The Promised Hour

George Murchison leaned toward me while watching a couple at the other end of the gallery. “They’ve bought Indifferent Guardians.”

“Which one?” Thank goodness, I thought, a sale!

“All seven.” George stepped in front of me and turned his back to the room. He grinned like a child. “The Shaffers want the entire series.” The couple owned a downtown office building. One was on the board of the Seattle Art Museum, the other on the American Craft Council. “The purchase will be in the news,” he said, “probably reported nationally.” He breathed deep. “This is good for both of us, Athena.”

I had worked long and hard for a solo show but felt only amazement that my work had actually sold. I called the sitter and told her I might be late.

While George, the Shaffers, and I walked to a wine bar up the street, my ex-husband was parking under the trees behind my rural home, though no one knew this until later. He had recently gained supervised visitations on alternate weekends. There had been a well-documented history of his abusive relationships, and I thought I’d hidden my address. He crossed the yard where my daughter’s swing hung from a branch and broke through the back door. That Thursday, because of the opening of my show, the teenage daughter of a neighbor sat for Samantha. Police found the sitter’s backpack on the front lawn, her phone on the stairs inside. The first shot can be heard on the 911 tape. The sitter deliberately reentered the house. They knew this immediately, that after the first shot she ran back into the house to rescue my sleeping child, who was already dead. The sitter died on the stairs a moment later. Then he—the man I had fallen in love with and married—sat with his back against my daughter’s open bedroom door and shot himself in the head. The 911 operator who talked to the teenager on the phone had told her to wait outside, said it at the beginning, and later screamed it into the phone over the sounds of two more shots. That teenager’s parents, just a few hundred yards away, had looked up at the gunfire—but it was the country, and people owned hunting rifles; boys kept pellet guns in the garage. There had been talk about raccoons, perhaps a neighbor scaring off critters from their garbage.

Except that was not what was happening.

It was after the promised hour when I got home in an Uber, high on good wine and the flush of a successful opening.

Ambulances and police cars, blue and red lights turned in the darkness, bright lights in the trees, men. The eyes of the two girls—the seven-year-old and the one who had just turned sixteen, and the man who killed them had gone quite dull. The sharp stink of gunpowder clutched the darkness. Sweat ran down my shivering ribs, stained my borrowed dress. Neighbors cried in their driveway, parents of the sitter. When I held out my arms, they turned their backs in a gesture that lasted until I moved away.

That is how lives end. Color and light all gone from the world.

#

In the weeks after, people put their arms around my shoulders, hugged and sighed in sympathy. Friends who had never trusted my husband insisted they understood my grief. They shook their heads, their voices shaking too. I overheard one say to my sister Ismene that she did not understand how anyone could recover from such a loss. Ismene snapped: “Just give her time. Let her find some distance.” And that is how Izzy tried to help, by being a home for me to run to. I had run from an abusive marriage; it was something I knew how to do. This running away and distance only made clear I was lost.

I returned to the house only to rid myself of it. The real estate agent warned that work would have to be done before the house could be listed, but also predicted a quick sale. “The market is phenomenal for homes at this price point,” he kept saying.

Despite what happened here, he did not say.

I had waited outside with Izzy while he walked through the property. Everything was too pale to look at, as if nothing quite existed. My fingers were cold even on that hot day. Wind blew through the leaves in the trees behind the house. I tried not to hear.

“How much property in the land?” he asked when he was done with the house. “An acre?”

“Two acres and a bit.” I gestured toward the trees but did not look in that direction or meet his eyes. I turned and looked to Izzy where she waited by my car. I was grateful to be moving away, though I had no particular place to go.

The agent nodded, added to his notes. “Replace the carpet in the upstairs hall and in the one room.” He looked up from his device, showed even white teeth. “Your sister—she said she would take care of that?”

Izzy stepped between me and the man. “Thena, we can use some of the furniture to stage the house. I’ll put the rest in storage.”

“Give it to Goodwill.”

Leaving was the goal, everyone said. I needed to move past my grief. I needed to leave it all behind and move on. My sister said it every time we spoke. Move on. Move on, move on, move on. The neighbors who no longer spoke to me wanted me gone, perhaps vanished to where they would never have to contemplate how their loss had also been mine. We lost our daughters. What was the point of being anyplace at all?

