The Babysitter

Chapter 6 — The Sound

The second Friday, Jess told herself she was being ridiculous.

She’d taken the Callahans’ number off the fridge the first night and texted Sarah Saturday morning — *Tommy was an angel, have me back anytime* — and Sarah had replied within minutes: *You’re a lifesaver. Same time next Friday?*

Now it was next Friday, and Jess was walking up the Callahans’ porch steps at seven sharp, telling herself the wall noise had been pipes, the closet had been just a closet, and Sarah’s sharp look had been a tired mom being a tired mom. Case closed.

Tommy met her at the door in dinosaur pajamas, already wired on the sugar high of a kid who knows his parents are leaving.

“Jess! Guess what? I drew the man again!”

He thrust a crumpled sheet of printer paper at her. In waxy crayon: a dark rectangle, and inside it, a tall shape with two black eyes and no mouth. Tommy’s handwriting wobbled beneath it: THE MAN IN MY CLOSET.

“Wow,” Jess said carefully. “He’s got, uh — strong posture.”

“He stands really still,” Tommy said. “So nobody hears.”

Sarah appeared behind him, coat already on, car keys in hand, and her smile tightened just a fraction at the sight of the drawing.

“Tommy, honey, what did we say about scaring Jess?”

“She’s not scared. Are you scared, Jess?”

“Nope,” Jess lied, ruffling his hair. “Dinosaurs would eat him anyway. T. rex doesn’t mess around.”

Mark came down the stairs loosening his tie, phone in hand. “You guys have fun. Back by eleven. And Tommy — bed by nine, no negotiations.”

“Jess,” Sarah said, and something in her voice made Jess look up from the drawing. “Last time — you went into his closet. He told me.”

Jess’s stomach dropped straight through the floor. “I was just — he said he heard something, I wanted to show him there was nothing in there—”

“I know.” Sarah’s eyes held hers a beat too long, and Jess had the uncomfortable feeling of being studied. “Just… let me know next time, okay? I’d rather he not get fixated.”

“Of course. Sorry.”

They left. Jess locked the door behind them, turned the deadbolt the way Sarah had shown her, and the house settled into its evening hush — the refrigerator humming, the radiators ticking, the particular silence of a big house with only two people in it.

The night went fine, mostly. Mac and cheese from a box, the good kind with the powdered cheese that stained everything orange. A board game Tommy won by moving his piece when she went to get juice, which she pretended not to notice. A chapter of the dragon book, Tommy doing all the dragon voices. At eight-forty Jess started the bedtime routine — teeth, pajamas already on, one more glass of water — and by nine-oh-five Tommy was tucked in, night-light glowing amber, closet door open exactly three inches.

“Why three inches?” Jess had asked the first night.

“So he can see I’m not scared,” Tommy had said, which Jess found weirdly brave for a six-year-old.

She went downstairs. Algebra homework she didn’t do. Phone scrolling she did too much of. A text from her friend Priya — *u still alive or did the rich people adopt u* — which made her snort out loud in the empty kitchen.

At nine-forty, she went up to check on him, the way she’d promised Sarah she would. She moved quietly on the stairs, the way you do in someone else’s house at night, and eased Tommy’s door open.

He was asleep, one arm flung over his stuffed stegosaurus, mouth open, breathing soft and even. Jess stood in the doorway for a moment the way she’d stood a hundred times in doorways, watching a kid sleep, feeling that strange tender protectiveness that was the whole reason she liked this job.

Then she heard it.

Not a groan of pipes. Not the tick of the house cooling down for the night. A footstep. Then another. Slow, deliberate, weighted — from inside the wall to the left of the closet. *Inside* it, she was sure, a sound with depth and direction, like it came from a space that shouldn’t exist.

She froze. The steps stopped.

Her phone was in her hand before she could think about it. Thumbprint, voice memos, the red record button — she held the phone out toward the wall and waited, heart hammering so loud she was afraid the mic would pick it up instead of whatever was in there.

Thirty seconds. A minute. Her arm started to ache.

Then — three soft thuds in a row. Evenly spaced. Deliberate.

Footsteps. Moving away from the closet wall, fading deeper into the house.

Jess stopped the recording. Her hands were shaking so badly she almost dropped the phone.

She stood there another full minute, listening. Nothing. The house had gone back to its refrigerator hum and radiator ticks, innocent as a held breath.

Downstairs, she sat at the kitchen table under the too-bright pendant lights and pressed play, volume low. The first forty seconds: silence, her own breathing, the faint rustle of her sleeve against the phone. Then the thuds. Three of them. Clear as knocks on a door.

She played it again. And again, leaning closer, like proximity would help. On the fourth listen, she turned the volume all the way up and pressed the phone hard to her ear — and heard, beneath the footsteps, something else.

A long, slow exhale. Ragged at the edges. Like someone breathing out, right on the other side of the wall.

Jess set the phone down on the table very carefully, as if it might break. Or as if it might answer.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked — the normal kind, the hallway kind — and she nearly came out of her skin. But it was just the house. Just the house being a house.

She sat at that kitchen table until the Callahans came home at eleven, the phone face-down in front of her, and when Sarah asked how the night went, Jess heard herself say “great, he was an angel” in a voice that sounded like someone else’s.

Driving home with Mark — he’d insisted, it was late — Jess stared out the passenger window at the dark streets of the suburb and thought about the recording. Three footsteps. A breath.

Pipes don’t breathe.