My high school had a student exchange program. The idea of spending half of my senior year somewhere more exotic than the American Midwest was exciting. My junior year I got my parents’ permission to sign up and apply for the state education department’s merit scholarship to spend the first semester of my senior year with a host family abroad.
I got the scholarship and placement in jolly old England. At first glance, it wasn’t all that different. Sure, the school had its quirks. We had uniforms, for one, which was a first for me. We spoke near the same language, but things like how the “the” in front of nouns got dropped seemingly at random, meaning people went to hospital and not the hospital took a bit for me to catch on to. Also, the phrase “maths class” will always sound off to me, even after months of attending one. But everyone was nice, and my host family was very welcoming to me. They designated a spare room for my use; it was small and cozy, with a twin bed, desk, and large walnut wardrobe that more than accommodated all the clothing and things I’d brought along.
I had a good time trying out rugby (didn’t make that team) and soccer/football (a team I did make), and generally had a good time, making friends with the other guys via the time-honored tradition of talking trash about each other’s respective homes. Teenage boys have few brain cells and no filter, and I’m not proud to say we were all little edgelord morons true to form. Jokes ranged through stereotypes both trite (comparing their dental situation to a store’s entrance on black Friday, them cheerily ribbing me about the rascal scooter flotilla they assumed all Americans traveled in like a pod of whales) and current- how nice it must be for me to go to a school with no danger of getting shot, with my response being some iteration of how polite folks were on Knife Crime Island, and how getting stabbed was much better, had that personal touch. I can feel your eyes rolling, but we bonded through our shared idiocy and still keep in touch to this day. Well, I never got stabbed, but I came closer to it than any of the glossy brochures about the exchange program would have led me to believe, in my first month there.
One of the toiletries I ran out of first was contact lens solution. My host mom was all too happy to take me around to the shops and help me locate it. The druggist closest to their tidy brownstone was small, thus limited the stock they had. My usual brand was unavailable, save in an inconvenient travel size that I’d have run through in a week. Instead, I ended up with a brand I’d never heard of before but said all the assuring things you’d want out of a storage solution for your sight. It promised to erode any build-up on my lenses – gross, but a known problem to anyone who wears contacts - and had a strange little tube with small plastic cages for each lens in lieu of the usual glasses-shaped two-compartment case. Well, I’d come across the Atlantic to try new things, right?
We made it home in time for her to get dressed for a standing weekly dinner date she and her husband kept every Thursday night. She left a plate of food for my dinner – beef and potato stew – and I bade them farewell from the stoop of their townhouse. I was grateful for a couple of hours to myself. While I am extroverted, way more so than anyone else in my family, even I can use the occasional bit of time to myself. So, I ate dinner, finished the last bit of homework I had, and replied to an email from my baby sister back home. It was about eight PM but feeling tired I decided to call it a night and get some shut-eye. I used the bathroom, taking a few extra minutes to figure out my new contact lens case and solution. Like I said, it was a tube situation, with a trap for each lens that protruded from the cap and hung down into the little cylinder, which was filled with solution from a white squeeze bottle. Unlike the stuff I used back home, this appears to fizz when my contacts hit the solution. I thought again of the “build-up” mentioned on the packaging and shuddered, then brushed my teeth and started walking across the landing to my bedroom.
But as I did, I heard a noise coming from downstairs. It almost sounded like a door closing. But… my host parents weren’t due back for another hour.
Maybe they’d come home early? I called out “Mrs. Peters? Mr. Peters?” But no answer came back. It was dead silent. Something about that unnerved me. It felt like an occupied silence. Not the silence of an empty house, but one in which someone hid, holding their breath. Slowly, I walked about halfway down the stairs, squinting and grimacing as I tried to “look around” with my contacts out. It was quiet still, and I saw no movement as I descended, looked around, wandered from room to room- something I wouldn’t need to see details to see. I found nothing. But… I just had that feeling that there was something. I turned back to the stairs and back up to the bathroom. Without my contacts I’m as blind as a bat; if I wanted to stand a chance against an intruder or, more likely, be able to confirm there was no intruder at all, I’d need to pop them back in to see.
