by Cai Emmons
“Are you an attorney?” I asked suddenly.
He nodded hesitantly.
“Where do you work?”
He paused for a moment, considering the wisdom of answering. “Ostrow, Reichert and Burton.”
I nodded. `ORB,’ we called them at work. “I’ve seen you then.” I did not mention that his firm was the opposing representation on my 10-B Haines Realty case.
“Oh?” He was pouring the wine now. He handed me a glassful.
“I work for Bartlett, Boggins, Pipkin, and Spitzer.”
He squinted at me. “For?”
“Bartlett, Boggins, Pipkin and Spitzer.”
“I mean which attorney do you work for?”
“I am an attorney.”
“I see.” He sipped his wine. I didn’t have to be Einstein to see that he neither recognized nor believed me, but my own memory of him was becoming more and more distinct. I could picture him sitting at the end of our conference table, digging into the cherry molding with his pencil. The action had annoyed me then—I suppose he was not relenting on some point; I don’t recall exactly—and when I saw him pick up those popcorn kernels, I had no doubt this was the same man.
“An attorney,” he repeated and the sneer returned to his face. I felt I was at work, in a meeting at the conference table with fifteen men who made me half invisible and half a laughing stock, who would never make me partner, and who habitually saved their best jokes until after I left the room.
I was drinking the wine without meaning to. I knew it was whittling away the legal acumen I needed, but at the moment it was the only way I had to calm myself. It drove me crazy that we were there chatting like perfectly normal logical people. Or rather I was treating him like a logical person, though he was hardly returning the favor.
“Okay,” I said, “do you have the deed?”
“The deed. The lady wants the deed.”
“If you can show me a deed, I’ll leave.” I knew I had him then. What was he going to do, draw up a deed right then and there?
He got up and left the room. I heard him climbing the stairs. What if he did something to the twins? I started after him. Then I heard his footsteps tramping into Martin’s study, followed by the metallic shiver of a file cabinet drawer lurching open. Was he honestly looking for his supposed deed in Martin’s file cabinet?
I returned to the living room. Next door I could see the silhouetted bodies of our elderly neighbors, the Maxwells, moving around their living room. When they turned out their lights I felt unbearably alone. A sudden impulse carried me outside, across the lawn, and onto the Maxwells’ porch. Their outdoor light went off just as I arrived at the front door. I knocked anyway. I could hear muffled voices, but it was at least a full minute before the door opened.
Mr. Maxwell peered through a crack, then he recognized me and opened the door wide. He wore a red plaid bathrobe and his expression was puzzled. We don’t see much of the Maxwells, so he was understandably surprised. Mrs. Maxwell was saying something inaudible in the background. He glanced at her.
“It’s the lady from next door.” Then he turned back to me. “Yes, dear, how can I help?” His voice was tired and reedy.
“Well, it’s a little hard to explain—” He looked so stooped and sallow I began to question the point of my solicitation.
“Yes?”
Knowing I had to say something, I tried to order the events. “When I came home today there was someone in my house.”
“Oh dear. Shall we call the police? What did he take? You aren’t hurt are you?”
“Oh no, it’s not—” I paused. How could I say it? “He’s not exactly a criminal. I mean he might be, but he’s very well-dressed and polite and all. And he’s an attorney—”
I lost my train of thought. Vern was alone in our house, alone with the girls. How irresponsible of me to leave.
“I’m sorry, I have to get back. I’m so sorry.”
Mr. Maxwell frowned. “Have you called the police?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to?”
“Well—” I thought of Vern looking for his deed. What if he had one? Not that I thought he did but . . . I sighed. “It’s so complicated. I’m really so sorry to have bothered you.”
I turned and hurried down the steps, pausing for a reassuring wave when I got to the pavement. Then I dashed home.
