if someone was whispering her name from the bottom.
When I gently touched her shoulder to guide her back to bed, she wouldn’t blink. She would stand there, her small body trembling like a leaf in a gale, whispering phrases that made my blood run cold:
“The man with the long fingers is coming up the stairs, Mommy. He’s looking for his keys.”
“There’s no one there, sweetie,” I would whisper back, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Mommy’s right here. You’re safe.”
“He says the walls are too thin,” she would murmur, her voice dropping an octave into a flat, monotone whisper that didn’t belong to a seven-year-old child. “He says if we don’t open the window, the cold will get inside our bones.”
I blamed her night terrors on the damp Oregon air, on an overactive imagination, on the lingering psychological
