The Babysitter Lives E-Book

Stephen Graham Jones

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A chilling and masterfully terrifying horror novel about a young woman who is all that stands between malicious supernatural forces and the children in her care. Perfect for fans of Nat Cassidy and Grady Hendrix. When high school senior Charlotte agrees to babysit the Wilbanks twins, she plans to put the six-year-olds to bed early and spend a quiet night studying: the SATs are tomorrow, and checking the Native American/Alaskan Native box on all the forms won't help if she chokes on test day. But tomorrow is also Halloween, and the twins are eager to show off their costumes. Charlotte's last babysitting gig almost ended in tragedy when her young charge sleepwalked unnoticed into the middle of the street, only to be found unharmed by Charlotte's mother. Charlotte vows to be extra careful this time. But the house is filled with mysterious noises and secrets that only the twins understand, echoes of horrors that Charlotte gradually realizes took place in the house eleven years ago. Soon Charlotte has to admit that every babysitter's worse nightmare has come true: they're not alone in the house.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

The Babysitter Lives

Acknowledgments

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

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The Babysitter Lives

Print edition ISBN: 9781835410301

Black Crow Edition ISBN: 9781835417195

E-book edition ISBN: 9781835410318

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: July 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Stephen Graham Jones 2022

Stephen Graham Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

Set in Adobe Caslon Pro by Richard Mason.

For Josephine “Tiny” Calflooking Jones, my grandmom.

You were born in 1929 and you made it all the way to 2021.

A mother carries her six-year-old daughter into the tiled bathroom where the bathtub is already running, is still running, is overflowing, and for a moment the girl calms, seeing her little brother floating facedown in the water, his hair a golden halo around him, but then this mother is guiding her face-first down into that water, that, as it turns out, isn’t just water but scalding water, and eleven years later her scream is the drawer screeching out of the counter by the sink.

Charlotte turns away from the sound and Mrs. Wilbanks does too, even sucks some air in about it.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Wilbanks says, tilting her head to the side to guide her earring in. “I need to get Rog to call somebody about that.”

“I can—” Charlotte starts, but Mrs. Wilbanks is already moving away from the toothbrush drawer to her daughter’s pink and turquoise bedroom, to explain how the inhaler works. Like every other inhaler in the history of inhalers, surprise. The daughter, Desi, six, cute as a button, is sitting up in the middle of the huge pink beanbag in the corner, watching the stranger Charlotte is, her eyes big with wonder. Charlotte sneaks a wave to her, and Desi’s dimples appear right when she’s shying away.

“Mom, Mom!” Desi says to Mrs. Wilbanks in a whisper that’s louder than her real voice can possibly be. “Your dress is—”

“I know, I know,” Mrs. Wilbanks says about the zipper up her back that’s flapping open. “I’ve written everything down in the kitchen,” she goes on, walking and talking again, leading Charlotte down the hall into the master bedroom, neatly stepping around the lamp table, which is pretty much asking to be tipped over. “But you’ll be fine, they’re good kids, never steal cookies or draw on the walls or play hide-and-seek in the freezer, any of that. We don’t even let them in the garage. They do think they’re funny, so expect some big joke, I guess, wearing each other’s clothes or saying they only drink milk with ice or who knows. At worst they might try to fudge when lights-out eyes-closed usually is, but—”

“One hour from now,” Charlotte fills in.

“Is it eight already?” Mrs. Wilbanks says, her eyebrows coming up in panic. “Shit. Shit-shit-shit. Okay, um, if we’re not back by midnight, Roger says we’ll add twenty dollars, does that work?”

Charlotte nods yes, yes, that will most definitely work, thank you, her brain defaulting to the test mode it’s been locked in for the past month: If babysitter X earns thirteen dollars an hour for four hours and gets a twenty-dollar bonus, then that babysitter’s smile will increase by a factor of Y plus what?

She rubs her forehead with the pad of her finger, trying to smush that kind of thinking away for just five minutes, please.

“I just want the two of you to have a good time,” she says, stepping in to work that zipper up. Mrs. Wilbanks stills at the touch and draws her breath in, holds it, is suddenly this tall perfect porcelain doll, ready to shatter.

“Thank you,” she says, her eyes clocking the depths of the mirror, Charlotte’s pretty sure. Clocking it to see if her husband happened to have stepped in, seen this unasked-for intimacy, this dark girl lightly touching his milky-white wife.