Vern stood in the living room near the window that looks out to the Maxwells. He eyed me as I tried to recover my breath. From the superior little smile he wore I realized he’d probably been watching me over there and perhaps knew what had transpired. As for his deed, I didn’t see it, but before he sat back down on the couch he reached into his pocket and withdrew a sheet of folded parchment paper which he handed to me. It was indeed a deed, bearing the address of the premises and his name, Vernon Leroy Hallohan. It bore a date from two years earlier.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him leaning back on the couch, sipping his wine and watching me gloatingly. After that, my mind wouldn’t settle properly. It was not possible that we both owned these premises. Had Martin sold the house without my knowing?
Vern radiated a terrible, forceful calm. I saw he was not an imposter. His ownership was palpable. Certainty leached from me; everything I had known for sure only hours before, now crumbled around me.
I did not rip up his deed; I handed it back to him. I went upstairs and bundled the twins into quilts. They moaned a little and stared at me. How solemn their pursed matching mouths looked! How large their eyes! It was almost as if they did not trust me to do things correctly. I put on a warm coat and, purse in hand and one twin under each arm, I went outside without bothering to look for Vern again.
The other houses on the block were dark and the streetlight outside our house must have had a short circuit because it was flickering off and on like a lighthouse beacon. I went to the car which was parked on the street in front of the house. As soon as I got there, I remembered in a panic that my keys were missing, but now when I checked my purse they were there in the usual place. I wanted to cry out from relief and confusion. Had he put them back there? Had I simply overlooked them?
With some difficulty, I lowered the back seats so the girls could lie flat. Then I got into the driver’s seat, but I didn’t start the ignition, I just sat there, trembling, thinking about Martin and wondering if he was still alive. What I felt was not fear—I had already passed through that—but an overpowering sense of dislocation.
Every once in a while I looked back at the twins. Once, I caught Beatrice’s eyes, round and reflective and breakable as Christmas tree ornaments, and I thought: These precious girls are all I have left. I brought Beatrice into the front seat with me, thinking if I left her awake by herself in the back she would die from loneliness.
After a while, I saw the light in the living room go off. I put Beatrice in the back again, started the car, and drove a little way down the street until the house was barely visible. Lying across the two front seats, coccyx against the gearshift, back bridging the chasm between the bucket seats, I tried to sleep. The light from the streetlights would not stay still, but moved in lurid waves that penetrated my lids. I suppose I must have dozed a little because I recall a nightmarish dream.
I was in the house talking to Vern Hallohan and suddenly various men from my firm started appearing. They sauntered into the room with drinks and seated themselves, ignoring me. After a while, I began to realize they could not even see me. Vern began laughing. He seized one of the pillows from the couch and rubbed it across his face, removing a layer of dark makeup. Underneath the makeup, the man was Martin.
I awoke with a start, filled with a thought I’d never had before. Did Martin want, deep down, to leave me? In the dark I fumbled for my cell phone, which I knew was in my purse. Sometimes it is a reassuring device, but that night it wasn’t. I felt sure it would connec
t me to bad news. It was late, I knew, but with Martin that wouldn’t matter. Then, just as I was about to call, I thought of the way I might sound, my voice thin, squeaky perhaps, the voice of a woman without command, incapable of conducting her business alone. I couldn’t help thinking of a thing that had happened the morning he left. It was a small thing but nonetheless notable. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking his coffee, and I was feeding the girls their cereal. I alternate spoonfuls—one to Gina, one to Beatrice, one to Gina, one to Beatrice, and so on. In between my spoonfuls they try to feed themselves with their hands, and their faces, admittedly, become quite comically messy. Usually Martin doesn’t notice. But that morning something caused him to glance over at us. His face was hard with disdain. Martin is a kind, mild man; he never looks disdainful. “Can’t you clean them up a bit?” he said. His voice sounded momentarily irate, savage even, but then he smiled and turned back to his coffee as if he was only making a joke. For an instant I could not move, but right away, of course, I came back to life. He is an accountant and very precise, and I am also very precise, but less so than Martin. Remembering this moment again in the car, I found it almost a relief to discover my cell phone battery was dead. Later, I dozed briefly again, but my arm fell asleep and the numbness awakened me. I sat up to readjust my position. My gaze was drawn to the house. I felt as if the girls and I were all part of a satellite drifting in a lazy orbit around that place. I didn’t want to look, I didn’t mean to look, but there I was, looking. Even from this distance I could tell the whole house was ablaze with light and I remembered how he’d said he was having people over. I glanced at my watch. Two-thirty, Tuesday morning. I considered going to investigate, but to what end? To gaze at a house I could no longer call my own?