What I didn’t realize was that the contact lens solution I’d bought wasn’t saline like I’d always used. It was 2% hydrogen peroxide. 2% isn’t much on paper but believe me: it’s a huge difference for something that goes into your eyes. The first contact stung, but the second one hurt like hell, making my eyes well up almost instantly, attempting to eject the burning contacts by washing them out of my eyes. The tears made it near impossible to get a good grip on my eyelids to get the contacts out. As I pawed at them with my fingers, my eyelids began to swell, making it even harder to get in there and get them out. I was bent over the sink, completely blind, as I fished for them, my panic at the burning in my eyes mixing with the fear that someone had broken in, it wasn’t just nerves or being in a new place, and I had a limited amount of time to get my sight back. My idiot brain decided now was a good time to imagine that not only was someone in the house with me, but that they were, in the tradition of all good horror movies, stood right behind me, and once I popped back up, I’d see them in the mirror over the sink, ready to attack me from behind.
I finally got the damn things out and immediately bent forward, flushing my eyes out with water from the tap. My heart was trip-hammering, idiot brain assuring me that someone was behind me, ready to strike. I sprang up and half turned, my abused eyes as wide as I could make them, to see my attacker.
There was no one there.
My breath, which I’d been holding, whooshed out of me, and I laughed aloud. I then turned my attention to the box my contact lens solution had come in. How I had missed the big red warning *not* to try putting in your contacts before 6 hours had passed and the peroxide had a chance to neutralize, I had no idea. I felt pretty dumb as I turned back to the mirror to assess the damage. My eyes were red, the skin around them still swollen, but I thought the damage to be superficial, and hopefully cleared up by morning.
Then, in the mirror, I saw the shower curtain behind me twitch.
A pause, only long enough for my heart to painfully skip a step, then land with both feet deep in my chest.
Then, like a starter pistol had fired, I bolted from the bathroom.
Behind me, I heard the shower curtain rustle as whoever had been hiding behind it ripped it to the side, heavy footsteps banging on the floor tiles as they sprang from the tub. I was panicked, sprinting, flailing my arms and legs ahead of me to pull me forward and away from this living nightmare. I heard a bunch of clunking and a low shout, followed by a thud that shook the second floor, sending me into a panic. A panic in which I did not run down the stairs. I wasn’t thinking. I was a living nerve ending, fear pulsing through me, my heart beating so hard it hurt. I ran instead, half-blind and in a dead sprint, to my bedroom and into the heavy dark wardrobe, the doors swinging shut with a tiny creak, plunging me into darkness. Again, I heard heavy footsteps, still echoey and far. The thud and shout of surprise may have been him tripping, falling- why else hadn’t he been on my heels? I didn’t know. I knew nothing, nothing except hiding in this dark, quiet space was life or death.
Then. Footsteps. Not echoey. Not from the bathroom. Closer, outside the bathroom, on the landing. The footsteps paused. I remember sending out a babbling, stream of consciousness prayer.
Then, I heard the footsteps hit the stairs. Whatever this intruder was – cold blooded killer or hopped-up junkie – even they couldn’t believe I was dumb enough not to make a run for the door downstairs.
The clomping continued all the way down the stairs and back into what sounded like the kitchen. I held as still as I could, trying to think of what to do. The house phone was in two rooms- kitchen downstairs, and my host parents’ room upstairs. Could I make it across the landing silently enough that the intruder wouldn’t hear, realize, charge back upstairs to deal with me?
Well, I had to try.
I slowly eased the wardrobe door open a crack. Light from the hallway, usually unremarkable as far as illumination goes, looked as bright as the surface of the sun. My eyes immediately teared and snapped shut. God. I let the wardrobe door close again, and the darkness was a relief. How was I meant to evade detection, find a phone in a room I’d never been past the doorway in, ring 9-9-9 (the first thing my parents, host parents, and temporary professors had impressed upon me was over here, it wasn’t 9-1-1) and get the old guard to come and save me from this psycho? Blind?
As though my thoughts were making actual noise, I then heard a sound that sent a cold chill through my body: the stairs creaked. Oh. Oh no, he was coming back upstairs. How long until he looked in the conspicuous wardrobe and found me, scared and so blind I wouldn’t be able to stop… whatever he was planning? I held my breath again as I felt the trickle of new tears roll down my face. Whether they were from the fresh pain of exposure to light, or from panic and dread I couldn’t tell you. My fear felt oversized for my body, and it plus the pain forced them from my eyes.
The front door downstairs had a distinct sound, owing to it not being hung on its hinges perfectly straight. The rhythm you’d hear when the front door opened, and I heard as tears coursed down my face, was swing and creak, rush of outside air into the entryway, thud as the door dropped against its hinges a bit, creak, and swing-bang shut. If I wasn’t already weeping at my sure doom, I would have done for relief as I heard my host dad call out for me.
