Invisible Man Asshole

Three months before my husband and I married, we moved to a house on the route of a ghost tour. It didn’t stop outside our door, but one block away was a haunted graveyard and a house that when photographed had white orbs hovering outside its upper windows. The tour guides wore long black coats and swung lanterns as they ushered groups along cobblestone streets. Spanish moss caught in the trees, like the wiry-haired beards of hundreds of old men, dripped on the heads of tourists.

I had taken the ghost tour on three occasions. Each time, the guide gave me a cheap beaded necklace, and each time, I didn’t believe in the ghosts. I thought that I was special for not believing; I didn’t understand that the guides were, above all, storytellers. Having grown up as the daughter of Christian missionaries, I was accustomed to more disturbing invisibilia: the devil’s handiwork. Ghosts—meaning the transparent embodiment of dead humans—were imaginary and harmless, but I reveled in the idea of unholy spirits. I enjoyed horror movies inspired by true events in which people became possessed by demons, and I latched onto stories where people had visions in their dreams or before they died. I sought evidence of God. The supernatural suggested transcendent existence and thus, in my desperate brain, a God. My wise and loving parents could not have spent their missionary lives in foolishness, the joyful periods of my life in which I sensed divinity could not have been false, and I could not live with the notion that upon my death I would vanish.

Living on the ghost tour’s path did not make me feel spiritually enriched. It was like being invited into a church service, only to find out that it was a movie set, the stories not real, and everyone just an actor. On the day we moved, I was in my first week of work at a psychiatric residential-treatment facility for five- to twelve-year-old survivors of abuse, which forced me into an even more tender sense of reality.

There were three stages to the facility’s hiring process: an interview with my supervisor, a four-hour shadowing experience, and a conversation with the director. We sat opposite each other at a small round wooden table in her spacious office. The ends of her graying blonde hair rested on a string of pearls. Outside the window was a recently mown lawn.

She asked about my shadowing time. “Did you get to see any of their behaviors?”

“One boy made sexual noises from his bedroom, and he was shouting ‘faggot’ a lot,” I said.

“Yes, they’re going through a bit of a sexual phase.”

I nodded.

“Are you a prayer warrior, Jillian?”

The nonprofit was founded on the belief that Christ could heal the abused. I said, “I used to pray more, but I do pray.”

“If you take this job, you will need to be a prayer warrior for yourself, and you will need other people to pray for you too.”

It had been years since I’d had a boss who spoke about prayer, but I was unfazed. My parents had had their own prayer team while they were missionaries, and as a missionary intern for a summer in the Czech Republic, I was encouraged to create such a team myself. I had a wonderful time in Prague, but I was frustrated by my lack of visible faith. That summer, I finally realized that acquiring faith was not like getting your period: Faith did not appear one day and change your life forever. It was a choice and a practice, and I had never been good at practicing.

“We deal with some serious spiritual warfare,” she said, her voice soft and low. “The devil is here. Once you start working, you will see him. We fight him every day.”

I knew this approach. Every time humans considered sinning, they were encountering the devil. Every time our hearts hardened toward God or grew bitter, that was the devil’s work. Not only was I used to such rhetoric, but the idea of seeing the devil—metaphorically or not—perched me on the edge of exhilaration, as if I were watching the opening credits of a scary movie.

“Well, I can formally offer you this job if you’d like to accept,” she said, smiling.

“I would love that,” I said.

It was a full-time job with decent pay and guaranteed play with children. We shook hands. It’s strange to think that two months later, after all the children were gone, my fiancé would stand on the lawn and look into her office on the second floor, and she would turn off her light, faking absence. My fiancé would think she was a coward. I would think that she was in mourning. “It doesn’t matter,” I’d say, curled behind him. “Let’s leave.”

It took twenty minutes to get to the facility, ten of those on a rural road through yellow fields, which provided plenty of time to consider praying. Eventually, I slowed my car outside double black gates and punched a code into a keypad, and the gates swung open. I drove slowly through the grounds. The grass was vibrant, flowers thrived outside the cottages where the children slept, and white picket fences framed the small yards. Inside my cottage, natural light brightened the wooden floors and made the children glow.

