The Night I Knocked on Her Door

The walk-through

She asked to see the house. I showed her.

She looked in the refrigerator. There was milk, eggs, a block of Colby, a pan of goulash with foil on it, and the boys’ juice boxes lined up on the door. She looked at the smoke detectors, and I pressed the button on the one in the hall so she could hear it work.

She asked where I kept medicine. I showed her the lockbox on top of the cabinet over the fridge. Nurses are funny about medicine. I have seen too many kids come in after getting into a grandma’s purse.

She asked about guns. Josh had a twelve gauge and a deer rifle. After he died, his brother Jeff took them to his house and keeps them in his safe. I said so.

She asked what happens if something goes wrong at night.

“Emma calls me,” I said. “My charge nurse knows. If it’s bad, Emma calls 911 and then calls me. The ER is twenty-two minutes away. I can be home in twenty if I drive like Josh.”

Becky almost smiled at that.

“Is there an adult close by she could go to?”

I thought about it, and the honest answer was no. My mother is in Defiance and doesn’t drive at night anymore. Josh’s folks are in Florida in the winter. Jeff is forty minutes out in the country, with three kids of his own.

“Not really,” I said.

Becky wrote that down too.

Emma

Emma came home from school at 3:20 that day. Becky had asked to talk to her, so Becky came back.

I want to say this clearly. My daughter did nothing wrong. She is the most careful child I have ever known. She checks the stove knobs twice before bed. She makes the boys’ lunches the night before and writes their names on the bags with a Sharpie, because Sam likes to see his name.

Becky talked to her at the kitchen table while I sat on the stairs where I could hear but not be in the way.

“What time do the boys go to bed?”

“Sam at eight. Cole at eight-thirty, but he reads till nine.”

“What time do you go to bed?”

“Ten. Ten-thirty sometimes. I have to do homework after they’re down.”

“Are you ever scared?”

There was a long pause. I gripped the banister.

“Sometimes when the wind’s bad,” Emma said. “The furnace makes a noise. But Dad showed me what the noise is, so it’s fine.”

I had to put my hand over my mouth on the stairs.

Becky asked her a few more things. Did she know the address to tell 911. Could she get the boys out the back door in a fire. Where would they go. Emma answered all of it, steady as a grown woman.

Then Becky came out to the front room and sat down across from me.