The street was quiet. No tires screeching on the asphalt, no dogs barking in the distance. Not even a bird flew overhead. The only sounds Jade heard were her sneakered feet falling on the sidewalk.
She smiled down at Tristan, who was sucking on his pacifier. He looked so adorable laying in his stroller, so precious, that Jade felt a stab of guilt for the intrusive thoughts that had flooded her brain over the last few days.
I made a huge mistake. If only he would stop crying. I shouldn’t have had him.
She brushed the thoughts away like crumbs off a table.
Now, she could see Tristan was a good baby, and she was a good mother. She would be an even better one once she got some caffeine in her system, she thought. They were out of coffee at home. Terry, her husband, had been handling the food shopping since Tristan had been born. But Terry was out of town for work, again.
The wind whistled through the palm trees and Jade shivered even though she was wearing sweatpants and long sleeves. A cold front was passing through Nassau and the temperature had dropped to the mid-sixties. It was December. Christmas was just a couple of weeks away, but Jade wasn’t in a particularly festive mood.
Just then, Jade felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She turned and saw someone standing about twenty feet behind her. He was a wisp of a man, sharp angles and gangly limbs shouldering the gray sky. Dressed in all black, his legs looked like an upside down V planted on the sidewalk.
He wasn’t moving.
Just stood there staring.
At her.
Jade started walking again, faster this time, the outline of the grocery store coming up in the distance.
She knew she shouldn’t be afraid. This was a good neighborhood. Safe.
Homes on this street were worth a million dollars or more. A foreign diplomat—maybe even an ambassador—lived around the corner. Jade had spotted the blacked-out SUV with foreign license plates and a police motorcycle detail a few times while out on walks with Tristan.
The neighborhood was a far cry from the inner city where she grew up.
Nothing bad happened here.
Still, Jade let out a long breath like a deflating balloon as she entered the grocery store’s automatic doors, a bead of sweat running down her back despite the air conditioned chill inside.
+
The night before had been difficult, the same as all the other nights this week. Out of nowhere Tristan had morphed from a chubby-cheeked six-month-old cherub into a feral demon child who seemed allergic to sleep.
He had decided that the only acceptable place for rest was in her arms. Or a moving vehicle. The crib had suddenly become off limits.
No matter how limp with sleep he appeared, drunk and satiated with her breast milk, as soon as Jade transferred him from her arms into the crib, Tristan’s eyes would flick open like a doll’s. His body would recoil as if she had placed him onto a bed of searing hot nails and not onto a six-hundred dollar breathable mattress fitted with an organic sheet.
Then, the crying would start. A loud, high-pitched shriek that pierced Jade’s eardrums and set her teeth on edge.
Jade had tried everything: giving Tristan a warm bath before bed, shutting off the lights and filling the bedroom with soothing white noise. She had even strapped Tristian into his car seat and took him for a ride around the neighborhood. The women in her Facebook mommy group swore this last one always did the trick. Car rides were supposed to be metal melatonin for fussy babies.
And they were right. After a few trips around the block, Tristan had gone comatose. But the minute she pulled up at home and tried to wrangle him back inside, the wailing began.
So she spent the better part of an hour driving around the neighborhood, grateful at least for the reprieve from the screaming even if her own eyelids felt like sandpaper.
+
Jade blinked a few times, disoriented, her head feeling like she had stuck it in a vat of Jell-o. Her body was splayed on the couch. She must have nodded off after putting away the groceries. She wondered how long she had been asleep—ten, maybe fifteen minutes? A few feet away from her, Tristan lay in his playpen, screaming his head off. Despite her fatigue, Jade moved with the dexterity of a firefighter responding to an alarm.
She scooped Tristan up and set him down on the couch, dragging the diaper caddy she kept under the coffee table for situations like this towards her. In a series of fluid motions, she unbuttoned Tristan’s onesie, changed the wet diaper, squirted hand sanitizer into her palms, and dressed him again.
Rocking Tristan in her arms, Jade walked over to the large living room window that overlooked the front yard. She felt a swell of pride as she looked outside. The house sat on nearly an acre of land. With five bedrooms, a two-car garage and a pool, it was the type of home Jade could only dream of living in when she was a child, suffocating in the matchbox apartment she grew up in, the walls so thin she could hear her mother’s “dates” even with the volume on the TV turned all the way up.
A flash near the iron gate caught Jade’s eye. At first, she wondered if it was just her mind playing tricks on her. Then, she saw it again.
Someone was creeping around the edge of the property. Another flash of movement, and then the apparition came into focus: the man Jade had seen this morning. He was staring straight at the house—straight at her—as if he could see Jade peering at him.
Jade shut the blinds and moved away from the window, her heart beating like a caged bird in her chest.
+
“Did you call the police?”
Terry had taken the video call in the lobby of his hotel.
