There could have been four strangers. There could have been one. My children are all adults now, healthy, happy, and unaware they might have died on a humid August night in 1985.
The tent trailer rotting in the grassy, mostly dirt driveway of our starter home should have gone to the dump and not the classified ads in the local paper.
Tent Trailer. Terrible condition. $500 OBO. Call Lawrence at…
If he was honest about the leaking canvas roof and the probable spider infestation, then Lawrence didn’t see any ethical dilemma.
“No one’s forcing anybody to buy it. We could use the money, Sharon.” The paper factory in the north end had closed up and moved to Toronto. We could have followed.
Instead, we stayed, and he lost his job as a foreman. Piecing together mortgage payments, living hour by hour, was his occupation now. So, I kept my reservations about selling the trailer to myself.
The week before the May long weekend brought a thirty-something man with a scowl to our driveway. My sons - a teen, an adolescent, and a toddler - observed him from a safe distance. I shared their caution. There was an aggression and tension to him, impatience, perhaps because his wife waited in the car.
Lawrence exited the trailer first with cash in hand. “You’re sure? This is more than I asked for.” The stranger didn’t answer, walking off to his car and promptly backing his hitch up the steep driveway, scraping his rear bumper awfully. I didn’t like the way he raced about without looking, so I made everyone go inside for popsicles.
“Morning Popsicles?” my eldest asked.
“Yay!” said Joel, the toddler, correctly answering his brother’s inquiry into the appropriate time for Popsicles.
“600 bucks,” Lawrence said when he came in. He was both happy and confused. “He counted wrong but didn’t say anything when I told him and tried to offer back the extra hundred. Weird.”
I shivered and not because of the Popsicles. The stranger was more than weird. He was off, but if you asked me why I thought so, I couldn’t say, aside from his irritating demeanour. The details of his appearance, his face, faded quickly. Physically, there wasn’t much to distinguish him. Nothing I noticed anyway.
“Happy for the money. Glad he’s gone,” I said.
Lawrence stared at the crisp bills and shook his head again. “A lot of weirdos out there.”
The matter became settled by our mutual conclusion regarding the stranger’s status as a weirdo. We moved on and forgot more about the tent trailer and the guy who paid too much for it.
A month flew by and Kyle, my second son, was suddenly turning seven, as of 2:36 AM specifically. He’d lied about going into my closet and finding the bike we’d bought him by telling us the previous night, “I’m going to bed now, and not into your closet. Goodnight.”
Kids are delightfully dull and it is lovely. I walked him to school and told him his older brother would be coming for him later.
Darren, my eldest, attended a school experimenting with a work-at-your-own pace format, and he’d completed his exams earlier than usual, so he hung around the house and watched TV unless my husband or I gave him something to do. Picking up Kyle most days was a job he accepted reluctantly and with many exasperated sighs.
Off he went as I iced the chocolate cake and tried to remember what my seven-year-old liked and detested on the pizza I hadn’t ordered yet. I went to our only phone, an oversized aqua green rotary dialer screwed to the wall of the kitchen. I reached for it and it started to ring, which made me jump a little.
“Hello?”
Heavy breathing.
“Uh, hello? Is someone there?”
More breathing. “Do you have any fucking clue what you did to me?”
I moved the phone from my ear about half an inch. “What?”
“I’m the guy that bought your shitty trailer.”
“Oh,” I said.
“My wife has forbidden us from ever going camping again.”
“Um, okay.”
“Okay?!” he shouted. “Not okay! That fucking thing is a piece of shit! Fucking spiders, fucking leaks. It rained all day.”
I was starting to get angry too. “Look, my husband told you the many problems with that trailer and gave you every chance not to buy it. He even offered back the extra you gave him but you’re such a dickhead, you didn’t bother to listen.”
“Fuck you, I want a refund.”
I replied in kind. “Fuck you, but no, that money is gone. We’re not a rich asshole like you. That money is long spent on bills. I’m sorry you had a rough time camping. Maybe next time someone speaks, you listen. Goodbye.” I began to move the phone back to its vertical cradle but a word in his next tirade caught my attention.
I brought the phone back to my ear swiftly. “What did you just say?”
“Your children. Your children. I’m going to kill your children.”
“You fucking try something and… hello? Fuck.” He’d hung up. I hung up the phone and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of a figure on the porch, pressing his face against the screen door. It was Darren.
“He wasn’t there,” he said.
