My Darling Husband

by Kimberly Belle

  The man’s gaze whips to mine. “No offense, but when it comes to your kids, you’re not the most reliable witness. I prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” He scratches a gloved finger over Baxter’s knee. “Hello, horsey.”

  It isn’t really a question, and Baxter doesn’t answer. I clutch his body tighter to mine.

  “Come on, little guy, I thought you and I were friends.” A slight edge has snuck into the man’s voice, a not-so-subtle warning. “Friends don’t keep secrets. Now tell me where your big sister’s hiding.”

  But this time Bax isn’t falling for it. By now he’s seen too much—the awful words this man has been slinging around, the gun in his fist and the switchblade in his pocket. Baxter knows the masked man is not his friend. He shrugs against my shoulder and mumbles, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  Baxter shakes his head.

  “But you just said she wasn’t downstairs.”

  He nods.

  The man’s eyes go a little wide, a universal gesture for WTF. “Then how do you know?”

  “’Cause the scary man who bangs on the pipes lives down there. How come you wear a mask? Do you have superpowers?”

  Just then, a familiar sound sticks the breath to my lungs. A key, rattling in the front door.

  All heads whip in the direction of the noise, even though we can’t see the door from where we’re standing. Not with the four-foot stretch of wall, a solid boundary between the base of the stairs and the front door, blocking the view. I stare at the alabaster plaster, breathless.

  The man’s whisper laps at the side of my neck. “Who’s that?”

  I shake my head, the burning in my arm muscles bleeding away into a panicky tingle. Is it Cam, returning home already with the money? I hold my breath and wait, clutching Baxter to my chest, straining to hear. Five full seconds of frozen terror.

  There’s a sharp sound of metal on wood, followed by a whoosh of outside air.

  And then two things happen all at once. A long steady beeping erupts from the alarm pad bolted onto the bedroom wall, and a familiar voice sings out a hello.

  Tanya Lloyd, the neighbor from across the street.

  “Jade, are you here?”

  With impressive speed, the man tugs me down the hall and into the bedroom. “Tell her not to move,” he hisses, flipping open the cover on the alarm panel and ticking in the code. “Do it.” Just in case, he raises the gun six inches from my face—as if I need convincing.

  “Hang on, Tanya,” I shout, pointing my face into the hallway. “Stay where you are. I’ll be right there.”

  My words don’t stop her footsteps from moving deeper into the house. Tanya is our nosiest neighbor, the kind who parks herself in her bay window when the kids are at school so she can keep an eye on the street. She knows every neighbor within a five-mile radius. She knows their kids’ names and their dogs’ names and what day their lawn and pool service comes. She knows who’s pregnant and who’s getting married or on the verge of divorce, and which houses are about to go on the market weeks before the broker hammers a For Sale sign in the grass. If one of our neighbors forgets to pick up their dog’s shit from our front yard, Tanya calls to tell me who it was, and exactly which bush it’s under. She is a one-woman security patrol, and she drives Cam and me up a tree.

  And now she’s here, in our house. Standing in the foyer. If she comes in any farther, and she will, which way will she go? Left, into the kitchen and the television room beyond? Or right for the stairs—in full view of us, standing just inside the bedroom doorway.

  And speaking of bedrooms, it feels strange to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a masked man in mine. The space is too personal and far too intimate. Everywhere I look are pieces of me and Cam. The framed photos of the kids, naked but for their diapers, on the wall. The romance novels piled up on a nightstand strewn with discarded earrings and Chapstick and lotion bottles. The neat pile of freshly laundered sports bras on the bed, which I wish to God were tucked in a drawer. I don’t want to be here with him. It’s too disturbing, like some kind of BDSM nightmare.

  On the other side of the wall, Tanya’s footsteps go dull and blunted, which means she’s moved from the foyer marble onto the living room hardwood.

  Please go left please go left.

  Turning right would get us killed. Me, Baxter, Tanya. Three unarmed innocents. Turning right would involve her in this nightmare, too.

