He Comes in the Night

by Ricky Fry

  Mr. Bennett removed the fancy handkerchief from his breast pocket, the kind that was normally only for show, and dabbed her tears away. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned up. I won’t have you looking like the star of a Lifetime movie.”

  She did as the lawyer had said, and held her head high as they passed the sea of reporters gathered outside on the steps of the courthouse. Microphones were shoved in her face. Camera lenses framed her from all directions. But not once did she waver. Not once did she give them the satisfaction of recording her tears.

  As the car pulled away, she turned her attention back to practical matters. “What happens next? Will he go straight to prison?”

  Mr. Bennett, who had seemed more flustered by the media than she, straightened his tie and smoothed his jacket. “No, now we wait for sentencing. The judge set a date in two months.”

  “Two months?”

  “It’s typical,” he said. “He needs time to review the details of the case before deciding on an appropriate sentence. In the meantime, I’ll make another petition to extend bail until the hearing. It’s certainly not unheard of in white collar cases.”

  “So he might come home?”

  “At least until the sentencing. But don’t get your hopes up, Nancy. I’m a good lawyer, some might say a great lawyer, but the decision rests with the judge.”

  If you’re such a great lawyer, she thought, Byron would be riding home with us. “And what happens after sentencing? Then will he go to prison?”

  The lawyer straightened his tie again. “It’s hard to say. In the past, he might have gotten away with some probation, maybe a term of house arrest. But the public sentiment has shifted, and the courts have responded with tougher sentencing guidelines.”

  “How long?”

  “Nancy—”

  “How long, Anthony?”

  “If I had to guess, and mind you this is only a rough estimate, I’d say Byron is looking at five to ten years in federal prison. With good behavior, he could be out in as little as two or three.”

  Five to ten years. It was a long time. Nora would be in elementary school. Nancy wondered if their daughter would even recognize Byron when he came home, the father who’d spent her childhood in federal prison.

  Did it even matter? She was hardly a present mother. Nora’s first word had not been ‘mommy,’ but the name of the old nanny. Was it too late for them to be good parents? Was it too late to give their only daughter the attention and love she deserved?

  As the car approached the house, she was relieved to see the street was empty. The media already had their fill of soundbites, their videoclips for the six o’clock news. Soon, there would be another drama to fill the space between advertisements for smartphones and the latest blood pressure medications. They’d move on as quickly as they’d come, and the Hardaways would be forgotten.

  Her attention drifted to the sights of the city passing by outside the window. Boston had been home all her life. But now, with her husband on his way to prison, and the life they’d made shattered to pieces, it was less like home and more like some foreign, distant place she could no longer recognize. She closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping for a moment it was only a bad dream.

  “There’s one more thing, Nancy.”

  Her attention snapped back to the confines of the hired sedan. “Can it wait?”

  The lawyer sucked in air through the corners of his mouth. “It’s best to get ahead of these things. I don’t want you to be caught unprepared.”

  “Unprepared for what?”

  “It’s normal practice in these cases for the judge to order restitution.”

  “Restitution?”

  “Yes, the court will seize your assets, and sell them off to pay the victims back for their losses.”

  “What about Nora’s trust?” Her daughter’s trust was the only thing keeping them going month-to-month since the start of her husband’s trial.

  “It’s hard to say. But nothing is sacred, not in the eyes of the court. If you have any precious family heirlooms, jewelry that belonged to a grandmother or a great aunt, I’d find a box and bury it.”

  “And the house?”

  “It won’t be long.”

  So this is how it ends, she thought, a disgraced mother and her helpless daughter, wandering together through the cold streets of Boston. She imagined herself begging for change. “Can’t you do something?”

  “Look,” he said, “they won’t exactly throw you out on the street, not with a baby girl. I expect they’ll allow you enough to rent a small apartment, maybe a second-hand car to get yourself around.”

  Nancy’s worst fear had come true. She would have to be normal, to live like those woman she saw stuffing their snot-nosed kids into the backs of minivans and buying in bulk at the local Costco.

  She would have rather died in the streets.

  She took great care closing the heavy door behind her as she tiptoed into Byron’s study. Inez would surely be listening for her return with keen ears, and although Nancy loved the woman, perhaps even more than she had loved her own mother, she couldn’t bear the thought of facing her. It was only a matter of time before she would have to let her go.

  Byron kept his most expensive bottles on the bottom shelf of the liquor cabinet. It was one of his stupid jokes, she thought, as she poured herself a glass of his single malt whiskey. Things wouldn’t be the same without him. Her only hope now was that she might keep the house long enough to celebrate Nora’s first birthday.

  She took a sip of the whiskey and surveyed the room. It was all the same—the smell of the leather sofa, the unread books lining the shelves, and the desk where her husband had spent many long hours plotting the crimes that had brought their family to ruin. But something was different. Byron had been there only a few hours before, talking on the phone with Mr. Bennett as he prepared himself for the jury’s verdict. But now he was gone and she was alone. She was unprepared for how much it hurt. A single tear rolled down her cheek.

