Sarah woke up when the door to her bedroom clicked open. Or at least she thought she heard it open, she didn’t know now if it was part of a dream or if it had actually happened. She knew checking would wake her up and so she desperately tried to think back to what she had been dreaming about; hoping she could trick herself back to sleep. She had been dreaming about work? That was depressing. She spent enough time at the restaurant, and there was no need for her to go there in her subconscious when she was off the clock.

She had almost fully conjured the imaginary waitress’s station when she heard a floorboard creak back in the real world. The forming dream dissipated instantly as her hand shot up and pushed the night mask onto her forehead. She quickly blinked as the unexpected sunlight met her eyes. Her son, Johnny, stood by the bed waiting patiently as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and propped herself up on one arm.

“Good morning, mom.”

“Hi, baby,” Sarah said, “Are we late again?”

“You are, kinda, but I can still make the bus.” He looked from her to the nightstand where an empty vodka bottle sat with the cap beside it. There wasn’t even a glass in sight.

Sarah looked at the bottle and felt the urge to hide it, but knew her ten-year-old son knew well enough what it was and what she had done with the contents of it after putting him to bed last night. Well, and maybe just a little bit before. She stared at the bottle a moment longer, wishing she had put it away last night; wishing she didn’t get so goddamn irresponsible when she drank; wishing a lot of things were different. A throbbing pain behind Sarah’s right eye, that had been there since she woke up, reminded her she was indeed about to have another brutal hangover.

“Do you have time for me to make you breakfast?” Sarah asked, changing the unspoken subject.

“I already ate.”

“Well, did you…”

“Take my vitamins and pack my lunch? Yes.”

“Oh, Johnny,” she started, but didn’t know how to finish her sentence. She knew he deserved praise for being so independent at his age, but her internal monologue was scolding her for parenting in a way that he had to be this way in the first place. She thought she might cry and so she held out her arms and Johnny came over. The voice in her head (her mother’s voice, in fact) berated her once more as it was obvious Johnny knew this drill too well. Mommy looks like she is going to cry? Get ready for a hug. But he didn’t struggle or try to get out of it, even in front of his class mates, which Sarah prided herself in. Some of the other children made “fuck you” faces at their parents’ requests for public affection, even before they even knew they were doing it. But not Johnny. Maybe he knew his mommy needed it more than the other ones? A rebellious tear slid down her face.

“Well, you have a wonderful day at school. Okay, baby?” She said, wiping up tear that had escaped. Her hand had a smudge of black when she brought it back down and she realized she hadn’t even taken her makeup before going to bed. This made her really want to bawl, but she also knew Johnny had seen enough of this to last him a lifetime. No, she would get Johnny on the bus and then her and her mental mother could hash it out, maybe over a bloody Mary? Too soon?

“I love you, mom.”

“I love you too, Johnny.”

She began to get out of bed, to dig about in the scattered piles of clothes throughout the room for a robe she could walk Johnny to the bus in, but he stopped her before she even peeled the covers back.

“Why don’t you stay in bed a little while longer?” he asked, in that backhanded way only children could do when they didn’t know how to best feign politeness. He looked into her red eyes with streaked mascara beneath them. “I can walk myself to the bus. You rest.”

She wanted to protest and be the voice of reason, even if he was right, but he didn’t give her a chance. He kissed her on the cheek and then scuttled out the door. Moments later, Sarah heard the front door open and then shut and she knew Johnny was gone. Though he was fairly quiet to begin with, his departure always left a cold emptiness to the house.

Sarah moved the vodka bottle on her night stand to the side and saw it wasn’t even seven o’clock quiet yet. She still needed to converse with the voice in her head and then there would inevitably be something for her to do with the lump in her throat, but, for now, the headache spreading from behind her eye and into her temple was forcing her back down onto the pillow. She didn’t have to be into work till noon and there would be plenty of time to straighten up the house before then. Or she could always wait to do that tomorrow, her favorite daily excuse.

