by Mary Kubica
How are my favorite ladies doing? he asked, as he kissed her back. Fake Mom said they were fine. Mouse mumbled something along the same lines, though no one heard because they were too busy kissing.
Mouse told her real mom about Fake Mom. She sat down across from her on the edge of the red rag rug and poured them both cups of pretend tea. There, as they drank their tea and nibbled cookies, she told her how she didn’t like Fake Mom much. How sometimes Fake Mom made Mouse feel like a stranger in her own home. How being in the same room with Fake Mom gave Mouse a tummy ache. Mouse’s real mom told her not to worry. She told her that Mouse was a good girl and that only good things happened to good girls. I’ll never let anything bad happen to you, her real mom said.
Mouse knew how much her father liked Fake Mom. She could see it in the way he looked at her how happy she made him. It made Mouse feel sick to her stomach because Fake Mom brought out a kind of happy that Mouse never could, even though they were happy before Fake Mom came.
If her father liked having Fake Mom around, she might stay forever. Mouse didn’t want that to happen. Because Fake Mom made her uncomfortable sometimes, and other times scared.
Now when Mouse wrote stories in her head, she started making up stories about bad things happening to an imaginary woman named Fake Mom. Sometimes she fell down those squeaky steps and hit her head. Sometimes she got buried in one of the rabbit holes beneath the clumps of fur and hair and couldn’t get out.
And sometimes she was just gone, and Mouse didn’t care how or why.
SADIE
That evening, there’s a bite to the air. The temperatures are plunging quickly. I pull my car from the parking lot and head home, remembering that Will and Tate are off playing with Legos tonight. The idea of it concerns me, of Will not being around to act as a buffer between Imogen and me.
I try not to let it get the best of me as I drive home. I am a big girl; I can take care of this myself. And besides, Will and I are Imogen’s guardians. It’s our legal obligation to take care of her until she turns eighteen. If I want to search through her things, it’s very much in my right to do so. That said, there are questions I have that I’d like answers to. Namely, who is the man in the photograph that had his face scratched off at Imogen’s hand? Is he the same man who wrote the note to Imogen, the one I found in the pocket of her sweatshirt? A Dear John note, I took it to be. His reference to a double life leads me to believe that Imogen was the other woman. That he was married, maybe, and broke her heart. But who is he?
I pull into the drive and put the car in Park. I look around before I step from the safety of the locked car, to be sure that I’m alone. But it’s dark out, nearly black. Can I really be sure?
I move quickly from the car. I scurry into the safety of my home, where I close and lock the door behind myself. I tug on it twice, to be sure it’s closed tight.
I move into the kitchen. A casserole awaits me on the stovetop when I step inside, a piece of foil folded over the top of it to keep it warm. A Post-it note on top. Xo, it reads. Signed, Will.
The dogs are the only ones waiting in the kitchen for me, staring at me with their matching snaggleteeth, begging to be let outside. I open the back door for them. They make a beeline to the corner of the yard to dig.
I climb the creaky steps to find Imogen’s bedroom door closed, the lock on it undoubtedly turned so that I couldn’t get in if I wanted to. Except that when I look, there’s a new lock on the door, a whole system—complete with padlock—that slips over the door handle. The door now locks from the outside in. Imogen must have installed this herself, to keep me out.
Rock bands the likes of Korn and Drowning Pool lash out over the Bluetooth speaker, volume turned all the way up so that there’s no misinterpreting the songs’ lyrics, dead bodies a recurring theme. The profanity is atrocious, hate spewing through the speakers and into our home. But Tate isn’t around to hear it, and so this time, I let it be.
I go to Otto’s door, rap lightly and call out, over the sound of Imogen’s noise, “I’m home.”
He opens the door for me. I look at Otto, seeing the way that he looks more and more like Will each day. Now that he’s older, the angles of his face are sharp. There is no more baby fat to soften the edges. He’s getting taller all the time, finally enjoying that growth spurt that has for so long bypassed him, keeping him small while the other boys in school grew tall. If not now, then soon he’ll rival their height. Otto is handsome like Will. In no time at all, he’ll be making girls swoon. He just doesn’t know it yet.
“How was your day?” I ask him, and he shrugs and says, “Fine. I guess.”
It’s an indecisive reply. I take it as an opportunity. “You guess?” I ask, wanting more: to know how his day really went, if he’s getting along with the other kids at school, if he likes his teachers, if he’s making friends. When he says nothing, I prod. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?” It’s silly, one of those things doctors say when they’re trying to gauge a patient’s pain. Otto shrugs again and tells me his day was a six, which ranks as moderate, decent, an okay day.
“Homework?” I ask.
“Some.”
“Need any help?”
He shakes his head. He can do it himself.
As I make my way to Will’s and my bedroom to change, I catch sight of a light drifting from beneath the doorway that leads to the third-floor attic. The light in the attic is on, which it never is, because it’s where Alice killed herself. I asked the boys never to go up there. I didn’t think it was a place any of us needed to be.