I rolled down the window and heard music playing. It thrummed with an insistent bass line. I did not go to sleep after that. I sat up with my head bent over the steering wheel, waiting for the girls to stir. They awakened with the sun, wet and hungry and agitated by the strange surroundings. I’d left the house so hastily that I had no food or diapers, so I had to distract them by singing crazily. Exhaustion snaked behind my eyes. Around seven-thirty people began emerging from their houses to go to work and I knew I had to move.
The girls had made me giddy and I wasn’t sure I should be driving, but of course in moments like that you pull yourself together. As I started the car, I avoided looking down the street toward the house, but I caught a brief glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror—limp sweaty hair, eyes made grotesque from hours of foreboding—and I panicked. There was no place to look.
I drove to the babysitter’s at fifteen miles per hour, keeping my eyes on the rectangle of pavement immediately in front of my bumper. The girls were crying in high-pitched yelps that told me how disconcerted they were.
I stood on the babysitter’s porch gripping the twins, leaning desperately on the buzzer and trying to suppress the thought that perhaps she no longer lived here and someone else, a complete stranger, would answer the door. I smelled urine, I wasn’t sure whose.
“Heavens!” she said when she opened the door. “What happened?” She took the twins and looked for the diaper bag, but saw that I didn’t have it.
“I have to run,” I said. “I’ll explain everything later.”
I went out to the car and drove a few blocks to a commercial district where I parked in the back of a dry cleaner’s and sat for a long time. The door to the dry cleaning establishment was wide open, and I heard the giant machines slapping the clothes around. The fumes permeated the car even though the windows were closed. Finally, I convinced myself to get out. I walked gingerly into the cleaner’s. A man with a thick Indian accent stood behind the desk. He regarded me warily and hesitated when I asked to use the phone. “Please,” I begged. “Something bad—” I flung an arm out toward the street, a gesture he couldn’t possibly have interpreted in any meaningful way, but he pointed toward his landline, no doubt pitying me, and allowed me to come behind the desk and watched me as I called my office and told them I was ill and would not be in that day.
Then I returned to our neighborhood to examine the situation in the light of day. I drove by the house, amazed to see it still standing. I rounded the block twice, three times, before I finally stopped. Perhaps I should have enlisted someone’s help before going inside, but I knew from the way I looked that my credibility would be in question. Instead I took the tire iron from the trunk, just in case.
Of course I was as careful as could be. I didn’t go inside until I had verified from the outside that the place appeared empty. My key worked as usual and I stood breathlessly in the foyer, waiting for the house to speak. The grandfather clock ticked out its usual metronomic beat. Everything looked so neat. I began in the living room. The coffee table was clean and unblemished. I lifted the couch cushions to search for popcorn kernels, but found none. The kitchen was also spotless. No wine glasses in the drainer or the dishwasher and, when I checked the cupboard, I found all twelve of them settled complacently in their usual corner.
Then upstairs. I can picture how strange I must have looked mounting the stairs with a tire iron held high in striking position. The suit was gone from the chair in the bedroom. The bed was made. There was nothing amiss in the bathroom or in the girls’ room. The blanket Vern Hallohan had folded was lying in the drawer where he’d put it. Of course I opened every closet, looked under every bed, even peered behind the extra blankets in the linen closet. I made sure each door and window was locked. Then I took a shower, put on some clean clothes, and called a locksmith.
