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Eleven Events
Episode 1 of 3 of Sound Events by Theo Vance · free to read
“Eleven,” I said, out loud, to a kitchen with nobody in it.
The app puts the number on the lock screen before I have had coffee. Sound events, overnight, room two. Tap it and you get a list of timestamps, and under each one a twelve second clip. The camera is on the wall over the dresser in room two and there is a speaker unit on my nightstand. The clips back themselves up to a folder, which I set up in July and then stopped thinking about.
Most mornings it is three or four. The furnace kicking on. A truck on Halsted with a bad muffler. Caleb turning over and saying something into his pillow, which is the reason I bought the thing in the first place.
He is four. He talks in his sleep. I had been treating that as one of the good parts.
Eleven events, and nine of them between 2:04 and 2:19.
I stood there with the milk out and counted the days backward twice, because I did not want to be wrong about it.
Wednesday. Caleb was at his father’s on Wednesday.
Neil picks him up at five and brings him back Thursday after preschool. That is the arrangement and it has been the arrangement since March. I had slept in a house with one person in it.
I called him at seven fifteen.
“Is everything okay?”
“Was he with you Wednesday night?”
“He’s been with me every Wednesday since the spring, Josie.”
“I know. I’m asking about Wednesday.”
There was a pause, the specific one he does when he is deciding whether to be kind.
“He was in the bottom bunk,” he said. “He asked for two stories. What’s going on?”
“The app logged some noise. It’s probably the furnace.”
“So it’s the furnace.”
“It’s probably the furnace,” I said.
Going through the house took four minutes. It is a rental with three bedrooms and a basement you can see all of from the stairs. The windows were locked. The back door was locked. There is no attic, only a hatch to the crawlspace that has been painted shut since before we moved in.
The app has a sensitivity slider. One is a slammed door and ten is a moth. Mine was on six.
I moved it to nine, which is the opposite of what a reasonable person would do, and I knew that while I was doing it.
Thursday I got him at four and he fell asleep in the car over eleven blocks, the way he does.
I carried him in and put him down in room two and stood in the doorway longer than I needed to. It is a nice room. There is a window over the driveway and a closet with a folding door and a strip of dinosaur border somebody else’s child had, up near the ceiling, that Pam never took down.
Nothing about it asks you to look twice. That is most of what I want to say about that house.
I did not sleep that night. At one I gave up and got my phone and played the eleven.
Ten of them were nothing. The furnace. The truck. A long stretch of a house being a house at two in the morning.
The eleventh had a voice in it.
Not loud. Down at the edge of the room, the way a person sounds when they are speaking to somebody closer to them than to the microphone. A man, I thought, or a woman with a low voice. He was asking something. I could not get the words. I played it eleven times and I could not get the words.
Caleb had told me in August that there was a man. He said it the way he tells me about the dog on the next street, with no weight on it at all, and I said that sounded like a good friend to have, and he agreed, and we went on to something else.
So I opened the nights he was home.
There were hundreds of clips. I started at the most recent and went backward, and every one of them had my son in it, and in every one of them he was cheerful, and patient, and a little bored, the way he is when an adult asks him what grade he is in.
I had been hearing him since August and calling it talking in his sleep.
He was not talking in his sleep. He was holding up his end.
Caleb was the one answering.