I have lived on Sycamore Street in this little town outside Cape Girardeau for thirty-eight years, and most days the biggest worry I have is whether the blight is going to take my Early Girls before July. Merle passed away in the kitchen back in 2019, right by the toaster oven where he liked to burn his English muffins, and since then it has just been me and the garden.
You get used to the quiet after a while. You learn the exact sound of the mail truck’s transmission when it drops into second gear for our corner, and you know which neighborhood dog likes to dig under the chain-link by the drainage ditch.
When Delia and Trent moved into the rental house directly behind my property last spring, I did what I always do with new neighbors. I watched from behind the kitchen curtain while they unloaded a U-Haul truck that smelled like wet cardboard and stale cigarette smoke. She was maybe twenty-six, with dark hair she kept tied back in a messy clip and skin the color of skim milk.
She always had a baby on her hip, a little boy named Rowan who didn’t seem to make much noise for a toddler. Trent was a thick-shouldered fellow who drove a primer-gray Ford pickup with a busted muffler that rattled every window on the block when he came home from his shift at the salvage yard.
You notice things when you spend your life sitting on a back porch shelling butterbeans or weeding flowerbeds. You notice how a person moves when they are trying not to make a sound. Delia would hang laundry on the line by the back fence, and every time a car door slammed two streets over, she would freeze with a clothespin between her fingers and glance toward the rental house like a rabbit caught in high beams.
I watched her drop a plastic basket of socks one afternoon because Trent stepped out onto their back step without shouting, and she looked at him the way people look at a loose copperhead in the woodpile.
I never went over there with a casserole. A casserole tells people you are nosing around, and nosy neighbors just make skittish men lock the front door tighter. Instead, I waited until I caught her alone by the wire fence one Tuesday morning while Rowan was gumming on a teething biscuit in his stroller.
She was pulling weeds around the tomato stakes I had given her over the gap in the wire, and her sleeve hitched up when she reached for a stray dandelion.
I saw the marks on her forearm right away. Four purple bruises spaced like thick fingers, dark as overripe plums against her skin. She caught me looking, and her face went tight and small. She yanked her sleeve down so fast she scraped her wrist against the wire, but she didn’t make a sound.
I didn’t lecture her about leaving him or packing a bag. You cannot lecture a woman who is living in a cage because she already knows the door is locked; telling her to walk out just makes her feel stupid for not doing it sooner.
So I told her something practical instead. I leaned against my side of the fence and wiped the dirt off my garden trowel with the hem of my apron.
“You see my back gate over there?” I asked her, keeping my voice low so the wind would take it away from their kitchen window. “The hinge is rusted out and the latch is stiff, but it opens if you give it a hard enough yank. I am leaving it unlatched from now on. On a bad night, you and that baby come right through it. My back door is never locked after dark.”
She stopped pulling weeds and stared at me through the wire mesh. Her eyes were too big for her face, dark-rimmed from weeks of not sleeping.
She whispered, “How will I know it’s a bad night?”
I looked right back at her and said the only thing that made any sense. “Honey, you already know.”
I reached into my apron pocket and pulled out a little rubber-cased keychain flashlight I had bought down at the hardware store when they were on sale for two dollars. I pushed it through the diamond-shaped holes in the fence.
“Keep that in the diaper bag,” I told her. “Right in the bottom pocket where he doesn’t go looking for spare change or receipts. Use it if the power goes out or if you need to see your way across the grass.”
For three weeks, nothing happened. That was the hardest part, the waiting in the dark while the house next door stayed quiet or occasionally flared up with voices that sounded like furniture being dragged across hardwood floors. You get to my age and you do not sleep much regardless, but those weeks I spent half the night sitting in the old floral armchair by the window with my glasses off, listening for the sound of glass breaking or Trent’s voice carrying over the fence line.
I heard him some nights. Voices low and mean, then rising sharp like a saw hitting a nail. A door slamming so hard the windowpanes in my pantry rattled in their wooden frames. Once I heard something heavy hit the wall right behind my tool shed. I stood up in my nightgown with my phone in my hand, my thumb hovering over the keypad, and I forced myself to sit right back down. A woman has to be the one to decide to walk, or she will spend the whole way over wishing she stayed, and she might just turn right back around at the first porch step.
Then came a Tuesday in late October, right around the time the first hard frost was turning the pumpkin vines to mush. The digital clock radio on my nightstand glowed 2:12 in the red numbers that always hurt my eyes if I stared too long.
