Here She Lies

bedsheet. He listened as Mack said there was no sign of breaking and entering, as Julie told him she had searched the house and nothing was missing, and as I explained about my wallet. Lazare then had his own look at the rogue window and, apparently satisfied with Mack’s assessment, opened his pad and made a few brief notes.
    “You should have the alarm company come in and check out the system,” he told Julie. “Do it tomorrow. You don’t want to lose another night of sleep.”
    “I will,” she said.
    “I’ll send someone over first thing in the morning to dust the window for fingerprints, just to be sure.” He peered sleepy-eyed into the blackness beyond the window, then slipped his notepad into the pocket of his nylon jacket. “If someone was out there, Mack would have seen him. Well, I’ll give you a call tomorrow, let you know what Forensics has to say about the window.”
    Julie saw him out. I went upstairs, back to my room,where Lexy’s deep, rhythmic breathing seemed to warm the air. And yet, when I got into bed between the chilly sheets, I felt cold. The glowing red face of the digital clock showed 2:16 A.M. At the sound of Julie’s footsteps in the hallway, I got up and popped my head out to say good night.
    “Think you’ll sleep now?” I asked.
    “Probably not. Damned malarm.” She didn’t have to explain; I knew she meant malfunctioned alarm.
    I smiled. “Sweet dreams, if you can.”
    “You too.”
    But I tossed and turned, wired from the excitement of the malarm. I felt a sickening awareness that I had never been so afraid, controlled by fear in a way I didn’t like. Being severed so abruptly from deep sleep had triggered a Pavlovian dread of the alarm’s ever going off again, even in the case of an actual intruder or a fire or some other reason we would need to be alerted to real danger. If the mere thought of it going off made me so tense, how had it registered in Lexy’s brain? They said that children had no memory until generally the age of three, but clearly some things were programmed during those early years. I remembered reading about a woman who had grown up in Israel saying that years later, living in America, every time she heard a car backfire she hunkered down, taking cover. To her, every explosive sound was a bomb. Would Lexy associate sudden noises with falling out of windows? Would her mind catalog the experience as having almost been thrown out of a window? Not that I was ever going to throw her, but what had her baby eyes seen from our angle at that height? Would ourmoments in the window later translate into an amorphous mistrust of me?
    As my mind ground over the possibilities, something else occurred to me. Why had the magnet slipped? I could understand it if the glue holding it in place had grown old and dried out, but the alarm system had only recently been installed. Could something have shifted it, like a movement of the window? Had someone tried to open it from outside?
    Definitely a paranoid thought. The magnet had simply slipped. But now I knew it would be impossible to sleep, so I got out of bed, checked Lexy (sound asleep; an angel), double-checked that all my bedroom windows were locked, picked up the receiving end of the monitor and walked quietly through the hall, thinking I’d go downstairs and read a while. The house was so still. Nothing creaked; floorboards and hinges were still too new to have acquired the complaints of an experienced house. Standing on the split staircase I wondered if Julie was awake and on impulse, instead of going down, I went up.
    She was sleeping, a long lump under her white blanket in her big king-size bed. The high-contrast room in the depth of night was neither black nor white but silver. A soothing, peaceful space. I put the monitor on the floor and got in beside her. Her bed was very comfortable and I immediately felt calmer and warmer, reassured, and without thought I fell into a dreamless sleep.
    In the morning I woke up with Julie swiveled in my direction, propped on her elbow, watching me. When I opened my eyes, she smiled.
    “Couldn’t sleep?”
    I stretched my arms. “This mattress is supercomfortable.”
    “It’s some kind of space-age foam,” she said, “supposedly developed by NASA. It holds the shape of your body.”
    “How much?”
    “Don’t ask.”
    Then I thought of Lexy and turned to look at the monitor. The sound and motion sensor was unlit, reassuring me that all was well.
    “Not a