Will was just fourteen, and I imagined we were abandoning him to an unparented, unloving education, that he would be unguarded and unguided for the four long years that stretched ahead. We had arrived in Concord the day before to drop Will off it was a tense and awful time. Or not in a house, exactly, but underneath the gabled ceiling of the gothic eating hall at my son’s boarding school. I saw a bat once inside another house, too. And when I looked up, I saw it: the swirling, hunting bat that circled, and circled again, above my husband’s head. But there was a swift flicker overhead as I watched my sleeping husband, a darting and flashing, a fast shadow that swooped and fled. The headphones framed his face, the lamp cast its useless pool of light on the table edge, the iPad flashed blue along the bottom of his nose. When I came upstairs that late July night, I mostly found what I thought I would: Jim’s glasses were still on and his chin rested on his sleeping chest. I take the dogs outside with a flashlight, and think about walking the garden, but I come back in almost right away because of the skunks and the possums that wander close when it’s late, and also because I’m afraid of the dark. I mess with a jigsaw puzzle or skip ahead to the last five paragraphs of a magazine article I want to finish. I bum around in the kitchen, eating nuts and cookies.

I hate to do it, and so I come to bed later and later at night.

It’s bleak, for me, to find Jim this way. He would be wearing large, black headphones, and all the lights would be out, except for the dull bedside lamp on the brown side table, while Jim nodded in, nodded off, and finally fell asleep despite the flashing screen in front of him. He would lie in bed with the covers shoved down, and stare at random news of life that popped across the iPad he had propped against his bent knees. One evening last July, though, my husband went up to bed earlier than I did. The bats mostly stay away from me, in their hunt for nighttime insects that cluster in the shadows of the house. I cannot see their faces only the outline of wings and ears. In the Sonoma dusk, bats swoop above the winding road to our gate and around the garden pond below our bedroom window.

High school of succubus black screen