CREEPY CATALOG

I Recorded Myself Sleeping Because I Thought I Had Sleep Apnea (Part 3)

I heard the door to the master bedroom down the hallway shaking like it was holding back a caged rhino. The sound of my dad wailing against the door drowned out some more disjointed statements from my mom and what sounded like the faint whispering of a man. I wanted to scream at my dad to shut the fuck up so I could hear what the man who I assumed was Scott whispered into the door, but didn't get that chance.

The racket coming from the direction of my dad's door came to a head and I heard my dad's feet stomp down the hallway and fly down the stairs. I listened to my dad tearing about the first floor of the house over the sound of my heaving breathing and my mother making eerie statements.

"Can't watch you go," my mother said just outside of the door.

"Fuck," I heard the single word burst out of my dad's mouth from the first floor before I heard him run back up the stairs.

"Katherine," my dad's voice boomed through the door followed by ragged breaths.

"What the fuck just happened?" I asked.

"He got out the backdoor."

"Scott?"

"I don't know. I didn't see him. He shoved a cabinet against the outside of my bedroom door. I had to break down the door with a golf club."

I didn't respond.

"Can you open the door? It's okay, it's just me and your mom out here."

I turned the lock and opened the door to reveal my dad standing shirtless in the hallway with my mom wallowing behind him.

He looked upon me with sweat beading down his face.

"He slipped out into the woods out back, but Buddy is following him. You can come out if you want."

I thought about it silently for a moment. I stared at my sweating dad and my raving derelict mother who was fidgeting about behind him.

"No, that's okay. I'm just going to stay in here for the rest of the night."

I started to shut the door, but noticed something in my dad's hand... a crumpled piece of paper.

"What's that?" I asked with my eyes on his hand.

"Oh, uh, just something I found. Just some trash."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure," my dad answered in a tone that made it clear he was reluctant to give me the paper.

I wrung out the lined notebook paper that had been crumpled into a ball in my dad's hand. A quick glance revealed it was a note, scribbled in tragically sloppy hand writing with an eyeliner pencil Scott must have snagged from my mom's bathroom.

I know someday you'll have a beautiful...

It cut off there. Scott was probably in the midst of writing his note when my dad made it out of his bedroom and he had to dart away, leaving me with just those seven words that would haunt me for years.

My mom had gotten better. The key indicator to me was she was regularly unearthing memories from long before she disappeared into a fog of dementia and she seemed to be able to communicate in a way that didn't make it seems as if she was a dyslexic reading cue cards.

The night when Scott appeared in my parents' house and then escaped into the night was almost three years ago and I had had effectively scrubbed away a lot of what happened. It was like a movie you only saw once a long time ago, I remembered the plot, but not the details.

A big part of why it felt like another life was because I had moved on to a completely different life after the in-house incident with Scott. After the incident, I heard about a unique opportunity that could jettison me and my mom far from LA and provide safety. A giant out-of-commission psychiatric hospital in Washington State tucked into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains had been reopened as an outpatient living facility for those living with mental disabilities and their family members. In an effort to promote support for mental illness, the facility was offering very generous rates for those who would like to come live in the community.