Sleep Now While You Can

Thank God you weren’t home, everyone will say when they hear. Except Robert. He’ll say, Tell me again why we moved to the suburbs. They moved because of the baby. The baby that started as an idea, became a plan, and now grows in Katrina's slightly tilted uterus.

She turns her key in the front door with one hand and shoves it open with her shoulder. Inside, her bags drop to the floor as she pushes off her shoes with her feet. The doorknob is missing from the coat closet, so she has to reach into the round empty space to pull open the door and hang her jacket. No cats appear demanding dinner.

Katrina walks through the dining room, toward the kitchen shelf holding stacked cans of grain-free paté. She stops inches short of getting a foot full of broken glass. The back door is ajar, one of its panes shattered.

Katrina spins around and fumbles for her phone. Robert’s number is the only one she has saved as a favorite.

“Get out of the house,” he tells her. “Call the police.”

She rushes out the front door in her socks, and two squad cars show up minutes later. The officers leave her shaking on the sidewalk while they enter the house. She’s still standing there alone when Robert pulls up in his Prius, driving not quite as fast as she would have expected, given the situation.

“Tell me again why we moved to the suburbs,” he says, slamming the car door behind him. Katrina looks down at her belly.

Once the cops confirm the house is clear, they take a statement from Katrina and ask Robert to follow up with an inventory of everything that’s missing. Robert opens the Notes app on his phone, but there’s nothing to list. Whoever it was left the big-screen TV, Katrina’s laptop, her jewelry, and the jar of coins by the back door.

Katrina’s mind flashes to her earlier arrival. She turns to Robert. “Did you take the doorknob off the coat closet?”

They walk through the house again and discover all the doorknobs are gone. Downstairs: the coat closet and the powder room. Upstairs: the three bedrooms, the bathroom, and the linen closet. Even the doorknobs for the closets inside the bedrooms have been removed. The only interior knob that remains is on the door to the basement. It’s not glass like the others were, but cheap imitation brass.

Katrina and Robert argue about whether to report the stolen doorknobs to the police.

“It’s only a dumb prank,” Robert says. “The cops have better things to do than search for some bogus hardware thief.”

He’d rather just have the back door repaired and put it behind them. 

Robert isn’t what Katrina's father would call “handy.” He’d sooner pay someone else than spend his time trying to fix a leaky faucet or nail down a loose board on the deck. He has no tools of his own, and Katrina's slim pink toolkit from college is still buried in a box somewhere.

It’s too late to call someone tonight. Robert retrieves a random piece of plywood and a roll of red duct tape from the basement, managing to patch the empty pane with these crude supplies. Katrina's not sure what he thinks they will keep out.

 

At 28 weeks, Katrina is the frequent recipient of unsolicited parenting advice. Sleep now while you can, everyone tells her. As if she can bank the hours and roll them over into the newborn months. Rest up while things are quiet, they say. 

Tonight she lies awake for hours waiting to hear a noise. Tape slowly peeling from the faraway door frame, wood clattering to the floor…Maybe something else?

It’s 2:41 a.m. when the bedroom door creaks. Katrina’s already-open eyes dart toward Robert, who faces the wall, his chest slowly rising and falling. She looks back toward the door, although it’s impossible to see anything in the dark and without her glasses on. Before she can convince herself she’s imagining things, she hears a distinct scuffle and clatter on her dresser.

Just one of the cats. With no doorknob and nothing to latch the door shut, it must have been easy for him to push his way into the room. Robert thinks Katrina is cruel for keeping the cats out at night. Easy for him to say—he can sleep through anything. He swears they’ll take turns for midnight feedings when the baby comes.

Katrina feels a familiar pressure on her bladder and eases her way out of bed, into the bathroom. She’s sitting on the toilet when the other cat walks in and sniffs at her bare thigh.

“You won’t have any privacy once the baby’s born,” Katrina’s older sister has been telling her. Noelle has three kids already and knows everything.