“Full-service babysitter,” Charlotte says, taking a long step back into her own space like the help she is.

“And if the doorbell rings—” Mrs. Wilbanks starts, leaving the blank for Charlotte to fill.

“There shouldn’t be any trick ’r treaters until tomorrow night,” Charlotte says.

“But if someone’s got their calendar flipped to the wrong day …” Mrs. Wilbanks says, leaning in to unsmudge her eyeliner.

“Then nobody’s home,” Charlotte says with the right amount of perk, straight out of the handbook she’s always imagining. Specifically, the chapter on dealing with paranoid parents who haven’t been out on a date since their kids were born.

“And if that homeless man comes back?” Mrs. Wilbanks prompts, widening her eyes to get her line straight.

“Homeless who?” Charlotte asks.

“His calendar is flipped to the wrong decade,” Mrs. Wilbanks says. “Neighborhood Watch will call the police on him if he comes back, don’t worry.”

“Is he … hungry, you think?” Charlotte asks.

Mrs. Wilbanks refocuses her eyes about this, no longer looking at her makeup in the reflection but at Charlotte.

“Don’t engage,” Charlotte says, on cue—what Mrs. Wilbanks wants to hear. “Nobody’s home.”

“And you know the security code,” Mrs. Wilbanks prompts, her tone leading Charlotte to the proper answer.

“The temporary code,” Mr. Wilbanks says from the doorway of the master bedroom, then—for his wife—“I thought some rooms were going to be off-limits, dear?”

His hands are pulling on the hanging ends of the plaid scarf looped around the back of his neck, and there’s a diagonal red crease pressed into his forehead, like he’s been leaning in the doorway for a little bit, just watching, and listening.

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Wilbanks says, sketching a fleck of black onto the white of her eyeball and, instead of flinching away from it, Charlotte can clearly see that she’s making herself feel that burn. “Our room’s out of bounds, of course”—now she’s dabbing the eyeliner away ever so gently with the very corner of a tissue—“no reason to be in here. And Roger’s office, naturally.”

“It’s already locked,” Mr. Wilbanks says from his station in the doorway, and shrugs his office at the end of the long upstairs hall into the non-issue he most definitely wants it to be for Charlotte.

“All I need is Desi’s and Ronald’s bedrooms to tuck them in nice and tight, the bathroom to make sure they brush their teeth—”

“Bathrooms,” Mr. Wilbanks corrects, since each kid has their own.

“Bathrooms,” Charlotte repeats, no insult in her voice at all, thank you, “the kitchen, where the lasagne should just about be done, and the kitchen table, so I can study for my SATs after lights-out eyes-shut.”

She shrugs one shoulder at the end of this and practically kinks one knee up enough to twirl her toes into the hardwood floor, her hands clasped at her lower back like she’s in some pervy anime.

“Lights-out eyes-closed,” Mrs. Wilbanks says into the mirror.

“I know we probably sound …” Mr. Wilbanks starts in with a self-deprecating smile, “it’s just, the off-limits rooms—we’ve heard, and they’re probably the urban legends of our, our age group, but you hear things like—”

“Sex parties, drugs, rifling through personal belongings, absconding with passwords,” Mrs. Wilbanks says, ticking through them. “Unmentionable things done to silverware. Intimate photography that, well, compromises home values and probably leaves emotional damage besides.”

Charlotte blinks once, trying to gauge whether this is an accusation or not.

“You checked up on me, of course?” she says to each of them, not in a challenging way but a reassuring way—no, a reminding way. Because of course they did: 3.96 GPA, Honor Society, Mathlete, president and pioneer of the high school’s Premed Club, on the volleyball team that went to State last year, certified in both adult and infant CPR, and no brushes with the law. In short, babysitter extraordinaire, and then some. Like she was grown in a vat to watch their kids, or ordered up from a menu. Plucked from a daydream.

“The Lopezes were very confident in your performance, yes,” Mr. Wilbanks says—which is an odd word, right? “Actually, we considered whether or not you might be blackmailing them into being so positive.”

For a moment after delivering this he doesn’t smile, but when he does, Charlotte can too.

“I love their little Arthur,” she says. “My main regret about going off to college is not getting to see him grow up. The next few years will be so formative for him.”

“But surely you’ll miss your—your parents?” Mrs. Wilbanks asks, her eyeliner pencil held in suspension until Charlotte delivers the next correct answer. “When you go off to college?”