The boys know that Alice gave us the house. They don’t know how she died. They don’t know that one day, Alice slipped a noose around her neck, securing the other end of it to the ceiling’s support beam, stepping from the stool. What I know as a physician is that, after the noose tightened around her neck and she was suspended, supported only by her jaw and her neck, she would have struggled for air against the weight of her own body. It would have taken minutes for her to lose consciousness. It would have been extremely painful. And even when she finally did lose consciousness, her body would have continued to thrash about, taking much longer for her to die, up to twenty minutes, if not more. Not a pleasant way to go.
It’s hard for Will to talk about Alice. This I can understand. After my father passed, it was hard for me to talk about him. My memory isn’t the best. But what sticks with me most is when I was around eleven years old, when my father and I lived just outside of Chicago and he worked for a department store in the city. Dad rode the train downtown every day back then. I was old enough to keep watch over myself by then, a latchkey kid. I went to school and I came home. No one had to tell me to do my homework. I was responsible enough for that. I made and ate my own dinner. I did my dishes. I went to bed at a reasonable time. Most nights, Dad would have a beer or two on the train ride home, stopping at the bar after he’d departed the train, not getting home until after I was asleep. I’d hear him, stumbling around the house, knocking things over, and the next morning there’d be a mess for me to clean.
I put myself through college. I lived alone, in a single dorm followed by a small apartment. I tried living with a roommate once. It didn’t work for me. The roommate I had was careless and irresponsible, among other things. She was also manipulative, a complete kleptomaniac.
She took phone messages for me that I never received. She made a mess of our apartment. She ate my food. She stole money from my wallet, checks from my checkbook. She used my credit card to buy herself things. She denied doing it, of course, but I’d look at my bank statements later and find checks made out to places like hair salons, department stores, cash. When I asked the bank to produce the processed checks for me, I could clearly see that the handwriting on them was not mine.
I could have pressed charges. For whatever reason, I chose not to.
She wore my clothes without asking. Sh
e brought them back wrinkled and dirty, sometimes stained, reeking of cigarette smoke. I’d find them hanging in my closet like that. When I asked her about it, she’d gaze at my filthy clothing and say, You think I actually wore that ugly shirt of yours?
Because on top of everything else, she was mean.
I put a lock on my bedroom door. That didn’t stop her.
Somehow, she still found a way in. I’d come home from a night out to find my door open, my things rifled through.
I didn’t want to live like that.
I offered to move out, to let her keep our place. She was angry to the point of being combative. Something about her scared me. She couldn’t afford the unit all on her own, she told me, seething. She got in my face, told me I was crazy, that I was a psychopath.
I held my ground. I didn’t flinch.
I said calmly, I could say the same about you.
In the end, she was the one to leave. That was best, seeing as I’d recently met Will, and needed a place where we could hang out. Even after, I had my suspicions that she was still letting herself in, going through my things. She’d given me her key back, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t taken it to the hardware store first and made a copy of it to keep. In time I had the locks changed. That, I told myself, would have to stop her. If I thought she was still coming in, it was only my paranoia speaking.
Still, that wasn’t the end of her. Because I saw her some six months ago or so, when I passed her on the street, not far from Will’s and my home. She looked the same to me, strutting her stuff down Harrison, just as arrogant as she’d always been. I ducked away when I saw her, slipped down another street.
It was just after graduation when Will and I met, at the engagement party of a friend. Will and I have different versions of the time we met. What I know is that he came up to me at the party, handsome and gregarious as ever, thrust out a hand and said, Hey there. I think I’ve seen you before.
What I remember is feeling awkward and insecure that night, the awkwardness abating ever so slightly with the cheesy pickup line. He hadn’t, of course, seen me before. It was a come-on, and it worked. We spent the rest of the night intertwined on the dance floor, my insecurities lessening the more I had to drink.
We’d been dating only a couple of months when Will suggested he move into my apartment with me. Why he was single, I didn’t know. Why he chose me over all the other beautiful women in the city of Chicago, I also didn’t know. But for whatever reason, he insisted he couldn’t stand to be away from me. He wanted to be with me all the time. It was a romantic notion—no one had ever made me feel as desired as Will did back then—but it made sense financially, too. I was finishing up my residency and Will his PhD. Only one of us was earning an income, albeit a small one, most of which went to repay med school debt. But still, I didn’t mind covering the rent. I liked having Will with me all the time. I could do that for him.
Not long after, Will and I got married. Shortly after that, Dad died, taken from this world of his own volition. Cirrhosis of the liver.
We had Otto. And then, years later, Tate. And now I find myself living in Maine.
To say I wasn’t completely bowled over when word arrived that Will’s sister had left us a home and child would be a lie. Will always knew about the fibromyalgia, but we learned about the suicide from the executor of the estate. I didn’t think any good could come from our moving to Maine, but Will disagreed.
The months before had been merciless and unsparing. First, Otto’s expulsion, followed immediately by the discovery of Will’s affair. It wasn’t days after that that a patient of mine died on the table. I’d had patients die before, but this one nearly wrecked me. He’d had a pericardiocentesis done, a relatively safe and routine procedure where fluid is aspirated from the sac that surrounds a person’s heart. When I looked back at my medical notes, the procedure was well warranted. The patient was suffering from a condition known as cardiac tamponade, where the accumulation of fluid puts excessive pressure on the heart, stopping it from functioning properly. Cardiac tamponade can be lethal unless some of the fluid is drained. I’d done the procedure before, many times. There’d never been a problem.