Slowly, as if to deter her hangover from worsening, Sarah pulled the night mask back down over her eyes. She had long forgotten about the work dream and instead focused on her usual sleep meditation which consisted of driving around the country roads of her childhood home town. If I was at my house, and I wanted to get to the post office, what would that look like? She would think and away she would drive, usually by bicycle (as she had in those days) this made the trip longer, and a bit more boring, which was perfect for putting her back to sleep (well, nearly perfect – vodka was actually much better at the job).

She was just pedaling onto Main Street when Sarah heard approaching footsteps again. Maybe it was Henry she thought for the millionth time, before her brain had to remind her again that her husband had been dead for five years. He wasn’t coming back to bed ever, she thought, and he also wasn’t there to protect her. She lifted up the sleep mask again to find nobody was in the room.

Maybe she had imagined the footsteps? She thought about trying to go back to sleep again, but knew it would be a lost cause. Perhaps today would be the day she got to the laundry she thought, throwing the covers back and stepping out onto the cold bedroom floor.

Sarah did a quick stretch and yawned deeply which made her slightly woozy combined with the hangover. She let herself get reoriented with gravity then looked about the room and started picking up her favorite sets of work shirts from the scattered heaps and sniffing them to see if they needed a wash; they all did. She gathered these up and began to walk towards Johnny’s room to see if there was anything in his dirty clothes hamper.

Though Johnny was much better at staying on top of his laundry than she was, he was still quite terrible with the amount of clothing that he wore. Once after a particularly long bout of doing laundry, something like seven full loads, she had told him he must have more wardrobe changes than Cher. The reference was completely lost on him, but it made her laugh as she continued to fold the clothes. It was true though; he often even came home from school with a second set of dirty clothes in his school bag that she had never even seen him pack!

“I really need to check his bag before he leaves” she said aloud. “Oh, now you’re talking to yourself, Sarah? Dr. Mikel will love to hear this.”

Sarah’s mother in her mind cleared her throat.

“Don’t you start,” she said, turning into Johnny’s room.

She stopped directly outside the door when her eyes crossed over the unexpected sight of skin; of someone else in the home she presumed to be empty.

“Johnny?” Sarah asked, dropping the clothes she was carrying to her feet.

His head spun in surprise. In the next fraction of a second, Sarahprocessed the curls of his hair bouncing as his head turned to face her and that Johnny was as naked as the day she gave birth to him. She saw his thing, as they had codenamed it years ago, when Henry was still alive, and she was embarrassed. Sarah thought to look away from his nudity, his thing, but she was in complete shock which only heightened when the door slammed in her face; though Johnny stood still feet from it. Someone else had shut the door.

“JOHNNY!” she yelled, reaching for the knob and finding it locked, “JOHNNY! OPEN UP!”

Johnny screamed, his prepubescent voice still shrill like that of the opposite sex.

“JOHNNY!” Sarah screamed again, though she was scared now and crying as she pounded at the door, “DON’T HURT HIM! LET ME IN!”

Her son’s piercing cry stopped abruptly.

Before her brain could even process what her body was doing, Sarah stood back and began to kick at the door near the door knob. A book of random facts Henry had told her lay open in her mind’s eye and she knew this is where she needed to kick, or was it ram? Either way, she could feel the door giving with each burst of force and when she delivered the fourth or fifth kick, the door swung open, knocking against a shelf of Johnny’s action figures and sending them in disarray across the bedroom floor.

The room was empty.

Sarah ran in and looked to the right where the other person had to have been standing outside of her view before. There was no one there, or behind the now broken door, or under the bed.

“Fucking shit!” Sarah cried out as she stepped on an action figure on her mad dash to the window.

She looked out the window. Again, there was more nothing. The panic in her mind began to blur her vision and when she forced her eyes to refocus they set themselves on the window latch; it was locked shut. She spun around looking at the room again, thinking she might have missed a spot, but she knew she hadn’t.

Sarah raced back to her room and began to shift the piles of clutter on the top of her night stand in hopes her phone wasn’t hiding as well as usual. Unfortunately, it was and so it took the better part of five minutes before she found it on the inside of the pillowcase she had passed out on. She usually squealed slightly when she found her phone on her own, but this time there was no room for excitement in the waves of panic that were crashing down upon her.