On weekdays, I worked the evening shift from two in the afternoon to ten thirty at night. I led athletic exercises; supervised playtime; ate dinner with the kids around a large rectangular table; put movies in the DVD player; allocated coloring books; intervened when hands gripped Ninja Turtle action figures in a way that implied they were weapons; decided who got to move from their “transition spot” first; squeezed shampoo onto heads for showers; combed wet, tangled hair; listened to the kids’ conversations with social workers or grandparents; and turned off their lights (except for the youngest, who could keep his on).

The children were asleep for the final two-and-a-half hours of my shift. Staff sat in the hallway and filled out paper work, pausing to open each of the children’s doors every fifteen minutes. We hoped for dreamless sleeps. We listened for knocks from kids still awake. We whispered about the new kid in the other cottage who liked to bite. We started the children’s laundry, cleaned the floors, and rummaged in the kitchen for leftovers. We gossiped with the nurse. We waited for the night shift. We were always replacing ourselves while the children slept. Mine was the face they saw at night, the one that read them bedtime stories, but not the one they woke to in the morning.

During those dark evening hours, my coworkers whispered about the financial state of the nonprofit. After asking a few questions, I understood I might not get paid. They had a potent distrust of the facility’s administration, especially of the director with the pearls, and they recommended cashing my checks at the bank and immediately depositing the bills so there’d be no wait. Never deposit the check over your phone, they said. Checks have bounced. To be really safe, open an account at the bank the nonprofit uses.

I saw their wariness as a lack of faith in the facility, so I deposited my second check over the phone. None of my supervisors had told me not to. The money went into my account, but two weeks later I received a notice in the mail: There had been insufficient funds, and the bank took back my money. I was disappointed, but I couldn’t quit the job. Watching the children’s eyes droop as I read bedtime stories would have been all it took to grow attached to them, but I also sat with them at every meal, watched them giggle during cartoons, and helped them build dream houses out of Jenga blocks. Sunlight poured through the double glass doors and pooled between the couches and the enormous televisions in the living rooms.

We were trained in the theory and practice of restraints. There were different restraints for differently sized bodies. The most commonly used technique required two people, one on either side of the child. You approached from behind, used the crook of your elbow to scoop the child by the armpit, and then you held her arms behind her, in front of your chest so she couldn’t strike you or herself. If she didn’t resist, then she hung as if from a cross, one staff member holding out her right arm, and one her left. This restraint was used when the child needed to be transported, most commonly to the empty seclusion room. During training, our supervisor locked us in the seclusion room so we could see how it felt. Some children were known to take off their shirts and wrap them around their necks to get someone to open the door.

The first time I performed a restraint on a child, I grabbed her wrists, crossed her arms in front of her body, and slid down the wall behind her until I was sitting on the ground, legs straight in front of me. She sat in my lap with her legs between mine.

Mary, as I’ll call her, was small, and she brought a pink box full of Barbies and dress-up clothes to the cottage. She adored blankets and stickers, and often slipped her feet into oversized plastic high-heeled shoes. Her big eyes were sunken and ringed in purple. It was so easy to love her, even when she could not stay in her room during designated quiet times but kicked staff and grabbed at their hair.

I held her silently as she squirmed. While a child was “in restraint,” we were to stay quiet. I felt her small body rest against my chest like I was a lounge chair, but occasionally she tried to tug her wrists from my hands and slide her body out. I looked to the wall ahead of us or down at the top of her blonde, curly head. She whined. Michael, a boy with a heavy southern accent, opened his bedroom door at the end of the hall and bellowed, “Shut up!”

“Try to get her back a little straighter,” said the nurse, who had come out of her office to monitor the restraint.

I positioned my back flat against the wall and pulled Mary against my torso. “That’s better,” the nurse said, and made a note on her clipboard.

“You’re hurting me,” Mary said quietly. I adjusted my grip on her skin.

“You can let go,” she said, yanking at her wrists. “I’m ready.”

