A Stranger Entered Our Bedroom Every Night Until I Learned Why
I asked her to repeat it, hoping I had misheard something, that she had been describing a dream or a story from a book. She only looked out the window and said she had seen him more than once. He came when it was very dark. He always had something in his hand. He never made much noise.
Mom looked sad when he was there.
I heard that detail and it should have shifted something in me. Later I understood that it had been the most important thing she said. But suspicion is a fast poison, and once it reaches your blood it begins converting everything it touches. The sad was not what I carried away. I carried the man, and the darkness, and the closed eyes, and the not saying anything.
When I got back to the house, Elena was in the kitchen with the coffee maker hissing and morning light filling the room at a low angle. She looked up and gave me the ordinary smile of someone who does not know the ground beneath a marriage has shifted in the night. I had loved that smile for eleven years. I had trusted it with the specificity of a person who believes they know exactly what something means because they have seen it ten thousand times. Standing there with my car keys cutting into my palm, I felt the first sharp edge of something I had never wanted to feel about Elena.
