She rang Sydney on her cell phone. She got Mike.
‘She’s in the bathroom, puking,’ Mike said. ‘Morning sickness.’
‘It’s evening, Mike.’
‘Go figure,’ he replied.
She closed her eyes. The voice on the end of the phone, with its deadpan humour and grouchy humanity reassured her.
‘How you settling in?’
‘Early days,’ she said. ‘When I am settled, I want you guys to be my first dinner guests.’
‘We’d be delighted,’ Mike said. ‘Though my instinct for diplomacy tells me it might be better not to raise the subject of food with Syd until tomorrow.’
‘Bye, Mike.’
‘Is there a message?’
‘What?’
‘Did you call Syd for a reason, or was it just a girl thing?’
‘No,’ Juliet said, ‘no message.’
She went to bed that night scared. Despite her crash course in radio meteorology, and the grounding exchange with Sydney’s sweet and lovely husband, her fright in the bathroom had left her feeling raw and jumpy and frayed her nerves. She slept eventually but her sleep was shallow and restless. Even so, it wasn’t the shadow flitting through the apartment living room that woke her.
But something did. Her eyes flew open and a sense that something wasn’t right in her new space washed over her. She lay still for a moment. This was not at all the same as the feeling of sinister melancholy she had felt days earlier in the dreary apartment where a mob executioner had ended his life. It was a sense of not being alone and more than that, stronger, of being observed and perhaps even studied.
She sat up. ‘Is there someone there?’ she called out.
Silence.
‘I know someone’s there. Answer me. Don’t approach me. I have a can of mace.’
Silence. But a silence that was charged. It seemed oddly watchful.
Juliet cleared her throat with a cough. The cough sounded very loud to her. ‘If you do not show yourself, I will call nine one one.’
Nothing. Just more of that silence that felt somehow like scrutiny. An image impinged on her mind. It was of the old man, August, silent and staring at nothing, standing just beyond the doorway of her bedroom, in her hallway, where she could neither see him nor hear his shallow breathing. His bloodshot eyes were wide and spittle glistened in the darkness on his white beard where he had drooled with secret excitement.
Juliet shuddered, even as she knew she was being ridiculous. Her apartment had a secure lock on a substantial door and her landlord’s grandfather was a harmless old man who would be fast asleep in his bed by now. So why was the sense of menace she felt so tangible?
She did not think the feeling she was experiencing had been prompted by a dream. For when she sat up with a start in bed, beyond its foot she saw a faint light glowing dimly under her bedroom door from the hallway. Her gaze focused on the light. When she could ignore its anomalous presence no longer, she stole across the floor and opened the door and walked into the hallway.
Her front door must be ajar. She was sure of it. Where else could that subtle spread of light leaking into her home have come from? She went to close it, past the opening to her living room, where at the edge of her vision a dark figure stood still in the gloom as though poised and waiting, and when she turned to look fully at it, ominously returned her gaze.
Juliet was frozen with fear, unable to blink, much less to breathe or move a limb. Sheer effort of determined will forced her to raise her arm from her side and switch on a light. Brightness erupted overhead, filling the room, blinding her momentarily with light, so that now she did blink, involuntarily, and when her eyes adjusted, there was no one there.
She turned her head towards the front door. It was firmly closed. She approached and pushed it and found that it was indeed locked and secure. Just a shadow, she thought, the figure in the room behind her. Just a shadow cast by the bridge outside. It was first-night paranoia. That was all. A moment of small-hours spookiness provoked by the earlier incident with the bathroom mirror.
Jesus, Juliet, get it together. You’re a doctor not some neurotic bundle of nerves.
But she couldn’t stop the overwhelming feeling that someone was out there, loitering, lurking. She was sure of it. Someone with malevolent intent and a cunning gift for concealment was toying sadistically with her. Her intuition told her that this was more than first-night jitters.
Her heart leapt into her throat when she heard something outside in the hallway. Her body tensed, ready to flee, then relaxed as she realised that it was the elevator doors, opening or closing.
She put her eye to the peephole. At first there was nothing. Then she saw the reassuringly solid form of Max, walking by with bags of groceries, the mundane aftermath of a late-night shopping trip. She felt relieved that his apartment was on the same floor as hers. He was a man of simple and straightforward routine. He began to whistle. He whistled softly because it was late, she supposed. She recognised the tune. It was a song made famous all over the world by Frank Sinatra: ‘Strangers in the Night’.
The sound faded as Max approached his own door and behind hers, Juliet indulged a secret smile.
She had exaggerated his mystery deliberately over the restaurant dinner shared with Sydney and Mike. She had made him more enigmatic than he was just to entertain them. What he actually was, was one of those what-you-see-is-what-you-get types. She felt qualified to judge. Her husband, with his interior life and his writer’s ego, had been exactly the opposite.
Juliet breathed a sigh of relief and rested her head against the wood of the door, reaching up to the light switch to return her apartment to darkness. Her fingers hesitated. Her hand fell. She walked back towards her bed, determined to sleep and feeling more secure. Yet despite that determination she left the light burning through the remainder of the night.