“My mom’s working overtime to pay for the applications,” Charlotte says, a hint of challenge rising in her voice in spite of her trying to play it so neutral here.

“Speaking of sons,” Mr. Wilbanks says, leaning back to look down the hall then speaking to his wife again, as if Charlotte isn’t there at all: “Has she met Ronbo?”

Charlotte tucks this nickname away for later.

“I’d love to,” she says, skipping forward without waiting for permission from Mrs. Wilbanks.

Mr. Wilbanks backs out of the doorway, presents the hallway to her, and all Charlotte can think for the two doors down to the far bedroom is that her ass is probably going to catch fire here, with all this laser-focused attention she can feel it’s getting. But that’s part of it too, she knows: the husbands—that’s how she thinks of them, not “fathers,” because yuck—they want and need her to be a good girl for this babysitting gig, but at the same time they’d trade anything to be the boyfriend they know is hiding in the bushes, waiting for a romp on the dining room table, the curtains not even drawn.

Charlotte stops by the closed door and raises her hand to knock but holds it, looking back to him for confirmation. He gets his eyes up just in time and brushes past her, his top-heavy bulk somehow sinuous, his hand finding the knob perfectly. “Kids don’t have privacy at this age,” he says, and swings the door in.

Like Desi, Ronald is six—twins—but unlike Desi, he’s not in pajamas yet, just tighty-whities that are pretty much a match for what Charlotte is guessing must be the signature Wilbanks pallor.

His back is to them. He’s hunched over something, is skinny enough that his individual vertebra are pushing up through his skin in a knobby ridge.

“Ronald?” Charlotte says, an inviting smile to her tone, a safe look prepped and ready on her face.

Ronald doesn’t turn around to the new voice. His right arm moves the littlest bit.

“Ronnie,” Mr. Wilbanks says.

Neither he nor Charlotte exist for this six-year-old. Only whatever he’s working on.

“Maybe we should just let him—” Charlotte tries, making peace before it’s even all the way broken, but Mr. Wilbanks is already crossing the room to his son.

Charlotte presses her lips together for the arm-grab and sudden haul-up she knows she’s about to have to witness and, against all her training, not report, but at the last moment—maybe because she’s there?—Mr. Wilbanks steps around Ronald, brings his laser eyes to bear on what’s got all his son’s attention.

“He’s usually not this rude,” he says. “I apologize, Charley.”

“No, no,” Charlotte says, stepping in but keeping to the side, to see what’s got Ronald so fascinated. She’s not a Charley, is a “Charl” at best, but this forced familiarity hardly even registers. Instead, she’s focused on what Ronald’s working on so intently.

A … an antique jack-in-the-box?

He’s turning the red metal crank a fraction at a time, like trying to draw out the moment before release. Like trying to make it last—no, Charlotte decides: like a safecracker in a movie, right? Like he’s unlocking something he’s not supposed to be getting into.

“It’s a playground story,” Mr. Wilbanks says, dismissing it even as he says it, his hands still gripping the ends of his scarf like a gym towel. “When the cafeteria flooded, all the grades ended up taking recess together, I don’t know. The older kids pulled some of the younger ones under the equipment where the teachers couldn’t see, and they—I guess they tried to scare them, you know how it is.”

“Ronald?” Charlotte says, taking a knee to be on his level, which she knows might be giving a certain husband a leery angle down the too-big flannel shirt she’s got tied at her waist, but screw it. It’s not a preview if he’s never getting to the main attraction.

“Shh,” Ronald says, not looking over to Charlotte even a little.

He’s still turning the crank one single plastic tooth at a time.

“This sixth grader evidently told the first graders that everybody stops when the clown pops up because they think that’s the end,” Mr. Wilbanks explains. “But there’s supposed to be a certain spot later in the turn that—”

“Where did he find that again?” Mrs. Wilbanks says from the doorway, already bustling in, snatching the jack-in-the-box up. It jostles it enough that the clown pops up all at once, its black diamond eyes and painted-red smile startling Charlotte back into some rattly action-figure case, then the wall. A huge press-on vinyl poster or banner of the night sky billows down around her—the oversize kind of thing you have made for your kid when your company’s got an account with the printer. Instinctively she fights out of it back to the light. Instinctively and a little more desperately than she would have liked, since she’s supposed to be the one in control, the one they can trust not to panic.

