That Time When

That time when, while your mother was shopping, you pressed yourself through the woven fabric and faux fur of the coats hanging on their carousel at JCPenny—the sudden muffled quiet of that secret inner circle a delight—until some long minutes later you emerged to no sign of her—your mother, her hair, the camel-color of her coat, gone—and as you looked and looked, increasingly hot, your skin itchy, some terrible feeling squeezed your chest, accompanied by the realization of what it meant to be your exact and only self in an unfamiliar, unprotected world.

That time when your uncle took you through the haunted house with your cousins and it was so much worse than your nightmares, and you wanted to wake up, you wanted it to stop, you wanted your mother, and your uncle had to carry you out, to peel you off of him.

That time when you first learned what a demon was.

That time when, in the middle of the night, you heard terrible screams outside your bedroom window, and you gripped the windowsill just as something wrestled past in a blur of shadowed dust, a demon, you thought (it was a pair of minks).

That time when you first noticed the horror section at the local video rental store: Don’t look, you thought (you looked).

That time when your mom was upstairs with friends and the big kids were in the basement watching The Neverending Story, and you slunk down there, peeked around the couch’s corner, and saw the snarling black wolf with his terrible pale eyes, terrible yellow teeth, and tried to call for your mother but couldn’t breathe.

That time you saw a snake swim past you in the water, its eyes the same eyes as the wolf, the minks, the demons. Monsters lived.

That time when you woke up to helicopters and police dogs and detectives in your backyard, and your father’s undisguised fear. The months (years) when you thought the man-monster who kidnapped the neighborhood boy was coming back for you. That time when two men in a cream-colored car were taking pictures of you and your little brother, and how your heart pounded when you eventually ran straight at the car, screaming, something raised in your hand like a sword—a tennis racket?—and the car screeched away.

That time your parents left you home alone—it was probably just for an hour, for forty minutes, to buy milk, but it was the first time after that neighbor boy was kidnapped and there were shadows where there should have been light, sounds of doors or windows opening and closing, the house huge and unknowable, and you crept down behind the sofa where you could see the front door, and you watched its handle, waiting for it to move.

That time when you put your fingers on the Ouija Board at a sleepover and it moved. That time you watched Children of the Corn at a sleepover in a house surrounded by cornfields, every black window with swaying stalks beyond it. That time when you watched The Exorcist at a sleepover, and in the middle of the movie, right when that child’s head was twisting like a demon doll, a group of boys pounded on the front door and you thought you were going to have a heart attack and wanted your mother.

That time you got separated from your friends at a house party, how you were surrounded by other bodies, but knew you were alone. That time when a carousel of large drunk almost-men grinned at each other over your head as if you were a thing, a coatless girl, and how they coiled closer. That time when you walked home coatless in the dark from a party someone else had driven you to, and all you knew for sure while you shivered was that your dorm room was near the lit-up church steeple, and both it and your mother seemed so far away.

That time when you and your friends got in a car with those strange guys in Florida and went to their apartment where nothing terrible happened except the feeling you felt the whole time that it might.

That time when you heard there was a school shooting at your former high school and, you thought, Oh God, my brother, what if he’s—.

That time when there were too many times, and you drank shot after shot to forget—to feel that pressure lift, your mind go limp. How it worked. How that was terrifying too.

That time when, after college, you lived alone in a duplex at the edge of a new town, and one night, outside the window of your pitch-black bedroom, the motion sensor went off—blinding terrible light. How you told yourself, heart racing, peeking beyond the blinds, It’s nothing—just a wolf. A mink. Some shadows. But monsters. How the truth was, you wanted your mother like you’d wanted her that time at JCPenny, that time in the haunted house. But you’d learned women had enough to worry about; you felt it essential—some kind of counterweight—to be a twenty-something-year-old woman who did not require more worry. How every few nights, when the motion sensor went off inexplicably, spiking your heart rate, paralyzing you, you told yourself to control your mind, how you told no one that you couldn’t.

That time when, finally, you told your friends one of these stories, another one of these stories, then more of these stories—all of you older now, respectable jobs, strong independent women who no one thought of with worry—and after each of those telling times, they said, “Me too.”

That time when your five-year-old daughter sobbed just out of reach, her face turning red, her breathing labored, her eyes looking in terror at the tweezer you held in your hand, which, you explained to her, you needed to use to remove the sliver lodged in her pinkie finger. “But it will hurt!” she wailed. “I’m scared!” You looked at her fear. Looked and looked. And then placed the terrible tweezers down, out of reach—See?—when you opened your arms, when you said, “I know it’s scary, honey, I understand,” and you waded into that worry with her, until together you were strong enough to pluck it out.