Free Jack & Jill by Kealan Patrick Burke Page A

length, "What did you say?" I asked her, and whispered a short prayer, the first I could recall uttering in my adult life, that her response would be something benign.
    What I got was no answer at all.
    I waited, held in place by panic. "Honey," I asked the quiet room. "Honey, what did you say?"
    Again, only silence.
    "Jenny, answer me." How I longed in that moment for the familiar and ordinarily infuriating hornet-in-a-jar buzz from her iPod ear buds. It would have been a normal, innocuous, everyday sound in a room that suddenly felt pregnant with expectant dark.
    Sick to my stomach, I jerked my hand upward and light flooded the room. I snapped my head around to Jenny, to the chair, and found it empty, my daughter's name dying on my tongue before I had a chance to speak it.
    Confusion buzzed through me, the taste of copper filling my mouth as a new headache tapped gently but insistently at my right temple. Another hallucination?
    I looked again toward t he bed, at the folds where the iPod lay, and realized those folds had formed around my daughter's body. She was in her bed, and squinting up at me through newly wakened eyes. Her hair was spread out around the pillow, and she frowned at me and raised a hand to block the glare of the light.
    I slowly, carefully sat down next to her, as if afraid she might prove intangible, another facet of my imaginings. "What did you...?" I began to ask again, then thought better of it. It was clear now that she had been in her bed all along. The covers were warm, the ear buds still nestled in her ears. She had fallen asleep while listening to her music. Nothing strange about that. Nothing strange here at all. And yet there was a lingering unease in my chest, an unsettling feeling in my brain that indeed something was wrong here, that I'd imagined nothing. Perhaps my exhaustion combined with the shadows in the room had merely composited an optical illusion from clothes, flattening perspectives of various objects to form an impression of my daughter's likeness sitting at her desk. It seemed unlikely given the clarity of what I'd seen, but fine, if I had to concede that it was possible, if not probable, then I could. But what of her words? Had I imagined them too? Or simply misinterpreted as sinister something she'd mumbled in her sleep? Maybe she'd been dreaming, and said: "Here to tuck me, Mommy?" and not "He touches me, Mommy." But she was too old for such infantile requests and I knew it.
    I brushed a lock of my daughter's hair away from her forehead and she offered me a wan smile.
    "You okay?" she asked.
    "I am. You?"
    "Uh-huh. What time is it?"
    "Late. Go back to sleep. I'm sorry I woke you."
    She nodded and closed her eyes.
    I rose, and stood for a moment watching her. Then: "Jenny?"
    "Mmm?"
    "Thank you for watching Sam tonight."
    "S'ok."
    You saw nothing , I told myself. You heard nothing. And if you did, remember what happened with Sam. You're tired, and sick. You need help. Until you get it, keep it together. It'll be fine in the end. Just hold on.
    I bent down and kissed Jenny on the forehead, just as I had done with Sam, the difference being that if Jenny had been fully conscious, she wouldn't have stood for suc h an overt display of affection. Likely, she'd have scowled and reminded me how old she was. But the kiss was less for her than for me. I needed the emotional contact to remind myself I was still here among people who loved me, and not on the far side of some dark plain screaming at hallucinations while the real world tried to shake me off. I was afraid, and no amount of self-counseling could lessen the feeling. If I was imagining all of these crazy, nightmarish things, how crazy did that make me? What if the therapist heard my story and decided the best thing for me was institutionalization or a pharmaceutical regimen that would turn me into a drooling zombie? Would it be any worse an existence than this one? I asked myself and decided that no, it wouldn't. I had agreed to