Ronald draws his breath in in the most satisfied way about the jack-in-the-box, his eyes tracking the little clown up and away.

“Clothes,” Mr. Wilbanks tells him—orders him—then, to Charlotte: “This isn’t in any of the parenting manuals, but having to teach them shame? That’s the part I never expected.”

“Shame is societal, not biological,” Charlotte hears herself saying, trying to stand up from the poster without ruining it, then padding her hand into the rug for the tacks that must have been holding it up.

“You really are an honor student, aren’t you?” Mr. Wilbanks says, the words themselves harmless, but there’s something behind them that’s pretty much the opposite.

“1460 on the PSATs,” Charlotte says. “But tomorrow I ace it.”

“They do tests on Halloween?” he asks.

“Scarier that way,” Charlotte says with a shrug.

“I think I hear the lasagne,” Mrs. Wilbanks cuts in with all due impatience, the jack-in-the-box tucked behind her back as if Ronald isn’t staring straight through her at it, waiting for that crank to turn one delicious click more.

“What time is the reservation for?” Mr. Wilbanks says in a fake and formal way to Mrs. Wilbanks, which is their cue to flutter down the stairs, start the goodbye process.

“He’ll be okay with his pajamas?” Charlotte asks on the landing, about Ronald.

“He’s a big boy,” Mr. Wilbanks says, and, before hauling his own overcoat out of the closet by the front door he flourishes Mrs. Wilbanks’s red one out, holds it open for her. It’s cute; they haven’t been out on the town since that overcoat was in style, Charlotte would bet.

“The numbers are all on the fridge,” Mrs. Wilbanks says, straightening her husband’s collar, which is really just her nerves keeping her hands busy.

“Our thing’s over at eleven, eleven thirty,” Mr. Wilbanks says for maybe the third time so far. “We’re here by quarter til. Not even that.”

“They’ll be fine,” Charlotte says, making a show of ferreting the key from its high basket in the closet, using it to twist the deadbolt back, punching the temporary code into the alarm pad—pure chipper performance, but that’s part of it. She opens the door, presents the outer world to these two nervous fledglings.

“Of course they will,” Mrs. Wilbanks says, and leans forward to give Charlotte a quick, awkward hug, her right hand, the one closest to her husband, to Charlotte’s shoulder, her left to Charlotte’s opposite hip, the fingers of that hand tucking something into the waistband of Charlotte’s mom jeans, like repaying Charlotte in kind for zipping her dress up—intimacy for intimacy.

Charlotte stiffens, wonders if she’s just been tipped or propositioned or what, and nods a courteous bye to Mr. Wilbanks, who, instead of some suggestive goodbye, calls out that Ronald needs to pee like a big boy before bedtime.

“Like a big boy,” Charlotte confirms, which is maybe the first time she’s ever said this out loud, or at all, and the moment the door’s shut she’s sliding the key in and turning that deadbolt over so they can clearly hear the click.

Standing with her back to the door, the alarm’s green light blinking steady, she can finally breathe. Let the muscles of her face go normal and slack. She pulls the scrunchy from her hair, shakes it loose, luxuriates in this small but so-necessary freedom. Next she palms her phone, sends the text she’s been working on in her head all day: sory, do over? Autocorrect doesn’t want to let her misspell like that, but the misspelling’s the whole thing. Will Murphy be able to resist texting back to correct?

Fifty-fifty, Charlotte figures, and makes herself pocket her phone instead of staring into it, waiting for Murphy’s typing ellipses to burble back. Now to just get the twins fed and asleep, which, if they’re anything else like every other six-year-old Charlotte’s worked with, should be cake. That should be her next book, even, for new moms: How to Reclaim Your Life by 9 p.m. But that’s all later, after food and games and brushed teeth.

Now … she curls her right side in, extracts the scratchy paper from the waistband of her jeans.

It’s not a ten or a twenty but a Post-it folded over twice, the adhesive keeping it shut enough that she has to apply some serious fingernail. Written inside in hasty blue ink, probably upstairs at Mrs. Wilbanks’s vanity while Charlotte was getting the Ronald intro, is … a book title?

Charlotte looks upstairs for any small faces watching her through the jail bars of the wooden railing. When there aren’t any she crosses the living room, finds the dark bookshelves built into the wall behind the television. The book Mrs. Wilbanks wrote down is Plutarch’s Lives, which Charlotte suspects will be about zero-point-zero help on tomorrow morning’s SATs.

