Margaret and I are much too sober for this place and I’m not in the mood for what’s on the menu—stale beer and dim neon lights. Catherine, a friend who used to work with me at a now-defunct magazine, wants to stay at this Legion-style bar across the street from her studio apartment. It’s not a particularity shady late-night bar it’s just not where Margaret or I want to be.

We have a six-hour drive from Chicago back to Minneapolis/St. Paul in the morning, so we opt to go back to Catherine’s place. It’s barely after midnight but far past my usual bedtime. As we climb the four flights of fire escape, the rusted steel groans and squeaks under our feet. Margaret unlocks the door—click, click—and drops the keys down to Catherine and her friend, a guy who we just met and whose name I don’t remember.

“Lock the door but don’t chain it, so I can get in,” Catherine says from the ground in a hoarse whisper.

Once inside, we bolt the door, brush our teeth, and try to find somewhere to sleep. Tabatha, the gray cat, has peed on our air mattress and blankets and it is easily one hundred degrees in the apartment. It is mid-August, and the apartment doesn’t have a functioning window unit and there is no breeze at all. I am lying in the dark on the sofa wearing only my underwear and my hair is piled on the top of my head—if it touches my shoulders, I will melt like butter brickle on concrete. I’m regretting our last-minute decision to visit Catherine. Margaret had never been to Chicago and Catherine said we should visit. I never thought to ask about the status of the air conditioner.

Margaret is in a chair a few feet from the end of the sofa and she is talking to her boyfriend on the phone. She tells him it is so hot, Amy is sprawled out on the couch wearing only lacy underwear.

“Whatever,” I say. I grab my towel on the back of the sofa and pull it over me. It is still damp and it feels like salvation. I never sleep sans clothing. My husband could verify this. I have always dressed fully for slumber, even before I became a mom and our son appeared at the side of our bed each night, wanting a place in the middle.

I pet Tabatha who sits on the floor next to me even though I hate her now for peeing on our bed. Margaret hangs up and we talk as we fall asleep. Our words swim back and forth in the humid ebony between us.

“Marg, you need to take your contacts out.”

“I know,” she says.

She is quiet now, sleeping, I’m sure. I can’t sleep because I worry for Margaret’s eyeballs.

“Margaret.”

“I will.”

I give up on her and drift off. A few minutes, maybe five, pass, and I’m half asleep, half awake. Then I feel the strange but definite sensation of the towel lifting slowly off of my body. I assume I’m dreaming until something brushes up against my right breast. I feel a puff of air when the towel lands back against my skin. I think I should sit up or grab at the air, do something, but I am too scared to move.

“Margaret.”

“What?” Her tone signals she desperately wants to sleep.

“I think I just had my first poltergeist experience.”

I’ve never actually seen a ghost and, until this moment, was on the fence about whether I believe in them or not. I am surprised when Margaret, who watches a ghost hunting show that we happened to discuss on the road trip here, isn’t impressed with my report.

“Um. Okay,” is all she says.

I try again.

“The towel just levitated off of my body. Something touched my breast,” I say.

“I believe you, but what do you want me to do about it?”

Fercripesakes. While it’s nice to be believed by a dear friend after you say something bonkers unbelievable, I would like for her to turn on a light or sound remotely interested. We have become two female characters in a horror flick—lacy underwear and all.

“It’s fine. Go back to sleep,” I say. After a few seconds, I hear even, deep breathing. She’s likely unaware of anything I’ve said.

I reach down by my feet, grab my bag, and squirm into my tank top and shorts. I do this while remaining on the sofa, so my feet don’t touch the floor. I can’t force myself to get up and find a light, so I lie back down and pull my towel over me. A minute or so passes while I tell myself I’ve imagined it all. Then, from behind the sofa, to my right, I hear a soft noise. Thump, bump. I assume it’s the cat jumping down to the floor.

“Tabatha, that better be you,” I say.

Tabatha answers with a loud meow, she is sitting on the coffee table to my left. It wasn’t me, she says.