I heard my own back gate.
It was that specific, rusty squeak of the latch dragging across the cedar post. I know the sound that gate makes when the wind catches it versus when a human hand wraps around the cold iron.
Then came the second sound. My back door, easing open on its old brass hinges that I keep oiled with three-in-one oil, followed by a child crying the tired, wet way children cry when they have been woken up out of a deep sleep and dragged out into the cold.
Then Delia’s voice, thin and shaking so hard she could barely form the words. “It’s the lady. It’s okay, baby. It’s the lady’s house.”
I was already up and moving before my brain even caught up with my feet. I had my heavy flannel robe halfway on and the kettle going on the gas stove because I didn’t want them walking into a dark kitchen where they might trip over the scatter rug.
She stood right inside my back door holding little Rowan on her hip. She wasn’t wearing shoes, just a pair of thin cotton socks with holes in the heels, and one side of her face was already swelling up purple and ugly where a ring or a fist had caught her. The baby had his face buried in her neck, his little bare legs dangling out of his sleeper, shaking like a wet sparrow.
“Delia,” I said softly, reaching out to take her by the elbow because she looked like she was about to fold right there on my linoleum. “You’re all right now. You’re in the kitchen.”
She didn’t answer me. She just stared past me toward the open back door, her pupils blown wide and dark.
And then, out by the unlatched gate, I heard the footsteps.
They weren’t running. Running people make a racket in the dry leaves. These were slow, heavy footsteps coming across the wet grass, methodical and in no hurry at all, the boots dragging slightly the way Trent dragged his left foot when he had been drinking too much cheap whiskey down at the tap.
The screen door of my back porch gave a little creak as someone leaned against the outside frame.
A man’s voice, thick and slurred and entirely too close, floated into my kitchen. “Delia. I know you’re in here. Open the damn door before I take it off the hinges.”
I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed Delia by the shoulder and practically pushed her down the narrow hallway toward the back bedroom, where the bathroom sits right next to it with the heavy brass lock on the door.
“Get in the bathroom,” I told her, my voice dropping into that low, flat register I used to use when my boys were little and playing with matches in the garage. “Lock the door behind you and stay on the floor with the boy. Do not make a sound.”
She scrambled into the dark, her bare feet slapping against the runner rug, and I heard the heavy brass click of the bathroom lock sliding home into its iron plate.
Right as I turned back toward the kitchen, my back door shuddered. The deadbolt I had thrown back when Merle was still alive held firm, but the wood around the frame groaned under a heavy shoulder slam.
“Open up, old woman,” Trent shouted through the painted pine, his voice turning ugly and ragged now that he realized he wasn’t going to just walk in and pull her out by her hair. “I know she’s in there. That’s my wife. You’re harboring a runaway.”
I stood right there in the middle of my kitchen, looking at the blue flame dancing under the whistling tea kettle, and I didn’t feel scared anymore. You only get so many years of being afraid of men who shout in the dark before you just get plumb tired of it.
I walked over to the landline phone sitting on the little oak desk by the pantry, picked up the receiver, and looked down at the tiny screen where the caller ID showed the number I had punched in three minutes before Delia even reached my back step.
The dispatcher’s voice was calm and steady in my ear, right through the sound of Trent kicking the side of my aluminum siding out on the porch.
“We’ve got deputies turning onto Sycamore right now, Mrs. Gable,” the dispatcher said over the line, loud enough that I could hear the radio chatter in the background of the county office. “They’re about two minutes out. Is she inside?”
I looked down the dark hallway toward the locked bathroom door, listening to the soft, muffled sound of Delia trying to quiet Rowan’s crying.
“She’s here,” I told the dispatcher, watching the porch light flicker as Trent hit the door frame one more time with his shoulder. “And she’s got every single date, every picture, and every hospital record from the last eight months sitting right inside that diaper bag in the bottom of my hallway closet.”
The heavy blue lights of the county cruiser flashed across my front living room windows a second later, cutting right through the sheer curtains and painting the walls in long, steady stripes of blue.
Outside on the porch, Trent stopped banging on the wood. I heard the sharp crunch of gravel under heavy tires, followed by a deputy’s voice shouting for someone to put their hands where they could be seen against the side of a primer-gray pickup.
I didn’t go to the window to watch them cuff him. I just reached over, turned off the burner under the whistling kettle, and walked down the hall to unlock the door for the girl who finally knew how to use an unlatched gate.
