“Dad, who is that man who always touches Mom’s body with a red cloth every time you sleep?”
My 8-year-old daughter broke the silence out of nowhere as I was driving her to school that morning.
I froze the moment I heard those words.
“Sonia, what are you saying? Where did you hear such nonsense?” I asked.
“Dad, it happens every night when you’re sleeping in Mom’s room with you,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were telling a normal story. “And Mom doesn’t say anything. She just closes her eyes,” Sonia added.
“Stop! Don’t ever say that again!” I warned her, and we rode the rest of the way in heavy silence until we reached the school. I dropped her off and headed back home.
On the drive, I couldn’t stop thinking: Could it be something she saw in a movie? Maybe it was just a dream… but then… the seriousness on her face, the complete lack of fear in her eyes. I became worried instantly.
What if Sonia was telling the truth? What if what she saw was real? What if another man really comes to see my wife every night while I’m asleep?
“But I trust my wife so much… she would have told me if something like that was happening,” I told myself in an internal monologue.
When I got home, I found my wife in the kitchen preparing breakfast.
“Honey, you’re back?” she asked as soon as I walked in.
I couldn’t answer her. For the first time since we got married, I felt disgust at her presence. But for some reason, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions based only on what my daughter had said. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. After all, seeing is believing.
I waited patiently until night fell, and when darkness finally arrived, I let out a sigh of relief.
After our nightly prayer, my daughter went to her room, and then my wife and I went to ours. Her bedroom and ours were directly across from each other. Five minutes after we got into our family bed, I pretended to fall asleep. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut.
I’m not the type who snores. But that night, I snored. And I did it so perfectly it could have been professional.
A few minutes later, I began to sense a strange presence in the room… as if someone had just entered, right near the bed. I heard faint sounds.
My God! At that exact moment, goosebumps covered my entire body. I wanted to open my eyes to see what was happening, but something told me to hold on.
Suddenly, I started hearing a strange sound coming from my wife. I couldn’t bear it any longer. But the moment I opened my eyes, I was shocked to my core. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Standing over my wife’s side of the bed was a tall silhouette, illuminated only by the faint sliver of moonlight creeping through the curtains. It was indeed a man, dressed in dark, loose-fitting robes, and in his hand was a thick, crimson cloth that seemed to steam in the cool air of the bedroom. He was pressing the cloth gently against my wife’s chest, and to my horror, my wife wasn’t fighting him. Her eyes were closed, tears streaming down her face, her teeth gritted as if she were enduring immense pain.
Rage and adrenaline flooded my veins instantly. I didn’t think; I reacted. I roared, lunging from my side of the bed and tackling the stranger to the ground. The red cloth flew from his hand, landing with a heavy, wet thud on the floor. The man didn’t fight back; he simply raised his hands in a gesture of surrender as I pinned him to the floorboards, my fist raised.
“Mark, stop! Please, stop!” my wife screamed, her voice weak and raspy. She scrambled out of bed, grabbing my arm with surprising strength. “Don’t hurt him! Please!”
I froze, confused by her plea. I reached up and slapped the light switch on the wall. The room flooded with harsh yellow light, revealing the intruder. He wasn’t a lover, and he wasn’t a thief. He was an older man, perhaps in his sixties, with kind, weary eyes and a bag of herbs spilled beside him. The room didn’t smell of cologne or sex; it smelled of strong medicine—menthol, camphor, and burnt sage.
“Who is this?” I demanded, breathless, looking from the man to my wife. “What is going on here?”
My wife collapsed onto the edge of the bed, pulling her nightgown tight around her chest. “He’s a healer, Mark,” she sobbed. “He’s a traditional healer from the old district.”
“A healer? Why is a healer in our bedroom at midnight?” I yelled, my heart still pounding against my ribs.
My wife looked up at me, her eyes filled with a sorrow so deep it silenced my anger. She slowly lowered the neckline of her gown. There, on her left breast, was a large, angry lump, the skin discolored and swollen. “I found it six months ago,” she whispered. “The doctors said it was aggressive. They wanted to start chemo, surgery… they said the odds were low. I was so scared, Mark. I didn’t want to become a patient. I didn’t want you to look at me like I was dying.”
I stood there, paralyzed. The “red cloth” was a poultice, soaked in hot herbal remedies, intended to draw out the pain and inflammation. She had been enduring this treatment every night, biting her lip to keep from waking me, trying to cure herself in secret because she couldn’t bear the thought of breaking my heart with the truth of her diagnosis.
The older man stood up slowly, brushing off his robes. “She loves you very much,” he said softly. “She refused to let me come during the day because she didn’t want to disrupt your life. She pays me with the little savings she has.”
I looked at the red cloth on the floor, then at my wife, who was now trembling. The betrayal I had felt earlier evaporated, replaced by a crushing wave of guilt and heartbreak. Sonia hadn’t seen a lover; she had seen her mother fighting for her life in the silence of the night.
I fell to my knees beside the bed and wrapped my arms around my wife, burying my face in her lap. We wept together for a long time, the silence of the secrets finally broken. The next morning, we went to the hospital together. We didn’t know what the future held, but we knew we would face it with eyes wide open, and no more secrets in the dark.