She starts to haul the heavy volume down, not sure what Mrs. Wilbanks intends here—will there be a quiz? another note folded into the pages?—but then she sees: on the book beside the Plutarch is an eight-inch rubber lizard, blue on top, paler blue on bottom. The kind you find tucked in every place in any house with kids, even places as moneyed-up as this.

Only, instead of a hollow throat, this lizard has the iridescent eye of a nanny cam. Motion-activated, surely. Meaning it’s recording now. If its rubber tail could switch back and forth like a predator watching its prey, then that’s exactly what it would be doing, Charlotte knows.

She holds her face normal, unfocused, and keeps moving as if just scanning this library for something to read for the night, book-girl that she is, and knows now not to change her shirt on the couch this lizard is so interested in. Good to know. Also good to know: Mrs. Wilbanks didn’t tell her about this lizard because she wanted to keep Charlotte in line, she told her about it to keep her safe. From Mr. Wilbanks.

Great. Wonderful. Just the kind of stress Charlotte needs before the biggest most life-deciding test of her whole life. Checking the Native American/Alaskan Native box on all the forms doesn’t mean jack if you choke on test day.

But at least there won’t be more cameras, Charlotte tells herself. If there were, Mrs. Wilbanks would have polite-hugged her longer—long enough to tuck Post-it notes all over Charlotte, effectively going ahead and doing the sexual assault she was trying to warn her about.

“You can do this, you can do this,” Charlotte tells herself, licking her lips for resolve, then nodding to herself when that doesn’t quite take.

Not only can she do this, but she’s been doing it every Friday night for the past two years, pretty much, all over town—she’s the dependable girl, the one sure not to have weekend plans, the one who gets paid to hit the books for an hour or two after her charges are safely tucked in. Take that, everybody else from senior class who has to flip fryer baskets until end of shift and then pay taxes to the Great White Stepfather. If she’s lucky tonight, the Wilbankses’ big important “second first date” will even cross into Halloween by a few minutes, for an easy twenty dollars. Just, she reminds herself, be careful when Mr. Wilbanks offers that lift home. And remember that his eyes are cameras too.

On the way upstairs, already trying to twitch her lips into the smile the twins need, Charlotte caches the jack-in-the-box in the top of the closet by the front door and angles her head over so her face can be at the same jaunty angle as the clown’s.

“Yeah … I don’t think so,” she says, and closes that door, rattles the knob to be sure it caught. Behind her the key to the deadbolt is still in the deadbolt, exactly as she was warned not to do. But it’s their house, she reminds herself. Their paranoid rules. She reaches down for the key but stops at the last moment, narrows her eyes at the closet door.

Was there just a click in there?

Surely not.

*   *   *

After turning the oven off per handwritten instructions and sliding the lasagne onto the kitchen island to set, peeking under the foil tent to make sure things turned out all right, Charlotte leans against the counter and checks for the text she already knows isn’t there.

She shakes her phone like that might help, then checks the signal—strong enough—but, just to be sure, she tries to tap into the Wi-Fi. When she needs a password she peels up the night’s instructions, turns the sheet over for some cryptic string of numbers and letters.

This was one of their concerns, though, right? That she would snake access then sit outside their house for all the nights to come, using their network to upload terrorist plans and traffic kiddie porn and read all their secret emails?

More like she’d be submitting college applications.

Screw it.

She’s got some kids to tire out for bed.

“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” she calls up the staircase, less pulling herself up with the handrail than bouncing up the steps, “here I come …”

There’s no giggling in response, no hurried footsteps.

Don’t kids know this game from birth? When the teenager goes into monster mode, spreads her fingers wide like claws, you giggle and look around, hide if you can, shriek when the jig’s up and there’s nowhere to go.

Charlotte crests up onto the second-floor landing and considers which kid to fake-attack first. Desi, she decides. Because she’ll need the fun one on her side if she’s going to pull the serious one into some make-believe run-and-chase game.

Charlotte galumphs into the doorway of Desi’s room, throws an arm up onto the jamb like she’s been running for miles, but … no Desi?

“Dez?” Charlotte tries in her own voice.