“What? What do you mean he wasn’t there? Kyle wasn’t at the school? He wasn’t outside the school?” Panic surged through my body as I stiffly moved to the front door. Darren stepped back from the screen, enough that I could open the door and go outside.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
The look on my face must have told him what was wrong. Everything was wrong. Everything. Kyle was seven. Seven. Big for his age and a risk taker. He’d hop into a car if it gave him a quicker way home to his birthday party.
“Mom? It’s not a big deal. He’s done this before.” That was true. He had. Once. He had gone to play hockey at “the school” which we assumed meant Willowdale, his elementary school. That had been the plan he’d relayed to us.
Lawrence gave him some extra time before picking him up, seeing no harm in letting him play around a bit with his friends. Only Kyle and his friends weren’t there. They’d gone a few blocks to the Catholic school to play. The wrath of my husband isn’t mean or hateful; it’s anger born from the all consuming fear of losing his children. Kyle swore to never do anything like that ever again.
“He wouldn’t. Not again,” I said. “Go back to the school. Now.”
“Uh, okay,” Darren said reluctantly. He didn’t know about the call or the growing pit in my innards. “Mom!” he shouted. “He’s coming. Look, he’s there.”
I had left the porch and gone to the end of our walkway to the sidewalk without thinking. Kyle was skipping up our street. The big smile on his face diminished and collapsed under the weight of my glare.
“Where were you?!” I shouted into his little face, grasping his shoulders and pulling him into a hug before he could answer. I got the full story in pieces.
Essentially, he’d gone out from his last class and skipped his locker because he was excited to get home. When he went outside, he didn’t see Darren who’d been dragging his ass to pick up his little brother.
“I thought it was because I was older.” He thought we were surprising him with a new, unannounced responsibility: Walking without an adult. He left the school and somehow missed Darren along the way back, mostly because of a “shortcut” Kyle had found through a bait shop parking lot that went through an alley, out of sight, delaying his arrival.
All was quickly forgiven and the party ensued while Lawrence and I thought about what to do. We were young parents, didn’t know law and figured the police couldn’t do anything without a name. We’d learn later we were correct in this assumption.
By evening, when the kids were asleep, we decided to do nothing but be more vigilant in our proximity and observation of our surroundings. Time passed and, by summer break, life had more or less gone back to normal. The threat had been hot air, we figured.
There were no video games and only one TV without cable in the house. The kids played outside from early morning till evening in the summer. Only Darren stayed in to read when he wasn’t out with his friends.
Kyle did well at including his toddler brother in play with the other neighbourhood kids. I hadn’t dropped my guard exactly; there was just so much to do around the house.
I stepped out around lunchtime with a tray of PBJs and lemonade. The car parked across the street roared to life and its tires squealed as the driver peeled out, leaving a trail of exhaust and burnt rubber.
“What the hell was that?” I asked Kyle.
“What was what?” He didn’t understand my concern but gave me the story anyway. An hour or so ago, a man with a moustache had pulled up to the curb. He watched Kyle and the others and kept his seatbelt on the whole time, according to Kyle. Darren had come outside for whatever reason about twenty minutes before I had and asked about the man.
“Hey, Kyle,” he’d said, calling over his brother. “How long has that guy been there?”
Kyle didn’t know exactly. He’d been too busy playing.
“What are you guys doing?” Darren asked.
“Hide n’ Seek.”
“Where’s home free?”
Kyle had indicated the tree at the front of the lawn, a metre or so away from the car. Darren, shrewdly in his opinion, moved home free to the porch steps and armed whoever was “it” with a large plastic gun.
“That guy tries anything,” Darren had instructed the kids, “clock him with that.” Feeling he’d done his due diligence, Darren went back inside and had a popsicle.
“If anything like that ever happens again,” I told my sons, “tell me immediately. Got it?”
Lawrence had been away on a painting job, earning a bit of money. He’d had more words for his eldest and emphasised again the potential danger.
“I don’t get it,” Kyle confessed. “That guy was just in his car, sitting there. He didn’t do anything.”
Our second child had given voice to our next stumbling block to informing the police. It wasn’t illegal to park, even if you were being super creepy about it, was it? Yet again, Lawrence and I made no call.
“Do you think it’s him?” I asked Lawrence as we lay in our water bed, the window open, admitting the pleasant scent of woodsmoke from our neighbour’s chimney.
“Him? Him who?”
“The trailer guy. The guy who bought the trailer.”
