I love having the house to myself on occasion. Then it’s mine, all mine and I relish every moment … well every moment except that night when someone left a beeping time bomb in my kitchen. Heart beating I tentatively went to investigate. The sound stopped.
Barely breathing, I looked around.
Nothing.
Slowly my heart rate returned to normal, only to be jacked up again when the ominous beeping returned. I ran into the room and found a smoke alarms battery announcing its dying experience.
I changed the battery.
No dying batteries required my attention last month after I watched my husband leave in our van for the family reunion driving the van. I flew there later with my daughter’s family and we enjoyed the luxury of having him meet us at the airport and drive us to and from our resort.
He did not enjoy his leisurely drive returning us to the airport. It was leisurely because the transmission failed. We moseyed down the Interstate at 40 mph with our lights flashing to warn the cars coming up behind us.
I flew home and left my chauffeur to find a shop that could repair the van and a hotel where he could stay a couple extra days until the part arrived to be installed.
While he twiddled his thumbs through the motorized inconvenience, I returned home and relished the quiet, orderly house. Only the scolding cat demanding breakfast broke the silence of the house.
Then he came home and the quiet dissipated especially loudly one night as we slept.
We both woke up from a deep sleep to hear voices mumbling at the other end of the house.
“I thought I heard the phone ring,” he said. I had not heard it and we do have a phone at the head of the bed.
Silently, we laid in bed staring into the darkness, wanting to sleep but we had to know what we heard.
“You better check that out,” I said before I slid a bit deeper in the blankets, ever so happy it was not me going down that hall to investigate.
He rolled out of bed and turned on the hall light. The mumbling stopped.
“They stopped as soon as I turned on the light,” he said.
Silently, he walked down the hall. I heard nothing. Waiting in the silence, I wondered how long it would take me to push aside the blinds, yank open the window and climb out to the lawn.
I wondered how would I know if I needed to get out of the house.
He did not return. He did not call out anything. I thought about calling out and asking what he found … but what if those mumbling voices answered instead?
I waited.
Finally, he walked in, puzzled and quiet, “Everything was turned off: the radio, the TV, the computer. And, they stopped talking as soon as I turned on the light.”
Oh.
“Did you check all the closets and behind the couch?”
He sighed, put on a brave face and went down the hall to look inside all those hiding places.
He came back, “Nothing.”
We looked at each other.
Something had awakened us.
“I thought I heard the phone ring,” he said again.
Standing up, he walked resolutely down the hall again. A couple seconds later I heard the mumbling voices again.
“It’s on the answering machine. That’s what I heard,” he said. “Come here and listen to this and see if you can understand it.”
I emerged from the safety of the blankets, touched the bed lamp and leaned over to study the bedroom phone’s plug-in. It had come loose. We had not had a working phone in the bedroom. He had heard the phone ring.
I plugged in the phone and went to listen to the messages. Garbled talk echoed through the house. It sounded like a not quite tuned-in TV or radio station. A weird robo-call.
We deleted the messages and went back to bed to puzzle over our midnight alarm. Eventually, our hearts stopped racing and we slept, hoping nothing else went beep in the middle of the night.
(Ever so brave in bright daylight, Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)