Free Jack & Jill by Kealan Patrick Burke

It wouldn't make a difference, I knew. He'd find a way to kick them off again, but he'd be warm for a w hile at least. As I bent down and kissed his brow, he mumbled "Mommy?" and I whispered to him a good night. He chewed contentedly on his dream and went back to sleep.
    I slipped out of the room, hesitating briefly at the door to wonder how I could ever have doubted my devotion to this beautiful little boy, to my daughter or my husband, and shook my head.
    You have a lot of work to do, lady , I thought, and gently closed the door.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    Jenny had, only in the previous year, instituted a new rule regarding her privacy. If the door wasn't ajar, then we had to knock and wait for an answer before entering her room. We were informed that it was never okay to just walk in, nor did we have the right. And though we of course knew she was absolutely entitled to her privacy, and had expected such declarations of secession from our decidedly uncool dominion for quite some time, we had to marvel at the way in which her demands were conveyed. She made it clear that these were not requests, but rules, and to violate them meant suffering her wrath, which translated as a hissy-fit and silent treatment that could last for weeks. The problem with this rule, however, was that another recent change in Jenny's life had been her discovery of and subsequent dependency on music, ubiquitously carried to her ears via the iPod Chris had bought her the Christmas before, so that even when we knocked on our daughter's door, chances were she wouldn't hear us. This left only two options: Knock louder, a tactic we could only employ when Sam wasn't asleep in the next room, or: Enter the room anyway and just hope that Jenny wasn't indisposed, or otherwise engaged in something deemed unsuitable for parental consumption by her high school BFF s.
    I knocked on the door and waited. No sound from inside the room, not even the faint tinny buzz of the music being pumped into her brain. I gave it thirty secon ds or so and then knocked again, a little louder this time.
    Another thirty seconds, and I eased open the door, just enough to increase the c hances of Jenny hearing me, not enough for her to declare it an invasion, and called her name.
    No answer.
    From downstairs, I heard the clink of a bottle and the whush of the fridge door closing. Suddenly I was eager to be back down there with Chris, capitalizing on this ceasefire before he got too drunk or too maudlin, or both. And , I told myself, you're the adult here for Chrissakes, yet you're standing outside your daughter's door like you're afraid of her. I frowned. Respecting her wishes was one thing, but acting like she was the boss was granting her a little too much power for her age. If it led to a war, then fine, I was willing to fight it, but Jenny would have to understand that if she wanted her privacy respected, she'd have to be available to hear it when someone came to her room.
    I pushed the door open. It was dark inside, but the expanding wedge of light from the hallway allowed me to see that Jenny was sitting at her desk in her nightdress, her back to me.
    "Hey, d idn't you hear me?" I asked.
    Clearly she hadn't, nor did it appear as if she'd heard me now. She just continued sitting there, motionless, so much so that I wondered if she'd fallen asleep in the chair.
    "Jenny?"
    Listening to that damn music, I thought, annoyed.
    But then I glanced at her unmade bed and saw the iPod lying amid the folds of her comforter like a raft in the troughs of a rough sea.
    I sighed— nothing's ever easy —and reached for the light switch. Jenny's voice, little more than a whisper, stopped the motion, and my heart, with four simple and yet devastating words: "He touches me, Mommy."
    I did not look at her. Did not move. Instead I stared at my hand, frozen there inches from the light switch, my shadow a misshapen lump thrown against my daughter's bedroom wall, and I told myself I had misheard.
    At