I stand up, fast now, and peer into the triangle space behind the sofa and there—wait. Ohmagawd. I see my ghost. It is an outline of a man—a flesh-and-blood human being. How long have we been here with him? Forty-five minutes? An hour? He is crouched down low with his arms crisscrossed over his head. The bill of his faded red baseball cap sticks out between his elbows.

“Margaret!” I say this fast and stern in a tone that brings her to her feet in an instant.

We lock eyes through the dark.

“There’s a guy in here!”

Before I can finish my sentence, the intruder leaps out from behind the sofa, over the bed, and through the dining area. I stand in place as an involuntary banshee screech starts deep in my gut. It quickly reaches a crescendo that would make Jamie Lee Curtis proud. This sound and my ability to create it shocks me because in my nightmares, I can never scream when I need to. Now, I am a high-decibel horror movie star.

While I am busy raising the dead, Margaret goes from Sleeping Beauty to Wonder Woman in an instant. She sprints past me and chases the intruder through the dining room and toward the back door. I don’t want her to do this. What if he has a knife? I mean to say this out loud but I’m not sure if my thought becomes audible. The lock barely slows him before he races down the fire escape. Immediately neighbors from every direction, some already in the courtyard, respond to the scream. I hear voices from below.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m calling 911.”

“Get him!”

“Run!”

“Get that mother fucker!”

Two men in the courtyard sprint down the alley after the intruder. In a few minutes they return.

“He is strong and fast,” one of them says, gasping with his hands on his knees. “We had him for a few seconds but he got away.”

“We’re so sorry,” the other says.

Then I blank out for a bit. I don’t remember going down the fire escape and I don’t remember Margaret and I being asked into another person’s apartment. I also don’t know where “I” has gone. It is as if my body is walking around without an operator. When I finally regain control of my brain, I am aware we are in someone else’s home and the owner is quite concerned for me because I am shaking uncontrollably. Margaret has her arm around my shoulders while she collects information from the other witnesses. There are half a dozen people around us, and they are very kind. The woman who has invited us into her home gives me an oversized red sweatshirt and offers me tea. The police are on their way. Margaret pats my back and says my scream was amazing.

“Was that really me?” I ask. My voice box sounds like it has gone through a paper shredder.

She’s proud, but I’m extremely embarrassed of this primal thing I’ve done. (Midwesterners do not like to inconvenience people at such a late hour, nor do they like to inconvenience them at a reasonable one.) What mortifies me even further is the fact that I was only wearing underwear beneath my towel when the intruder touched my bare breast. I’m feeling a level of shame I didn’t even know existed. Immediately my mind tells me I’ve invited this thing to happen because I was sleeping scantily clothed—even though I know this thinking is deeply flawed.

I try to reason with my subconscious. Dearest brain: Had I known there was a potential rapist hiding in the corner, events would have unfolded much differently, and it is unlikely I would have disrobed and lain prone on a sofa, so please get a grip. My brain will not be forced to believe any such truth. There is nothing I can do to talk myself out of this spiraling shame.

Margaret says we can go back to the apartment, but I keep repeating: “What if there was another person with him? What if he comes back?”

When the police officers arrive, both men, they are kind, but they will not listen to our story. They go into great detail, questioning us about where we were the entire night. This makes no sense to either of us since the intruder was obviously in the apartment when we got there.

We took a train to a tapas restaurant (We each had two sangrias over three hours, sir.) Then we took a train back to Wrigleyville and stopped at the bar across the street, where our host is now. We each ordered a glass of water. Yes, we are quite sober, sir.)

“Now ladies,” he says, “we know you aren’t from around here, but you should not have been at that bar.”