I signed papers on the hood of my car, and Izzy had already stuffed the back of my Honda with my canvas and paints, Samantha’s favorite books, Nana’s little armchair, and a box of kitchen tools. I hugged Izzy and drove away past the neighbors’ closed windows. My breath came ragged as if at the end of a hard run or as if I were clawing through a nightmare. My sorrow mere steam to the sky.

#

I moved to Portland, an aging neighborhood in the city where I was born, a one-bedroom rental house in need of simple repairs I could ignore. My sister helped with that too and ordered a bed over the phone. I found work at Powell’s Books in customer service, the same job I’d had years ago while in college. Izzy went home to her own child, and I didn’t bother to have mail forwarded. I ignored my Facebook account and dismantled my professional website without reviewing messages. I gave my new phone number only to my manager and my sister, since if I didn’t answer her calls, Izzy would send the police.

I settled into a routine and, as everyone promised, time moved.

#

The next autumn, Ismene was already waiting outside the Greek restaurant. Lunch in the Pearl was my sister’s treat. She took the train from Seattle every few weeks to be sure I was functional. “If I don’t check on you, you might drift away,” Izzy said as if it were a joke. “You want care. You want mothering.” This reminded us both that our mother was gone too.

Over lunch I hoped for gossip about her department at the University of Washington: who was sleeping with grad students, who was presenting a paper in Toronto next fall, stories about other people and about Izzy’s little boy, Carlos. She seemed shy of talking about her son, maybe afraid of stirring pain. Instead she focused on my job.

“You’re lucky the store took you back after ditching them all summer,” Ismene said. “You’re lucky they needed you and hadn’t replaced you. Lucky you didn’t get sick. Is your insurance back?”

“Hmm?” Lucky? The tall, elegant dining room was cold, and I struggled to listen. “Oh, medical. Yeah.”

“You took a terrible chance. What if something happened?”

I ignored the irony. “They like me at the store, and I needed the time off.” I cut through an eggplant slice, then cut each half into quarters. We shared crusty bread and tzatziki. Ismene’s lamb sizzled on a metal plate. The bloody odor forced me to take shallow breaths.

“Are you sleeping?” she said.

“Of course I’m sleeping.”

“You need to slow down if you stop sleeping again.”

I forked eggplant squares into a line. I knew this habit of composing my plate disturbed Izzy but could not help it. “I paint mornings and work in the bookstore the rest of the day. I sleep at night.” I looked up into my sister’s eyes and then away. “I sleep.” At the front window the backlit profiles of two diners looked cut from black paper. I took a bite and chewed. Not thinking of Samantha required nearly all my strength. Not allowing my sister to know this was impossible. We both pretended that our shared aim was something other than distraction.

Ismene put down her napkin. “Do you have anything to show?”

“No.” I swallowed and pushed the eggplant squares into a new shape. “No.”

“But that’s why you took the time, wasn’t it, to get back to painting?”

“Sure, yeah, but—it’s not that simple.”

Ismene realigned her cutlery. “George Murcheson has called me several times. Three times, and I ran into him at an opening last week. He’s wondering if he should make space in the gallery schedule for next year.” She stabbed at her meat. “He’s perfectly willing to do that, Thena. Anyway, he thinks I’m lying when I say I don’t know what you’re doing.” She chewed ferociously. “You should call him.”

“I’m not working on anything George needs to see. Just exercises, studies.”

“After the summer I thought you’d show me.”

“There’s nothing.”

“Thena—”

“I don’t have anything to show.” I stopped pretending to eat, set down my fork, and folded my fists one on top of the other in my lap. I glanced at the couple at the window table. I looked at the mirrored wall at my left, at my plate, at the corner of my sister’s chair visible behind her back. “I am sorry about George’s schedule, but I can’t show him anything.” I waited.

“He thinks you blame him, Thena.”

Something like laughter broke acid yellow into the edges of my vision. “George? Because I was drinking with him after my opening when it happened?” Color flew away. “I never blamed him.” I needed to say something more but could not. I could not discuss what happened. Not even with Izzy.

And then for a long moment we both looked away, away from each other and the table, the food and conversation, the restaurant sounds of cutlery and kitchen clatter, the flirtations of the couple beside the window, the brush of the waiter’s trouser legs as he hurried past. Traffic noise from the street dropped in pitch as a truck rumbled by.

Ismene opened her mouth and then, instead of telling me what she thought I ought to do, she closed her mouth and made a note in her day planner—everything went into that ancient planner. She diagramed, listed goals, and recorded events. Did they even sell actual planners anymore? When the waiter passed again, she ordered baklava, and he took away the last of her meat. She always left part of her meal on her plate.

