Many times after they fought Duane would take off in his car. The screams and shouting beforehand often woke Ann up, and sometimes she’d hear her mother sobbing and go to their room and lie down next to her until the growl of Duane’s Camaro rattled the windows again and she’d slip back to her own bed. If she was lucky enough to fall back to sleep, her dreams would still arrive to scare her and she’d end up lying in bed, staring up at faces in the wood ceiling until the morning half-light came through her window and showed her they were only knotholes. Often her mind was still dreaming when she opened her eyes and the things in the ceiling would whisper too softly for her to understand.
One night she woke up from a bad dream and thought Duane hadn’t come back and she wanted to crawl into bed with her mom because when she did the scary dreams wouldn’t bother her. At the end of the hall, however, she’d seen a strange light coming from the kitchen and decided to see what it was. The side door to the kitchen had been left open and moonlight was pouring inside on the linoleum and she’d gone and stood in it and it made her feel good.
The kitchen door shouldn’t be left open, and she wondered if Duane had just forgotten to close it or if the raccoons were now trying doors in the middle of the night. She heard someone crying, and it sounded a lot like her mother.
She padded into the doorway and saw light coming from the garage door and she went outside to see who was in there. It was a warm night, and the buttons on her pajamas twinkled. She glanced around the yard and didn’t see any raccoons watching her. When she reached the door she could hear Duane and her mother talking, but the window was set too high for her to look through.
She was about to knock but something stopped her hand. Instead she flipped over an old milk crate her mother used to sit on when she was picking peas and set it next to the door. The window was still too high and she’d needed to stand on her tiptoes to be able to see her mother lying back on the old couch and Duane bent over her outstretched arm and giving her a shot like a doctor would do. Her mother’s eyes were glazed and when she looked up and saw Ann’s face floating in the window she began to laugh like she did sometimes when she didn’t think anyone else was around to hear.
Ann suddenly didn’t recognize her and fell off the crate. She hit her head on a stepping stone and lay there until Duane found her and they took her to the hospital. And that’s when the doctor said her trouble with faces may have started, because she’d hurt the place in her brain that did that kind of thing but she’d never told him what she’d seen that night to make her fall.