  And then something else occurs to me. What if she’s here because she saw Beatrix make her escape? What if she saw her...I don’t know, shimmy down a drainpipe, race down the hill, sneak through the bushes to the neighbors’? If anybody saw Beatrix make a run for it, it would have been Tanya. What if that’s what she’s coming here to tell me?

  Tanya’s footsteps are clomping around, moving nearer. “Where are y’all? Are you upstairs?”

  “Get rid of her,” the man whispers, and now he sounds like Cam. Cam has never been a Tanya fan. Not since the welcome-to-the-neighborhood party she threw us, where after one too many cocktails, I offered her a key. Cam wanted me to march over there and demand it back, because he knew she’d equate the key with an open-door policy. She uses it at least once a week to pop over for drinks, to deliver our mail or just to say hi. She’s sweet, but she needs constant coddling, like an insecure, jealous spouse. She wants nothing more than to be needed.

  And now that’s one battle won because boy do I ever need her.

  I scurry down the hall with Baxter on my hip, my shoes slipping in the broken glass, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. I spot Tanya in the living room, pinching a fuchsia-tipped bloom of an orchid plant between two fingers, I’m guessing to see if it’s real.

  “Sorry, sorry. We were in the bedroom. Hey, Tan.”

  She whirls around, her oversize shirt swinging around her hips, and I know what she sees: wild hair, lipstick chewed off, haunted eyes. I saw myself in the bedroom mirror just now. I know I look a mess.

  But Tanya is her usual put-together self. Dark jeans, white shirt topped with a chunky necklace. This one’s made of long fingers of polished black horn studded with diamonds. Tanya once told me she knew every time her ex-husband had an affair, because he’d come home with another stunner for her jewelry collection—and she has amassed quite the collection.

  “There you are. I was just bringing by some mail I picked up for you last week. Y’all should really put a lock on that mailbox, it’s a surefire way to—Aww, Baxie, what’s the matter, sugar? You look like you’ve been crying.” She steps close enough to brush his cheek with the pad of her thumb.

  One more inch, one tiny twist of her head, and she’ll spot the masked man slinking silently down the hall to my right, the gun he’s aiming at my temple.

  “He’s just tired. It’s been kind of a crazy day.”

  Her glossed lips purse with sympathy. “Poor baby. I hope you’re not coming down with that nasty bug that’s been working its way through the club.” She presses the back of her hand to Baxter’s forehead, then one of his cheeks. “You’re a little warm, but nothing too bad. Are you feeling okay?”

  She’s standing less than a foot away, close enough I can smell her spicy-sweet perfume and the caramel she stirred into her afternoon coffee.

  “Baxter’s fine.” I run a shaky hand over Baxter’s head, flattening the tangle of fine hair at the crown. My next words are as much for him as they are for me: “He’s fine. Everybody’s fine.”

  She smiles, but I can’t manage to match it.

  “Well, you can never be too careful, you know, and you don’t want to push too hard if you’re not feeling well. Bill McAllister tried that, and he passed out on the ninth tee. One minute he’s standing there, bragging to his caddie about the birdie he just scored, the next he’s lights out on the green. They carted him off in an ambulance, you know.”

 
Tanya blabbers on, oblivious as ever to my discomfort, but I’m no longer listening because out of the corner of my eye, movement. A black smudge, shifting from me to Baxter. The man didn’t say it, but he also didn’t have to. One wrong move and he’ll shoot us both dead.

  I transfer Baxter to my other hip, putting my torso between him and the muzzle of the gun. If anybody here is taking a bullet, it will be me. I’m going first.

  Take that, asshole.

  I stare at Tanya’s mouth and will the chattering to stop—Leave, there’s a gunman standing right here, run back across the road and save yourself—but my mind is as thick as molasses. I need her to stop talking long enough for me to give her some kind of sign. A subtle clue that she will recognize as a call for help, but the gunman won’t.