But this time, I didn’t do the procedure. Because, according to my colleagues, I walked out of the room just as the patient went into cardiac arrest, forcing a resident to perform the pericardiocentesis without me. The patient on the table was dying, and without the procedure he would have died.
But the procedure was done incorrectly. The needle punctured the patient’s heart so that he died anyhow.
They found me later, upstairs on the hospital’s rooftop, perched on the edge of the fourteen-story building, legs dangling over the edge, where some claimed I was about to jump.
But I wasn’t suicidal. Things were bad, but they weren’t that bad. I blamed Otto’s expulsion and the affair for it, for wreaking havoc on my emotions and mind. A nervous breakdown, claimed the rumors circulating throughout the hospital. The buzz was that I had had a nervous breakdown in the ER, marched myself up to the fourteenth floor, prepared to jump. I’d blacked out is what happened. When all was said and done, I didn’t remember any of it. It’s a period of my life that’s gone. What I remember is examining my patient, and then coming to in a different room—except by then I was the one spread out on a table, hidden beneath a sheet. When I later heard that my patient died at the hands of a less experienced doctor, I cried. I’m not one to cry. But that time, I couldn’t keep it inside.
The triggers of a nervous breakdown were there: a period of stress that hadn’t been dealt with, feeling disoriented, worthless, unable to sleep.
The next day, the head of the department put me on forced medical leave. He subtly suggested a psych eval. I said thanks, but no thanks. Instead, I chose to resign. I couldn’t go back there ever again.
When we arrived in Maine, Will and I found the foursquare farmhouse in quite a state. The step stool was still in the attic along with three feet of rope, snipped at the end while the rest remained bound to some sort of exposed support beam that cut across the ceiling. Anything within reach of Alice’s thrashing body had been knocked over, implying death hadn’t been a breeze.
I make my way to the attic door and pull it open. From up above, a light glows. I climb the steps two at a time as, beneath my feet, they creak. The attic is an unfinished space, complete with wooden beams, a plank cork flooring, wads of fluffy pink insulation scattered here and there like clouds. The light comes from a single exposed bulb on the ceiling, which someone, whoever was here, has forgotten to turn off. A string dangles beneath. A chimney, wrapped in exposed brick, runs through the center of the room, venting outside. There’s a window that faces onto the street. It’s so dark outside tonight, there’s nothing to see.
Sheets of paper catch my eye. They’re on the floor with a pencil, one I recognize right away as one of Otto’s graphite drawing pencils. The ones Will and I got for him, the ones he never lets Tate use. They’re expensive and also Otto’s prized possession, though I haven’t seen him use them in months. Since all that happened in Chicago with him, he hasn’t been drawing.
I’m stricken with two things: disappointment, for one, that Otto would disobey me and come into the attic when I said not to. But also relief that Otto is drawing again, the first step, perhaps, in a return to normalcy.
Maybe Will is right. Maybe if we give it time, we can find happiness here.
I make my way to the sheets of paper. They’re on the floor. The window is open an inch, crisp December air coming in, making the paper move. I bend at the knees to retrieve it, expecting to see the big anime eyes of Asa and Ken staring back at me. The characters from Otto’s graphic novel, his work-in-progress. The barbed lines of hair, the sad, disproportionate eyes.
The pencil, sitting inches from the paper, is cracked in half. The end of it is worn down and blunt, which isn’t like Otto. He’s always
taken such great care of these pencils. I reach for that, too, and stand upright, before looking at the image before me. When I do, I gasp, a hand going involuntarily to my mouth.
It’s not Asa and Ken I see.
Instead angry, incomplete lines that stop and go. Something dismembered on the page, a body, I assume. A round object at the end of the sheet that I take for a head; the long, limb-like shapes for arms and legs. At the top of the drawing are stars, a crescent-shaped moon. Night. There’s another figure on the page, a woman, by the looks of it, from the long scraggly hair, the lines that jut out of her circular head. In her hand, she holds something with a keen edge that drips with something else, blood, I can only assume, though the drawing is in black and white. No telling red. The eyes of this figure are mad, while the decapitated head nearby cries, big shaded blobs of tears that tear a hole in the page.
I suck in my breath and hold it there. A pain settles in my chest. My arms and legs go momentarily numb.
The same image is replicated on all three sheets of paper. There’s nothing different about them, nothing that I can see.
The drawings are Otto’s, I tell myself at first because Otto is the artist in the family. The only one of us who draws.
But this is far too primitive, far too rudimentary to be Otto’s. Otto can draw much better than this.
But Tate is a happy boy. An obedient boy. He wouldn’t have come into the attic if I told him not to. And besides, Tate doesn’t draw such violent, murderous images. He could never visualize such things, much less depict them on paper. Tate doesn’t know what murder is. He doesn’t know that people die.
I go back to Otto.
These drawings belong to Otto.