Then that dull whap at the door, a second time.
I peel the blanket from my legs, swing myself to my feet, find the remote, pause the movie.
Twilight sifting down outside. I walk to the door and open it.
Whap.
I step into the hall—the one area of the house I dislike and distrust, the cool gray zone between my realm and the outside world. Right now it’s dim in the dusk, the dark walls like hands about to clap me between them.
Streaks of leaded glass line the front door. I approach one, gaze through it.
A crack, and the window shudders. A tiny missile has struck: an egg, blasted, its guts spangled across the glass. I hear myself gasp. Through the smear of yolk I can see three kids in the street, their faces bright, their grins bold, one of them poised with an egg in his fist.
I sway where I stand, place a hand against the wall.
This is my home. That’s my window.
My throat shrinks. Tears well in my eyes. I feel surprised, then ashamed.
Whap.
Then angry.
I can’t fling wide the door and send them scurrying. I can’t barrel outside and confront them. I rap on the window, sharply—
Whap.
I slap the heel of my hand against the door.
I bash it with my fist.
I growl, then I roar, my voice bounding between the walls, the dark little hall a chamber of echoes.
I’m helpless.
No, you’re not, I can hear Dr. Fielding say.
In, two, three, four.
No, I’m not.
I’m not. I toiled nearly a decade as a graduate student. I spent fifteen months training in inner-city schools. I practiced for seven years. I’m tough, I promised Sally.
Scraping my hair back, I retreat to the living room, yank a breath from the air, stab the intercom with one finger.
“Get away from my house,” I hiss. Surely they’ll hear the squawk outside.
Whap.
My finger is wobbling on the intercom button. “Get away from my house!”
Whap.
I stumble across the room, trip up the stairs, race into my study, to the window. There they are, clustered in the street like marauders, laying siege to my home, their shadows endless in the dying light. I bat at the glass.
One of them points at me, laughs. Winds his arm like a pitcher. Looses another egg.
I knock harder on the glass, hard enough to dislodge a pane. That’s my door. This is my home.
My vision blurs.
And suddenly I’m rushing down the stairs; suddenly I’m back in the dark of the hall, my bare feet on the tiles, my hand on the knob. Anger grips me by the throat; my sight is swimming. I seize a breath, seize another.
In-two-three—
I jolt the door open. Light and air blast me.
FOR AN instant it’s silent, as silent as the film, as slow as the sunset. The houses opposite. The three kids between. The street around them. Quiet and still, a stopped clock.
I could swear I hear a crack, as of a felled tree.
And then—
—AND THEN it bulges toward me, swelling, now rushing, a boulder flung from a catapult; slams me with such force, walloping my gut, that I fold. My mouth opens like a window. Wind whips into it. I’m an empty house, rotten rafters and howling air. My roof collapses with a groan—
—and I’m groaning, sliding, avalanching, one hand scraped along the brick, the other lunging into space. Eyes reel and roll: the lurid red of leaves, then darkness; lights up on a woman in black, vision blanching, bleaching, until molten white swarms my eyes and pools there, thick and deep. I try to cry out, my lips brush grit. I taste concrete. I taste blood. I feel my limbs pinwheeled on the ground. The ground ripples against my body. My body ripples against the air.
Somewhere in the attic of my brain I recall that this happened once before, on these same steps. I remember the low tide of voices, the odd word breaching bright and clear: fallen, neighbor, anyone, crazy. This time, nothing.
ARM SLUNG around someone’s neck. Hair, coarser than my own, rubs my face. Feet scuffle feebly on the ground, on the floor; and now I’m inside, in the chill of the hall, in the warmth of the living room.
“YOU TOOK A TUMBLE!”
My vision fills like a Polaroid print. I’m looking at the ceiling, at a single recessed light socket staring back at me, a beady eye.
“I’m getting something for you—one second …”
I let my head loll to one side. Velvet fizzes in my ear. The living room chaise—the fainting couch. Ha.
“One second, one second …”
At the kitchen sink stands a woman, turned away from me, a rope of dark hair trailing down her back.
I bring my hands to my face, cup them over my nose and mouth, breathe in, breathe out. Calm. Calm. My lip aches.
“I was just headed next door when I saw those little shits chucking eggs,” she explains. “I said to them, ‘What are you up to, little shits?,’ and then you sort of … lurched through the door and went down like a sack of …” She doesn’t finish the sentence. I wonder if she was going to say shit.
Instead she turns, a glass in each hand, one filled with water, one with something thick and gold. Brandy, I hope, from the liquor cabinet.
“No idea if brandy actually works,” she says. “I feel like I’m in Downton Abbey. I’m your Florence Nightingale!”
“You’re the woman from across the park,” I mumble. The words stagger off my tongue like drunks from a bar. I’m tough. Pathetic.
“What’s that?”
And then, in spite of myself: “You’re Jane Russell.”
She stops, looking at me in wonder, then laughs, her teeth glinting in the half-light. “How do you know that?”
“You said you were
