Author’s note: Rachel Feder’s contemporary gothic novella “The Turn” follows Baxter, a young writer and recent college graduate, who accepts a live-in nanny position for an affluent professor’s family in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
By night I dream the house is underwater. Sea beasts float by, all excess and tentacles. When I press my face to the window, I see packs of seals playing like dogs.
It’s one of those split-level homes on the hillside. My room and the baby’s room are downstairs. Sometimes he’s crying in the dream, but I never go in to pick him up. I don’t know why.
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Eight steps, two sharp turns, and I’m in the living room. Alison is standing in front of the plate glass, Thebes balanced on her hip. But he was downstairs; I swear I heard him crying. She’s staring out the picture window, but where we should see slabs of stone looming over the rose-gold glow of campus, there is only the sea. Sometimes we are deep underwater, the house a submarine. Sometimes the living room is more like the deck of a ship—though always encased in glass—and I look out across roiling waves or midnight phosphorescence. She says something—I can never remember what — and turns to me.
I always wake up before I see her face.
“I can’t believe they took down the fucking tree.” Alison is staring out the kitchen window at the neighbors’ yard. The neighbors are renovating, the house left empty. All day workers rearrange its face.
I look up. Alison’s skin is tight, severe in profile, her slender hands resting on her denim hips. For some reason, she has worn jeans every day since the pandemic started. I don’t know what she’s trying to prove.
I bite my lip, deciding whether to respond. It’s never clear if she’s actually speaking to me.
“The Turn”
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“What tree?” Quinn sets down her organic toaster waffle, pushes back her chair, and is soon at her mother’s thigh. “Pick me up,” she says insistently, and when Alison doesn’t, she comes back to the table and begins to pull and push her chair through the arched opening in the drywall cut between the living room and the kitchen.
“Quinny, stop.” Alison raises a flat palm, then moves to the deck door. “Come, we can look together.”
I continue to mash banana with a silver fork, tethered to the highchair. She must mean the blue spruce I can see from the window by my bed. My eyes have rested on it often, a frazzled silhouette in the gloaming. I feel something hard and fast in my stomach.
I never planned on heading back east after graduation and I didn’t have a job lined up when schools went online in March, so I jumped when Alison offered me her spare bedroom in exchange for part-time nannying. At first, being here felt like walking into a tabloid—no longer one in the crowd of creative writing majors jostling for Alison’s attention and approval, I was suddenly behind closed doors, watching her calm a tantrum, make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich, obsess over a pimple, or give her husband a brusque kiss goodbye on his way to the lab. But now, five months later, the gleam has dulled, time a thick, viscous patina over everything. It was hard to imagine ever leaving, or even where I’d go, so we renegotiated—full-time child-care for room, board, and a small stipend.
Alison carries Quinn inside, and I can tell the child has been crying. “I know it hurts,” Alison soothes, tucking a stray ringlet behind her daughter’s seashell ear, “but it was just a tree.”
“It was my tree.”
“Well, technically, sweetheart, it was their tree, and I suppose it was blocking their view of the mountains.”
“But trees make oxygen. That tree made the air we breathe, and I can’t breathe without it.”
“You’ll be fine.” Alison settles Quinn on the sofa, flips open a tablet, and lets her pick out a cartoon. “At least you’re easily distracted,” she consoles, glancing up from the six-year-old to wink at me.
I smile, scooping up the rest of the banana, then feel myself grimace as Thebes bites down hard on my finger.
Alison is weaning, her breasts extended and engorged, her mood raw. She’s also letting Thebes cry it out—and I really mean cry it out. Alison says baby monitors are for the weak.
I’m sitting up in bed with my back against the window, the glass cool even though it was ninety degrees out just a few hours ago. I wish I could melt into the blue glow of my phone.
I stopped looking a while ago, but I know the tree is there, behind me, lying on the lawn like a slain giant, the heft of its branches at grotesque angles.
Midnight. Two o’clock in the morning. The baby keeps waking, keeps screaming. I’m not supposed to pick him up; that’s not the method. But come on.
Every time I wake up, I check my email, as though someone would be emailing me at three A.M. And every time I check, I reread the email from Jack.
Just checking in, Bax. Hope you’re doing okay in spite of everything.
It’s so like Jack to email, for his email not to ask any questions.
The missive doesn’t demand a reply; he can feel like he’s done the right thing without having to encounter anyone else’s emotions.
Around four o’clock, I break. I tiptoe halfway up the stairs and listen. Everyone else is sleeping—I hear Quinn’s white noise machine, Seb’s ragged snoring. I pace back down and open the door slowly, careful not to make a squeak.
“Hi, buddy.” Soon Thebes is in my arms, the weight of him on my wrists, his damp face buried in my neck. He is catching his breath from crying, and the palm of his little hand slaps twice against my clavicle, as if to say, there you are.
Across the lawn, the fallen spruce languishes, making an awkward horizon. Something rustles in its branches, and I shudder. Beyond it loom the crags, flat expanses of conglomeratic sandstone pushed up when an ancient seabed ruptured to create these mountains.
Thebes is teething on the collar of my pajama shirt. As I remove it from his mouth, I see a new tooth gleaming in the moonlight, its unexpected shape. I squint and look again, then run my Finger gingerly along the baby’s gums and up and down the tooth. My touch makes Thebes smile, and I twist my body to catch the light from my bedroom window. What I see is unmistakable. The tooth comes to a sharp point.
I turn to press my way inside, but the door has locked behind me. Shit. Make my way around the house in the stilling dark, trying not to think about the predators we’ve seen off the deck this summer—a mountain lion that caught my eye as he bounded behind a hedge at twilight, a bobcat strutting up the driveway without a care in the world, a lynx that looked like a man transformed and embarrassed to be seen in his new guise.
Alison keeps a spare key in a lockbox for emergencies; emergencies are her favorite.
I hear a toilet flush upstairs, pull the door shut fast and soft behind me, and soon Thebes and I are in my room.
“Can you smile, sweetie?” I whisper, then blow a raspberry on the palm of his hand. When he grins, there’s nothing peculiar—just the same opaque whiteness pressing against pink gums.
Last week, a black bear lumbered past the car, its coat a mahogany shimmer, smile in its hips.
My eyes must have been playing tricks on me in the moonlight.
Copyright © 2026 by Northwestern University. Published 2026 by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Rachel Feder is an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of several books, including “Daisy,” “Harvester of Hearts,” “The Darcy Myth” and “Birth Chart” as well as two coauthored works, “AstroLit” and “Taylor Swift by the Book. Across genres, her work explores how literary history informs our shared mythologies. Learn more at rachelfeder.com.