Nine
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Juliet opened her refrigerator door, her stomach rumbling with hunger, to find only a four pack of beer, perfectly chilled but hardly appropriate for breakfast and not exactly nourishing either. Her kitchen cupboards contained only a solitary can of baked beans. She opened it and spooned them down cold. She thought of Max the previous evening, groceries held in his sturdy grip, sober and sensible on her landing through the spyhole of her door. She imagined that his breakfast would be somewhat more organised and satisfying.
She was still thinking of Max on the subway ride to the hospital. His presence outside her apartment really had been a comfort in the night, the difference between being able to get to sleep and fleeing the darkness that her freaked-out state had allowed to assume disproportionately sinister dimensions.
Her intuition told her that he was a decent man. The rent he had set was a more than fair consolation for the upheaval caused by ongoing work to the fabric of the building. He had helped her move her stuff in without hesitation. It was reassuring that her landlord was a man on whom she could rely.
Trust, fidelity, betrayal: these were even more important concepts to her now. She had a strong moral instinct which had certainly not been passed down from her parents. And that moral sense was all she had now. Her mom and dad were dead; she had no siblings. She was alone in the world and God knew she had never felt it more intensely than when she saw Jack’s naked back arched over a stranger.
Her parents had believed in the hippie concept of free love. In their rackety way they had practised it. Or her father had; her mother had always seemed to be left holding grimly on to the theory. They had possessed no religious faith and had regarded marriage as a bourgeois conceit. She supposed they had loved one another, probably loved her too in their vague and distracted way, but they had not been very conscientious as parents.
Heart trouble had taken her mother and her father had followed not long after with complications arising from diabetes. They had shared a drug habit they had regarded as recreational, but which Juliet now understood was more likely a chronic addiction. Since hippies did
not really hit the gym, they had done no physical exercise. No doubt her own fastidiousness, like her morals, were in reaction to her parents’ laxity in that department. She ran hard and habitually. She had never so much as puffed on a cigarette. Her only vice was a cold beer or a glass of wine, and she could not remember having been drunk since the night she discovered she had passed her final round of exams at med school.
Had that been the fundamental problem in her relationship with Jack? Did he think she was a killjoy? Jack had been entitled to a little fun in his life, hadn’t he? It had not been Juliet’s job to provide it, but maybe her inhibited way of living had frustrated him.
There certainly hadn’t been any problems in the bedroom. Their lovemaking had been wild, intense, abandoned, right until the last occasion she had ever slept with him.
The thought provoked a small, involuntary sob, which she suppressed quickly, no one cried on the subway. But there was a hollow feeling in her belly as she reminisced about Jack, remembering how they had first come to meet one another, that the cold baked beans of her makeshift breakfast did nothing to diminish.
It had been in the history section of the New York Public Library. She had been researching an essay on virology and epidemiology in relation to the Black Death. She’d had a student caffeine habit back then. So did the guy studying in the carrel next to hers and their breaks always seemed to coincide. Jack later confessed that this was not a coincidence at all. But the confession came six months after they were married, too late to have any real impact on the way events played out.
He was very good-looking with the physique of an athlete but an intellect the average college jock could only dream about. They chatted easily, a novelty for her because Juliet was quite shy with strangers. He told her that he was an aspiring writer, researching a novel he planned to set in the early 1920s. He knew quite a lot about the period because he had majored in modern history, but he did not know enough for the easy voice of authorial authority he was aiming for in his story.
‘You have to write truthfully. It doesn’t need to be the actual truth, but it has to be convincing,’ he explained.
‘I get what you’re saying.’
‘You have to be familiar with the world you’re describing, Juliet. More than familiar, intimate.’
It was the first time he had ever used her name in conversation. It made her feel warm, the sound of it shaped by his mouth and said in his voice.
‘Aren’t you writers supposed to use your imagination, Jack?’
‘I’m not a writer. Not yet.’
‘But you will be. You’re clever and determined.’
‘You channel your imagination. You use it, but in a disciplined way.’
Juliet had nodded, she hoped sagely. She had no appetite at all for reading fiction. All the books she read were factual and most of them were medical text books. This seemed to delight Jack. The contrast between their tastes and their backgrounds, their life experience and their enthusiasms, only seemed to highlight, as they began tentatively to date, the things they were able to share. Together, they were the embodiment of that old cliché about the attraction of opposites.
For a while, after she qualified to practise medicine and he got his first book deal, she was sure that they were soulmates. They had been best friends and passionate lovers; she’d trusted in him completely, confiding in him, sharing what was most secret about herself. He was familiar with her innermost dreams and aspirations and why wouldn’t he be, when most of them involved him.
She could not identify the moment at which she now realised they had begun to grow apart. Juliet could not have named the month, or even the season of subtle estrangement. But with the clarity of hindsight, when she thought without the blur of emotion about it, things had begun to go wrong about a year before the August afternoon when she surprised him in bed with the Tennis Club Blonde.
