by Mary Kubica
But then it’s the movement I see. Her hands rise up sharply as she shoves him.
They’re tucked in the far corner of the room. Courtney has Jeffrey backed against a wall. He reaches out to stroke her hair, but she pushes him away again, hard enough that this time, he cradles his hand against himself as if injured.
The ex-wife slaps Jeffrey across the face just then. I flinch, drawing back from the doorway like I’m the one who’s been hit. His head turns sharply to the right, then comes back to center. I hold my breath and it’s only because she raises her voice then that I hear her, these words louder than all the rest. “I’m not sorry for what I did,” she confesses. “She took everything from me, Jeff. Every damn thing, and she left me with nothing. You can’t blame me for trying to take back what’s mine.”
She waits a beat before she adds on, “I’m not sorry she’s dead.”
Jeffrey grabs ahold of her wrist. Their eyes bore into each other. Their mouths move, but they’re quiet now, voices muted. I can’t hear what they say. But I can imagine, and what I imagine is hateful and barbed.
I take a careful step into the room. I hold my breath, sharpen my focus, try desperately to home in on what they say. At first, I just barely make out phrases like won’t tell and never know. A fan has kicked on in the room. Their voices are muted by the sound of blowing air. It doesn’t go on long, thirty seconds maybe. Thirty seconds of the conversation I miss. But then the fan quiets down, and their voices rise. Their words come back to me.
“What you did,” he breathes out, shaking his head.
“I wasn’t thinking,” she admits. “My temper got the best of me, Jeff. I was angry,” she says. “You can’t blame me for being angry.”
She’s crying now, but it’s more whimpering than anything, a soft cry that produces no tears. It’s manipulative. She’s trying to elicit sympathy.
I can’t tear my eyes away.
He’s quiet for a minute. They’re both quiet.
He says to her, voice light as a feather, “I’ve always hated to see you cry.”
He softens. They both do.
He strokes her hair for a second time. This time, she leans into his touch. She doesn’t push him away. She steps closer to him. His arms encircle the small of her back. He draws her in to him. She wraps her arms around his neck, her head falling to his shoulder. For an instant, she’s demure. They stand at nearly the same height. I can’t help but watch as they embrace. Because what was savage and cutthroat only seconds ago is now somehow strangely sweet.
The ping of my phone startles me. I pull sharply back, dropping the door. It clicks loudly shut, and for a split second, my knees lock. A deer in headlights.
I hear movement on the other side of the sanctuary door.
They’re coming.
I get ahold of myself.
I walk quickly through the double church doors and outside into the bitter December day. When my feet reach the church steps, I begin to run.
I can’t let Jeffrey or his ex-wife know it was me.
I dash for my car parked on the street. I open the door and quickly get in, eyes locked on the church doors to see if anyone has followed me out. I lock the car doors, grateful for the mechanical click that says I’m tucked safely inside.
Only then do I peer down at my phone screen.
It’s a text message from Joyce. I check the time on my phone. It’s been over an hour since I left. Sixty-four minutes, to be precise. Joyce is counting them all.
You’re late, she says. Your patients are waiting for you.
My eyes rise back up to the church doors to see Jeffrey Baines’s ex-wife, not twenty seconds later, step circumspectly outside. She looks left and then right before jogging down the church steps, pressing the plackets of a black-and-white houndstooth coat together to stave off the cold.
My eyes follow her to her car, a red Jeep parked just down the street. She tugs open the door and slides inside, slamming the door shut behind herself.
I glance back at the church to see Jeffrey standing in the open doorway, watching as she leaves.
SADIE
There’s a cargo van in the drive when I get home that night. I pull up beside it, park my car behind Will’s. I read the lettering on the van, relieved Will is having the furnace replaced.
I go to the front door. The house is at first quiet when I step in. The furnace is kept in the dingy basement. The men are down there.
