My heart was racing. I gripped the banister until the veins in my hands popped and I thought the wood was going to snap beneath the pressure.

I waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t I climbed the rest of the stairs. Once I was in my bedroom I shut the door and leaned with my back against it. Almost as quickly I turned around and pressed my ear against the wood. I couldn’t hear any movement. I took seven reverse steps up until the backs of my knees were touching the bed, then I spread my arms wide and fell backwards.

When I was seven my mother left my father. She also left me, but mostly she left my father. She told me that before she carried her two suitcases out the front door and climbed in the cab. I have to do this for myself. He’s killing me slowly. I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving him.

I never had the courage to ask her why she wasn’t taking me. I watched her leave from the living room window with my hands pressed against the glass in a silent STOP. Her parting words to me had been, You’ll feel me in the fall backwards. She’d kissed me on the mouth and walked out.

I never saw her again. I never stopped trying to figure out what she meant. My mother had been a writer, one of the obscure artsy types who surround themselves with color and sound. She published two novels in the late seventies and then married my father, who she claimed sucked all the creativity out of her. Sometimes I felt like I became a writer just to make her see me. Consequently, I was very good at it. I’d yet to feel her in the fall backwards.

I stared at the ceiling and wondered what it would feel like to have someone’s life in your hands, and then to watch that life slip away like Isaac had. And when had I started to call him Isaac? I felt myself drifting off and I closed my eyes, welcoming it. When I woke up, I was screaming.

Someone was holding me down, I writhed left and then right to get away. I screamed again and I felt hot breath on my face and neck. A crash and my bedroom door swung open. Thank God! Someone is here to help me. And that’s when I realized that I was alone, lying in the residue of a dream. No one was here. No one was attacking me. Isaac leaned over where I lay, saying my name. I could hear myself screaming and I was so ashamed. I squeezed my eyes closed, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t make it go away—the feel of cruel, relentless hands on my body, tearing, pressing. I screamed louder until my voice grew fingernails and tore into my throat.

“Senna,” he said, and I don’t know how I heard him above the noise I was making, “I’m going to touch you.”

I didn’t fight as he climbed in bed behind me, and stretched both of his legs on either side of mine. Then he pulled me back until I was leaning against his chest, and wrapped both arms around my torso. My hands were curled into fists as I screamed. The only way to deal with the pain was to move, so I rocked back and forth and he rocked with me. His arms anchored me to what was real, but I was still halfway in the dream. He said my name. “Senna.”

The sound of his voice, the tone, calmed me a little. His voice was a slow thunder.

“When I was a little boy, I had a red bike,” he said. I had to stop screaming to hear him. “Every night when I went to bed I begged God to give my bike wings so that in the morning, I could fly away. Every morning I’d crawl out of bed and run straight to the garage to see if he answered my prayers. I still have the bike. It’s more rusted then red now. But I still check. Every day.”

I stopped rocking.

I was still shaking, but the pressure of his arms wrapped around my torso caused the trembling to taper off.

I fell asleep in a stranger’s arms, and I was not afraid.

Chapter Fourteen

Isaac breathed like he had trust. He pulled in his air steady and deep and exhaled it like a sigh. I wished I could be like that. But that was all gone. I listened to him for a long time, time enough for the sun to come up and try to press through the clouds. The clouds won, in Washington they always won. I was still wrapped in him, leaning against his chest—this man I didn’t know. I wanted to stretch my muscles, but I stayed still because there was something good about this. His hands were draped across my abdomen. I studied them since my eyes were the only things I dared move. They were average looking hands, but I knew that the twenty-seven bones in each of this man’s hands were exceptional. They were surrounded by muscle and tissue and nerves that together saved human life with their dexterity and precision. Hands could bruise or they could fix. His hands fixed. Eventually, his breathing lightened and I knew he was awake. It felt like a standoff to see who would make the first move. His arms left my body, and I crawled forward and stepped out of bed. I didn’t look at him as I walked to the bathroom. I washed my face and took two aspirin for my headache. When I came out he was gone. I counted the cards on the counter. He didn’t leave one that day.

He didn’t come back that night, or the next.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Or the next.

There were no more dreams, but not for lack of horror. I was afraid to sleep, so I didn’t. I sat in my office at night, drinking coffee and thinking of his red bike. It was the only color in the room—Isaac’s red bike. On January thirty-first my father called me. I was in the kitchen when the phone vibrated on the counter. There was no house phone, just my cell. I answered without looking.

“Hello, Senna.” His voice always distinct, nasally with an accent he tried not to have. My father was born in Wales and moved to America when he was twenty. He retained the European mentality and accent and dressed like a cowboy. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

“How was your Christmas?”

I immediately felt cold.

“Fine. How was yours?”

He began a detailed minute-by-minute account of how he spent Christmas Day. I was, for the most part, grateful I didn’t have to speak. He wrapped things up by telling me about his promotion at work; he said the same thing he repeated every time we spoke.

“I’m thinking about taking a trip out there to see you, Senna. Should be soon. Bill said I get an extra week’s vacation this year because I’ve been with the company twenty years.”

I’d lived in Washington for eight years and he’d never come to visit me once.

“That’d be great. Listen Dad, I’ve got some friends coming over. I should go.”

We said our goodbyes and I hung up, resting my forehead on the wall. That would be it from him until the end of April, when he would call again.