She checks the bathroom, the shallow closet, the hot-pink beanbag, then, smiling, she pulls the frilly pink bed skirt up all at once, her face right there for the little girl who’s got to be hiding.

She’s not.

“What the hell?” Charlotte mutters.

Instead of flouncing dramatically into Ronald’s room, she walks right in, casing every nook that could hide a skinny six-year-old, her hands opening and closing by her thighs.

“Ronald?” she tries, then, getting desperate, “Ronbo?”

Charlotte ties her hair into a sloppy bun—playtime’s over—mentally backs off this situation to see what she could be missing.

Twin one: missing.

Twin the other one: just as gone.

She flashes on the key she left in the deadbolt, has a sudden vision of what she’s already warned herself never to think of again, ever: two weekends ago, the last time she babysat Arthur for the Lopezes. Arthur, who had never until that night sleepwalked. Charlotte with Murphy in the dining room, perhaps in a somewhat compromising position, hadn’t heard him slip out the front door, hadn’t even known he was gone until her mom—her ride, not supposed to be there for twenty more minutes—rang the doorbell, a bleary-eyed five-year-old on her hip.

Where she’d found him: in her headlights.

Instead of what he should have been: a lump in the rearview mirror.

Charlotte had fallen to her knees, had made such an empty sound that Murphy had come out of hiding to see what was wrong, and Charlotte’s mom had just shaken her head, wordlessly exiled Murphy to her car, then carried Arthur upstairs herself, stayed to talk with the Lopezes about their date, her every utterance about to be the one that told on Charlotte, that revealed what had almost, almost happened there that night.

But she never did say it. And Arthur must not have been checked-in enough to remember. So they drove home in complete silence that night, Murphy in the backseat to be dropped off on the way.

The one question Charlotte’s mom finally asked was, “You learned your lesson?”

It had made Charlotte burst into tears.

It’s what’s about to happen now, too.

“Be serious,” she tells herself.

This isn’t a repeat of that. It can’t be. First, twins might share a birthday, but that doesn’t mean they sleepwalk together. Second, she was only in the kitchen long enough to pull a lasagne from the oven, not nearly long enough for a couple of awake six-year-olds to have manipulated the stiff deadbolt, slipped out into the night. Anyway, their mom said they don’t do that kind of stuff, right? No, there’s no way they could have gotten downstairs without passing her. They’re not ninjas, and invisibility cloaks aren’t real, and they can’t—they can’t crawl on walls and ceilings, or tunnel under the carpet. There’s no carpet anyway, just rugs everywhere on this pricey hardwood.

Charlotte makes herself go Sherlock then, and looks all the way down the hall, to the only possibility now that everything else is pretty much eliminated: Mr. Wilbanks’s office. Mr. Wilbanks’s locked office.

“No way,” she says, and shakes her head, balls her hands into fists, makes herself go down there. Just on the chance.

It’s just as locked as Mr. Wilbanks said it was. She bangs her open hand on it all the same, calls for the kids, and … are they in there? Is this the game? The big joke Mrs. Wilbanks warned about?

Charlotte stills, listens harder, closer, eyes closed, more trying to feel the space on the other side of the door than actually hear it.

Is that breathing?

“Desi?” Charlotte says, more alarmed now, and, if asked why she thought it was Desi more than Ronald, there’s nothing she can put her finger on, exactly. Just, for some reason, she got girl from what she was or wasn’t hearing more than boy.

She claps on the door again, listens again, then, mouth a thin line, she turns, goes full-on Terminator, gridding her visual field into sections and processing them each with scrolling text: door one, the hall entrance to Ronald’s bathroom, locked; door two, Ronald’s bedroom; after that, Desi’s bedroom door; and, at the far end around the corner, right past where the stairs spit her up here, the master bedroom. The off-limits master bedroom, but screw it, that’s the only place left, right?

On the way to it Charlotte realizes there’s another door, on the left: a linen closet flush with the wall and not going all the way to the floor. Making it actually a cabinet, she guesses? She grips her hands into the inset handle groove and pulls it open, fully expecting two giggling kids to spill out.

What comes down at her instead is tall and fast and … an electric dust broom thing. The upstairs vacuum cleaner, “Featherweight” model, bright red with grey accents. She guides it back, eyes the space behind it. Linens and board games, every shelf stuffed to spilling.

“I’m going to kill them,” she says, shutting the door fast to keep the vacuum from tipping out again.