I see only Tate, at the coffee table with his Legos. He waves at me and I step out of my shoes, leaving them by the door. I go to Tate and give him a kiss on the head.
“How was your—” I begin, but before I get the rest of the words out, the sound of angry voices rises through the floorboards to us, though I can’t make out what they say.
Tate and I exchange a look, and I tell him, “I’ll be right back.” When he makes an effort to follow, I say firmly, “Stay here,” not knowing what I’ll find in the basement when I go down.
I step carefully down the roughened wooden steps to see what’s the matter. I’m nervous as I do, thinking only of some strange man in our home. Some strange man who neither Will nor I know.
My next thought is: How do we know that this furnace man is not a murderer? It doesn’t feel far-fetched, considering what’s happened to Morgan.
The basement is sparse. The walls and the floor are concrete. It’s harshly lit, only a series of bare bulbs.
As I approach the bottom step, I’m afraid of what I’ll find. The furnace man hurting Will. My heartbeats pick up speed. I curse myself for not having thought to bring something down to protect myself with. To protect Will. But my purse is still with me, and inside it, my phone. That’s something. I could call for help if need be. I reach inside, take ahold of my phone in my hand.
My feet reach the final step. I cautiously turn. It’s not as I expect.
Will has the furnace man pressed into the basement wall. He stands inches from him in a way that can only be viewed as threatening. Will doesn’t hold him there—it’s not physical, not yet—but from his proximity to the man, it’s apparent he can’t leave. The man, in contrast, stands complaisantly back as Will calls him a parasite, an opportunist. Will is red in the face because of it, the veins of his neck enlarged.
He steps somehow even closer to the man so that the man flinches. Will stabs a finger into his chest. A second later he grabs the man by the shirt collar and chides, “I should call the BBB and report you. Just because you’re the only fucking furnace—”
“Will!” I say sternly then. It’s so unlike Will to be profane. It’s also so unlike Will to be physical. I’ve never seen this side of Will.
“Stop it, Will,” I demand, asking, “What in the world’s gotten into you?”
Will stands down, only because I am here. His eyes drop to the ground. He doesn’t have to tell me what’s happened. I know by context clues. This man is the only furnace man on the island. Because of it, his prices are high. Will doesn’t like that. But that’s no excuse.
As Will takes a step back, the furnace man quickly gathers up his tools and flees.
We don’t speak, we don’t mention it again all night.
* * *
The next morning, I wrap the towel around myself as I step from the shower. Will stands staring at his reflection in the fogged-up mirror above the sink. The silver along the edge of it is tarnished by time. The bathroom, like everything else in the house, is suffocating and small.
I stare at Will staring at his own reflection in the mirror. He catches me. Our eyes meet. “How long do you think you’ll keep ignoring me like this?” he asks, referring to our silence in the aftermath of his blowup with the furnace man. In the end, the man had left without doing a thing and so the house is still uncomfortable. The furnace has begun to rattle, too. Soon it will be dead.
I’ve been waiting for Wil
l to apologize for his behavior or at least acknowledge that it was wrong. I understand why he’d have been upset. What I don’t understand is the overreaction. Will’s response was over the top, completely irrational, and so unlike Will.
But what Will is expecting, I think, is that I’ll just sweep it under the rug and move on.
Instead I say, “I’ve never seen you like that, over a silly little thing like the cost of a furnace.”
Will is visibly hurt by my words. He draws in a breath, says woundedly, “You know how hard I try to take care of this family, Sadie. This family means everything to me. I won’t let anyone take advantage of us like that.”
When he says it like this, I see it differently. And soon I am the one apologizing.
He does so much to care for us. I should only be thankful that Will had done his research, that he wasn’t willing to let the furnace man price-gouge us like that. Will was protecting our finances, our family. That’s money that could otherwise be spent on groceries, on the kids’ college education funds. I’m so grateful he had both the knowledge and the intrepidity to protect it. If it’d been me, I would have unknowingly thrown hundreds of dollars away.
