“James, wake up. I hear something.”

Alice rubbed her foot against my leg. Four in the morning, in mid-January. The house was cold. My brain struggled to focus.

“What? What’s going on?”

“Someone’s in the kitchen,” she said in a whisper. I could barely hear her.

We kept our bedroom door wide-open. Since our house, a two-story wood frame, was built in 1910, it was common to hear creaks and wall-settling noises inside. 

The kitchen was thirty feet away, down the hall to the left from our room.

I started to hear the sound that woke her. It reminded me of plastic sheets being handled or shaken. A soothing swoosh of soft plastic bags at the dry cleaners. It stopped and then it resumed.  I grabbed a putter from under the bed and started for the hallway. Alice said to be careful. She remained in bed.

Halfway to the kitchen I stopped. Without thinking I started to yell: “Get out! Get the hell out!” My voice exploded, loud and deranged. As the words came flooding out, they burned my throat. Where did that come from? Fear? Complete uncertainty?

Reaching the kitchen I paused, trying to focus. The kitchen was dark, but one wall reflected light from an outside light pole. I checked the door to the back yard. It was locked. 

 Nothing outside was moving. Finding nothing, I returned to the bedroom.

Alice said, “You got really upset. What happened? You scared me.”

“Nothing.” I didn’t want to be interrogated about losing my composure. But we talked for twenty minutes.

After a few hours rest I got up and had coffee. Before leaving for work I decided we needed to buy a gun. It seemed the right thing. It wasn’t essential for survival. And it wouldn’t provide peace of mind. The key part was hiding the gun from Alice, not telling her about my plan.

The next afternoon at a local gun shop I ended up choosing a 38-caliber Cobra. The clerk asked, “Interested in a Glock? Cops’ favorite.”

“Nope.”

“How about a gun class? 

“Not now.”

Some guns on the shelves were so clean-edged and polished you could frame them on a wall.

Home later I didn’t tell her about my gun. It went into a drawer near my side of the bed. I  had the option of returning it in thirty days.

Sometimes over the next week, I’d take the gun out and test the balance, letting my hand get comfortable with the grip. When Alice wasn’t around. 

Two weeks after I got the gun, we were in bed talking about the night of the strange sound. I told Alice it felt scary, to be that vulnerable. She asked a series of what-ifs. “What if we had a gun here in the room? Would you be ready to use it?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I’m not sure what I’d do.”

“Should we get a dog?”

“No. It will bark a lot. Big deal.”

Alice didn’t agree. She wanted to get a dog. 

The next night, in bed, Alice said her plan would be to hide rope under the bed. The next time we’d surprise the intruder, tie him up and call the cops.

Some days I totally forgot about the Cobra. Other days I’d grab it and feel that we were better prepared than before.

The next scary moment was three weeks after I bought the gun. This time she didn’t need to wake me up. My ears strained, trying to make sense of the sound, like dozens of tiny plastic pieces hitting the hallway floor outside our dark room.

“You hear that? Something’s there,” I said.

Sitting up, Alice was groggy. She said, “I hear something scraping. Against metal.”

“Keep the light off. I’ll go see.”

A second later, she said, “Here. I have a gun.” She put a slim black handgun on my side of the bed. “Take it. It’s not loaded.” 

“Where did you get it? And what good is it unloaded?” 

“You don’t have to shoot anyone. Just scare them.”

I didn’t think before responding. “You do it then. Take the gun!”

We heard another sound, this time possibly from the kitchen. Something soft striking a pot. “Fine.” She grabbed the gun, leapt from the bed and stepped into the hall.

A flame of guilt pushed me out of bed. I opened the dresser drawer and grabbed the Cobra. 

She said something I could barely hear. Leaving the gun on the bed, I went into the hall.

“Alice? What happened?”

“In here.” With her back turned to me, she stood next to the island in the middle of the kitchen. She was hugging herself and refused to turn toward me.

Her gun sat like a rock on the solid-white counter top. Its dark metal reflected the red dot of light from the coffee maker four feet away.

I placed my arms around her and felt her chest shaking. Her breathing was shallow and irregular.

I told her, “It’s OK. You were really brave.”

“We did hear it, didn’t we?” she said. 

“Yes. We did. You did the right thing, coming out here.”

We went back to our room. Because it was dark she didn’t see me grab the Cobra and tuck it under the bed.

I asked, “Do you know how to use a gun?”

She shot back: “Do you?” 

I started to massage her knotted shoulders. She made approving sounds but after ten minutes the alarm clock sounded. 

Since then, it’s been five weeks since the second night of odd sounds. 