“I’m ready,” she said again, but I did not move. We weren’t supposed to begin the release process until the child was quiet and calm for five minutes.

She slumped, her pale belly visible below her pink shirt. The lights were half-off in the hallway, a few of the other children already asleep. I could hear the cook washing pans in the kitchen sink. Mary turned her head so her ear was resting on my chest, and though she relaxed, I couldn’t stop thinking of myself as her captor. It was against my nature to be forceful, but I was also drawn to do what I’d been told was right. We were supposed to be doing God’s work. In a radio interview, the director said the facility was on Holy Ground: “His name is on it.” But I could not imagine God being present in restraint, and this was not the work of the gentle missionaries I had known. One evening as the children slept, a night nurse who had been working at the facility for over five years whispered to me, “I’m not sure if God is really here at all.”

Mary said, “I can hear your heart beating.”

“Oh yeah? What does it sound like?”

“Bum bum.”

“It’s not humming a song?”

“No,” she said.

During the middle of my second week, on a humid summer evening, after the children had given their half-eaten dinner plates back to the cook, swept the floor beneath the dining table, and started taking showers, the oldest two, Leah and Patrick, escaped the cottage through an open window and an unlocked gate.

One child was coloring in the living room. I heard the sttk sound of crayon lifting from paper. Another child was watching a movie. The two staff members and I stood in the hallway. We were all brunettes in our twenties. We decided who would go outside and who would stay in the cottage. I wore running shoes. My hair was in a bun, making it harder to grab. Panic soon spread to the children left inside—all except for Sean, the new kid who was always sleeping.

In the end, Danielle and I ran after Leah and Patrick, following them down the path toward the main office building. Nearly five feet tall, Leah was the largest and strongest child at the facility. We would need at least two or three people to restrain her. “Stupid bitches!” she shouted as we ran, a long car antenna in her hand. “I’ll kill you with this!” Rapt faces of children peered from bedroom windows in the green cottage, their hands on the glass, their eyes big with the thrill of an escape. I knew it was spreading: the idea of breaking free.

Danielle ran toward the steps of the office building where Leah was decapitating cheerful yellow flowers with her metal stick. She’d smashed flower pots on the front steps, and now she picked up another flower pot and threw it at Danielle, narrowly missing her head. I followed Patrick into the facility’s small neglected garden. I jogged atop dead weeds and wrapped Patrick’s arms across his chest. “Fuck you,” he said. “Let go!”

Then Leah was in the garden. She used both hands to push my shoulders, and my hip slammed into the soil, allowing Patrick to scramble from my arms. Leah screamed, her voice filled with gravel. Flyaway hairs clung to the sides of her sweaty face. Her feet were bare. I had never been so simultaneously scared of and sympathetic toward a child. When she screamed, I thought of what the director had said about seeing the devil.

Leah said, “I told you I’ll kill you if you touch us! You better remember!”

They went running for the main gates of the facility, and we ran after them. To the right of the gates was a shorter brick wall accessible through the bushes. They hopped it and slowed to a walk in the middle of the empty road. Now that we were off the property, we were not allowed to touch them; we had to get a police escort. This was a small relief.

Leah turned around. “Are y’all tired? You look tired.”

“Yeah,” said Patrick. “Do you need some water, Miss Jillian? You look like you need some water.”

“We should get out of the road,” Danielle called, but they did not respond. I could tell that Leah was exhausted, that she needed shoes.

“Bitches, you better not touch us,” she said.

They turned down a residential street, and we followed. Leah hit a mailbox with her antenna. Neighbors appeared on their front porches, wearing tank tops and caps. “You really look tired, Miss Jillian,” said Patrick. “Or have you got something on your face? Yeah, I think there’s something wrong with your skin. What is wrong with your face?” He mockingly used his stick to point at the place between my eyes.

Leah laughed, then said, “God, stop following us!”

“We have to know where you are,” I said.

“I think I was close to getting out,” Leah said. “Maybe getting a foster family soon. Not anymore, though.”

She laughed again. “Shit.”

“Same,” said Patrick. “Oh well.”

