Page 23 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

The sky was a dramatic black. The volcanic lake below glittered like it had been scattered with jewels, ringed with deep black-and-green foliage. She took out her phone and snapped a photo, but the image didn’t capture the wild, breathless beauty around her, its dimension and movement lost on the screen.

Why, even now, did she think of Miller when something moved her? He’d abandoned them, ruined all their lives, and yet she still wanted to share everything with him. Wanted to hear his thoughts, his laughter.Isn’t this amazing?she wanted to tell him.Look at where I am.

If she was better at WeWatch, she’d be using this moment to go live. But she didn’t. She just wanted to be present.

Somewhere a structural groan. Then, maybe, the sound of a voice carried on the wind. Adele pulled herself away from the view, moved back out into the hall.

“Malinka?”

There. Something moved. A bulky shadow.

Her eyes grappled with the changing light. Whatwasthat?

Then, at the end of the hall, a thick, dark form seemed to spill from the black, moving fast. Toward her? Away? She couldn’t tell.

“Hey,” she yelled, alarmed. “Hey!”

Then it disappeared through one of the doorways.

Fear like the strum of a guitar string vibrated on her nerve endings.

“Who’s there?” Her voice wobbled, betraying her.

No answer.

She flashed her light around, scattering the night. Behind her, nothing, just the ambient glow from the stairway, ghostly and gray.

She should leave.Walk away from danger, she always told the kids,not toward it.

But she kept moving. The hallway felt like a nightmare tunnel, growing longer and longer. A perpetual moan of air moved through cracks and openings in the structure, kicking up dust and debris, snapping at the legs of her cargo pants, tossing the free strands of her hair.

No door on room 704. Empty but for that view again. Her breath was ragged, throat dry.

“Hello?” Some joke maybe. She’d seen enough of these onWeWatchto know how they would manufacture scares for the camera. Malinka would suddenly jump from one of the doorways and scare Adele for her followers.

But no. The girl with her still features, her serious bearing, didn’t seem like a prankster.

Room 706 was also empty. She kept moving.

The door to 708 stood slightly ajar.

“What scares you the most?” Another question from Dr. Garvey. “And how do you deal with that fear?”

“Not being able to take care of or protect my kids. I just keep working at it. One day at a time.”

“What else?”

“Secrets and lies. People who pretend to be one thing and are really another.”

“Those are all existential. What else? What about heights or enclosed spaces?”

She’d thought about it. Violet was terrified of snakes: anything thatlookedlike a snake—a hose in the backyard, a stick on a hiking trail—could make her scream. Blake couldn’t handle bugs, even ants had him running in circles batting at himself. But Adele? There was nothing, not really. Not having good health insurance…that was scarier than most things she could conjure.

“Well, when I was a kid, I used to be afraid of the dark. But aren’t all kids afraid of the dark?”

Her light flickered, came back to life, then flickered again. Of course. Because unlike with her tent, she’d cut costs and purchased the one that cost nineteen dollars instead of the one that cost a hundred and thirty-nine. She knocked it on her palm, and it came back to full brightness.

“The dark in the closet. The dark under the bed. The dark behind a closed door. Where things hide,” she had replied to Dr. Garvey.

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