Alice doesn’t object that I’m sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. At first it was to avoid the sounds. It’s become my hideout. The Cobra is under the bed; it’s always loaded.

Alice now goes out three nights a week taking kick-boxing classes. She runs four to five miles every Saturday morning.

We haven’t talked about that last time. If the noises returned, Alice doesn’t mention it. 

One night a few days ago, she yelled out, cursing loudly at something. I jumped up and raced down the stairs, my stomach churning. “It’s nothing,” she said. She had dropped an alarm clock on her foot.

⁎⁎

AFTER TWO SESSIONS with my therapist, I mentioned I’d bought a gun. I asked if she thought I should sign up for a gun safety course.

“Since you keep a loaded gun in your house, proper training is essential. Your wife should join with you in a training program.”

She wondered why I didn’t tell Alice I had a gun. 

“I will, once I’ve gotten rid of it.” 

Not long after, I started firearm lessons through a business called The Blank Target. My first session, after work, was with an instructor named Rudy, a guy in his 70s, a retired U.S. Forest Service supervisor. We were in the basement of a converted concrete warehouse.

Rudy asked to see my gun. “You know how to load it?” I told him yes.

“You know how to shoot?” I said no. 

“All right, we’ll start over here, with that target.” He pointed toward a wall about twenty feet away that had several black-and-white cardboard targets attached. 

I wondered what my options were.

“Standing. Or you can kneel and shoot.” That way would let me rest my elbow on my knee for stability.

Which did he prefer? He said he liked to stand. “Personal choice I guess.”

He handed me foam-padded headphones. I fired fifteen rounds at the target. I hit the nine-inch-wide center circle one time.

“You’re going to get better,” he told me. “Don’t rush it. Relax your fingers.”

I mentioned the night noises that happened the first night, when they woke Alice and me. “I got the gun after that first night.”

“That’s not the best reason,” he said. “Try to think of that,” he pointed at my gun, “as just a hobby. Something to do on weekends. Not for noises in the dark.”

What about defending myself? Being ready? I wanted to ask that but I held back. Maybe he was telling me, in so many words, I should abandon the whole self-defense plan. 

We went upstairs and I grabbed my gym bag. As I got to the door, I told Rudy about my first encounter with guns. When I was a college student, some friends and I drove into the country and visited a farm belonging to a friend of one the guys.

We went out in a field and took turns taking target practice with an old .22 rifle. There was a table forty yards off, with five or six metal cans on top.

“I was pretty good. Hit the cans three or four times.” I’d forgotten all that until being there with Rudy.

After my second training class, I decided not to keep the Cobra in the house. I might still sell it, or take it back. In the meantime, I wrapped it in oilcloth and buried it in the garden. It’s under three fresh rhubarb plants near the back fence. I surrounded the stalks with a mulch of oat straw and mowed grass. 

A few days after the class, Alice said she’d arranged a shooting lesson. For herself, at The Blank Target, too. At first I wondered if she knew I’d gone there. Then I realized our town only has two target ranges. When you search, The Blank Target shows up first.

She asked me to come along, and I did. Rudy was there to give the lesson. He acted like he’d never seen me before. He didn’t lie, exactly. I got the idea he saw lots of couples acting weird about taking gun classes.

He examined her gun and approved of it. “Nice.” he said.

He gave her a belt of thirty bullets and pointed at a target thirty feet away. It took her about five minutes to fire off the rounds. She hit the target circle twenty-one times. Seven times in the small center ring.

She was a natural, Rudy told her.

Rudy turned to me. “You want to practice? I bet you can shoot too, huh?” I shook my head. 

On the way back she told me she didn’t know why she had the gun. 

“It’s not a bad idea, if you use it right.”

She looked irritated when I said that. I tried to rephrase the idea. I told her it’s clear she had good skills. “You’ve always had great hand-eye coordination,” I said.

Last week a squirrel started sniffing around the rhubarb. I grabbed a rock and threw it, missing the squirrel by a few inches. It ran off. I went to the spot where it was digging and rearranged the soil and made it look less disturbed. 

Alice told me yesterday it’s good I’m spending more time in the garden. It, gardening,  helps maintain a positive outlook toward the future. I didn’t know if that was true. In recent weeks I found myself waiting, trying to decide what was causing my loss of energy.

She smiled and said, “You’re looking better lately. Keep it up, James.”

A day later I got the gun and took it with me on a road trip. After 45 minutes I reached a remote field miles from my home. No one was around and the only sign of people was an abandoned  out-building that belonged to the long-gone past inhabitants.