Soon the silence between us filled with little sounds of crisp pastry. I did not taste it. Instead I tried to change the subject: “I heard a child crying one night. In a house behind mine. I think someone was hurting her.”

“When?” Ismene wiped her sticky mouth. “Are you sure?”

I thought back over the past week. Izzy was right that I needed sleep. I was careful about that. My routine was precise. At the end of each morning’s work, I cleaned brushes and placed them in a row on the counter, a rag across my palette, canvas waiting in the bare living room. Everything laid out before I went to the bookstore. And then straight home and to bed. I did not welcome dreams.

A child had cried. It hadn’t been a dream that time. “I think she cried.”

“Terrible—do you think someone was molesting her?” Ismene slipped her credit card into the folder with the bill.

I was startled out of the troubling memory. “I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out which house the sound came from. It’s been a while. July, I think.”

“What did the police say?”

“The police?” Some nights were blue and some sharper colors… impossible.

“Oh, really, Thena! Didn’t you call 911?”

“I wasn’t sure—I thought maybe I’d dreamed it all.” But it wasn’t a dream. Not that time.

“A dream.” Ismene stopped, put down her pen, reached across the table to push my water glass into my hand. “Drink,” she said.

My attention spun around to rest again on the couple at the window. “I’m fine, Izzy. You don’t need to fuss.” My hands shook and the room seemed to whirl.

“Then how about coming up to Seattle and doing First Thursday with me? Take the train. Stay the night.” Ismene’s voice was reasonable and calm. “You’ll want to see Emily Blocker’s new show in October. She’d love to hear from you. Toni and Colin, too.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s been almost two years—”

Samantha would be nine next month. Would have. “It’s late. I have to get to work.” Healthy people did not avoid galleries. They did not move across state lines to avoid friends and family and ordinary conversation. They did not work on a painting and then turn it to the wall and start another without looking back.

We separated outside Powell’s, and I hurried through the door, climbed to the third floor, and blinked in the bright light, adjusting to people moving past, shoppers muttering as they searched the tall aisles of books. I pinned my identification badge to my shirt and became a helpful clerk.

#

Crying woke me. Perhaps it was my imagination? What exactly had I heard? A voice? The cry of an animal? Had a child’s cry woken me, a clear, unmuddy sound? Not the sound of my own daughter crying, not the rush and flare that came out in dreams. Flashing lights and gunshots and sirens I had never heard, struggling against invisible binding.

This had been real. I shoved the unlatched casement window open wider. It shrilled on its rusty hinges. Porch lights left on all night made the darkness less than dark. No stars shone through the rusty sky overhead. City sounds filled what passed for darkness. There was a moon, a dog barking up the street, faint gasping brakes of a truck traveling three blocks away on Stark.

The luminous hands on my bedside clock showed there were hours before morning. I should not be awake. Then I walked through the house, past the painting I had finished the day before. Yes, the birds were done and two others from that series. Good. The rest, the ones turned away, were nothing. Nothing. I stared at these canvases, then gathered hammer and nails, pounded them into the dining room wall, and hung the three bird paintings I could not paint over. Even the faint light from the chandelier hanging over where there should have been a table, even in that faint light I could see: George would like them. I knew this as surely as if he were beside me, rubbing his temples the way he did when he was excited. He would like these paintings, and he would sell them. I held back a small cry.

Horse chestnut leaves rustled, and the shush of traffic was so far away the sound might have flowed from memory.

Back in bed I watched the window until daylight came in blue and then gold and I could begin my day.

#

Autumn shriveled into winter and I painted every morning, despite working extra hours at the bookstore. Christmas shoppers asked questions about books, picked them up and put them back in the wrong places so that later in the day someone else would not be able to find them.

Painting was another kind of running away. Hiding. The only escape that worked. Three more paintings went up on another wall.

This second childless holiday I chose books for my sister and brother-in-law and for my nephew Carlos. Carlos liked fantasy and I chose books I knew to read aloud and some with maps—all with happy endings. Soon he would be too old for the stories I’d read to Samantha. Some evenings I read Carlos to sleep over the phone on speaker. Ismene sat beside him on his bed. Maybe she remembered Mom reading stories to us when we were small. I imagined the little boy’s drifting eyelids as he fought off sleep. I did not stop reading until the story ended and Ismene whispered goodnight to the phone.