  No, she thought, I’ve done enough crying for the day. I have to be strong—strong enough to salvage whatever is left of Nora’s future.

  Another tear fell, then another. Maybe it was just the whiskey, or a general sense of exhaustion, or the empty relics of her husband. Maybe the years of expensive makeup and fake smiles and pretending to be happy had all finally converged on a single point. Whatever the cause might have been, the hard face she’d always worn—the same hard face that had once belonged to her mother—cracked into a thousand pieces. And she cried. She cried harder than she had ever cried before.

  She thought she might cry forever, balled up on the sofa in a soggy mess of tears, but her sobs were interrupted by a knock on the study door.

  “Please,” she said. “Go away.”

  The door slid open to reveal the old nanny, shadows falling across the lines of her wrinkled face.

  “What do you want?” She was surprised by the harsh tone of her own voice.

  Iryna only smiled as she crossed the room and lowered herself to the sofa. “I had a husband once, same as you. Of course, I was much prettier back then, some might have said the prettiest girl in our village. Oh, you should have seen him—so handsome and funny.”

  It had never occurred to Nancy that the old nanny might have a story to tell—a life before the night she arrived on their doorstep. “What happened?”

  “It was a beautiful spring day, and when he left with the other men to fish the North Atlantic, nobody could have imagined such a ferocious storm might appear in the skies above the sea.” Iryna’s gaze drifted off, as though she was reliving the tragedy in her mind. “A few pieces of their boat washed up on the beach in the weeks after, but the men were never found.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to be sorry, dear. It’s only a distant memory, and they say time heals all wounds. My only regret was not having a child to call my own.”

  “Is that why you became a nanny?”
/>
  A light shone in the old woman’s eyes. “I had so much love to give. It would be a shame if it went to waste.”

  “Iryna?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I’m a terrible mother.” The thought had come to her before, in those rare moments in between pills when she’d had the clarity to be honest with herself, but it was the first time she’d ever said it aloud.

  Iryna moved a hand to Nancy’s knee. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Don’t judge yourself too harshly.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “Nora hardly recognizes me. It was your name she spoke first, not mine.”

  The nanny’s face froze as though Nancy had caught her off guard. After a long pause, she lowered her shoulders and sighed. “I should have said something. It was anything but intentional, I promise.”

  Tears returned to Nancy’s eyes—wet, salty rivers running down her face. “It’s all my fault. I could have been there, but I was too busy attending parties and wooing clients for my husband. Now he’s going to prison.”

  Iryna slid closer and wrapped her arms around Nancy’s shoulders, pulled her tight to her chest. “That’s it, dear. Let it come. Don’t hold back.”

  She buried her face above the old woman’s breast and cried one tear after another, until there were no more tears to cry. It felt good, being held as though she was only a child. Whatever lingering suspicions she still had about the discrepancies on Iryna’s résumé were replaced by the woman’s gentle compassion and love. Her mother had never held her that way, not even the time they came to say her grandmother had died.

  “Come now,” said the nanny. “I’ll make some tea and draw a hot bath.”

  Nancy smiled. She wondered if tea and hot baths were Iryna’s answer to everything.

  She sent Inez home early. Still, the housekeeper had insisted on preparing dinner before she left.

  “I won’t have you going hungry,” she’d said, as she fussed around in the kitchen.

  Nancy tried to tell her the truth—in a matter of weeks she would be unable to pay her salary. But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. The thought of losing both her husband and her closest friend on the same day was too much for her to bear.

  She sat at the kitchen table and poked at Inez’s famous crab cakes. Baby Nora’s cries had sent the nanny upstairs to the nursery. Alone and without appetite, Nancy pushed the plate aside and trudged up the stairs to the bedroom she’d once shared with her husband. Though she was tired—an exhaustion rooted deep down in her bones—her troubled thoughts prevented sleep.

  She stared up at the coffered ceiling, replaying the events of the day in her mind, as she waited for the sleeping pill and a double dose of her precious anxiety medication to take full effect.

  She had no memory of falling asleep, but not long after she’d drifted off, she awoke to find herself alone in a forest. It was night, and strange, twisted shadows fell at her feet. She ran, branches scratching at her face, until she reached the shore of a lake. Something behind her made a sound, and when she spun around she saw a pair of red eyes moving toward her in the dark.

  She should have been afraid, but instead she welcomed him. It was a dance they’d done before—Nancy playing the part of the prey and he the hunter. She surrendered herself to him, and he took her her into his cold embrace.

  Pleasure pulsed throughout her body. It was something sex with her husband had never been, a wordless energy that surged up from the base of her spine, crackling and tingling her skin like lightning in a storm.

  She couldn’t say how long it lasted. It could have been hours or only minutes. But when it was over, and she’d finally succumbed to the climax of her pleasure, he held her close as she drifted off once more into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  She was jostled awake by the piercing wail of a siren and the screech of tires coming to a sudden stop in the driveway. Bouncing red and blue lights poured in through the window and filled the dark space of the master bedroom.