Danielle was on the phone with a counselor at the facility, who said that our supervisors and the police were on their way. Leah and Patrick approached the road’s dead end and turned right into someone’s large backyard. We followed, weaving through trees and stepping on fallen limbs. My stomach was slick with sweat. We approached a hunting stand, and the kids climbed into it. They tried to spit on us. Patrick hit my shoulder with a rock.

After the police escorted them back on-site, my supervisors put Leah in the seclusion room, and Patrick was held in a three-person restraint on the playroom’s wooden floor. He lay with his back on the ground, a staff member clasping his legs shut like you’d hold an alligator’s mouth. Two other people kneeled at his shoulders, bending his arms to touch the top of his head.

The cottage vibrated with Leah’s stomping. She was kicking the walls and screaming for Patrick. I thought about the other children in their rooms, always listening, and I wished they had plugs for their ears.

That evening I went back to my house beneath the Spanish moss, ghost-tour guides rotating in loops around the neighborhood, and relayed the story of the escape to my fiancé. I slumped on the couch and said that it was the sort of day I would remember for the rest of my life. I was happy to be experiencing the breadth of human emotion, but constantly heartbroken for the kids. With the screen door to my left, I appreciated soft sounds: moth wings slapping lights, cockroaches scurrying over cobblestones, the town’s storied ghosts gliding through the dangling Spanish moss, sending pale green spirals to the ground.

The next morning, Leah and Patrick woke angry. Leah ripped her Bible and kicked a hole in her wall. She drew on her bedroom furniture with markers. Every bright coloring page she’d ever pasted to her walls she tore off and shredded. Patrick was put in the seclusion room multiple times. Before I arrived for my afternoon shift, they had both been taken to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. Rumor had it they were not coming back. I was surprised. If I knew anything about Jesus from my missionary background, it was that he gave innumerable chances.

Two days after their removal, the director held a meeting to announce that my cottage was closing. The four remaining children would be moved to the other, bigger cottage. Though she expressed hope this would cut operational costs, I assumed that the nonprofit was in its final act and that I would not get paid for the remainder of my work.

I did not like the other cottage. There were more children and little natural light. The bedrooms were arranged along a windowless rectangular hallway, which allowed distressed kids to run in an endless loop, giggling and slipping on the linoleum, uncatchable unless another staff member arrived. And there was an alarming picture hung on a cabinet in the dim staff office. It had been drawn by a child using chunky markers. A stick figure walked on a yellow lane labeled “heaven,” and above the figure’s head were several gray ovals with the word devil written inside. As we left the office on our first tour, Danielle whispered, “We need to take that picture down.”

After moving to the green cottage in the middle of my third week, I had five new children and six new employees to meet. I found myself especially fond and protective of the original four kids who had traveled with me. They were younger and smaller, each a baby bird in its own beanbag nest, fed by many mothers. I was especially fond of Sean, the one who slept so much. I spent hours with him in the hallway, where he ran around the loop, refusing to stay in his room. He loved cars, his family, and dirt bikes. He loved to describe his tricks and accidents on them, sometimes acting them out. “Look, look, look,” he’d say, nudging my back until he had my full attention. He’d put his hands out on invisible handlebars. “It was like this,” he said, and tried to reenact the stunt. He had a big smile and slightly crooked teeth. When he ate spaghetti, sauce got all over his face.

One employee, Bridget, seemed to be many of the children’s favorite. She pushed her long gray-blonde hair back with a pair of thin glasses, and she frequently wore an overlarge T-shirt that depicted a cat’s head floating in space. As the children slept, she and I often sat on the hallway floor and talked about her daughter, who had a wonderful boyfriend.

One afternoon, as the children were waking from naps and knocking on their doors, I heard the spray of a shower turning on. It was the boys’ bathroom, but no one had asked for bathroom permission.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Bridget. I peered down the empty hall, dim even in the afternoons, as though shadows had been mixed in with the paint.

“What?”

“The shower.”

“Oh,” she said, her large eyes rounding. “That’s the ghost.”

“What?”