As light faded, I opened the bedroom window again. I’d oiled the hinges. The house behind and one down showed a dim light in a back room. There had been no crying for weeks, but I listened. What could I do? The hush of air and darkness followed me out into the living room. I passed the canvas waiting on my easel as if it were another empty wall. Some afternoons I walked across the city to work, even in rain. I thought about rainfall, the reflections of water. Strokes of oil applied with a stiff brush. On my way home I walked around the block, past the houses of people I did not know, and listened hard for a crying child.

#

The Greek restaurant was busier in the spring. Ismene rushed through the door just as people rushed through the bookstore, always on their way someplace else. She hung her purse from the back of the chair opposite and then reached around to remove her planner. She ordered soup, the lamb, tzatziki, and my soup and eggplant without asking or looking at the menu. She opened, then snapped shut the catch on her planner.

“Why don’t you use your cell?” I said. Izzy seemed nervous. It was unlike her.

“You’re losing weight again,” Ismene said.

“No.” I looked down into my lap as if I might catch the pounds slipping off. “No, really. My pants fit. I’m fine.” Please do not tell me to eat or sleep. Please do not tell me to move on. There are no more places to move.

“Are you sure? You’re not staying up all night? You’re sleeping?”

“I’ve been up late, last night and the night before, but I sleep.” I rested palms on the edge of the table. “Are you okay?”

Ismene sipped water. “I’m pregnant.”

I was not surprised but had not guessed. Izzy and Frank had been trying for another child. I knew this. Izzy had lost a pregnancy, a girl, before our mother died. Before Samantha died. She was determined to have another. Izzy did not believe in only children.

“I’m sorry,” Ismene said. “I wanted to tell you last month. I was surprised you didn’t notice.” She looked down. “I wasn’t really showing, but I wanted to tell you. But the first months—I couldn’t say anything until we were safe. I’m nearly five months, due in August. Early August.” She laughed, a billowing sound of sweet young leaves and salt—green—which made me close my eyes and imagine her laughter on canvas. Rain. Hawthorne buds. Bright strokes, top right to left on canvas.

“Are you okay, Sis, really?”

I looked away into the mirrored wall, bright with light that stung my eyes. “I’m fine, Izzy, and I’m so happy for you.” It was true. “Perfect.”

“We’re all fine here,” said Ismene. We both laughed then. It was a family line, something our mother said when times were hard. “We’re all fine here!” she’d say.

“I heard that little girl again.” I’d stood in the darkness and listened, afraid I could do nothing. This was running away, not moving on. The cries came only when I was not ready for them. Abruptly frightened, I stood up and bumped the table with my hip. “I’m not imagining this.”

“Athena. Oh, Thena.” Ismene moaned. “Listen to me—”

I sat down again but could not listen. Water sloshed from our glasses and spread in a dark stain across the cloth.

The waiter arrived and in moments the table was cleared and redressed with a dry tablecloth; food was set before us.

“You have to let it go,” Ismene said in a low voice. “I know it’s hard—”

“Please don’t say that. I am so tired of people saying that.”

“You have to stop blaming yourself.”

“No. It’s not just me—the neighbors—”

“The neighbors can’t blame you.”

I sat back in my chair. “Their daughter died in my house.” Our daughters died in my house. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter who anyone blames or doesn’t blame.” I unclenched my hands and began eating the lemon rice soup, which was too hot and burned my mouth. It tasted of mud, dull and soundless, but I continued to eat. I could eat and sleep and go to work. I could do these things. I could pretend to be a painter, that I had a life that went on.

“Thena—?”

“I’m fine.” It was a lie, but what I said next was true: “I’m so happy about the baby.”

#

After work that night I oiled the bedroom window hinges and, over the next nights, lay awake shivering with fever and memory, worrying about what to do. By then there were eleven good canvases hanging in my dining room. I had not shown them to anyone.

Then I heard her. What had the child said? Please, Daddy? There was no moon, and no more words arrived. Rain fell.

I would know this time. I would do something. I slid from under the blankets, felt my way across the dark room to the window.

There. Crying. It had to be that house just behind and one up, the house showing a faint orange light in a back window. Backyard fences were a barrier between that yard and mine, but the glowing window, the same house I walked past, just around the corner. A dog barked. Then from farther away, another dog barked.

Crying.

I shoved the window wide and lifted myself onto the sill, swung bare legs into the cold, and dropped to the wet grass. Rain fell straight down like a wall in the darkness, but I heard the little girl crying, louder it seemed—sound escaping from the lit window in the house behind and fourth from the corner. Fences between. I stepped the other way between my house and the neighbors’ to the sidewalk, hurrying around the block to the front of the houses behind, and counted to the front of the child’s house. Pale even in the dark.

