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Daddy once told her that there was no such thing as monsters. But that wasn’t true. He had been one of them the whole time. Daddy had also told her that if monsters did exist, they would never come hurt her. They wouldn’t dare. Now, she understood why he’d said that. Because daddy had been the monster that the other monsters had nightmares about. Either that, or he had been their king, and they had obeyed him without question.
But with their king gone, she knew it wouldn’t take long for the other monsters to come.
And the monsters did come.
Ainsley could hear every little bump they made in the night. They were not the distant, dampered sounds of her brother getting a midnight snack from the kitchen below, nor the sounds of her parents going to –or returning from– late night galas or hospital shifts. No, the sounds she heard were the sounds of softly thunking rubber-soled boots. The kind with a deeply-defined waffle pattern on the bottom. The kind that were always some shade of deerskin brown. The kind that smelled good in the stores, at least when they were virgin boots that had never touched the earth which they were meant to grind under their heels.
That night, Ainsley slipped out of bed and wandered downstairs.
She was exhausted of being scared, and she was exhausted of feeling grief and confusion. She was so emotionally worn out that her fear had ebbed into a numbness that consumed her. She felt too hollow to care about her self preservation. She only wanted to sleep, but she couldn’t sleep when those monsters were downstairs, making their distant, gentle, thunk, thunk, thunking noises.
She chose to haul along the biggest and supposedly scariest of her stuffed animals; the one that would keep her the safest in daddy’s absence because it was the most like him. Her biggest, fuzziest brown bear –the one with little white felt teeth that looked like they belonged in the mouth of a stuffed shark.
The girl stood in the hallway, wondering if she should wake Malcolm or mommy and inform them of the monsters downstairs so they could handle the situation. The thought caused her guilt. She knew they both had had trouble sleeping lately, too. She felt that she herself had to be the one to deal with the monsters that night. She had to be strong, like her parents had always told her to be. Strong, and brave, like Malcolm always seemed to be.
She took her time down the stairs, sliding one hand along the banister in the dark. She silently waddled towards the main floor of the large house with big, slow, careful steps as she imprisoned her bear against her chest in a one-armed hold. She was careful not to trip on his dangling paws.
Ainsley stopped on the stairs as the kitchen came into view, deep and black and cavernous. A shadow shifted, spotting her, and as the child’s eyes slowly adjusted to the night, she saw that it was not a monster. It was a man.
They didn’t speak. They both remained very still, and simply stared at each other. The child didn’t scream. She wasn’t scared. She was only numb, and tired.
She couldn’t see the man’s face; only his frame. He was outlined in a vague silhouette, backed by a hue of the kitchen that was more blue than black. She noticed that he had a beard and wild hair like daddy’s before it was combed. But he was not daddy. Even in the dark, and even while relying on sleep-deprived eyes, she could tell that he was someone else. Someone new. Yet someone just similar enough to her father that it made her think of him, and wish it was him.
Her lifeless expression animated only enough to distort with homesickness, and she saw the stranger in her kitchen as little more than a ghost. Not a monster. A ghost of her father. A shadow that he’d left behind. A part of him that the light did not touch. A part of him that had never revealed itself, until now.
A part of him she’d never met before.
At the time, Ainsley didn’t understand that human beings could be monsters, sometimes. She didn’t understand why they called her father one, even though he didn’t look like or act like one. She would later learn that her father was a monster, on the inside, and that this visitor was also a monster, on the inside. Just not the kind of monster that was born from cluttered closets or crept beneath the floorboards.
Except, in this man’s case… maybe he was that kind of monster, too.
“Who are you?” she mumbled, breaking their brief silence.
The man didn’t answer her at first, frozen with caution. He split his attention between the child, the higher reaches of the staircase, and the nearby door leading to the basement. With a whispered rasp, he replied, “A friend.”
“What are you doing in our house?” the girl mumbled with innocent, lethargic curiosity.