“There’s a ghost in this cottage,” she said, lowering her voice so the children couldn’t hear. “I swear. Or a demon. Go turn it off. There’s no way I’m turning it off.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“No. I’m not.”

I didn’t know her well enough to guess whether she believed in ghosts. I only knew that she was protective of her daughter and untrusting of everyone except for the boyfriend.

I knocked on the bathroom door and slowly pushed it open. The lights were on. I walked to the corner, pulled back the curtain, and saw the metal fist of the showerhead shooting water from its pores. I turned it off, dried my hands, and returned to Bridget, her shirt’s space-cat floating in a pink-and-purple psychedelic sky.

“It’s the demon,” she said.

“You’re joking.”

“Nope,” she said. “Ask anyone. Ask Cheryl.”

I did ask Cheryl, the most no-nonsense employee in the cottage, who walked with her back straight and her narrow glasses slightly down the slide of her nose. The kids were getting ready for bed, taking turns in the bathroom.

“Oh yeah, there’s a ghost,” she said. “Or a spirit, or something.”

I asked, “You’ve seen things?”

“I saw a shadow once, on that back wall.”

The kid who was dangerously obsessed with light fixtures emerged from the bathroom with the lively shower. “Is there a ghost?” he asked, toothbrush in hand.

“Of course not,” Cheryl said.

“I thought I heard you talking about ghosts.”

“Don’t you worry,” she said. “Go on and wait in your room.”

I heard a knock on a door at the end of the hallway, the room closest to Cheryl’s shadow sighting. The kids loved to request story times or prayer before falling asleep. Many of them had bedtime rituals: blankets placed over them in the right order, prayers said with carefully chosen words, or mattresses moved to the floor. I pressed open the door and saw David, an older boy I’d met the day before. “Miss Jillian,” he said. “Can I show you something?”

I walked inside and bent down to place one of his hardback books between the door and the frame.

He pointed to a mountain of stuffed animals on his small desk. He picked up a large dog with floppy ears. “This is Big Red,” he said. “Probably my favorite.”

“I like him,” I said. “Looks comfy.”

“I like Bear a lot too. See here, the one with camouflage. I’ve had him a long time.”

He considered the dozen other animals, as if trying to sense which one would feel the most hurt if not mentioned.

“This is Denny.” He passed a small penguin to me, and I held him as if he were made of glass.

“Can I get in bed, and then you can tuck me in and pass me the animals I ask for?”

“Of course,” I said.

He lay down on his sheets, faceup and unmoving. His blankets were in a mound by his feet, so I stepped forward and brought the blankets to his chin. “Thank you,” he said, and turned his face to the shelf of animals.

“Bear,” he said. I passed it over.

“And Denny, and the small round bird. I don’t have a name for him yet.”

“How about Claude?” I said.

“Claude? Maybe. And Big Red. He protects me from the invisible man.”

“Who is the invisible man?” I asked.

“I can hear steps in my room at night,” he said. “I call him the Invisible Man Asshole.”

My heart began beating fast.

“He walks outside my door and sometimes in my room. I use that book”—he pointed to the one I’d used to prop open the door—“to defend myself.”

“Well, we will keep a lookout.”

He positioned three of his stuffed animals around his head and held Bear in his arms.

“I love Bear,” he said, looking down at its face. “Can you pray with me?”

“Sure. You want to go first, and I can pray after?”

“No. You pray first, and then I’ll pray.”

“Okay,” I said, and closed my eyes. “Dear Lord, thank you for all these children. Thank you for these precious animals and all the gifts we’ve received. I pray that everyone will find permanent homes and feel peace and joy tomorrow. Amen.”

“Amen,” he said, his eyes still closed below his brown bangs. “And Lord Jesus, I love you so much. I pray that you will help me to be good. I pray that I will stay on Green tomorrow and not get angry. I pray that I will not be angry, God. I pray that I will get stars and that I’ll be able to visit my family, and that all of us will be able to go to our homes. I pray that you will keep me safe from the Invisible Man. I love you so much, God. Amen.”

“Amen,” I said. “Sweet dreams.”