I stomped right onto the wood porch, my oversize cotton T-shirt soaked through, toes already numb from cold grass and wet pavement. The paneled front door looked gray, but the house was white.

Rain pattered all around—alarms and sirens and rain blared from inside my head, all of the burning sounds. Lights flashed in my peripheral vision—suffocating and shrill. The idea rang through my pounding head that I was insane, but I pushed that aside. I beat on the door. The backs of my hands were purple with cold as I slapped the heavy door.

A yellow porch light came on and the door wrenched open, a warped door that did not fit its frame. A white man stood inside, a bit taller than me and muscular.

“What,” he said. It was demand, not question. His voice was tight and deep. “What do you want?” His white undershirt stretched tight across his chest. He looked past me.

I had stepped back. His words felt like a shove. Was there anything familiar about him? Had he driven his car up my street, had I seen him mowing his lawn, chatting with the garbage collectors on Tuesday mornings? He was young and strong.

“Who the hell are you?” Again he looked up and down the empty street.

I looked too. There was no one to ask for help. He raised a hand and I stepped back farther. What could I do? I was a weak person, panting, half-naked, and maybe crazy. I should have called the police. Stupid, stupid! Stop hurting her! Did I say that aloud? Behind the man, I heard the girl whimper, a stammer of pain or surrender.

“You need to stop,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing.” Anger and fear drew sweat, and hot tears slicked my face. The edges of my vision sparkled. Who was this man—the father? the mother’s boyfriend? Who are you?

He was saying this: “Who are you?”

How could I confront this man? I blinked and struggled for breath, for words—all of this in an instant. Red and acid yellow flowed between them, sharp like gunpowder. “I know you’re hurting her,” I said, struggling to take a full breath. I would suffocate on this man’s porch. “You have to stop.”

I backed and slipped off the bottom step, fell backward, and turned in the darkness and caught myself with palms on the wet grass, knees on the concrete walk, but I pushed back to my feet, pushed the ground away. The man moved through his doorway toward me, and I staggered. Run! My heart beat, my feet thudded and slapped, everything dark and so loud and bright I could barely see. I ran around to the back of his house. Overhead, soft light glowed in what must be the child’s bedroom window, but it was too high for me, and there was no door at the back of the house to get to the child. There was no escape for either of us, and he might be coming already, coming for me the way my husband might have come for me, should have come for me instead of for our child.

There must be someone who could save her, some way to end this. I ran on to the back of my own house, reached for the fence, grabbed hold, put bare toes against the rough boards, and pulled myself over the top into the next yard. In the dark it was so far, and he would see me, and before I could stop him, he would do something to the child. Then something clawed my feet and held. Whoomph onto my chest again. I pulled my feet out of blackberry vines and reached fingers into grass, earth, and raised myself, staggered forward, and then to my open bedroom window. I leaned against the painted siding.

Rain fell but I forced away darkness and the sounds of sirens that I had never heard and the flashing lights—what nights recalled. The weeping faces. I hoisted myself over the ledge and onto the floor of my bedroom and stumbled, kicked away blankets dragged from the bed, tripped, and fell again to my knees. All of my fears so loud and naked, I closed my eyes to blot them out.

But I could not stop. I could not let this pass. No one was safe. All of the night screaming like the 911 tape they kept from me, the alarms and cries I dreamt each night. I fumbled for my cellphone beside the bed, pressed 911, counted the rings and lost count, counted one two three, one two—a voice. “What is the emergency?”

“A man is hurting a little girl. I can’t stop him,” and I repeated this, louder. “Behind my house. He’s hurting her. Please. I have to do something. Please!”

I pressed the phone to my face and tried to understand the voice on the line, the impossible questions.

“Young,” I told the operator. “She’s young, just a little girl.” The roar plowed through my head, though no one was after me—was anyone there?—only the dog barking at the end of the block.

“I don’t know his name,” I said into my phone more than once. “Please, he’s hurting her. You have to stop him.” It was raining, rain that wet my face, not tears. I would cry some other time, not now. There was still something to do.

The operator asked again. The address? The police would be on their way soon—where should they go?

I realized I didn’t know the address. I looked up to see dawn color walk toward my windows, the dust of a long night reshaping into life. “Send them to me,” I said, “and I will take them there.”