As we tell our story, the younger officer looks for signs of a break-in and examines the wet spot on our blankets and air mattress after mentioning it may not be cat pee at all. “It’s possible it’s semen,” he says. All the while I am still shaking, even though I wear the stranger’s thick sweatshirt, have a blanket wrapped around me, and the apartment is still sweltering. The younger officer goes to the bar across the street to find Catherine and to see if the intruder might be there. This seems like a stretch since the only description we were able to give was the red baseball cap, with medium height and build. It was too dark to see his face.

All of my energy is spent trying to appear calm and together. I do not want to seem hysterical in any way since the officers are already giving off the “nothing major happened here” vibe. I get this idea because they have said: “You girls are very lucky,” “Usually we see much worse,” and, “There is not much we can do in this scenario.” We are lucky to a large degree, but not so lucky as to not be sitting across from police officers in a friend’s apartment at three in the morning. Again, the issue is raised that we shouldn’t have been at the bar across the street for fifteen minutes. What happened, they say, was the intruder saw “pretty young girls” at the bar and followed the four of us back to Catherine’s apartment and he snuck in behind us, unseen.

Margaret Minnesota-nicely explains that Catherine and her friend were at the bottom of the fire escape, and we had a clear view to the ground when we threw her the keys. There was no one on the fire escape, top or bottom, and no one followed us in. We locked the door behind us and also checked the front door, which was bolted. She reiterates our stance: “We are quite certain he was already in the apartment when we arrived.” Older Officer disagrees with our assessment and says he is certain he followed us from the local establishment across the street. In short, he won’t believe us. He says, “Sometimes, after being out at the bar, it’s easy to miss this kind of thing.” I assert again that we were sober. He says, “Mmm, hmmm.”

We ask if they checked the windows and Older Officer said he could not have gotten in a window because this a fourth-floor apartment. Younger Officer says it was not possible since there are no signs of forced entry. And then the older one says in a fatherly/jackass manner, “You girls aren’t familiar with Chicago, you should get back to Minneapolis as soon as possible—where it’s safe.”

And that’s finally where I was like: Uh. . . what now? (While trying to remain calm because I still do not want to be thought of as “hysterical.”) I once experienced a date rape there, in the city we are told to rush back to, and sadly, I know too many victims of every variety of sexual misconduct. As much as I love my home state, I know it’s not by any means some sort of sexual predator–free Shangri-La. Also, where could one go to find such a utopia? I’ve never gone on a road trip where a sign on the edge of town reads: Welcome to ______, Home of Zero Sexual Assaults. Have you?

I’m sure this officer has seen far too many lifeless bodies, and our situation looks like a downright fairy tale in comparison. However, Margaret and I are in preemptive mode. We worry about what the intruder might do to a different woman next Saturday night. We are terrified for Catherine, who will now have to live alone here. Margaret and I both want to help the police help Catherine and other women writ large. But they don’t seem to want our help because they keep inventing these unbelievable stories.

Catherine has returned with her nameless friend and Younger Officer. She is strangely calm, and while I talk to the officers, she pulls Margaret aside and says, “Amy is making this up, right?” She is convinced I invented everything.

I can hear what she is saying, enough to get the gist, and it’s not something I can deal with. The officers also seem perplexed by her behavior. Margaret is a psychologist, so I think it’s best to let her handle this new development. She tries but gets nowhere. Her eyes are wide, and she shakes her head back and forth. She says, “No, I saw him too, Catherine. I know it is hard for you, but this happened.”

Later I will learn that Catherine’s lizard brain has taken charge. It’s saying: Hey, let’s make a deal. You will be safe to live here alone only if you deny your friend’s awful reality. So this is what she does. It is odd and hurtful to watch. As hurt as I am, I also get it on some level. Wasn’t my own mind first willing to believe that a ghost could pick up a fucking towel before it was able to process that a predator was camped a few feet from us—watching us undress, listening to our private conversation, uncovering me, and touching me in the dark?

Now, Margaret saw the intruder and I saw the intruder and at least a dozen people from the apartment complex saw the intruder, two even chased him down the alley, so I’m not sure why Catherine is homing in on me as the great liar in this scenario. Maybe because she knows me the best out of everyone involved and it’s always easiest to shit on those you love most. Let’s go with that.