I guess I sounded irritated that he didn’t immediately catch my meaning. “Jeese, don’t bite my head off. I’m tired.” He shrugged as one does when horizontal on a waterbed: Awkwardly and with rippling disturbances to the water sack filling in for a standard mattress. “I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I guess it’s possible.”
All useful additions to the conversation. There was nothing more to say. He rolled over and went to sleep. I pulled out a paperback and tried to read but stared up at the window instead. Was he going to carry through on his threat?
Despite my growing apprehension, July went by without further incident, and so too the first week of August. I hadn’t seen the first man waiting. Maybe the kids had been wrong about him. It was strange he’d sped off at the same time I’d come outside, but perhaps that was just a coincidence and I was being dramatic.
We tell ourselves these lies so we can sleep easier at night. Frequently, they work, but only if there is no contradiction from reality.
Kyle came running into the kitchen that August afternoon. “There’s a car. It’s a different colour, and there’s a guy in there, and I don’t know if he’s the same guy because the other guy had a moustache but maybe-”
I brought my pen and paper, the one I had placed on a table near the door for this exact moment. The car was indeed different. The previous had been a gold colour and this one was blue. Almost everything that occurred next was the same, however. Squealing tires announced the swift escape of the driver. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
My kids and some of the neighbour’s kids ran instinctively toward me, behind me, and my youngest, Joel, a three-year old, grabbed at my arms to be picked up. I couldn’t get my arms free in time to write, and when I finally did, the numbers on the licence plate were hopelessly blurry. I had remembered a notepad and pen. I had forgotten my glasses.
“Fuck,” I swore, and none of the kids said anything or made the typical “ooooooo” sound they did whenever someone said a bad word. “Inside, everyone.” I called the neighbours and had them collect their children so they could be safely escorted home.
“Gonna call the police?” Tracy McCall, from down the street, asked.
“And tell them what?”
“That some weirdo is stalking our kids, Sharon,” she retorted before dragging her son, Matthew, out the door. “God.”
Once again, Lawrence had been off on an odd job to pay the bills. The difference, however, is that he didn’t arrive home until late, proudly with a few extra bucks for overtime. He deflated visibly when I told him what had transpired. The kids were already asleep on the pull out couch in the living room.
“We’ll wake them up if we call right now,” he whispered. “Come on, I need some sleep. We’ll call tomorrow.”
It seemed pretty reasonable. If the police decided to act, then they’d likely come in the middle of the night, and putting Joel down was already a chore under typical circumstances. Never wake a sleeping baby, especially one that’ll be bouncing around the rest of the night should he be awakened.
I went to bed. Lawrence locked the front and back doors, and checked beside our bed to ensure his trusty, black baseball bat hadn’t been moved.
The air was so humid and heavy; I turned on the noisy fan reluctantly, for obvious reasons. Despite the discomfort of the heat, we fell asleep fast.
Nine minutes to midnight, I woke up. Only the small squeak from the rotating fan broke the silence of the dark, and yet, I got out of bed; without a second thought, I went across the bedroom to the front window.
Below, on the sidewalk, stood a stranger. He wore a ski mask and seemed to only be staring at our home. I was too scared to move. At last, he clenched his fists and took a step onto the walkway.
I couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped my lips. He heard. He looked up, and I swear our eyes met for a protracted moment. Another tough decision had to be made, and he, with great hesitation, made it. The masked man turned away and fled.
Naturally, I roused Lawrence, who awoke with typical panicked shock, which always frightened me. He collected his trusty baseball bat from under the bed and charged down the steps; somehow, he didn’t wake the kids.
I heard him swear under his breath and I saw the reason why when I came down the stairs. The front door had been unlocked and opened to let in some more air through the screen door, which did not have a locking mechanism.
I am glad I don’t know which of my sons got up in the night to do such a thing.
We sat in kitchen chairs by the front door until the kids woke up the next morning. I never told them about that night. I didn’t want them to worry. Your house is supposed to be your safe place when you’re a kid, an impenetrable fortress against the monsters of the night.
Lawrence warned them against leaving the screen door open but didn’t have the heart to tell them his fears either. I’d never seen my husband so frightened.
The police were good. They took a report and put a cruiser in the area for a whole week. We told them our suspicions about the tent trailer guy but without a name or any other useful information there wasn’t much they could do.
“Why did I wake up, Lawrence?” I thought aloud the following night. Another shrug rippled the bed. “If I hadn’t…”
“But you did,” Lawrence intervened. “Like your subconscious knew something was wrong.” This was a very brief comfort because it wasn’t the last time I awoke, but the first of many.
