Praying for Sleep

the diffuse light of dawn. But now there’s nothing but darkness.
    The scuffling sounds outside the door.
    He’s coming. Lis lowers her head to her drawn-up knees. The wound on her cheek stings. Her torn elbows too. She makes herself impossibly small, condensing her body, and in doing so exposing wounds she didn’t know she had. Her thigh, the ball of her ankle.
    A huge kick against the wooden door.
    She sobs silently at the jolt, which is like a blow to her chest. It seems to send her flying into the stone wall behind her and her mind reels from the crash. In the hallway outside Owen says nothing. Was the blow one of frustration or was it an attempt to reach her? The door is locked, true, but perhaps he doesn’t know it can be locked from the inside. Perhaps he believes the room is empty, perhaps he’ll leave. He’ll flee in his black Jeep, he’ll escape through the night to Canada or Mexico. . . .
    But, no, he doesn’t—though he seems satisfied that she’s not inside this tiny storeroom and moves on elsewhere in the rambling basement to check other rooms and the root cellar. His footsteps fade.
    For ten minutes she has huddled here, furious with herself for choosing to hide rather than flee from the house. Halfway to the outside basement door—the one Michael had kicked open—she’d paused, thinking, No, he’ll be waiting in the yard. He can outrun me. He’ll shoot me in the back. . . . Lis then turned and ran to this old room in the depths of the basement, easing the door shut behind her, locking it with a key only she knows about. A key she hasn’t touched for twenty-five years.
    Why, Owen? Why are you doing this? It’s as if he’s somehow caught a virus from Michael and is raging in a fever of madness.
    Another crash, on the wall opposite, as he kicks in another door.
    She hears his feet again.
    The room’s dimensions are no more than six by four and the ceiling is only chest high. It reminds her of the cavern at Indian Leap, the black one, where Michael had whispered that he could smell her. Lis thinks too of the times as a girl when she huddled in this same space; then filled with coal, while Andrew L’Auberget was in the backyard stripping a willow branch. Then she’d hear his footsteps too as he came for his daughter. Lis read Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl a dozen times when she was young and although she understands the futility of concealment she always hid.
    But Father found her.
    Father hurt her doubly when she’d tried to escape from him.
    Still, she made this castle keep as defensible as she might—stockpiling crackers and water and a knife and flinging all but one of the green brass keys to the ancient lock into the lake, hiding the remaining one on a nail inside, above the door.
    But the mice got the crackers, the water evaporated, a cousin’s child found the knife and took it home with him.
    And the key proved irrelevant for when Father said open the door she opened it.
    Metal sounds on concrete and rings as it falls. Owen grunts as he retrieves the crowbar. Lis cries silently, and lowers her head. She finds in her hand the clipping—Michael’s macabre gift, spookier to her than the skull. As the blows begin, she clutches the newsprint desperately. She hears a grunt of effort, silence for the length of time it takes the metal to traverse the passageway outside then a resounding crash. The oak begins to shatter. Yet her room, so far, is inviolable. It’s the old boiler room next door that Owen is assaulting. Of course . . . That room has a head-high window. He’d be thinking that she would logically pick the room that offers an exit. But no—smart Lis, Lis the teacher, Lis the scholar after her father’s own heart, has cleverly chosen the room without an escape route.
    Another crash, and another. A dozen more. The wood shrieks as nails are extracted. A huge crack. His footsteps recede. He’s looked inside and seen that she isn’t there and that the window is still covered with dusty plywood.
    She hears nothing. Lis realizes that she can see again. A tiny shaft of light bleeds into the room around her through a crack in the thin wall shared with the boiler room. Her eyes grow accustomed to the illumination and she peers out, seeing nothing. She cannot hear her husband and she is left alone in this cell with the spirit of her father, a dozen pounds of ancient anthracite, and the clipping, which she now understand holds the explanation as to why she is about to