The man hesitated again. “I’m… picking up a few things,” he explained carefully. “For your dad. That’s all.” His voice possessed a rugged, grinding quality, like gravel, but was also somehow smooth, like silt.
He was daddy’s friend. Ainsley processed that for a moment, removing her hand from the banister to hug her stuffed bear with both arms. “Don’t come upstairs,” she told him. Her despondent demand was a simple one.
He would obey it, on one condition. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.” As he made his negotiation, he tilted his head and his voice lightened –like how daddy’s head tilted and like how daddy’s voice lightened when he gently told her not to let her mother know he’d allowed her to have a cookie before dinner. “Okay? It’s a secret.”
Ainsley’s baby cheeks shifted as she struggled to swallow around a small lump that gradually welled in her throat.
“Your mom would be pretty mad if she knew I was here,” the man warned, taking a slow step closer. His boot gently thunked, once.
The six-year-old promised him nothing. She looked at his hanging hands, seeing that they were empty. “What are you picking up for dad?” she asked. Was the man lying, or was he having trouble finding whatever it was that daddy wanted him to pick up?
“Just… some papers,” the man shrugged, taking another step with a gentle thunk of his boot. “Whatever the cops didn’t take.”
“Mommy burned everything.”
The man ceased his stalking. “What?”
“She burned everything the cops didn’t take,” Ainsley muttered with a pout. All of daddy’s clothes, and all of daddy’s books, and all his little trinkets, and all of the sketches and comic strips that he’d drawn for her.
“Oh.” The man visibly relaxed. A lot. “Well. Good.”
A distant confusion crossed the girl’s face. Why was that good?
The man became much more interested in the basement door than the stairs, and he stepped towards it with a few more quiet thunks of his boots. This time, he moved without caution, but perhaps instead with haste. “I’ll be going, then.”
“Will you tell daddy I said hi?”
He stopped and glanced back. “Yeah. Sure.” He continued for the basement door, reaching out to pull it open.
Feeling a flash of panic –the first thing she’d felt since the numbness began– Ainsley hurried down the last few stairs to the main floor and spoke up again. However, her voice quivered, and she hugged her bear tighter to try and stabilize her emotions. “And –will you tell daddy I’m not mad at him?”
The man hovered in the open doorway to the basement and looked at the child again.
Ainsley felt the lump in her throat swelling to its full size, and her eyes were already beading with moisture. “Will you tell daddy –I –miss him?” She grimaced and strangled the stuffed bear in her embrace, inhaling sharply through her words as the sobs came. “And –and that I want him to come –h-home?”
The man stared at her from the shadows as she succumbed to tears.
A rather loud hiccup of sorrow spurred him to rush over to the girl, glancing at the staircase as he hushed, “Heyhey shhhh, shh shh,” with his arms outstretched, aiming to grab her shoulders. She thought about burying her face in the fur of her bear to hide her crying, but as he descended to his knees in front of her, she found herself lunging forward and darting straight past his hands to bury her face in the fabric over his shoulder.
He didn’t really know how to react or respond, but he kept his focus on the stairs and placed a hand on the back of her head to keep her face pressed against his collar and muffle her crying. “Shhh, shhh.”
The man was wearing a sweater, but not the winter kind that were thick and woolly like daddy’s favorite sweaters. This man’s sweater was more of an autumn one. Light, and simple. Akin to what a man might wear as a pajama top. It had tiny weaves that were tightly-knitted and canvas-like. Hugging him didn’t feel like hugging daddy. His shoulders had less surface area to rest her head against, and his body was more firm than squishy. But he was still big and tough and warm and produced the faded scent of a forest.
His shushes worked, and she sniffled into a calmer state of crying.
She peeled away from the puddle she’d created on his shoulder to wipe her eyes. Between each pass of her balled fist, she saw his face. She studied the tangle of the soft, wiry hairs in his beard and the slight squint of his eyes, which were only just starting to grow crow’s feet.
