4338.216 · August 4, 2018 AD
The Babysitter's Hand
A drama teacher in Fern Tree has been waiting a week for news of her husband when a stranger knocks on her front door and tells her he knows where to find him. She goes to check on her four-year-old son before she answers. The son is not in his bedroom. The stranger is inside the hallway before she has worked out how the front door is still locked. By the time she has stepped through the light on her own hallway wall, the girl she has spent three months trying to keep away from her child is standing beside him in red dust on the other side.
Jenny Triffett is a drama teacher, a rationalist, a woman whose life has been built on the knowable. Her husband Nial has been missing for a week and the police have stopped returning her calls. Her four-year-old son Sammy is in his bedroom reading picture books, or he was, and she checks on him every fifteen minutes because her body has stopped tolerating the interval between reassurances. When a stranger knocks on the front door and tells her through the screen that he knows what happened to Nial, Jenny turns to check on Sammy before she answers. The bedroom is empty. The books are scattered on the bed where her son had been reading them.
She searches the wardrobe. She searches behind the curtains. She calls his name through the house. When she turns back toward the hallway, the man who had been on the other side of the front door is inside the house, and the front door is still locked. He tells her her son is with the babysitter — a teenage girl from her school. Jenny knows which girl before he finishes the sentence. Serena Cotton has been breaking into this house for months. Jenny has spent three months trying to keep Serena away from Sammy, and she has failed, and the reason she has failed is standing in her hallway opening a door that is not a door in the wall of her own home.
On the other side, Nial is twenty paces away in red dust and unfamiliar light, and Serena Cotton is standing beside their four-year-old son with her hand resting on his shoulder, and she is smiling like a babysitter at the end of a long shift.
