“Oh, Jesus,” Naomi says. Her hand whips to the lamp on the end table while her brain frantically scrambles to remember if she’d locked the front door before she went to bed. It used to be Sal’s job, to check all the doors before bed. Naomi has recently woken on more than one occasion with a door unlocked and even—how Sal would scold—a window still cracked.
But when the light clicks on, the woman in the corner of the room has disappeared.
Naomi slumps with relief, heartbeat still pounding. She sits back in bed and takes a few deep breaths.
In the clarity of her breathing, she realizes the woman can’t be real. There was something off about her, a shimmer around the edges that made her more mirage than mortal.
A dream, then. Or nightmare.
In the quiet, she can hear a ticking on the other side of her bedroom door. Steady and insistent. Back and forth. A slithering rhythm, as if something heavy is dragging its body across a threshold.
The cat.
After a moment, he yowls to be let in, though Naomi knows that just as quickly, he will want to be let out again. And they’d play that game the rest of the night, in and out. He was probably what woke her up, the little shit. She throws a pillow at the door and yells, “Jasper, go!”
The other side of the door goes silent.
God, but how real the woman had looked. She reminded Naomi of someone—a celebrity maybe? Someone she’s seen on the news recently?
She’s so tired of her mind playing tricks on her. It is impossible these days to shut off her brain. At any one time, peel back the layers of skin and skull, and you’d see her working through the viscosity of a bioink that’s causing problems at work, ruminating on the Ayurveda medicine podcast she’d listened to on her drive home, doom pondering the climate crisis, the deteriorating political landscape (Ah! That’s who it is—the woman looked like the Secretary of State), the broken American education system. Not to mention the grocery shopping she had to do and the dentist appointment she needed to make.
And Maisie, always Maisie, of course Maisie and the dash of her nose and the roundness of her cheeks. The way a line cut around her mouth when she smiled, just like Naomi’s and Naomi’s mother and grandfather, a whole generation of deep smile lines.
The color of her eyes: richest loam.
Dirt, Maisie used to say. My eyes are the color of dirt.
No, no, no. Clay, humus, soil. Peat, compost, deep earth. Living abundance. Vitality. The most important thing in the world.
The place her daughter now resides.
Naomi sighs and slumps back onto the bed.
3:30am. It’s going to be an early day. She should give up. Get up.
Instead, she rolls on her side, grabs Sal’s pillow, and wraps her legs and arms around it the way she used to big-spoon Sal.
They’d always had a strange relationship, backward from how everyone else supposedly did it, definitely different from Naomi and Sal’s parents: mothers who stayed home and made dinner, fathers who climbed into the car each morning with a briefcase.
Naomi was the main breadwinner of the family. Her job was fast-moving and competitive. She sometimes had to get tough with her lab assistants and often came home with a tension headache that felt like her skull was ripping in half. It felt like vital, important work, seeing how cells reacted to different disease and medicine combinations. A little like saving humanity, though she knew how pretentious that sounded and only ever voiced it to her husband.
Sal worked as a library clerk, reshelving books all day long. He only worked half-time and his schedule was flexible enough that he often had dinner waiting for “his girls.” He’d rub Naomi’s shoulders and ask about Maisie’s day. After dinner, he and Maisie would clean up, laughing and chatting at the kitchen sink, while Naomi went to shoot off a few emails before they all settled down to a t.v. show, reruns of Jeopardy if Naomi was in charge of the remote, cooking shows if Sal or Maisie was.
What an idyllic life, she realizes now, clutching the pillow to her chest. What a perfect, perfect fucking life she’d had.
And now look what she’s left with. An empty bed. An empty house.
What did she have—work? Some moldering petri dishes with her name on them? Jesus, how pathetic. To have your life so small and distilled that it fits in the space of a microscope slide. Her coworkers don’t even talk to her. Not anymore.
She’d had everything and now she had nothing. She was nothing.
“Pardon me,” a voice speaks from behind Naomi. “But that’s no way to think.”
As if time has slowed, Naomi can feel her body react: eyes widening, pupils dilating to take in as much light, to see as well as possible. The quickness of her breath, the way oxygen begins to flood her brain. Adrenaline injecting itself in her limbs, muscles rapid-firing in preparation for fighting or fleeing.
What she does instead is lock up, spine-stiff. Immobile. Paralyzed.
“Oh dear,” the voice says. “It seems I’ve startled you.”
Naomi can feel a whisper down the back of her neck and a movement, not of something solid, but breezy and transparent, like the flicker of light on water. The water solidifies into a feminine face, younger than the woman who was in her room earlier, but still. Secretary of State, Naomi’s brain shouts unhelpfully. But from twenty years ago.
The shimmering woman bends down and peers into Naomi’s face. “I only wanted to tell you that the cat is out of food. And he won’t leave me alone about it.”