“And tell them what, there’s a man standing outside on the public street?”
“Well, you said he looked menacing right? He could be dangerous, Jade. Call the police.”
“Maybe he was just waiting for someone. A neighbor or something. He’s gone now anyway.”
She peered out of the window just to be sure. The street was empty.
“Well, if he comes back, call the police, okay? How’s Tristan doing?”
“He’s being a handful. He still isn’t sleeping through the night and he’s been fighting his naps the whole week.”
“Maybe it’s all that coffee you drink,” Terry said. “It’s getting in your breast milk and keeping him up.”
“I only drink two cups a day. That’s allowed, you know.” Jade spat the words out. “I’m barely surviving, even with the coffee.”
“Well, maybe he’s teething,” Terry said. “He keeps biting his fingers.”
Jade looked down at Tristan who was gnawing on his fist. She hated when her husband was right.
+
She turned on the television to calm her nerves, mindlessly surfing through the channels while Tristan sat in his bouncer chewing on a teething ring, stopping at the local news.
The anchor, a twenty-something woman whose perky breasts made Jade self-conscious about her sagging stretch-marked chest, was droning on about Christmas tree sales. Apparently people weren’t buying many this year because of inflation. Jade’s eyes flicked towards the massive garlanded tree in the corner of her living room, its lights twinkling at her in accusation.
“On to crime news. Police are warning residents to be vigilant after a string of home invasions,” the news anchor said. “An armed man has targeted affluent homes in the western part of the island. In one instance, a woman was bound, gagged and assaulted in her home by an assailant who later made off with jewelry and electronics. At this time, the extent of the woman’s injuries are not known.”
A sick feeling grew in the pit of Jade’s stomach. She thought about the man she had seen on the sidewalk. Maybe Terry was right and she should have called the police.
“And now Action News has a tragic story to report.” The anchor’s saccharine voice had gone somber. “Police are hunting a hit-and-run driver who killed a man last night. The victim, an unidentified man believed to be in his fifties, was struck—”
Jade smashed the remote’s power button. She had heard enough bad news for one day.
+
A loud noise woke Jade up. At first she thought it was thunder clapping outside, but then she realized it was coming from inside the house.
Bang bang bang.
Her body tensed like a soldier awaiting enemy shrapnel for Tristan’s scream. He lay quietly in his crib.
A miracle had occurred.
Earlier Jade had smeared a glob of teething gel over Tristan’s bright red gums and dosed him with infant Tylenol before running through the usual routine—bath, breast milk, bed. Around nine p.m. he drifted off to sleep and when she transferred him from her arms to the crib, he stirred but didn’t wake.
Now, she scrambled out of bed to investigate the banging, her bare feet pressing against the cool tile floor. Outside the wind howled, a loud screeching that disturbed Jade. Tree fingers scraped against the windows.
Jade’s breath caught in her throat. The news report from earlier replayed in her mind. She grabbed her cell phone from her nightstand, fingers hovering over the keypad as she considered calling the police. But what would she say to them when they showed up asking questions? Steadying herself with a few deep breaths, Jade slipped the phone into the front pocket of her pajamas and crept downstairs.
The noise was the kitchen door leading to the garage slamming open and shut. The latch was tricky and the door didn’t close unless she pulled it shut all the way and jiggled the knob. Jade was sure she had done so before bed. And she was also sure she had closed the kitchen window. Except now it was open and a strong gust of wind fluttered the curtains.
She reached to pull the door shut when a rotten, sour smell invaded her nostrils. Goosebumps prickled on her arms. She tiptoed down the steps leading into the garage. Yellow moonlight pooled into the room from the windows above the exterior doors.
Jade heard a shuffling behind her. She spun quickly and came face to face with the man who had been outside earlier, watching her from the street. One side of his face was smashed in and looked like it had been through a cheese grater. Dried blood was caked to his skin. A white gleaming bone jutted out of his arm.
Jade was sure she was dreaming. She had to be because ghosts weren’t real and this man had to be a ghost. He was too broken, too injured to be alive. Jade backed away from him, blood pounding in her ears, and pressed herself against the hood of her car. Her fingers touched the crushed metal, felt the gaping hole where her left headlight should have been. She closed her eyes, the memory from last night rushing to the surface. Falling asleep at the wheel. Her car colliding with something—thump—in the darkness.
It’s just a dog. I can’t stop, not with Tristan in the car. It’s too late.
Now, she knew what she had hit. He had come back from the dead. For her.
The man stepped towards Jade, his lips stretched into a toothless grin.
Jade screamed.
+++
Taneka Thompson is a journalist, writer, and former newspaper editor. She will go (almost) anywhere for vegan food and has an unhealthy obsession with horror movies. She lives in Nassau, Bahamas and is currently working on her first novel.