The officers say the intruder likely wasn’t a thief since we all had accidentally left our computers out, and I forgot my ID and one of my credit cards on the coffee table. All remained untouched. Yet he stole plenty—our sense of safety, my self-confidence, mine and Catherine’s perfectly intact friendship, and the certainty of my sanity, which is withering by the moment. My head is a blender whirling with questions. Have I lost my mind? Did I invent this entire thing? Why would Catherine suggest this if I hadn’t? I’m unraveling but only internally. But I focus again on Margaret, who is giving her full account to Catherine, and I know for certain I imagined nothing.

After the police leave, Catherine still doesn’t believe us. Margaret and I don’t want to be around this toxic baloney, but we don’t want Catherine to be alone either. Nameless says he can stay with her and will handle whatever she is going through. While we feel like we are handing off our bratty kid to a babysitter and skipping town forever, it doesn’t stop us from throwing our cat pee/potentially semen–covered blankets in a trash bag, grabbing our things and shoving them into the back of my Jeep. We make a beeline to I-94, never once checking the rear view.

Margaret and I are finally free to be hysterical, but we must take turns. One of us must stay composed so that the vehicle can continue to move homeward.

First Margaret drives and I sob while playing happy music for Marg. Then she asks if it is okay if she can cry for a while. We pull over, eat handfuls of almonds and blueberries, and then I drive, clear-eyed, while she tearfully processes for an hour or so. Somehow, we make the entire trip this way until we finally pull into the driveway where my husband eagerly waits with open arms and a pot roast in the oven. My son hugs me tight and asks, “What’s wrong? Why are you sad?”

Later in the afternoon, Catherine calls. I can hear in her voice she is the Catherine I know again. She says she is sorry, so, so sorry for not believing me, it was just too hard at first. Her landlord came over after we left and easily found where the intruder broke in through a window in her closet. After she saw the window, her false construction of the situation came crashing down. She is not doing well, and I am concerned for her emotional well-being as well as her safety.

“He put bars on the windows. Now I live in jail,” she says.

“You need to move, please, please move,” I say.

***

Days pass and my shame returns. I apologize a million times to my husband for sleeping in my underwear, which he repeatedly and rightly says I don’t need to do. (Eventually, the joke I tell, in order to cope, is that only I could stumble upon a potential rapist on the one night I decide to sleep sans clothing. Har. Har.) But for a long while, I don’t want to tell anyone about this, especially our families. I worry they will judge me for this “lewd” act of being hot and removing my clothes. I am convinced everyone will fixate on my nakedness and not the fact that an intruder had violated our safe space. I can’t stop feeling responsible for what happened, even though I know it’s wrong to believe this. (I also worry, excessively, that the warm red hoodie has not been returned to the woman who loaned us the safety of her apartment.)

Once home, I believe I see the intruder everywhere. Especially in the living room next to the fireplace behind the rocking chair. This apparition will continue to haunt over the course of several years. I panic. Does he know my address from my forgotten driver’s license? I obsess. Did he snap a photo of my license? Was he looking me up online? I want to move, but the recently collapsed housing market does not allow this luxury.

The intruder roams free while we all live in our respective prisons. Margaret has nightmares and invasive daytime memories. Catherine, actually behind bars, is kept hostage by the fear the intruder might return until she finally does move cross-country. Me, in a house with too many windows and not enough bars, seeing him always around dusk in every corner. It is as if a phantom lived with each of us, coming and going without a key. And I do believe—no, I know—his lurking shadow never once paid rent either.

-Amy Stonestrom

Amy Stonestrom’s work has appeared in Brevity, Superstition Review, Defunkt, Storm Cellar Quarterly, Multiplicity, and others. She has received recognition from the National League of American Pen Women, New Millennium Writing Award, and Streetlight Magazine, and has an MFA in creative nonfiction. You can find her at amystonestrom.com.