Then my father stepped into the hallway, blocking the light so that he loomed like a dark shadow. “Go back to bed,” he said. “And turn your lights off.”
“Why is that girl here?” Susannah asked.
“Now,” my father said in a tone that made me automatically turn toward my room.
Susannah ignored him. “Is she hurt or something?” She craned her neck to try to see around our father. “Do we need to—”
Dad took a step toward her, and for a brief, silver-bright moment, I thought he would hit her. Instead he spoke in a low, terse voice. “She’s scared and wants some help. Your mother and I are going to help her. Now go to bed.”
“Come on,” I said, grabbing Susannah’s hand. She tried to yank it out of my grasp, but I pulled her back toward her room. “You heard Dad. We’re going back to bed.”
“Let go of me!” Susannah said, slapping at my arm with her other hand. I managed to open her bedroom door and pulled her inside, then closed the door behind us. As I closed the door, Susannah smacked the back of my head hard enough that stars popped in my vision.
“Jesus!” I said.
“Serves you right, you jerk,” Susannah said.
I took a deep breath to calm down. “You heard Dad,” I said. “He told us to go to bed.”
“So go to bed.” In the darkened room, Susannah seemed to glow with righteous indignation. “But you can’t make me do whatever you want.”
“It’s what Dad wants, you moron.”
“Run your own ranch, Ethan.” This was one of Dad’s sayings, meaning mind your own business. Then Susannah sat on her bed and turned on a lamp. Even her hair seemed to flare with resentment, a corona of rage around her pale, scowling face.
“Dad said to turn off the light,” I said.
“I’m not sitting in my room in the dark with you.”
“Why, because you’re scared of me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Right. Scared of the boy who’s scared Daddy doesn’t love him.”
“What the fuck is your problem?”
“Don’t cuss in my room!”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I said.
“Daddy!” Susannah shouted. “Ethan is cussing!”
I heard the car then, a deep, loud grumbling, like some mechanized dog of war had just arrived on our street. Headlights washed over Susannah’s bedroom window. The growl of the engine filled the night air outside. A car door slammed with a solid thunk. My spine crawled, and there was a coppery taste in my mouth, like pennies. I was frightened, truly frightened, not the daily, dull red alert of my home life, but a bright flare sent up by my nervous system. Danger, Will Robinson, I thought.
“Ethan’s cussing!” Susannah shouted again.
I rushed toward my sister and put my hand over her mouth, shoving her back onto the mattress. Between my teeth, I whispered, “Shut up.”
For once, Susannah didn’t argue. She was staring at me, surprised, shocked even, by how I had pinned her onto the bed. But she wasn’t afraid. Her stare told me she was assessing, reevaluating, considering next steps. All I wanted to do was hide with her from whatever was coming up the front walk.
“Let go of me,” Susannah said from behind my hand.
I shook my head and listened. Someone was climbing the front steps. The car outside growled.
“Right now,” Susannah said, her eyes narrowing.
A hammering on the front door—not the frantic knocking from earlier, but physical blows as if someone intended to bash the door in. Then a voice—harsh, male: “Kayla!” Another pounding on the door that made Susannah’s window rattle in its frame. “Kayla, I know you’re in there!” How does he know that? I thought. And then I realized—the girl’s shoe. She had lost her shoe running up to our front door. And whoever was out there had seen it, knew it was hers. My stomach, hollow and acidic, clenched like a fist. I should have grabbed the shoe, I thought.
Then my mother’s voice, piercing, distraught: “Jimmy!” she called out, and right then I knew my father was heading for the front door.
I let go of Susannah and half fell off her bed, then fumbled to open her bedroom door. Dad’s angry voice joined the rising chorus—my mother pleading, the man outside snarling, and the girl my parents had let in now wailing and crying in earnest. I couldn’t process the words, just the fear and the anger behind them. Senselessly I thought of FDR’s famous quote, which Ms. Poorbaugh had written on the board in social studies class: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Then the front door was thrown open, followed by the harsh male voice: “Kayla!” And my father bellowed, no words, just an unbottled rage that filled the house so that I thought the walls would explode. This is a bad idea, I thought, even as I rushed across the hall into my parents’ room. I had to find the flat, wooden box my father had brought home from Iraq.
More shouting from the foyer, followed by a hard smack and a bark of pain. Something smashed in the front hall—a plate? No, a lamp. I fell to my knees on the floor of my parents’ room and groped under their bed, struggling to reach the box. My fingertips brushed it, almost pushing it away, and then I gripped the box and dragged it out. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” I breathed, trying to shut out the other sounds—my mother screaming, my father’s incoherent rage, the pounding and stomping of a fistfight in the foyer, the keening wail of the girl, and, in the background, the continuous growl of the car. The box was locked, but I knew my father kept the key in his bedside table. I yanked the drawer out, spilling bottles of pills and loose change on the floor, and I began searching blindly on the floor for the key. “Motherfucker!” someone, not my father, shouted in the foyer. Then my fingers found the key, and I