“You’re right,” I tell him. “You’re absolutely right. I’m so sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says, and I can see in his demeanor that he forgives me. “Let’s just forget it happened,” and like that, it’s forgotten.
Will still doesn’t know that I went to the memorial service yesterday. I can’t bring myself to tell him because he thought we shouldn’t go. I don’t want him to be mad that I went.
But I can’t stop thinking about the strange exchange I witnessed in the church sanctuary, between Jeffrey and his ex-wife. I wish I could talk to Will about it, tell him what I saw.
After she left the memorial service, I followed the ex-wife in my car. I did a U-turn in the street, tailing the red Jeep by thirty feet as she drove the three blocks to the ferry. If Courtney knew I was there, following her, there was no reaction. I sat, idling in the street for ten minutes or so. She sat in her car, on the phone the whole while.
When the ferry arrived, she pulled her car onto the ship. Moments later, she disappeared out to sea. She was gone. And yet she stayed with me, in my mind. She’s with me still. I can’t stop thinking about her. About Jeffrey. About their altercation, about their embrace.
I’m also thinking about Imogen. About her silhouette in the corner of my bedroom at night.
Will runs his fingers through his hair, his version of a comb. I hear his voice, talking over the sound of the bathroom fan. He’s telling me that this evening he’s taking Tate to a Legos event at the public library. They’re going with another boy from school, one of Tate’s playdate buddies. Him and his mother. Jessica is her name, one Will casually drops in the middle of the conversation, and it’s the casualness of it, the familiarity of her name, that rubs me the wrong way, makes me forget for just this moment about Jeffrey and his ex, about Imogen.
For years, Will has been the scheduler of playdates for our boys. Before, it never bothered me. If anything, I felt grateful Will picked up the task in my absence. After school, the boys’ classmates and their mothers would come around to the condo when I was at work. What I imagined was the boys disappearing down the hall to play while Will and some woman I didn’t know sat around my kitchen table, hobnobbing about the other mothers at the elementary school.
I never saw these women. I never wondered what they looked like. But everything is different since the affair. Now I find myself overthinking these things.
“Just the four of you?” I ask.
He tells me yes, just the four of them. “But there will be other people there, Sadie,” he says, trying to be reassuring, and yet it comes off as sarcastic. “It’s not like it’s a private event, just for us.”
“Of course,” I say. “What will you be doing there?” I ask, lightening my tone, trying not to sound like a harpy, because I know how much Tate loves Legos.
Will tells me that they’ll be building something from those tiny bricks I find scattered all over the house, erecting rides and machines that move. “Tate can’t wait. And besides,” he says, turning away from the mirror to face me, “it might do Otto, Imogen and you some good, a few hours alone. Bonding time,” he calls it, and I harrumph at that, knowing there will be no bonding between Otto, Imogen and me tonight.
I step past him. I move from the bathroom and into the adjoining bedroom. Will follows along. He sits on the edge of the bed, pulling on a pair of socks as I get dressed.
The days are getting colder. The coldness leaks into the clinic through the door and windows. The walls are porous, the doors to the clinic always opening and closing. Every time a patient walks in or out, the cold air comes with them.
I dig into a heaping pile of laundry, searching for a brown cardigan, one of those versatile things that go with nearly everything. The sweater isn’t mine. It belonged to Alice. It was in the home when we arrived. The sweater is well loved, worn, which is half the reason I like it. It’s slightly misshapen, covered in pills, with a wide, ribbed shawl collar and big apron pockets I can sink my hands into. Four faux shell buttons line the front of it. It’s close-fitting because Alice was smaller than me.
“Have you seen my sweater?” I ask.
“What sweater?” Will asks.
“The brown one,” I say. “The cardigan. The one that was Alice’s.”
Will says he hasn’t seen it. He doesn’t like the sweater. He always thought it was odd that I laid claim to the sweater in the first place. Where’d you get that? he asked the first time I appeared with it on.
