You know the one: the babysitter is alone in the house with the kids, it's late, the kids are in bed, and the phone rings. She (always she) hears heavy breathing on the other end. The heavy breather keeps calling. Finally, the babysitter calls the operator and asks her to trace the call. The operator rings right back, says, "Get out. Someone is in the house. The call is coming from inside the house." She rushes to the kitchen to grab a knife, but before she gets there she feels the cold steel of the killer's blade against her throat.

Or some version of this. I hear it from a fifth grader on the playground when I'm six.

"How could the call come from inside the house?" one of the older kids asks.

The storyteller shrugs, having already lost interest in his own account. "Second phone line," he says.

That night and many nights after, I can't sleep. 

The call is coming from inside the house.

I ask my mother to leave the hall light on and the door cracked. I imagine the killer, when he comes, to be a thin man dressed all in black, with long dark hair, his eyes wide and crazed. For years I lie awake worrying about him, listen for the sound of his step on the stairs, watch for him in every dark window.


*


I wake as soon as I hear the glass shattering. I'm twenty-one, I've rented this place for cheap on what several people told me is the "wrong" street. I lock my bedroom door before I'm even fully awake. Grabbing my phone, I dive into the closet, my hands trembling so hard I can barely dial the three digits.

By the time the police car arrives, I'm alone. Nothing is missing.

"He must have heard you moving about. A lot of break-ins on this street recently," the cop says. "You live alone?"

I nod. "What should I do?"

I'm worried about replacing the glass in the pane, wondering how I'm supposed to feel safe in my house until morning.

The cop appraises me. "Get a boyfriend," he says. "Or maybe a dog?"


*


I'm twenty-three and I have a boyfriend. Well, sort of. There's a guy who texts me sometimes in the evening: Hey what u up to?

We have almost nothing in common but when he touches me it lights up my whole body. He comes over and we fuck or I go to his place and we fuck. Then I don't hear from him again for days, until he texts. In between, I drink too much. One night I've been drinking alone in my apartment and I send him a text. He doesn't answer for a long time, so I keep drinking, and by the time he arrives I'm so drunk I can hardly stand. He drags me to the bed and holds me down while I protest.

"You invited me over," he says afterwards.


*


The next boyfriend is a real boyfriend; he takes me out to dinner and we go for walks in the park on Saturdays. I marry him. We move to the suburbs, to a two-story house with an apple tree in the backyard. The house has many windows for looking out. Our son is born a year later. I wake up often in the night, even when he isn't crying, and creep into his room to look at him, asleep on his back, his head a large moon too big for his body.

More and more often, my husband and I fight. We fight about whose turn it is to take out the trash and who was supposed to pay the utility bill and who works harder at their job and who does more housework. Sometimes I think that we must actually be arguing about something else, something more important, but then I think about the trash bag sitting on the kitchen floor and I feel rage and I think, maybe this really is about the trash.

One night after the baby has gone to bed we begin arguing about the credit card bill in fierce whispers, moving down the hallway. We are at the top of the stairs when I tell him, loudly, that marrying him was the biggest mistake I ever made (it's not even true—it's just a thing to say) and he slaps me across the face. I take a step back and my foot searches for the wood floor but finds only empty air, my arms windmill, grabbing for the bannister, but I miss it by a fraction of an inch. I fall. I land at the bottom of the stairs with a thud. My neck cracks.

He rushes down the stairs, saying my name, but it's too late. Cradling me in his arms, he cries. Then he reaches for his phone, thinks for a moment, and puts it away. He disappears into the garage and is gone for a long time. When he returns, he picks me up like a groom delivering a bride over the threshold and carries me into the backyard. He places me in the deep hole he has dug next to the apple tree and picks up the shovel. By next summer, when my son is toddling across the grass with his babysitter, the tree's roots are already pushing through my sternum, gently prying open my ribs.