Then, a sound that turned my insides to water. The heavy footsteps doing a quick pivot and clump out of my room. While I had been silently (I thought, anyway) sobbing in the wardrobe, he had snuck into my room, and had been standing right in front of the wardrobe when my host parents had returned.
The heavy boots tore off in a dash down the stairs. I heard my host dad loudly exclaim and host mom give a startled shriek, “wha, what’s this then?!” Mr. Peters bellowed as my would-be executioner sprinted through the kitchen and out the back door. There was the sound of many footsteps then, and as I shoved the wardrobe door open and stumbled out I couldn’t make sense of where any of them came from. Another little shriek came, much closer. It was my host mom, who’d run upstairs to find me, and was now suddenly at my side, her cool hands on either side of my face. “Oh God, Oh God, are you alright? Did he hurt you then?”
I forced my tortured eyes open and took in her flushed face and worried expression. I explained what I could, that I had blinded myself and managed to get away and hide without him hurting me, a story I repeated when my host dad got called into their bedroom to re-tell it as he talked to the emergency services. While I hadn’t gotten a good look – any look- at the intruder, my host parents had. They were able to describe a man with coarse brown hair and beard, dark green track jacket, and wild eyes, the pupils so blown they looked like ping-pong balls with Sharpie marker dots on them.
The police came, walked through the kitchen to retrace what had happened. Scuffs on the doorjamb of the kitchen door led them to deduce he’d popped the lock and gained entry to the house there. One of the police officers, a red-haired girl with serious gray eyes, was the first to notice not just what was new- scuffs, tracks, dirt- but what was missing. It was conspicuous when you looked at it, as the kitchen buther’s block bristled with 6 knives, all in order from largest to smallest. The largest slot at the top though. It was empty. The chef’s knife from the butcher’s block was gone.
The police retraced his steps up the stairs and to the bathroom. That gave me another chill- the mud he’d tracked in made it clear he’d not dallied or looked around. He’d moved like he had a plan. Kitchen. Knife. Directly upstairs. Directly to the bathroom. This left little doubt that his motive had been bodily harm, not robbery. He’d done to the open bathroom door, taken a couple of steps here like he’d been adjusting his stance as he watched… something. Someone. Me. How long had he been there, watching me? When had he slipped behind me, seeing his own reflection in the bathroom mirror as I bent over the sink, defenseless, quite literally giving him my back. Had the water in the sink been so loud that his boots had been muffled, even as he stepped into the ceramic bathtub? Why?
Seeing the tracks of dirt from his boots in the tub answered none of these questions, and the following investigation similarly yielded non-answers. The police believed the man to be an itinerant who had been under the influence – alcohol, drugs, forces chemical or malevolent. He’d broken in, perhaps with no motive at all save whim or instinct. He’d been discovered, knowing this when I came from the bathroom, down the stairs- had I walked right by him? Instead of escaping, he’d hung around to find me. He’d followed the light like a moth through the dark kitchen and up the stairs, then followed the sound of the sink to the bathroom. He had no clear motive per the police. But he’d thought to take a knife up the stairs with him. I’m no cop, but to me it seemed clear he had some motive, some plan. Something involving a person and a knife.
My host parents were beside themselves. My host dad kept muttering “Good God,” and pacing through the house, cursing the weak lock on the kitchen door and himself for not seeing to it sooner. My host mom retrieved a vial of eye drops and insisted on gently holding my battered eyelids open so she could flush out any lingering trace of the hydrogen peroxide. It felt wonderful, and the sheer, bracing relief that they were here, I was safe, sent more tears to mix with the eye drops dripping down my face. They were both just constantly apologizing that I, a guest to their home and country, had been so terrified. I told them over and over it wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t. Who can be responsible for a wandering maniac, drawn to a locked door, a glittering knife, and a bathroom light?
They didn’t find the guy – no resolution there. Host Dad installed a whole new door. It was heavy, and for the remainder of my time there, foreign in its sound. That door left me more sad than anything. The old brownstone was a relic from the early days, 1800s or even earlier than that, and every piece of it was warm and charming. In such a house of known creaks, squeaks and clatters, the big, reinforced security door added an off-key, almost obnoxious heavy metal grating sound, closing with an air of finality. It was like the house had lost its innocence. I made a point of never using the kitchen door after that. Its presence was a reminder of how, like the house had lost something, I very nearly had too.
My life.