She is hiding beneath the kitchen sink inside their old home in Gastonia, North Carolina. She is only four or five years old. It is dark and damp inside the cabinet. Whenever her mother turns on the faucet Colleen can hear water coursing up the pipes before trickling back down the drain. Her mother is preparing dinner. She knows Colleen is hiding there, but tonight she will forget.
Their house is small, and each night when her father comes home from work, she hears the front door creak open no matter where she is hiding. She always hunkers down in an attempt to make herself smaller, adrenaline coursing through her body like an electric current, and she listens as he tosses his keys on the table by the door and hangs up his belt and holster in the coat closet. He always closes the closet door and sighs out loud as if he is greatly disappointed.
“Where is everybody?” he asks the quiet house.
Her mother, who is always in the kitchen, waits a beat before replying.
“Well, I’m in the kitchen,” she says, “but I don’t know where Colleen is.”
“Huh,” her father says. “Well, I hope she hasn’t run off.”
He then begins moving through the house, opening closet doors, looking under beds, and pausing only to narrate his search to her mother, his voice rising and falling in mock curiosity, surprise, and disappointment.
“She’s not in her bedroom. Surely she wouldn’t leave us without taking her toys with her.”
“I don’t know,” her mother says. “I’m telling you, honey, I haven’t seen her.”
If Colleen’s body had been a glowing ember, the red-hot heat emanating from it would have given her position away. She always stifled laughs and repressed squeals of torturous anticipation, and each night she fought the urge to burst from her hiding place to surprise her father whenever she heard or felt him draw close to where she lay in wait. Sometimes he would surprise her by making noise as if leaving the room for another, and then returning to throw back a blanket or peek behind a door and scream, “Found you!” She would leap toward him, and he would scoop her up. She would throw her arms around his neck and close her eyes. She could smell him, the fading scent of his aftershave, the sweet cigarette smoke that clung to his clothes, a smell that she had only ever found comforting on him. He would squeeze her close, speak into her hair; she imagined that his eyes were closed. “I’m so happy I found you,” he would say. “I was afraid that you’d left us.”
But in this memory, he does not search for her when he comes in the door, though she is waiting for him nonetheless. The floor of the cabinet where she’s hiding has been papered, and she runs her fingers over it, feeling its waxy film and the spots where the paper has begun to dimple and curl from moisture. Her back leans against one side of the cabinet; her knees are pulled to her chest. At her feet are boxes of Brillo pads and Ajax. It must be cold outside, because the smell of gas heat coming from the ducts lingers on the edge of her memory.
When the front door opens, her father does not call out, does not open the closet door to put his coat or belt and holster away. She hears his steps as he walks through the small foyer toward the living room. The springs give when he sits down on his chair. Outside the cabinet where she’s hiding, she’s aware that her mother has paused as if she too is listening and marking these alterations in her father’s routine. Her mother goes back to her work.
“It’s about time,” her mother says. She waits, but there is no response. “I don’t know where Colleen is.”
Her father is silent. His chair creaks as if his weight has shifted, and Colleen wonders if he is settling himself or reclining or standing.
“Marie,” he says. His voice is quiet, and Colleen recognizes it as a voice she has not heard before. “Come in here.”
“Winston?” her mother says. She turns on the sink, and Colleen imagines that she is washing her hands before drying them on a dish towel. “What is it?”
“Come in here,” her father says again.
She listens as her mother leaves the kitchen and crosses the small foyer to the living room. She can hear their voices, but she cannot make out what they’re saying. She opens one of the cabinet’s doors, but she can’t hear them any more clearly, so she lets it close.
“What?” her mother says. Her voice is breathy, almost apologetic.
“Shhh,” her father says. “Marie, come here.”
She can hear her mother crying, and Colleen pictures her father holding her mother the same way he would hold her if he had found her during their hiding game. His eyes are closed. He is speaking something quietly into her mother’s hair.
A few minutes later—it could have been longer because it is dark when she climbs out of the cabinet—she finds her parents sitting on the sofa together, hand in hand. Their faces are faces she has not seen before. Something bad has happened. A grandparent has died. Their dog has been run over like the neighbor’s dog had been run over a few months earlier. Russia is going to bomb them.
“What happened?” she asks.
Her parents look at her, but neither of them says anything. Her father releases her mother’s hand, and she pulls it back into her lap as if protecting it. Her father reaches his hand toward Colleen. His smile is an attempt at a smile.
“What happened?” she asks again. “Why didn’t you come find me?”
He is still reaching for her. She offers her hand. He takes it, pulls her gently onto his lap.
“I was waiting for you,” she says.
Her father wraps his arms around her. She can feel his breath on the top of her head, the sharp jut of his chin where it rests on her crown. Her mother rubs her hand up and down Colleen’s back.
“I know,” her father says, “I know you were hiding, but tonight I wanted you to find me.”
Colleen would not know the story for years, and there was still a lot she did not know, but that day her father had responded to a call about a robbery in progress at a pharmacy near their neighborhood. A man was inside the pharmacy, holding the pharmacist, the cashier, and a few customers behind the counter. He had a pistol. Her father had entered the store with his gun drawn, and when the man pointed his gun at her father, her father shot him. He died at the scene.
No one had ever told Colleen that story. What she knew of it had been pieced together, and she believed that she had begun perceiving that story from her hiding place beneath the sink. She felt her parents’ fear, uncertainty, and sadness. Sadness for the man her father had shot, sadness for his family, sadness for her father for having killed him, and sadness for her mother and for Colleen for having a husband and a father who had killed someone. Suddenly, she understood without ever having been told that the shooting was what had caused her parents to leave Gastonia and move 250 miles southeast to the coast. And she understood something else too: the great walling off of her parents’ lives from hers. In many ways, she was forever beneath that kitchen sink in their old house, the one she still dreamed of often, listening to the voices of her mother and father in the next room, wondering at the mystery of their language, yearning for one of them to open the cabinet door and lift her out into the early evening dark so she could see their faces and know that she was home.