The Knocking - Darcy Vebber

At the beginning of so many screenplays, a person is asleep. Sometimes there is a dream, sometimes just an alarm clock. Digital numbers flash. The main character awakens, confused. If there is a spouse, the spouse raises up on one elbow and asks, What is it?

Lisa was asleep on the couch, sitting up with a sleeping bag draped over her legs and one of Bobby's meditation books in her lap. The fabric of the sleeping bag made a disturbing slithering sound when she moved and then it slithered off her legs to the floor. No spouse, no digital clock. Stillness all around her.

Someone was knocking.

She was so tired, and at that place in the sleep cycle where the sense of self is lost. Who she was only came back slowly to her. The place, a cabin in the Berkshires, late in spring, far from her apartment in L.A. settled around her, waiting for her to guess. She knew there was someone at the cabin door. That simple imperative, the calling of a person outside the door, was clear. Come. Her heart was pounding when she got up.
Bobby was there, thin and also a little frightened. Tendrils of his wild, dark hair fell across his pale forehead. He wore running shorts and a high school sweatshirt and moved his feet in his running shoes as if to keep his legs from cramping.

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment as if they had each been startled out of sleep.

"You locked me out."

Her legs were trembling. Only this morning, she had been in L.A. waking up in the dark there to a call from a taxi service. She was certain then that she hadn't really been asleep. It had been days since she had really slept. Even on the plane she was awake, painfully aware of it, shoulders, neck, knees. "I was asleep."

"I see that."

There was a moment then when she might have said the things she had planned on the wakeful flight from L.A. to Boston and in the car, deep in to the mountains but she couldn't get the words in order. Before she saw him, it had seemed very important to her to say certain things, to tell him all about his place in her life. In a screenplay, it would be a nice speech. There would be cutaways to his grateful response. In life, in the oddly lit room, chill night air coming in the open door, it made no sense at all. Of course he was important to her. Otherwise, what would she be doing here?

"Did you bring food?" he finally asked.