It feels transgressive, twisting the knob on the master bedroom door that Mr. Wilbanks was sure to pull shut behind them, but there’s no other choice.

She walks in, can’t find the light at first. When she does it brings the ceiling fan on as well, rustles some papers on Mrs. Wilbanks’s antique vanity.

“Desi?” Charlotte says tentatively. “Ronald? Don’t make me call your parents …”

If there’s a camera in here, then the Lopezes are hearing about this, she knows. And everybody else as well. But forget all that. She’s really getting nervous about the kids. For all she knows they’re hiding in the closet right now, playing scuba diver with dry-cleaning bags. Which would be exactly what she deserves, would just be the world calling in its markers after she pulled the lucky card of it being her own mom who found Arthur toddling down the road.

Charlotte rushes across the room, pulls the closet door open, rattling the louvres, some sensor glowing the light on automatically—the lights: not just a single overhead, but an LED strip tracing the cubbies of shoes, the racks of dresses and blouses and slacks.

“Shit,” Charlotte says, legit impressed, and kind of humbled. She’s heard of other babysitters playing dress-up while the parents are away, but playing dress-up here would take all night.

No kids, either.

And they’re not huddled together in the shower stall, or under the California king bed, or tucked into the leg space of Mrs. Wilbanks’s vanity. Charlotte pushes the heavy stool back under, ruffles the edge of the Post-it note pad like there’s going to be some secret written on one of the hidden pages.

“Don’t cry,” she tells herself, trying to get the pad back exactly where it was. “That’s not who you are.”

All the same, she can feel it building.

She slumps back out into the hall, knows she’s about to have to do the Thing she’s never done—make the dreaded call, ruin a couple’s first date in years, burn them on going out altogether—but then she hears something … downstairs?

She gives one last look to the office door at the other end of the hall then, committing to this, she steps out of her shoes, picks her way down the stairs two and three timid steps at a time, hand tight to the rail.

“Desi?” she says. “Ronald?”

The living room is just as she left it. She checks the deadbolt—still locked—pockets the key for safety. Almost into the nanny cam’s field of view, she backpedals to the closet, has to look in.

The jack-in-the-box clown is still there, same jaunty angle. Not even moving on its spring or anything.

Charlotte presses that door shut, turns around, and doesn’t even have time to gasp, really: she’s not alone.

Standing side by side in the middle of the living room, one in My Little Pony pajamas, one still in tighty-whities, are Desi and Ronald. They each have a saucer with lasagne on it. Ronald’s mouth is sloppy with tomato sauce.

When Charlotte flinches back like she has to—her body does it with or without her say-so—her heels catch on the step up to the entryway and, like that, she goes down, the back of her head catching the closet doorknob hard enough to rattle her teeth, rush the taste of blood into her mouth.

She pulls her knees up in pain and rocks forward, holding her head with both hands.

“Charlotte?” Desi says, from the distant end of some long dark tunnel.

Charlotte holds her right hand up, keeping them back, back, just until she can get this pain to stop.

Don’t pass out, don’t pass out, she says inside.

Good babysitters stay awake. Good babysitters don’t let the world grey at the edges. They hold on to the light. They, they—

“I’m okay,” she says, wincing from her own voice.

When she can open her eyes again, the twins are spooning lasagne in and studying her.

“You’re supposed to … to use forks,” Charlotte says, pressing her back against the closet door and sliding up to stand again, still cupping the back of her head with her palm. “And, do your parents let you eat in the living room? Really?” When they don’t answer—which is an answer—she collects their dripping saucers of lasagne, leads them back into the kitchen, walking confidently for the lizard with the hungry eye.

*   *   *

Instead of eating the lasagne (“Indians didn’t come up milking buffalo” is her mom’s embarrassing go-to for lactose intolerance), Charlotte asks the kids where their snacks are, goes elbow-deep into that big plastic bin in the pantry, and makes herself a dinner from two boxes of animal crackers, some gummy worms that somehow aren’t sugar but protein, and a green apple that’s small enough to probably be organic.

“So,” she says, standing by the island in the kitchen, surveying the damage two kids can do to a perfectly good lasagne. Instead of cutting it into squares, they’ve … she’s not sure: either clumped hunks out with their tiny hands or maybe stuck their faces directly in, used their mouths like crane buckets to deliver bites across to the saucers Mrs. Wilbanks had left out. Though Charlotte shouldn’t disallow the possibility of using the saucers themselves as scoops, she supposes. Whatever the case, this lasagne looks like it had a firecracker planted right in its center. One that left a ragged crater.

