"What," she whispered. "What is it?"
He jumped down, went to the doorway, and sat.
Janet got out of bed. She was careful about it; she didn't want to wake Del, though nothing ever woke Del. The carpet was cold under her feet. She pulled her robe off the hook on the closet door and went and stood behind Milo in the doorway.
The hallway was black. Not dark; black. Del had taken the bulb out of the nightlight in the bathroom because he said it kept him up, which was a joke, because nothing kept him up. She could make out the faint gray rectangle of the bathroom door, open, and the darker darkness of the spare room door, closed. The linen closet beside her. The ceiling, which she couldn't see at all.
Milo was looking up.
Not at the closet. Not at the spare room. Up, at the ceiling of the hall, at a spot about halfway down, where there was—she knew without seeing it—the square of painted plywood that was the hatch to the attic. A pull-down ladder, the kind with a cord hanging from it. The cord had broken off two summers ago and Del had never replaced it, so now you had to get the step stool and push the hatch up with a broom handle to get the ladder started. Nobody ever went up there except at Christmas, for the boxes of ornaments and the artificial tree.
She stood with her hand on the doorframe and listened.
Nothing. The refrigerator. The clock ticking in the kitchen, the cheap battery one shaped like a teapot that her sister had sent from Akron.
And then—she thought—something. A creak. The particular creak of wood taking weight. It could have been the house settling; the house settled all winter, popping and groaning when the cold got into the trusses. Del said that was all it was, every time she mentioned it. Wood moves, Jan.
She held her breath. Milo's tail, wrapped around his feet, unwrapped itself and began to twitch at the tip.
Nothing else.
Janet stood there until the cold made her feet ache. Then she picked Milo up, all eleven pounds of him, warm and rumbling and unwilling, and she carried him back to bed and lay down with him pinned in the crook of her arm, and she did not sleep again.
* * *
"You look like hell," Bev Szymanski said on Monday, not unkindly, handing her a cup of the coffee from the nurses' station machine, which tasted like it had been brewed through a gym sock. "No offense."
"None taken. I feel like hell."
"Still the cat?"
"Still the cat."