Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in There’s Someone Inside Your House, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Loss, and Grief
Guilt, Shame, and Redemption
Alienation
Gossip vs. Communication
Inner Change
Summary
Analysis
Officer Bev leaves for the night, and Makani stays behind and waits for Grandma Young to get out of surgery. Makani doesn’t have her phone, so she can’t contact anyone. She turns on the TV. The news is showing coverage of the attack. Creston Howard announces the suspect’s identity: David Thurston Ware. Hearing the middle name makes Makani sick—she thinks it’s wrong for the news to treat David the same way it treated his victims. David’s school photo flashes across the screen. He looks boyish, normal, and innocent. Makani wants to change the channel, but her fear keeps her fixated on the news coverage. Just then, the nice red-haired nurse who’s been checking on Makani all night appears and tells Makani that Grandma Young is out of surgery.
By focusing on the normalcy of David’s school photo, the narrative pits David against his victims, who were largely stand-out students in their chosen fields (drama for Haley, football for Matt, and computers for Rodrigo). Could this offer insight into David’s motives for killing his victims, perhaps? Might he resent their success? Finally, alone in the hospital room with not even her phone, Makani is completely isolated, unable to connect her to the outside world, and left painfully alone to make sense of the trauma of her recent attack.
Themes
The surgeon tells Makani that Grandma Young will be okay. Luckily, David’s knife missed her aorta. However, she’ll have to stay in the hospital for at least three weeks. Makani panics and wonders who she can stay with while Grandma Young recovers. After what seems like an eternity, a nurse leads Makani to the ICU where Grandma Young is waking up from anesthesia. She’s weak, but she’s cogent. Ollie and Chris arrive. Chris brought Grandma Young and Makani flowers, though he wasn’t allowed to bring them into the ICU. Ollie won’t look at Makani, and Makani worries that he found out about her past during his police interrogation. Makani asks Chris if the police have caught David yet. They haven’t, but Chris promises it won’t be long.
Grandma Young’s long recovery period will leave Makani alone and unprotected in the house in which she very recently was nearly killed. The recent trauma of this experience will make returning to the scene of the attack no easy feat for Makani, who had already been suffering from the unresolved trauma of the Hawaii incident prior to tonight’s attack.
Themes
Ollie and Makani retreat to the waiting room while Chris stays behind to ask Grandma Young some questions. Ollie gives Makani her phone, and she’s met with a stream of texts from Darby and Alex asking if she’s okay and apologizing for suspecting Ollie. Ollie urges Makani to call her parents to let them know she’s okay, and she reluctantly complies, heading to a secluded spot by the elevators for privacy. But when she calls, neither parent picks up their phone. Makani walks back to Ollie and slumps down in a chair.
This scene further illuminates the poor relationship Makani has with her parents. Thus far, Grandma Young has hinted at the strain between Makani and her mother. Makani has also mentioned, in passing, how she thinks her parents sent her away to Nebraska to avoid having to deal with her. But when Makani’s parents don’t reach out to her after they likely heard of her recent attack—and when they fail to answer their phones—it really underscores how absent and uncaring they are. This helps explain why Makani may struggle with unresolved guilty and feelings of unworthiness—she has neither the support of her old community nor her parents.
Themes
Ollie reflects on David Ware. He’s known him his whole life: their families attended church together, and he and David were both on the middle school wrestling team. David never seemed like a killer. In fact, he was totally unremarkable. Ollie wonders if that’s why he turned to killing: because he resented feeling invisible. What still troubles Ollie, though, is why David would target Makani. Makani panics. She knows she needs to tell Ollie about the incident in Hawaii. But before she can say anything, Chris appears in the waiting room to take Ollie and Makani back to the Larsson home—Grandma Young gave her permission for Makani to stay there while she recovers in the hospital.
Again, the book is emphasizing that David Ware was totally unremarkable, so this detail is clearly important (though the reason is still ambiguous). Maybe it has something to do with my David is choosing to kill or how he’s selecting his victims. For her part, Makani remains paranoid that David chose her because he somehow found out about the bad thing she was involved in in Hawaii. Once more, we see that guilt and paranoia about this period of her life totally consumes Makani’s life and manipulates her sense of reality.
Themes
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