The Reader Is the Protagonist: Exiting a Horror Story

The summer of 1989, shortly after my second husband and I married, we buckled my two daughters, who were seven and three, into the rear seat of a used car purchased for cash. We’d already sold most of our belongings and walked away from the rest, and packed the car’s trunk with what remained: clothing and toys, pillows and blankets, four place settings, one pot, one pan. We told no one where we were going. We meant to disappear. Driving east out of California, we decided on our new names. If we hadn’t been so shell-shocked, it might have been fun, the idea of starting over, starting fresh, in a place where we were unknown. But this was do-it-yourself witness protection. Hidden under the driver’s seat was a book on how to create new identities, but it couldn’t tell us who we’d be.

We stopped in Boulder, Colorado. My new husband had once spent a day in the town, and he remembered it as a friendly place. We drove around for a while. The brick downtown seemed quaint, the neighborhoods leafy and safe. A park with a fast-running creek appealed to the girls. I liked the idea of living near a university, with a tranquil campus, the prospect of lectures and music, young people everywhere.

From a phone booth outside a supermarket, we called a number we found in a real-estate magazine. My new husband spoke to the realtor on duty, and within minutes he’d arranged a trade: a month’s rent for painting a condo that was for sale. We were worried about money, about making what we had last. The realtor met us at the property. He opened up the garage, which was empty but for a few rollers and pans on a shelf, and five-gallon buckets of paint. The condo had two bedrooms, two baths. A concrete patio on the other side of sliding glass doors. The high-ceilinged living room echoed. Such a melancholy sound. The realtor handed over the key.

For a week it rained every day. The storms kept us inside, but also, we were afraid to go out much, afraid to be seen. My new husband and I rolled white paint onto the walls. The girls colored or watched television on a black-and-white set we’d picked up at Goodwill.

My three-year-old tugged at my legs. She had her blanket over her shoulders and a book in her arms: She wanted a story. For more than a year now, the demands of everyday life had required all my attention. I’d trusted only what I could touch, what I could see or hear or feel. I had two daughters to protect, and things I’d once believed essential had fallen away. Books were among the abandoned; one day, halfway through a beloved novel, I set it facedown, and that was the end of that. I couldn’t read nonfiction, either, or newspapers, or magazines; that is, nothing meant for adults. My little daughter leaned against my legs. The older girl had

joined us, her anticipation charging the air. Reading to my children—that I could manage.

My mother read to me a lot when I was young. Our family life was often fraught: my father uncommunicative, physically absent, and emotionally cool; Mom either at his throat or steeped in hostile despair. Reading was her lifelong escape. One effect this had on me was that I believed that books were alive, not just the tales within them but the objects themselves. When I was seated in my mother’s lap with a story, the stiffness of the cover told me what it was to have a spine. The words in their regular rows were like heartbeats; the pages, turning, fluttered like wings.

The story my daughters wanted was Jon Stone’s Monster at the End of This Book.

Grover, one of the characters from Sesame Street, is the narrator. Frightened by...