Without meaning to—unable not to—Charlotte imagines Mrs. Wilbanks at midnight, alone in her kitchen, trying to imagine what kind of babysitter lets this kind of damage happen on her thirteen-dollars-per-hour watch. The idea of a lasagne this big has to be leftovers, right? As in, her and her husband each having a piece for lunch tomorrow, while congratulating themselves on having selected the right girl to watch the twins last night.

“Are you really from Thanksgiving?” Desi asks, pulling Charlotte from her deliberations. Charlotte turns, her face pleasant—they’re just kids, raised in a pasty-white dream—and focuses in on Desi, then Ronald.

“Is that how your parents explained me?” she asks back.

Desi looks to Ronald and Ronald looks to Desi, and Charlotte’s pretty sure they’ve each been coached that it’s not “Indian,” it’s “Native American.”

“We like cranberry sauce,” Ronald finally says for both of them.

“Who doesn’t?” Charlotte says, opening cabinets now to salvage this lasagne situation. “Have you two figured out what you’re being for trick ’r treating tomorrow night?”

“I’m going to be from Thanksgiving too!” Desi says, her excitement bubbling over.

Charlotte selects the right spatula for the job, manages a wooden “Oh, wow,” the pleasant look on her face more a mask now. Not for Halloween so much as for life. But college will be different, she knows. Nobody on campus will assume she’s the designated expert on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nobody will ask if her relatives live in tipis. No one will be elected to ask her if this or that spirit ribbon is offensive or not. The worst thing about being Indian, it’s being the only Indian.

She balances a neat square of lasagne across to the first container, leaving room for two more.

“All Native American, though,” Desi adds, using her whisper-voice again. “Not half-and-half.”

Ronald leans into her like shutting her up but she rolls with it, her eyes transfixed on Charlotte.

“Half-and-half?” Charlotte asks, trying to get the lid to seal.

“Like for coffee,” Ronald says, saving Desi from having to.

The scene builds itself in Charlotte’s head: Mrs. Wilbanks explaining the new babysitter over breakfast and using what she has at hand: her morning coffee. Your new babysitter, kids? Come here, come here now, listen, at which point she swirls her cup and explains how a walnut-colored mother and a creamy-white father can have a daughter who looks just like … this. Except of course Charlotte’s father’s not really white. More like invisible since the night-of, as her mom refers to it, pretty uncryptically.

“Come here, I’ll let you in on a secret,” Charlotte says, kneeling down and pulling the twins in. “You either are or you aren’t Indian, did you know that?”

“Like this,” Desi says, and holds her pudgy cute little hands up like a field goal, like butterfly wings, like moose antlers, having to concentrate to get it just perfect. She leans forward, waggles the tip of her tongue over where her thumbs touch, says—recites, Charlotte can tell—“In the middle.”

It’s good that Charlotte’s mom isn’t here for this.

“Sure,” Charlotte says, swallowing the rest down, and then Ronald’s pulling on her hand.

“I’m a nurse!” he says around the bite he’s trying to get down.

Part of the babysitter certification process is choking hazards and how to clear airways. The big choking hazards are supposed to be peanuts and cut-up wieners, grapes and hard candy. But lasagne isn’t exactly porous.

“Smaller bites, Ronald?” Charlotte says, standing but not losing his hand.

He moves his body back and forth like he’s embarrassed.

“Veronica,” Desi primly corrects.

This brings Charlotte around, first to Desi again, then Ronald—Veronica.

Hmm.

“A nurse, you say?” she asks, starting on the second container, carefully carving around the center of the lasagne, which looks more like Hamburger Helper now. Which is something they probably don’t even know about in this house.

“I’ll show!” Ronald says, and drops from his stool, scurries the other direction. Not to the living room but … Charlotte thinks he’s headed for the garage at first, which is supposed to be off-limits, but then he veers around the island and into the utility room, not stopping to turn the light on.

“He didn’t even say excuse me,” Desi says, trying to make her spoon work in the curvy folds of cheese and big flat noodles.

“Here,” Charlotte says, and passes across one of the forks Mrs. Wilbanks had left out.

Desi pokes into the heart of the flat noodles, opens wide to balance this sloppiness in.