  “Jade, I swear. You are such a dreamer. Did you hear a single word I said?” She watches me, eyebrows raised. I shake my head, and she laughs like I’m the silliest thing ever. “I have a question for you. And before you say no, just promise you’ll hear me out, okay?”

  I don’t respond. My mind is racing, trying to come up with words that pry loose some understanding, some urgency in Tanya. She takes my silence as an affirmative.

  “Okay, so I’m putting together a fundraiser for my niece, you know, to help out with some of the medical costs. Poor thing’s not getting any better. If you’re the praying type, say a little prayer she gets in that trial, will you? Her insurance is being so difficult.”

  I mold my face into something that I hope resembles sympathy. Tanya’s niece needs new lungs. Doctors say she won’t survive the next year without them.

  “Anyway, you know how you told me once Baxter went back to school this fall you were thinking about getting back into decorating?”

  She pauses just long enough for me to nod. I don’t remember telling her as much but it’s something I could have said after a glass or two of wine.

  “Well, that got me to thinking, what if you offered up some free room makeovers for the silent auction? We could take some before and after pictures at my house, or if you have a girlfriend who could use some pointers, her place. Doesn’t matter where, as long as the pictures are good because you know the people who come to these things. They spend stupid amounts of money on their homes, and I thought maybe this way, we could raise money and drum you up some business. A win-win, don’t you think?”

  This. This right here is why despite all her faults, I harbor a soft spot for Tanya Lloyd. On the one hand, she lets herself into my house to ask me a question she could have easily posed by phone. It annoys the hell out of Cam, and any other day, it would annoy the hell out of me, too.

  But anybody else would have marched over to ask me to donate something from Cam. A cooler filled with Lasky steaks, a dinner for twelve in the Lasky private room, a Lasky gift card.

  But Tanya didn’t ask for any of that. She didn’t even hint at it. I mentioned once in passing that I missed playing with fabrics and textures and patterns, that finding the exact perfect color combination was once upon a time as satisfying to me as an orgasm. My sister would have called me shallow, my friends would have forgotten that conversation ever happened, but not Tanya. Tanya filed that little tidbit away and pulled it out not to use to her advantage—okay, maybe a little to her advantage—but also to mine.

  Cam is wrong about Tanya. She can keep the key.

  She grabs on to the arm I have wrapped around Baxter. “Well? What do you think?”

  I think I don’t want her to leave. I think I need to figure out a way to signal for help. And if she picks up on the clues I’m about to slide into this conversation, I think I will love her forever.

  “Sounds great, sign me up. Oh, and hey, did you ever ask your brother about next weekend?”

  Tanya doesn’t have a brother, just three sisters who live on the outskirts of town, walking distance from where they stuck their mother in a memory care facility. That’s what she calls it, often and on repeat every time the two talk, that for the life of her she can’t understand why anybody would “stick” her in such an awful place. Tanya carries a lot of guilt for being miles away, but the point is, she has no brother.

  She frowns. “My brother...”

  “Yeah, he was going to come over and help Cam move the concrete table to the other side of the backyard, remember?”

  “I see.” She’s puzzled, I can tell, but not quick enough to make the connection that something might be wrong. Not yet. She needs more.

  I widen my eyes, flit them in the direction of the man with the gun. “Do you?”

  “No, Jade. I don’t.”

  I shake my head, a quick and subtle back-and-forth, were it not for the man watching from five feet away.

  Don’t say it. For the love of God, keep your big mouth closed.

  But Tanya Lloyd, neighborhood busybody and unsuspecting philanthropist, says the quiet part out loud: “Hon, what is going on? Because I know you know I don’t have a brother. Is everything okay?”

  J A D E

  5:39 p.m.

  I stare at Tanya, and I don’t know how to stop this train. My little blunder with her fictional brother just now could have gotten her killed. It could still, if she doesn’t let it go.

  I think about what I will do if the man comes after Tanya, how I can protect any of us with Baxter hanging from my hip. I feel the body-warmed metal of the screwdriver against the skin of my arm, painfully conscious that I’ve now got three people to worry about, three innocent bystanders to protect instead of just my two children. I need to come up with a way to reframe this battle and move it to a safer place—somewhere without the risk of collateral damage.