“It’s alright.” The man held her shoulders tightly and nodded with a small murmur, “I’m gonna take care of you, okay?” He rubbed her whole back with a strong hand that could push her right over if he applied any more force. It was soothing to her, like a deep massage. “You want some water or somethin’?”
Ainsley shook her head and wrestled around the lump in her throat to mutter, “I want cocoa.”
“Cocoa, huh?”
She nodded.
He glanced up to the second floor again before standing. “Okay. Alright. Come here.” He guided her to a spot in the kitchen, continuing to speak hushed words to her between throwing cautious looks behind his back. “You stay right there, and you hold onto your bear, and I’ll get you some cocoa.” He glanced at all the cupboards and did a double take at the knife block before scratching a hand through his loose, wavy hair.
Ainsley pointed out which cupboard had the cocoa powder. The man quietly and carefully fetched it, and a mug, and shoveled a couple spoonfuls of powder into the mug before moving towards the refrigerator. The child would have told him that he was doing it wrong (you always boil the milk first, then add the powder) but she forgave him for not doing it right, like how daddy did.
A broad, harsh ray of light poured over the man with a nearly holy-like nature as he opened the door of the fridge. He knelt behind it as cover, fetching the milk and making as little noise as possible. Behind the door of the fridge, he slipped his hand in his pocket and pulled out a special ingredient to add to the concoction.
Ainsley climbed onto a stool at the counter, slightly scraping it against the floor as she did so. It startled the man, and he shushed her again. She sat her bear on her lap and watched him stir the cocoa with a coffee stick. “Is daddy okay?” she whispered, hugging her bear tight.
“Yeah, he’s fine,” the man muttered without interest or concern, quietly placing the mug of half-mixed, cold cocoa in front of her. He kept looking up at the stairs between watching her. “Drink up.”
She used both hands to hold the mug as she drank from it, and tried not to feel too disheartened that the beverage wasn’t warm and creamy like the kind daddy always made. “Is he sad?” she asked with a chocolate mustache.
The man didn’t tell her ‘no,’ so the answer was clearly, ‘yes.’ But he wasn’t sorry about it. “It’s his own fuckin’ fault he’s in prison,” he grumbled, explaining, “He wasn’t careful, and he didn’t listen.”
Ainsley whispered between two more large sips. “That’s a bad word.”
The man kept his mouth shut and didn’t say any more bad –or worse– words.
She wasn’t incredibly enthusiastic about drinking the rest of the subpar cocoa, and when she pushed the mug back towards him and told him that she was done, he took it and dumped the rest in the sink without scolding her for failing to finish it. She didn’t have to finish it. She’d consumed enough.
“Now, go back up to bed,” he instructed, pointing to send her away. “Hurry, before you fall asleep.”
Looking forward to being able to sleep again, she clumsily made her way down the stool and back toward the stairs. Partway there, she realized she’d dropped her bear, and turned back for it. The man had already scooped it up and was carrying it over to her, still cautious of the stairs as he drew closer to them. “Go on, get up there.”
She took her bear from his hands and hugged it tightly before waddling up the stairs one step at a time, holding onto the banister again. He didn’t follow her. He gravitated towards the basement door. When she was halfway up the stairs, she turned around and asked, “Are you going to come back?”
Her voice made him stop again, but he struggled to decide how to answer her.
“Please?” she whispered. Her look reminded him that he had vowed to take care of her.
“Yeah. I’ll be back,” he promised. “Go to bed.”
The girl continued up the stairs, her steps more sluggish. As Ainsley went in her room and climbed into her bed, she heard the steady thunk, thunk, thunk of his distant boots in the rooms below her. The sounds gradually faded away, and she easily slipped into a deep, peaceful, sedative sleep, no longer afraid of any monsters that may come for her in the night.
The monsters would not come.
They wouldn’t dare.
Daddy had sent a guardian angel to keep her safe and to take care of her in his absence.