Instead of going back to bed, Katrina starts looking online for doorknobs.

She learns about backplates with beveled edges and dummy doorknobs just for show. She considers crystal knobs in pink, emerald green, cobalt blue, and amber. Maybe they could color code the house: blue for bathrooms, green for bedrooms. Robert would never go for it. He was reluctant to buy the old house and would have preferred a new construction. But Katrina liked the charm, the history. She wanted a home that was uniquely theirs.

After a second friend was robbed at gunpoint in the city, Robert conceded that their former neighborhood was the wrong place to start a family. Kids should be able to play outside, catch fireflies in the summer, go trick-or-treating, and sell lemonade on the sidewalk. That wasn’t the childhood she’d had, but it was the one Katrina wanted for her baby. A week before they'd closed on the house, she watched two pink lines materialize on a pregnancy test.

 

Katrina presses the side button on her phone and slips it into the pocket of her sweatpants. Circumnavigating a cat, her feet lead her into the nursery. They decided on a woodland theme, gender neutral for a girl or a boy. In the dark, the owl clock tick-tick-ticks and a racoon watches with hollow eyes. She sinks into the rocker, arms cradling the empty space beneath her breasts. She wants to nurse the baby, but she’s worried she won’t know how. Rabbits and deer don’t need doulas or lactation consultants.

There’s a thump in the hallway, too heavy to be even the fatter cat. Katrina freezes mid-rock, scanning the room for anything she can use to defend herself. If she takes all the rings off the rainbow stacking toy, she can wield its wooden base like a club.

No. She stands and pushes the changing table over toward the door. Now there are footsteps coming toward the nursery. She pushes faster, and the footsteps come faster. Finally the table is flush against the door. She kneels and peers through the gaping mouth where the knob should be, coming face to face with Robert's crotch. She’d know those stupid boxers anywhere.

“Katy?” The door knocks against the changing table as he tries to get in the room.

“Why are you up?” she asks between breaths.

“I rolled over, and you weren't there.”

“Go back to bed.”

He shuffles away, leaving Katrina to lie back on the cream-colored carpet.

 

It was cold on the floor of Marcie’s basement, even in flannel pajamas and a borrowed sleeping bag. But Katrina had eaten too much pizza, and now her parched mouth begged for relief. Careful not to wake the other girls, she unzipped the sleeping bag and crept upstairs to the kitchen. A few plastic party cups remained on the counter. She took one and filled it at the sink.

“Why don’t you use the water cooler?” It was Marcie’s older brother, standing there in shorts and a thin white T-shirt, the kind Katrina’s father wore under button-downs.

“Tap’s fine,” Katrina lied, taking a tepid sip. 

He didn’t blink as he watched her swallow. 

“I have a TV in my room. Want to put on a movie?”

“It’s the middle of the night.” Katrina stared into the cup; its bottom seemed fathoms away. 

Marcie’s brother took a step closer. “We can keep the volume low.”

“I’m actually super tired,” she said, pouring the rest of the water into the sink. 

“Come on,” he said, his hand on her arm. “You can sleep tomorrow.”

Katrina shrank away. “They’re waiting for me downstairs.” 

She made her exit, and once safe on the other side of the basement door, bolted it shut. Marcie and the others rested undisturbed as Katrina tip-toed through the darkness back to her empty sleeping bag.

She woke to a commotion at the top of the stairs. One of the girls was screaming that she needed to pee and another pounded on the door, unable to decipher how to open the latch. When they finally got out, Marcie’s mom frowned down at the group.

“We don’t lock doors in this house,” she scolded in a sing-song voice.

 

She fixes her gaze on a fox, humming an old Finnish lullaby as the baby flutters inside her. 

In the morning, she texts her sister, recounting the details of the break-in over a cascade of messages.

Promise you’ll put up cameras before the baby’s born, Noelle types. And then, before Katrina can reply, Thank God you weren’t home.