  It was the police, she thought. They must have discovered her unsuccessful attempt to destroy the evidence of their offshore accounts. Or maybe Byron had finally cracked and said something he shouldn’t have. They were coming to take her away, leaving Nora to fend for herself with neither a mother nor father. The poor girl would end up in one of those low-rent foster homes with six brothers and a mother with bad taste.

  Nancy flung open the closet and wriggled into a pair of black jeans, threw on her favorite sweater. She wouldn’t have them taking her to jail in her nightgown. Her face had already been all over the news, but a mugshot was something else entirely.

  She fumbled for her phone in the dark, not daring to turn on the lights and make herself an easy catch. She hoped she had time for one last phone call to the lawyer before they led her away in handcuffs. Mr. Bennett had, of course, given her his personal cell phone number, and she dialed it as she edged toward the window.

  “Yes?” The voice on the other end was slow and scratchy, as if the lawyer had also been asleep.

  “It’s Nancy,” she said. “I don’t have much time. The police have come for me.”

  “What are you talking about, Nancy?”

  She peered out the window at the source of the red and blue lights. It wasn’t a police car as she had expected, but an ambulance. “Just a second, Anthony.”

  “What the hell is going on over there?”

  Down below, two paramedics in white shirts jogged past the front door toward the entrance to the basement apartment. The caretaker was waving his arms in a panic.

  “False alarm,” she said. “I’ll have to call you back.”

  She hung up before the over-priced lawyer could ask more questions—the only thing lawyers ever did was ask questions—and made her way out to the sidewalk. The ambulance had been joined by a police car, and for a moment she thought it was all just a ploy to lure her out. It was only when she heard the panic-stricken cries of the caretaker that she knew something terrible had happened.

  “My son!” Tears gushed down the man’s face. “Please God, help my son!”

  “What’s happened, Leroy?”

  “It’s Connor. He’s not moving, Nancy. And when I touched him he was cold.”

  A police officer stepped in between them. “Are you the boy’s mother?”

  “No, but it’s my house.” It was still true, at least for a little while longer.

  “You’ll have to move aside.” The police officer motioned her back and turned his attention to the boy’s father, who’d collapsed to the ground in a puddle of tears.

  She could only watch the horrific spectacle unfold—the arrival of more police vehicles, the paramedics breaking the dreadful news to a devastated father, and the team from the medical examiner’s office removing the boy's body on a wheeled gurney. It was gruesome, seeing a young life with its myriad possibilities reduced to nothing more than a black plastic bodybag.

  Iryna emerged from the house with hot tea. Nancy was still on the sidewalk, sweater pulled tight against the cool night air. It hadn’t occurred to her to check on her own slumbering daughter until she caught sight of the nanny. “How’s the baby?”

  “She’s fine, dear. Sleeping like an angel.”

  Just then something caught her attention. Maybe it was only the rustle of leaves in the wind, but Nancy thought she heard someone whisper her name. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” The old woman cocked her head to the side and raised a single eyebrow.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. But as she gazed out into a darkened corner across the street, she saw a pair of red, glowing eyes staring back at her through the night.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Vladislav’s young eyes were as wide as saucers.

  “No,” said Bogdan. In fact, it was unlike anything he could have imagined. The city sprawled out before them in a tangled web, red tiled roofs extending in all directions. At the center of it all, the green, slow-m
oving waters of a wide river cut the city into two equal halves, joined together by the symmetrical stone arches of a half dozen bridges.

  Svyatoslav shrugged it off. He was the only one among them who, before their arduous journey over the mountains, had ever traveled more than a day or two from their village. “If you think that’s impressive, you should see Kyiv.”

  Bogdan didn’t care what Svyatoslav thought. They’d only just descended the last mountain pass when they first caught sight of the city. It was enough to take his breath away, but he couldn’t help wondering where in all that tangled mess they might begin.

  “Let’s find a tavern,” said the big man.

  “A tavern?”

  Svyatoslav slapped his forehead. “A tavern is where people gather to drink. I’m in need of some libations, and we can take a room to rest up. I’m tired of sleeping on sticks and stones.”

  Vladislav’s face lit up. “I need a drink, too.”

  “No,” said Svyatoslav. “What you need, my young friend, is a proper bath. You stink.”

  The boy raised an arm and sniffed. A joke had passed among them, in those tired moments when they’d stopped to bed down for the day, that not even the evil spirit would dare approach them once Vladislav had taken off his boots.

  “But we don’t have any money.” Bogdan felt ill prepared for the demands of the city. What did a handful of poor peasants know about such things?

  Svyatoslav rode up beside him and slapped him across the back. “Come now, you didn’t really think I planned to continue camping in the woods and chewing on dried meat? Stick with your old friend. I’ll take care of everything.”

  They rode together through the outskirts of the city, passing several taverns until the big man declared one suitable for his purposes. Once inside, he shuffled up to a game of dice that was already in progress. With great ceremony, he placed his wedding ring on the table.