Silent Alarm

The noise could have been in her dream--it seemed that way at first Somewhere in the lower region of the house glass was shattering violently, but Helene’s sleeping mind turned it into a part of the nightmare with which she wrestled. 

Her dream self crawled out of bed calling her husband’s name; he was neither beside her in the bed, nor standing anywhere in the shadow-filled room. 

With no response coming to her ears, she floated, wraithlike, along a familiar yet terrifying corridor, and stopped outside her child’s open bedroom door.  A breeze she could not feel swirled her filmy, ice blue negligee lightly around her.

Inside the room, the floor seemed to be coated with ice crystals--she knew at once it was broken glass--and it sparkled dazzlingly in the same moonlight that allowed her to make out her husband’s body.  His strong arms were raised threateningly above his head, as he leaned over Emily’s broken body. 

The horrified mother screamed, “No!  Jack!  What are you doing?”

Even as the ghostly words rang through her subconscious mind, new sounds from the next room yanked her jarringly back to the real world. 

Fully awake, she realized that her daughter’s cries and the dog’s incessant barking were not part of her dream. 

Jack, her husband of more than two decades, was already passing her side of the bed when Helene threw the covers back and urgently whispered, “Someone’s in Emily’s room.”

“In the house, anyway,” Jack confirmed.  “Dial 911.” 

He said nothing else; he was already out the door.

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Huddled in one corner of her crib, Emily Kathryn Fentnor, her middle-aged parents’ personal trainer, screeched at the tops of her lungs.

Terrified, the toddler clutched tightly to her teddy bear, Mr. Boslee, whose fuzzy, tan and brown face was buried in the child’s dark curls; judging by the stranglehold she had on the stuffed animal, its beady, black eyes should have been open as wide as her own hazel ones.  

As frightened as the cherub-faced toddler was, she was also confused, and even a little bit angry.

Snuggled comfortably beneath her Little Bo Peep quilt only seconds earlier, she had been enjoying a very nice dream about talking teddy bears and dancing dogs--now she was trying to understand whom it was who had barged into her room, banged sharply on the side of her crib, played chase with her dog, and then left her window wide open.

Where were Mommy and Daddy? 

The child would scream until they appeared in her room, and made the world all right again. 

Had Emily been old enough to understand and explain exactly what she had seen, the family’s devoted dog, Tillie--who even now growled menacingly at the window--might have been named the Humane Society’s Dog of the Year; not every Lab would chase an intruder.  

The present situation had been a dangerous one, and somehow the dog had grasped that--most likely because the two people the dog understood to be the pack leaders would never have struck the side of the little one’s crib with enough force to push it back against the wall.

Lunging away from the corner in which she had been sleeping, Tillie had chased the intruder away from the side of the crib and over to the window, biting the seat of his heavy, corduroy slacks every step of the way.

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