickly, the cash from the final cluster of sales due to be wired from the title company this morning. This wire would get him out from under the bank – finally, entirely – after three and a half years and meant they’d no longer have to eyeball their checking-account balance before deciding to go out to a meal.

The bank manager’s breath whistled over the line. The typing stopped. ‘Still nothing, Mr Wingate.’

Mike thanked him, clicked his cell closed, and ran the sweat off his forehead with the heel of a hand. The little nagging voice returned: What if, after all this work, something did go wrong?

He caught Annabel looking at him, and he said, ‘I shouldn’t have bought that stupid truck yet.’

She said, ‘And what? Duct-taped the transmission together on your beater pickup? We’re fine. The money’s there. You’ve worked hard. So hard. It’s okay to let yourself enjoy it a little.’

‘And I certainly didn’t need to drop eight hundred bucks on a suit.’

‘You’ve got a photo shoot with the governor, honey. We can’t have you show up in ripped jeans. Besides, you can wear it again at the award ceremony. Which reminds me’. She snapped her fingers. ‘I need to pick it up from the tailor this morning after class. Kat’s got that back-to-school checkup this morning. Can you take her on your way in? Meet back here at lunch?’

In the past year, their schedules had gotten more complicated to coordinate. Once it had become clear that Kat and third grade were getting along, Annabel decided it was time to go back to Northridge University for her teaching degree. State-school tuition was manageable, as long as they bent the budget here and there.

Mike flipped his phone open and checked the screen in case he’d missed the bank calling back with good news.