The closet. Upstairs, I said. It must have been your sister’s.
Really? he asked. You don’t think that’s kind of—I don’t know—morbid? Wearing a dead person’s clothes?
But before I could respond, Tate was asking what morbid meant and I left the room to avoid that conversation, leaving it to Will to explain.
Now I find another sweater in the laundry to wear, and slip it over the blouse. Will sits, watching until I’m through getting dressed. Then he rises from the bed and comes to me. He wraps his arms around my waist and tells me not to worry about Jessica. He leans in, whispers into my ear, “She doesn’t stand a chance next to you,” making a poor attempt at humor, telling me that Jessica is a hag, that she bathes infrequently, that half of her teeth are missing, that spit comes flying out of her mouth when she talks.
I force a smile. “She sounds lovely,” I say. Though still I wonder why they have to drive together, why they can’t just meet at the library.
Will leans farther into me, breathes into my ear, “Maybe after the Legos event, after the kids are in bed, you and I can have some bonding time, too.” And then he kisses me.
Will and I haven’t been intimate since the affair. Because every time he touches me, all I can think of is her and I bristle as a result, nipping any suggestion of intimacy in the bud. I couldn’t stake my life on it, but I was sure she was a student, some eighteen-or nineteen-year-old girl. She wore lipstick, that I knew. Hot-pink lipstick and underwear that was flimsy and small, leaving it in my bedroom when she left, which meant that she had the audacity to not only sleep with a married man but to parade around sans underwear. Two things I would never do.
I often wondered if she called him Professor, or if to her, he was always Will. Or maybe Professor Foust, but I doubted that somehow. That seemed far too formal for a man you’re sleeping with, even if he is twenty years your senior, a father of two with traces of gray in his hair.
I thought a lot about audacious young women. About what one might look like. Pixie cuts came to mind, as did low-cut blouses, midriff bared; shorts so short the pockets hung out from below. Fishnet stockings, combat boots. Dyed hair.
But maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe she was a self-deprecating young woman, shy,
lacking in self-respect. Maybe the marginal attention of a married man was all she had going for her, or maybe she and Will had a connection that went beyond sex and to a like-minded desire to save the world.
In which case, I think she did call him Professor Foust.
I never asked Will what she looked like. I did, and at the same time didn’t, want to know. In the end, I decided that ignorance is bliss and never asked. He would have just lied anyway and told me there wasn’t another woman. That it was only me.
If it wasn’t for the boys, our marriage may have ended in divorce after the affair. I’d suggested it once, that maybe Will and I would be better off if we got a divorce, that the boys would be better off.
“God, no,” Will told me when I’d suggested it. “No, Sadie, no. You said that would never happen to us. That we’d be together forever, that you would never let me go.”
If I said that, I didn’t remember. Either way, that’s the type of ridiculous nonsense people say when they’re falling in love; it doesn’t pass muster in a marriage.
There’s a small part of me that blamed myself for the affair. That believed I’d been the one to push Will into the arms of another woman, because of who I am. I blamed my career, which requires that I be detached. That detachment, the absence of an emotional involvement, works its way into our marriage at times. Intimacy and vulnerability aren’t my strong suit, nor have they ever been. Will thought he could change me. Turns out he was wrong.
SADIE
When I pull into the clinic parking lot, I’m grateful to find it empty. Joyce and Emma will be here soon, but for now it’s only me. My tires skid on the pavement as I make a sharp left turn into my spot, searching the adjacent street for signs of high beams.
I step from the car and make my way across the parking lot. This early in the day, the world is asphyxiated by fog. The air around me is murky, like soup. I can’t see what’s five feet in front of me. My lungs are heavy, and suddenly I don’t know for certain if I’m alone or if there’s someone out there in the fog, watching me. Standing just beyond those five feet where I can’t see. A chill creeps up my spine and I shiver.