“Good night,” he said. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

I took the book out of the door and placed it on top of his dresser.

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Good night.”

Back home, I told my fiancé about the shower, the shadow, and the Invisible Man Asshole. He was not intrigued by the stories. Several things could turn on a shower. He was aware of how much I wanted God to be real. I told him that I didn’t necessarily think there was a spirit at the facility, but that I did believe in the experiences of my coworkers and the children. I believed that a shadow was seen and that David sensed something. I believed that they believed. The summer air of my southern town was full of invisible weight bearing down upon us.

Four days later, the facility declared bankruptcy. We would stay open for just another week. The director with the pearls said in a radio interview, “I know He has a plan for it. I know He does. I can’t tell you I know what it is, but I know He does. I trust Him. I trust Him.”

I cried in the car. At home, my fiancé cried with me. The children’s unknown futures made every other aspect of my life shrink to the size of a pebble, and the pebble drowned at the bottom of a giant river whose water was the children’s lives. I did not care about planning my wedding. For a few days after the bankruptcy announcement, I felt that I existed only in relation to the kids. I’d been harboring a second life, as a mother and a warrior, and now that life was drifting away. The counselors and administrators worked diligently to place the children. Some of them would go to approved family members. Some of them would transfer to similar facilities in the state. Some of them would, the staff prayed and prayed, find foster care. I only prayed when the children requested. I could not pray with conviction for something as large as changing the course of a river.

The children did not know we were closing, though they suspected. Michael was the first to leave. His return to his family had been scheduled before the bankruptcy. The day before he left, he kept knocking on his door and insisting that someone was walking on the other side of the backyard fence. He asked to cover his windows in newspaper because he did not want to see outside, so we worked together to paper over every inch of glass.

The evening of his departure, I again asked about the demon and was guided to a certain night-shift employee.

The woman had long dark hair curled into firm spirals like the city’s moss, and a heart-shaped face. She wasn’t a nurse but wore a top that looked like a nurse’s scrubs. She was older than many of the other employees and had worked at the facility for ten years. “There’s definitely a demon here,” she said. “I can tell you so many stories.”

And so she did: Her daughter, who had also worked there for a few months, was alone in the living space when she saw glowing writings scratched on the walls. She did not understand the language, and by the time she’d found another employee, the words had disappeared. This woman had personally seen shadows pass by the back wall, right outside of the room with David and his stuffed animals. That was where she chose to sit at night. She listened to music in a recliner outside his door.

“What does the demon look like?” I asked.

“It’s mushroom shaped,” she said. “Round like Pac-Man but with a small bottom.”

She also saw the demon in dreams, in that same shape.

“Once, I went to a celebration, a sort of tent revival, with two other women who worked here. They don’t anymore. We were seated in the front row, and the pastor pointed to us and said, ‘You three. You all work together. The place where you work will close.’”

This woman was a wonderful storyteller. I believed everything, but back then I tended to trust everyone who spoke to me. I trusted the director when she said God was in the land. I trusted the nurse when she said God was out of it. I trusted the children. I also trusted my husband, who did not believe in any of it. I understood the idea that believing in everything was believing in nothing, but it didn’t feel that way.

“It’s good that we won’t be here much longer,” she said. “Bad things happen to the people who work here. You’ve got to be careful not to carry this demon with you.”

She hoped to keep the demon away by drawing crosses on the walls with oil as the children slept. I’d seen residue from one cross outside the girls’ bathroom.

“And you’ve got to tell the demon to leave you, out loud. You’ve got to actually say it. That’s how to get rid of it. When you go to your car now, before you drive away, sit in your car and tell it to leave.”

I thanked her for talking to me, and we said good night. I stamped my time card and left through the front door. Outside was quiet and dark. A few stars shone. I walked briefly down the small lane, past the shed full of bikes and shadows. As I turned into the parking lot, heat lightning lit the sky. Somewhere, dozens of dogs started barking a reply. As I unlocked the car, heat lightning again turned the sky a violent silver. It was like sunlight striking tinfoil, and I wanted to cover it with newspaper—or use newspaper to cover my eyes.