The TCB was a piece of work; a bored, independently wealthy woman about four years older than Juliet, sexually predatory, something of a joke really because her glamour was of the pantomimic, Baywatch sort. There was nothing subtle about her. She was all kitten heels and platinum locks and leopard-print catsuits.
She was actually a very good tennis player. But that hadn’t really been the point. The point had been that she was an avid reader of fiction and a true fan of Jack’s books. She was clever, despite the vampy wardrobe and the full make-up, and sashayed about the place like a happy object of lust, and she was someone Jack could have a serious conversation with about literature.
They had not been discussing fiction when Juliet caught them. They had not been discussing anything. The only sounds they were capable of voicing just then were of the breathless, grunted sort.
Juliet could not suppress the vision that came to her then, as she swayed along to the movement of the train, of them coupling on her own marital bed like a caricature of lust fulfilled. She could picture her own face, swollen and surprised at the door when they turned together to see her there. She could remember the perfume the TCB had worn, with its lemony top and base-notes of patchouli.
How had Jack hoped to get rid of a smell as potently strong as that? How on earth had he been doing so, and for how long? He must have been secretly laundering the sheets. She hadn’t thought him that cunning or duplicitous. Slyness and premeditated deceit just weren’t Jack at all. But until the moment of her discovery, she had never thought Jack would ever cheat on her.
That revelation, that she hadn’t known her husband at all, shook her to the core, even more than the adultery. Was it ever possible to truly know someone else?
Ten
HER SHIFT, WHEN she got to the hospital, was fairly uneventful, they often were during the day.
The ER was a subtly different place during the day. There were more victims of auto and domestic mishaps and fewer victims of deliberate damage such as shooting or stabbing. Crime was more common at night, when darkness helped conceal and drink helped provoke it.
But throughout the day Juliet could not shake the sensation that she was being watched. The observation was subtle and un-intrusive, but it was definitely taking place, she concluded after a couple of hours of work.
The thought almost made her smile. Last night she’d felt that she was under covert surveillance in her new home and now she was sure she was being spied on at work. It made her think of the old joke, I’m not paranoid, I just know everyone’s out to get me. Was there a condition or syndrome where people felt they were being watched all the time? Had she suddenly fallen victim to it?
She mentioned it to Sydney on her break. ‘Do you ever feel you are being secretly observed?’ she asked.
Sydney blew out a breath. Her cheeks wore crimson patches the size of apples. Work was more of an effort as her stomach expanded.
‘People don’t do much secret observing of women in the late-stage of pregnancy, hon. They tend instead to gawp openly and make inappropriate comments. I’m thinking of charging a dollar every time someone asks can they touch my bump. Why do you ask?’
‘Just a feeling I had last night. And this morning, to tell you the truth.’
Sydney chewed this comment over. She said, ‘You think Jack has maybe hired a private detective?’
Juliet laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
The notion was absurd. But then a couple of months earlier she would have thought the notion of Jack screwing around absurd.
‘Divorce does strange things to people,’ Sydney said. ‘The prospect of losing possessions they have toiled to acquire makes some people very bitter and hostile. That said, I can’t quite see it either. It’s too cloak and dagger. Too melodramatic. It would be like something from a trashy novel.’
‘And Jack doesn’t write those.’
‘No,’ Sydney said. ‘He very definitely doesn’t.’
Sydney had read both of Jack’s books, to Juliet’s knowledge. She had read the second because she had been so impressed by the first. That was two more of Jack’s books
than Juliet had read. But now was not the time to confess the fact to her friend.
’No, I think Holstrom’s probably asked one of the senior house people to keep an eye on me. I mean, it’s normal when you’re on probation, but I proved myself ages ago.’
‘He just cares for you, Juliet. And worries about you. And he doesn’t want you making any mistakes that could cost you your career. You should be flattered that he cares.’
‘Well, it makes me mad, especially as he doesn’t have to worry about me any more. I won’t be crying into some patient’s gaping wound any time soon now I’ve found my apartment. If my cheating ex-husband should turn up, however, he really would have something to worry about.’
Juliet stalked back to work. She needed a run. Nothing else would help her get rid of the churning fury in her stomach. But she would tell Holstrom that she had found a safe and comfortable and permanent place to live. That should at least give her some satisfaction. Finding her apartment had been little more than a very lucky break, but her boss would see it as the solid achievement of someone dogged and well organised.
The question of Jack’s betrayal, the mystery of it, nagged at her all day. At lunchtime she ate a huge bowl of pasta in the hospital cafeteria to fuel her later run. Was it boredom? Was it simply lust? She could not understand it because she could not pinpoint in her mind or heart the moment at which her husband had decided to stop treating her with the respect and devotion a wife deserved. At what point had he decided to renege on his marriage vows? She did not know the answer and the question was like an itch it was beyond her reach to scratch.
She missed him. It was a pitiful admission to make, but there it was. It infuriated her that she could be so competent and cool in her profession, she could make life-or-death decisions as a matter of course, and yet, she missed the man who had humiliated her and broken her heart. And though she’d admit it to no one, not even Sydney, every time her phone rang she wanted it to be him, begging her for forgiveness.
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