The Babysitter

Chapter 12 — Ray’s Story

The next night, Jess told Sarah she needed to start early — “Tommy’s been restless, I want to be here before bedtime” — and Sarah, looking ten years older than the polished woman from the first Friday, just nodded and thanked her.

At nine-fifteen, Tommy asleep, Jess opened the closet and knocked twice on the wall panel.

It slid open. Ray’s face appeared, hollow-eyed, wary. “You came back.”

“I said I would.” She sat cross-legged on the closet floor, careful not to knock over the shoeboxes stacked beside her. The air back there smelled of dust and unwashed laundry and something sweet — toothpaste, she realized. He brushed his teeth in here. In the walls. “Talk.”

Ray sat too, knees drawn up, back against the mattress. For a long moment he just breathed, like he was gathering something scattered. Then he started.

“I drove,” he said. “That’s what I did. That’s all I did. My buddy Derek — he said he knew a guy, a jewelry store, the owner kept cash in the safe on Fridays, no cameras in the back. I needed money. I was behind on rent, my car was dying, and Derek said all I had to do was drive. Sit in the car, engine running, that’s it. Easy money, he said.”

Jess watched his hands. They were twisting together, fingers knotting and unknotting. The knuckles were scraped raw — from the panel latch, she guessed. From forcing his way in and out of a wall that didn’t want to let him through.

“I didn’t know about the gun. I swear to God, Jess, I didn’t know. We were idling outside and Derek and his cousin went in, and then there was shouting, and a gunshot — I heard it through the car door — and they came running out with a bag and Derek’s cousin had a gun in his hand and I just drove. I just drove. I didn’t know where I was going. I drove until the gas ran out.”

“Was anyone hurt?” Jess asked quietly.

“The store owner. Shot in the shoulder. Last I heard, he was alive — thank God.” Ray’s voice cracked. “Derek got caught a week later. Rolled on everybody. The cousin’s in the wind. And me — the getaway driver. That’s the word they use in the papers. Getaway driver. Like I was in on it. Like I planned it.”

He looked at her, and his eyes were the same gray-green as Sarah’s, and suddenly the cut photograph made terrible sense. Same nose. Same mouth. Same stubborn chin. It was like looking at a rough draft of Sarah — the same face, but sketched in charcoal instead of ink, all the polish scraped away.

“Before all this, I was — I worked at a warehouse. Forklift. It was fine. Boring, but fine.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Sarah always said I was the dreamer of the family. She was the one with the plan — college, the house, the husband, the kid. I was the one who was going to figure it out eventually. Eventually just never came.”

“Sarah came to me the night Derek got arrested. She said, ‘Pack a bag, you’re coming with me.’ Mark didn’t even argue that night — he just looked at me like I was already a corpse. And then I was in here. Behind the closet.” He gestured at the narrow space. “Three months. I can’t go outside. I can’t see the sun. The panel’s the only door and it only opens from this side, so if anything happened to Sarah and Mark — a fire, anything — I’d die in here and nobody would ever know.”

The thought landed cold in Jess’s stomach. “You can’t open it from inside?”

“There’s a latch, but it sticks. Half the time I can’t get it.” He said it casually, the way people describe a broken cabinet. “Tommy found me the second week — little kids notice everything — and I made him promise it was our secret. Our game. I told him I was like a superhero with a secret hideout. He brings me things, you know. A cookie. A crayon drawing. Once he tried to bring me his night-light because he said my hideout was too dark.”

Jess’s throat tightened. She pictured Tommy, six years old, solemnly smuggling a cookie into his closet for the man in the wall.

“I hear him crying sometimes,” Ray said. “Through the wall. He has nightmares. He thinks the man in the closet is going to leave him. He doesn’t understand I’m not — I’m not a monster. I’m just his uncle. I’m just his uncle and I messed everything up and I’m scared, Jess. I’m so scared.”

He was shaking again. Jess reached out — she didn’t think about it — and put her hand on his shoulder. He flinched, then went still, like no one had touched him kindly in months.

“I’m not dangerous,” he whispered. “I know I look dangerous. I’m not. I’m just — I’m so tired of being afraid.”

Jess thought about the nights she’d heard sounds in the wall and told herself it was the house settling. She thought about Mark deflecting every question, Sarah’s face changing the night she’d stood too close to the closet. All of it suddenly rearranged itself into a picture that made a terrible kind of sense — a family holding its breath for three months, and her, the babysitter, walking through the middle of it like it was any other job.

Jess sat with him in the dark behind the closet, and for the first time since she’d taken this job, she believed she understood what she was looking at. Not a monster. Not a criminal mastermind.

Just a boy — because that was what he was, really, a boy who’d made a man’s mistake — hiding in a wall, begging the dark to forget him.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to talk to Sarah. Not the police. Sarah. You deserve a way out of this that doesn’t end with you starving in a wall.”

Ray looked at her, and for the first time, something like hope moved across his gaunt face. “You’d do that?”

“Somebody has to,” Jess said. “Because this? This can’t go on.”