What are you worried about?
I don’t want to spend another night in the house, but leaving right away would mean driving too many hours in the dark. I tell myself I’m just scared, that it’s better to rest so tomorrow I can think about things more clearly. But it’s a terrible night.
Why?
Because I don’t sleep well. I wake up several times. Sometimes I think it’s because the room is too big. The last time I wake up, it’s still dark out. It’s raining, but that’s not what alarms me when I open my eyes. It’s the violet light coming from Nina’s bedside table. I call her name, but she doesn’t answer. I get out of bed and put on my robe. Nina isn’t in her room, or in the bathroom. I go downstairs clutching the railing; I’m still half asleep. The light in the kitchen is on. Nina is sitting at the table, her bare little feet dangling in the air. I wonder if she is sleepwalking, if this is what sleepwalking children do, and also if that’s what you do at night, when Carla says she finds your bed empty and you’re not in the house. But of course, that’s not important now, right?
No.
I take a few more steps toward the kitchen and I see that my husband is there, sitting across the table from Nina. It’s an impossible image—how could he have come in without my hearing him? He’s not supposed to be here until the weekend. I lean against the doorway. Something’s happening, something’s happening, I tell myself, but I’m still half asleep. He has his hands folded on the table, he’s leaning toward Nina and looking at her with his brow furrowed. Then he looks at me.
“Nina has something to tell you,” he says.
But Nina looks at her father and copies the position of his hands on the table. She doesn’t say anything.
“Nina . . .” says my husband.
“I’m not Nina,” says Nina.
She leans back and crosses one leg over the other in a way I have never seen her do before.
“Tell your mother why you aren’t Nina,” says my husband.
“It’s an experiment, Miss Amanda,” she says, and she pushes a can toward me.
My husband takes the can and turns it so I can see the label. It’s a can of peas of a brand I don’t buy, one I would never buy. They’re a bigger, much harder kind of pea than what we eat, coarser and cheaper. A product I would never choose to feed my family with, and that Nina can’t have found in our cupboards. On the table, at that early-morning hour, the can has an alarming presence. This is important, right?
This is very important.
I go over to her.
“Where did this can come from, Nina?” My question sounds harsher than I would like.
And Nina says:
“I don’t know who you’re talking to, Miss Amanda.”
I look at my husband.
“Who are we talking to?” he asks, playing along.
Nina opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She keeps it open for a few seconds, wide open, as if she were screaming, or exactly the opposite, as if she needed a lot of air and couldn’t get it. It’s a terrifying gesture I’ve never seen her make before. My husband leans over the table toward her, then a little more. I think he simply can’t believe it. When Nina finally closes her mouth, he suddenly sits down again, as if someone had been holding him up the whole time by an invisible lapel, and now they’d let go of him.
“I’m David,” says Nina, and she smiles at me.
Is this a joke? Are you making this up?
No, David. It’s a dream, a nightmare. I wake up agitated, this time completely clearheaded. It’s five in the morning, and a few minutes later I’m already packing one of the three suitcases we arrived with. At six I have everything almost ready. You like these observations, David.
They’re necessary. They help with remembering.
The thing is, I think over and over how strange my fear is, and it seems ridiculous to be already loading things into the car, with Nina still in her room, asleep.
You’re trying to get away.
Yes. But in the end I don’t, do I?
No.
Why not, David?
That’s what we’re trying to find out.
I go up to Nina’s room. I pack her bag while I try to wake her up. I’d made her some tea, and I brought it up with her packet of cookies. She wakes up and has breakfast in bed, still sleepy, watching me fold the last articles of clothing, put away her markers, stack her books. She’s so sleepy that she doesn’t even insist on knowing where we are going, why we are going back sooner than planned.
My mother always said something bad would happen. My mother was sure that sooner or later something bad would happen, and now I can see it with total clarity, I can feel it coming toward us like a tangible fate, irreversible. Now there’s almost no rescue distance, the rope is so short that I can barely move in the room, I can barely walk away from Nina to go to the closet and grab the last of our things.
“Get up,” I tell her. “Come on, let’s go.”
Nina gets out of bed.