By Fall, we’d begun to relax a little. I never left my children alone or out of a teacher’s supervision when school resumed. I basically trained Darren into a bodyguard for his siblings. We were scared. But we were handling it.
The next time came in September, when the air was full of sweetly scented leaves decomposing. It was cool outside but I left the front window open, snuggling into the blanket beside Lawrence who fell asleep in minutes.
I awoke to silence. My heart began to race. I went to the window and saw the only thing worse than a masked man: Nothing at all. No one on the lawn, the sidewalk or the walkway. No obvious threat to gasp at and scare away. So why did I wake up? Where was the danger my subconscious noticed but I did not?
I shook Lawrence awake and we spent more hours on guard. He wanted to go outside a check around like any good murder victim in a horror film. Needless to say, I forbid it. The sun rose without incident. Lawrence did a thorough search, bat in hand, and found nothing.
“So I woke up for nothing? We stayed up for nothing?”
In the cold, grey dawn of our dirt driveway, his shrug was noticeably weary. “Maybe it was just a lucky coincidence last time. People wake up sometimes for no reason. Did you have to pee last night?”
“No, my love, I didn’t have to pee. Why would I go to the window if I had to pee?”
Shrug. He moved on. There was noise inside the house. The kids were starting to rise and needed to be fed and dressed for school, a challenging task when fully rested.
The following night, it happened again, and the one after that. I didn’t have to pee, and the window had been shut. Both times I found no villain waiting below. Anxiety. Must be. Sleep eluded me afterward and I started to worry I’d go nuts from the deprivation if it kept up. It didn’t though. October brought nearly three weeks of excellent sleeping.
But then again, I awoke. 11:53 PM on the digital clock and a feeling I should go to the window. I resisted for a minute or so. Sleeping would be impossible anyway, so I gave in and went and nearly screamed at the sight: A man was walking by the house, his identity obscured by the angle of the tree branches. Was he just walking by or had he been debating breaking in and killing my babies before taking off like the first time?
Lawrence wasn’t happy to be woken up anymore. He didn’t wait to go outside or ask for my blessing. Resuming his sleep took priority over potentially being murdered. Another odd job, landscaping, awaited him tomorrow. Nothing resulted from the search. He locked up and went back to bed.
I made tea and watched the street from the front room until the chirping birds of morn seemed to announce how hard the day would be with so little sleep. Joel wasn’t in school yet and he’d recently been skipping his midday naps.
Months went by before the next awakening and the sky dropped a fresh layer of snow, enough to brighten the winter night and reveal footsteps leading to the walkway and retreating. The same pattern of movement as the first time. I didn’t wake Lawrence. I didn’t go back to sleep.
I never do. Not in the months and years that followed, sometimes with a few days in a row, once for nearly a whole month when Darren had been away in his first year of university.
I resisted seeing a therapist until 2007, the year my daughter, not yet born during the initial tent trailer incident, finally left home, turning Lawrence and I into empty nesters. The awakenings ceased with all of my kids out of the house and on their own. The therapist connected the awakenings to severe anxiety over my kids’ safety. No more kids in the house meant no more awakenings. I was cured! And left wondering what I’d just paid for.
But then it happened again. None of my kids were living at home or visiting. I awoke at 12:33 AM and went straight to the window without hesitation. It’d been so long. There he was, waiting, a different disguise, a hoodie pulled over his bowed head.
“What do you want?” I asked through the screen. The pitch black interior of the hood looked up at me. Without a word, he walked away, in no great hurry. “Who are you?!” I begged. “Are you the same person?!”
My shouting woke Lawrence up. He still had the bat, and the urge to search. Once again, nothing came of it.
“This is insane,” he said. “Maybe we should move.” It was an offhand remark that turned into a serious suggestion. Lawrence, by that time, worked for city transit, driving a bus, a union job, with benefits, a fair wage, and a pension. We moved across town to a newer neighbourhood with less poverty and foot traffic, and, sadly, I awoke the very first night we spent here. The master bedroom of this place overlooks the backyard instead of the front lawn. Yet, I am drawn to the window with each awakening. Sometimes I leave the outdoor light on and sometimes I don’t.
Sometimes I see nothing down there. Sometimes he’s just passing by, disappearing around the corner of the shed and, on the worst nights, he’s there waiting, a different mask, or no mask at all, silently accusing me of what I knew all along: That trailer should have gone straight to the dump.