  “Sorry, Tanya. I must be confused. I’ve just got so much on my mind, I guess I forgot.”

  Tanya doesn’t seem the least bit offended. “No worries, sugar—for a minute there I was worried you were dipping into the afternoon sherry. Speaking of, did you hear? Suzanne Foster down the block just checked herself into rehab. Though I suppose nobody who’s ever been to one of her book clubs would be the least bit surprised. That woman’s liver must be big as Brazil.”

  Baxter wriggles to be let down, and I slide him down my leg. We didn’t exactly have time to go over the rules here, but I’m guessing the man aiming a gun at my temple wants us to stay in his sights. As soon as his feet hit the floor, Baxter takes off toward the back of the house, to the TV room and the chest full of toys. I watch him go, bracing for some kind of payback. At least he’s out of shooting range.

  “Did something break?”

  I follow Tanya’s gaze to the floor behind me, where shards of glass sparkle like fallen snow on the hardwood.

  “Oh, that,” I say, letting my gaze drift over the man. He’s pressed to the wall, his back to the living room, but all I see is his gun, mere feet away from my head. It’s like staring down a rabid animal. He lifts a gloved finger up to his lips. Shh.

  I turn back to Tanya. “It was a picture. I accidentally bumped it off the wall.”

  “Oh, well, better clean it up quick, then. If your kids are anything like mine, they don’t know where their shoes are half the time. If one of them runs through that mess, you’ll be digging glass out of their feet till Christmas.”

  My lungs swell with breath, and the words come out before I can stop them. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  Light. Casual. An Oscar-worthy performance, and it’s the polite thing to do, though I don’t have time to think through a game plan, and I definitely don’t want to consider the consequences. In my periphery, the man moves closer, the muzzle almost to the edge of the wall. The gesture is a warning, a promise of coming punishment.

  Tanya shakes her head. “Thanks, but I can’t stay. I just ran over to—”

  “Are you sure?” I flash her my most gracious smile, and then I do it. I step forward, shifting my body to the other side of the wall, putti
ng me officially out of shooting range. “I’ve got a bottle of that Sancerre you like so much in the fridge.”

  Last time she was here, she drank almost the whole thing by herself.

  Her gaze wanders in the direction of the front door, where she has a view of her house across the street. “I’d love to, hon, but another time, okay? When I left there were seven kids jacked up on Sour Patch and Coca-Cola, and I gotta go wrangle those rascals off my chandeliers before they burn the place to the ground.”

  Don’t leave. Take us with you. The words scream through my head, and then I think of my Beatrix, curled up somewhere in this house, and my skin goes slippery with fear. I can’t leave, not without both my kids.

  But Baxter can. He can leave. If I can somehow get Tanya to take Baxter with her, to take him by the hand and lead him to safety across the street, he’ll have told her about the masked man who tied his mother to a chair before they step through her front door. I’m surprised he hasn’t already.

  Probably because he was too focused on getting his hands on his big sister’s karaoke machine—in this house, it’s the root of the most vicious of sibling battles. Beatrix doesn’t allow her brother to touch so much as a dial, and now Bax is going to town with the disco lights. If that doesn’t smoke Beatrix out of her hole, nothing will.

  Tanya is still talking. “...over the weekend sometime and we’ll do a walk-through of my house. I have a couple of rooms that could use some rearranging. I can get my cousin to come over and take some pictures. He’s not a professional photographer, but he’s pretty decent.”

  Shit. She’s wrapping up. Adrenaline zings through my veins, and I blurt the first thing I can think of.

  “Oh my God,” I gasp, and it sounds real—those old acting skills again, and this time they’re more convincing.

  Her eyebrows shoot to the ceiling. “Oh my God, what?”

  “I just realized I forgot to take Beatrix to her dentist’s appointment, and now we’re about to be late.”