My dad and I had just sat down to a spaghetti dinner when the pounding on the door began. It was furious and incessant, as if someone were trying to knock the door down. My dad hurriedly shuffled to the door and opened it a crack. A screaming woman forced her arm through the opening and the rest of her body followed. Someone, she said, was trying to kill her. Running over, I caught a glimpse of the snowy moonlit expanse outside the front door. There, wild, noble-looking and gray, stood a Siberian Husky. The door slammed shut, and my dad twisted the deadbolt into place.
At first, I assumed it was the dog our unexpected houseguest was running from. She was a tall brunette with short hair. We sat her down on the couch, frazzled and weeping. As my dad and I translated her hysterics into comprehensible English, it became clear that it was not the dog she was talking about, but her husband. So, we let in the dog, afraid it would give away the woman’s location, exposing us to all to the unknown man’s wrath.
It was Christmas break of my freshman year of college. At the time, my dad and I lived 40 miles outside of a small town in Colorado, on a river near a lake on a very quiet street. Heavy snow had fallen a week earlier and most of the seasonal residents had fled to warmer climes. That night, ours was the only lit house on the entire street.
The woman sat on the couch and wept, trying to explain what was happening. She had come home from work, and found her husband alone and drunk. He’d consumed a lot of tequila, she said, and he had a shotgun. She had fled the house to a truck parked out front, but while the ignition sputtered in the sub-zero night, her husband had climbed into the bed of the truck and reached through the sliding window into the cab. He had ripped the keys out of her hand, and she had piled out of the truck and sprinted up the street, her dog following her.
Hearing her story, my first thought was to find a gun; I wanted to give us something of a chance against this deranged shotgun-wielding man. But I realized that our pistol was in a safe next to the front door, and I was afraid another gun might panic the woman. I had also decided to avoid the door, thinking her husband might try and shoot it out, having seen plenty of movies where that happened. Her paranoia was quickly becoming mine.
My dad called the police. We had locked our yellow Labrador, Jock, in a back room, and had been hearing his whimpers ever since. Our cat, a giant yellow tabby, had mysteriously disappeared. Everyone’s terror was palpable. But alone in the middle of nowhere, all we could do was wait for the police. This was certainly not how my dad and I had expected to spend the night.
With time, the woman cooled off a little, and tried to lighten the mood by shifting the conversation toward more generic topics. She worked for a local radio station, she told us, but not as a DJ. She had recently moved into a rental property down the street, and for that reason we hadn’t met her before. It was kind of her to try and calm us, but I was scared to death, worrying about how long it would take her husband to trundle through the snow to our door. The minutes passed like hours, as my eyes kept darting back and forth from the door. We closed all of the blinds.
The conversation lulled and I looked up toward the ceiling. Stretching across the room was a long drywall beam, which ran from the loft to an opposite wall. And there, paws drooped over the edge, sat my blob of a cat, wide-eyed and watching every move we and, more importantly, the dog made. Finally, there was a reason to laugh.
As much as we expected it, there was no showdown with the angry husband. Eventually, two sheriff’s deputies came. They told the woman to wait with us while they drove down the block. Fifteen minutes later, the deputies came back, saying they had subdued the husband, put him in handcuffs and locked him up in the squad car. The man had not even put up a fight. They were taking him in and offered to drive her home.
She left quietly with them, abashedly thanking us. The next morning, she knocked on our door again, this time gently. She was not crying. She was well dressed, composed, even smiling. She thanked us and said she was off to work. I hadn’t before noticed how attractive she was, and that morning she was almost radiant. Maybe it was simply the bright morning sunlight reflecting off of the snow. But then, she left for the second time and I never saw her again.