While I waited for the locksmith I went to find the deed, our deed. I wasn’t sure where Martin kept it, but his file cabinet seemed a likely possibility. Under H I found a folder for “HOUSE.” I rifled through it. Sure enough, there was the deed. It had both of our names on it and the date—September 27, 2014—the day we’d bought the house. I knew it!
I had Mr. Vern Hallohan now. If he came back for a visit tonight, he would be locked out and I would be armed with my tire iron and my deed. His deed would count for nothing then.
I did not leave the house all day. The babysitter obliged me by bringing the girls home, realizing from my appearance that morning that something dreadful was at stake.
Vern Hallohan did not appear that evening, that night, or the next morning. By the third day I felt ready to risk a return to work. When I arrived at my desk I sat for some time, staring at the neat undisturbed piles I’d left, the stiletto points of the pencils my secretary, Janet, had sharpened just so. I noticed a gray slug-shaped stain on my blotter and I scraped at it with my fingernail. I like a pristine blotter and the stain irritated me, but I needed to forget about it and catch up with my work. I pulled the paper pile toward me and began reading. The case at the top of the pile was a stock fraud case, not an uncommon case for our firm to handle. But this case I did not recall at all. In two days I had forgotten every detail of this dossier of briefs and documents. Usually my memory is irreproachable—sometimes I think my entire intelligence has to do with the precision of my memory—but that day, when I tried to remember the particulars of this case I could not. I labored for the better part of an hour with a series of self quizzes. How long have you had this case? What is the trial date? Who were you working with? Who is the opposing representation? I could not answer any of these questions from memory. What are the names of your children? I asked myself. What is your husband’s name? The answers to these last questions were still, thank god, accessible.
I knew, in order to calm myself, I had to turn my attention to a case with which I was conversant. I looked for the Haines Realty case. That case I had worked on obsessively for close to two months. I’d taken all the depositions, done most of the research and discovery. I knew it better than anyone at the firm, even better than Payne Whipple, the partner in charge. But the Haines dossier was not in my pile. I checked my file cabinet. It was not there. I checked
every shelf and drawer in the office. It was not to be found.
With great reluctance I summoned Janet. She is a stocky, efficient woman with a no-nonsense manner and intelligent eyes that notice details. At times I have thought she would make a better attorney than I. She is deferential to me in all observable ways, but she understands my position at the office and sometimes regards me with such unabashed pity that I am loathe to ask her help too frequently.
I spoke to her in a low voice. “Janet, I’ve misplaced the dossier on the Haines Realty case.”
“He didn’t leave you a note? Mr. Whipple took it when you were away. He said there was deadline pressure.”
“He said that?”
She nodded. She waited for my next request without affect.
“There wasn’t,” I said. “There was no deadline pressure. There are still two full months before the trial.”
She shrugged. “Talk to Mr. Whipple.”
She looked at me strangely and I realized I was leaning forward, ducking my head, speaking almost conspiratorially. I jerked back up.
“Of course,” I said.
I dismissed her and put on my suit jacket. I fluffed the shoulder pads and dusted a few flakes of dandruff off the lapels. Was this how they fired you, taking your cases one by one until your desk was empty? I stood with my palms on my desk, as if I planned to spring to action. But I didn’t. I weighed the benefits of speaking to Payne, versus those of letting the case go without comment. If I hadn’t sensed Janet at her desk outside my office taking measure of my courage, I wouldn’t have gone. Head high, arms in a military swing, I strode past her. On the maroon plush carpet my shoes were soundless. By the time I turned the corner onto Payne’s corridor, my arms hung like noodles and there was nothing vaguely military about me.
Payne was at his desk, pencil flying. I stayed outside but extended my head into the office margin. After a moment he looked up.
“Yes?” he said, almost as if I were a complete stranger.