She began scrolling through her contacts, her hands shaking hard enough that she almost dialed several people on accident. She stopped herself, holding the phone, and closing her eyes.

“Breathe, Sarah. Breathe.” She told herself, tilting her head back. She needed to calm down before she got anyone on the phone.

She looked back at the phone. Her hands were twitching now more than shaking, which was better. She found the number for Johnny’s school, hesitated, then placed the call. Sarah began to pace on the fourth ring.

“Pick the fuck up, people.” She said, as the fifth ring abruptly stopped and the phone cluttered off of its base.

“Shadowhedge Elementary. This is Connie speaking. How can I help you?”

“Hi, Connie.” Sarah said, trying to steady her voice, “this is Mrs. Olmstead. I was just wondering…”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Olmstead,” Connie interrupted in her ceaseless peppy tone, “how are you?”

Sarah ignored the question and started again.

“I was just wondering if Johnny had made it in from the bus yet.”

“Oh, I see. Let me check.” Connie said, indifferent to Sarah’s directness. “It looks like he rides Pat Dean’s bus. 109. And that one should be arriving any minute. Would you like to wait or I can take a message and have Johnny call you?”

“Is there any way you can radio the bus? I’m trying to make sure Johnny made it to the stop on time.”

Why was she lying? She thought, but part of her also knew the answer. Still, one of Henry’s crime shows was reminding her this would look lousy on her part if something had happened to Johnny. Has happened to Johnny, she corrected herself, thinking that this entire reality was starting to fall apart like her work dream from this morning. Had she really seen Johnny standing naked in his room? She felt very much the answer was yes, but she would be lying to herself if she didn’t admit it already was starting to feel a little bit more like a no. Was she dreaming? She pinched her arm like they did in the movies. It hurt as much as her leg did from kicking in Johnny’s door and her head as much as it did from her evening of drinking.

“Mrs. Olmstead? Are you there?” Connie’s voice sounded from the phone waking Sarah from her daydreaming. “Mrs. Olmstead?”

“Hi, yes.” Sarah said, “I’m here.”

“Oh, good. I have Pat on the other phone, he says Johnny is on the bus. I told him to double check anyways, and he said he’s sitting in the second row back, he can see him with his own eyes.”

Sarah let out a sigh of relief, though part of her was very much anxious for a new set of reasons. What had she seen?

“Mrs. Olmstead? Is there anything else I can do…”

Sarah cut her off by ending the call and sat down onto the bed. She started off into space for some time thinking and then got up and made her way back towards Johnny’s room. When she walked by it, she didn’t bother looking in, but instead, continued on into the one upstairs bathroom her and Johnny shared.

A year after they had moved in, Sarah had discovered the mirror in the bathroom opened up into a medicine cabinet. It was a very “duh” moment when she made the discovery, but she marveled at it all the same and how it had escaped her attention for a full year when she looked into it several times a day. It wasn’t until the weeks after Henry’s death that Sarah started to use the hidden cabinet; stocking it with antidepressants, anxiety medications, and an assortment of other drugs Dr. Mikel had prescribed for her to get her through the bad times.

It had been five years since Henry’s death and Sarah had done her best to ween herself off of the medications, telling herself that Johnny was enough to get her through the rest of her days. “You’ve just replaced the pills with buckets of alcohol” the mental mother reminded her. But on this day, Sarah opened the cabinet and started reading through the labels in search of an old friend that often chased the hallucinations away.

It was the last bottle she read and she quickly scanned the label before placing two tablets from it on her tongue and bending over to wash them down with some stale tasting water from the faucet. She looked back up at the mirror, saw the mascara streaked face Johnny had to say goodbye to that morning and she began to cry. She cried long and hard and eventually she found she had walked all the way back to her bedroom without even realizing it.

She picked up the pillow she had tossed aside earlier and fell onto it and cried herself into a dreamless sleep. If she had been awake even a moment longer, she would have heard the ceiling in the hallway outside her bedroom groaning from the weight it was supporting in the attic as the man shifted from side to side. She might have even heard voices if she had stayed awake a little longer. But she was out like a light. And when she woke up, the house was silent and she was an hour late for work.

Next Chapter: Chapter 2