I walked to an open area where the ground was bare dirt dotted with random bushes and clumps of weeds. From home I’d brought two old soup cans, and I placed them twenty yards away, on a stump. I fired about thirty shots and hit the cans four times.

I considered moving closer and trying again, and then I stopped. That was enough. 

Back home, I buried the gun beneath the rhubarbs. When the plants turn stiff and spindly, I’ll cut them down. I’ll get rid of the gun.

⁎⁎

But a week later I spotted activity in the garden. Two squirrels were circling the ground close to the rhubarb. One of them started digging down below the leaves. It was scraping off two or three inches of soil. How could it know what I buried there?

Alice wasn’t home. Within a minute I went into her room. It took less than two minutes to find her handgun hidden in a drawer with her underwear and bras. I checked to see that it had bullets.

My shooting practice came in useful. It took two quick shots. My first was good and on target. The second squirrel reacted the way I would have. It didn’t look back, running full-speed toward the neighbor’s yard.

I spent about five minutes tamping the ground around the plants, filling the gouges in the dirt, repacking the disturbed plants.

On a night a few days later, when Alice and I were sharing the bedroom, I heard the plastic sheets again. The swoosh and ruffling like flags on a windy afternoon. 

Alice was as awake as I was. “Let me go. Stay here,” I said. 

There was nothing to see in the dark kitchen. But the sound was distinctly there. I heard it and then it stopped. I waited to hear it resume, and it didn’t.

Going to the back door, I looked out and noticed something out in the garden, barely visible in the scant moonlight. At that spot where I’d buried the gun were several figures or small creatures, in a group. It was too dark to identify them. Cats perhaps, or small dogs?

My eyes adjusted and I could tell they were a conclave of squirrels. They were gathered near the rhubarb. As I watched, they moved about, switching positions like they were expected to rotate their stations over time.

I opened the door. They noticed me and within seconds they became agitated. They started making sounds. Kuk Kuk Kuk. Keees-keees or something like that. These were mostly low grunts, interspersed with shrill barks you wouldn’t think they could produce.

I stepped one foot forward, just to see what happened next. Their noises became shrieks.  They knew where I was. Were they daring me to get the gun? I considered it, then stopped.

I shut the kitchen door behind me but kept looking at them. Within several minutes the squirrels started digging, scratching the rhubarb out of the ground. They must have been aware of the gun, because two or three of them dropped into the burrow they’d made, their tails flailing about.

The next morning, when I went out to see the result, the Cobra was gone.

A few days later, with Alice’s approval, I moved out, setting up in a small three-room apartment nearby. I told her I’d visit from time to time. If she needed me to stay the night. If the sound of plastic continued, I asked her to contact me, so I could help.

This time it would be my job to calm things down, not make them worse.

I spent the next two weeks hoping she’d ask me to stand guard and protect the house. I would not fall asleep until after midnight, so as to be able to come over if needed. If moving out was supposed to help, I think it failed. I examined the options to get our life back the way it was before. The option that made the most sense was getting rid of the gun, finally and totally.

A few days later I asked if it was OK to come by and look for something I’d left there. She said fine, but that she’d be gone all afternoon. 

I spent ten minutes looking but found no sign of the gun. The rhubarb was long gone as well. As I walked toward the car, the neighbor woman saw me and said, “We don’t see you much around. Are you moving?”

There was no point in explaining my relocation. “No. Just involved with other things.” Before leaving, I asked if she noticed squirrels coming around more often, in her garden? More than before?

“Oh yes,” she said. “There are many more lately. That’s odd, no? Must be a family or two living nearby. Mostly in your garden.”

The following day I returned when I knew Alice was home. We stood in the back yard, chatting. I told her my theory, my explanation for the sound of plastic. It has to be a vapor barrier or loose insulation in the ductwork. It must have ended up there when we had someone remodel the kitchen shortly before that sound started.

“It’s rattling when the thermostat kicks on. So go look for it. You’ll see.” I offered to spend time going to the trouble of removing it. She said there was no need.

“I’ve gotten used to it. It’s not a problem. On the few nights I hear it, it leaves a soft tingling in my neck.” 

“OK. Great.”

Before I left, I asked if she’d found my gun in the garden. It would be near the rhubarb spot. She shook her head, with a look of accusation and annoyance. Why would I ask that question?

I stopped talking and looked at Alice. Her features were muted and diminished, softly out of focus. Like she was on the other side of a plastic sheet between us. When I reached out my hand to touch the sheet, it wasn’t there. 

A few hours later I realized she took the gun from the garden, but wouldn’t tell me. It was better for her that way. It would hang over me, a reminder of how I reacted to the sound. An event that might be explained easily enough as loose material. Or something else entirely.