I sat in my car and locked the doors. I fumbled the keys. I said, “Demon, leave me alone,” in a weak, disappearing voice. It was an absurdity different from the absurdity that accompanies prayer. I felt a sense of unreality, of nightmares pushing into daylight. My car beams threw clouds of light onto the side of the cottage, where there couldn’t be a demon, surely not—but where there could possibly be a demon.

On my last day of work, there were only five children left. In two days, they’d all be gone. Sleepy Sean was still there. He and Mary would not be housed with families when the facility closed but would transfer somewhere similar, another place where adult faces flowed in and out. Evil had won the battle for the land.

That evening, I read Sean a bedtime story. He had a fleck of tomato sauce on his cheek. We were not allowed to sit on the kids’ beds, so I sat on the floor beside his pillow while he lay down. When I finished, I stood to leave. Sean was not one of the children who liked to pray, and even though I mostly believed in God, I found this choice very mature.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “I’ve been to so many places.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure there will be lots of nice people where you’re going.”

“Well, you know what?”

“What?”

“This is the truth. I’m serious,” he said, waiting for me to nod my head before continuing. “If I could go anywhere in the world, anywhere, or just go home, I would choose to go home.”

I had read his file. He wouldn’t be going home.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I believe it.”

He asked, “Will you be here tomorrow?”

“No,” I said, and his mouth parted.

“You won’t?”

I shook my head and stepped toward the door.

“Don’t leave!” he said.

“You’ve got to sleep.”

“Stay!” He threw back his blankets, stood up, and grabbed my wrist, pulling me toward the bed. I gently stepped back.

“Let go,” I said.

“Stay!”

He tugged me harder toward him and then grabbed my other arm. When I took one arm away, he pushed me, and I stumbled backward.

“Stay!” he said.

“You need to sleep,” I said, backing toward the door. “I want you to have a good day tomorrow.”

He sat on his bed, and I stood by the door. He seemed so much older than eight.

“Damn it,” he said. “You’re going to make me cry.”

“I’m going to cry too.”

“Will I see you again?”

“I don’t know.”

He laid his head on his pillow and pulled one blanket back over himself. Legs tucked, he formed a mountain.

“Good night,” I said. “I hope you dream of dirt bikes.”

I closed his bedroom door and immediately heard a knock. It was Mary, who wanted me to play music so she could fall asleep. I went back to the end of the hall where the other staff were standing, found Debussy’s “Clair de lune” on my phone, and propped it up on the windowsill, playing the song at full volume.

I sat on the floor to complete paper work for the last time. I felt Sean’s grip on my wrists like invisible bracelets. The overhead lights had been dimmed, but the glowing nurse’s station illuminated my clipboard. I used to play the first three pages of “Clair de lune” on my grandmother’s piano, which my parents had lugged across the Atlantic Ocean after deciding to become missionaries. I had always wanted to learn the rest of the song but wasn’t able, just like I had always wanted to be a steadfast believer in God but couldn’t. As the piano melody broke apart the weighty air, the children entered their dreams to the sound of my old dream, and I thought that at least I was able to believe in a demon, which was a way to believe in God, which was a way to believe that the kids would be all right.

Another knock. The song was long over. Mary and Sean were asleep. David stuck his head out of his door. I was alone in the rectangular hall.

“What is it?” I said.

“I can’t fall asleep,” he said. “I’m scared.”

“We’re right here.”

“But I can hear him. The Invisible Man Asshole.”

“I’m watching. Now try to sleep.”

He growled, and I stared at the blank back wall where the Pac-Man shape had appeared to my coworker.

“I hear things!” he said. “You don’t believe me!”

We faced each other, four bedrooms and mounting darkness between us.

“I believe you,” I said, “but I don’t hear anything. I don’t see anything.”

“He’s here!”

He unleashed the face we feared: head tilted down, eyes slit like buttonholes.

“I don’t know what to say,” I told him.

“You will come check my room in ten minutes?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Someone will check your room every fifteen minutes.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know.”

An hour later, he fell asleep and I drove home.

Read more from Issue 16.1.