The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  Unless, I think, drawing in a deep breath and holding it there, they belong to Imogen? Because Imogen is an angry girl. Imogen knows what murder is; she knows that people die. She’s seen it with her own eyes. But what would she be doing with Otto’s pencils and paper?

  I close the window and turn my back to it. There’s a vintage dollhouse on the opposite wall. It catches my eye. I first found it the same day we arrived, thinking it might have belonged to Imogen when she was a child. It’s a charming green cottage with four rooms, an expansive attic, a slender staircase running up the center of it. The details of it are impeccable. Miniature window boxes and curtains, tiny lamps and chandeliers, bedding, a parlor table, even a green doghouse to match the home, complete with a miniature dog. That first day, I dusted the house out of respect for Alice, laid the family in their beds to sleep until there might be grandchildren to play with it. It wasn’t the type of thing Tate would use.

  I go to it now, certain I’ll find the family fast asleep where I left them. Except that I don’t. Because someone has been up here in the attic, coloring pictures, opening windows, meddling with things. Because things in the dollhouse are not how I put them.

  Inside the dollhouse, I see that the little girl has risen from bed. She no longer lies in the second-floor bedroom’s canopy bed but is on the floor of the room. The father is no longer in his bed either; he’s disappeared. I glance around, finding him nowhere. Only the mother is there, sleeping soundly in the sleigh bed on the first floor.

  At the foot of the bed lies a miniature knife, no bigger than the pad of a thumb.

  There’s a box beside the dollhouse, chock-full of accessories. The lid of it is closed, but the latch is unfastened. I open it up and have a look, searching inside the box for the father, but finding him nowhere. I give up my search.

  I pull the string and the attic goes black.

  As I travel down the steps with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, it dawns on me: the house is quiet. Imogen has turned her offensive music off. When I reach the second-story landing, I see her standing in her doorway, backlit by the bedroom light.

  Her eyes are accusatory. She doesn’t ask, and yet I read it in her expression. She wants to know what I was doing in the attic. “There was a light on,” I explain, waiting a beat before I ask, “Was it you? Were you up there, Imogen?”

  She snorts. “You’re an idiot if you think I’d ever go back up there,” she says.

  I mull that over. She could be lying. Imogen strikes me as a masterful liar.

  She leans against the door frame, crosses her arms.

  “Do you know, Sadie,” she says, looking pleased with herself, and I realize that she’s never called me by name before, “what a person looks like when they die?”

  Suffice to say, I do. I’ve seen plenty of fatalities in my life.

  But the question, on Imogen’s tongue, leaves me at a loss for words.

  Imogen doesn’t want an answer. It’s for shock value; she’s trying to intimidate me. She goes on to describe in disturbing detail the way Alice looked the day she found her, hanging in the attic from a rope. Imogen had been at school that day. She took the ferry home as usual, came into a quiet house to discover what Alice had done.

  “There were claw marks on her neck,” she says, raking her own violet fingernails down her pale neckline. “Her fucking tongue was purple. It got stuck, hanging out of her mouth, clamped between her teeth like this,” she says as she sticks her own tongue out at me and bites down. Hard.

  I’ve seen victims of strangulation before. I know how the capillaries on the face break, how the eyes become bloodshot from the accumulation of blood behind them. As an emergency medicine physician, I’ve been trained to look for this in victims of domestic violence, for signs of strangulation. But I imagine that, for a sixteen-year-old girl, seeing your mother in this state would be traumatizing.

  “She nearly bit the fucking thing off,” Imogen says about Alice’s tongue. She begins to laugh then, this ill-timed, uncontrollable laugh that gets to me. Imogen stands three feet away, devoid of emotion other than this unseemly gleeful display. “Want to see?” she asks, though I don’t know what she means by this.

  “See what?” I ask carefully, and she says, “What she did with her tongue.”

  I don’t want to see. But she shows me anyway, a photograph of her dead mother. It’s there on her cell phone. She forces the phone into my hands. The color drains from my face.

  Before the police arrived that dreadful day, Imogen had the audacity to take a picture on her phone.

  Alice, dressed in a pale pink tunic sweater and leggings, hangs from a noose. Her head is tilted, the rope boring into her neck. Her body is limp, arms at her sides, legs unbending. Storage boxes surround her, ones that were once piled two or three high but now lie on their sides, contents falling out. A lamp is on the ground, colored glass scattered at random. A telescope—once used to stare at the sky out through the attic window, perhaps—is also on its side, everything, presumably, knocked violently over as Alice died. The step stool she used to climb up into the gallows stands four feet away, upright.

  I think of what Alice must have gone through as she climbed the three steps to her death, as she slipped her head into the knot. The ceilings of the attic are not high. Alice would have had to measure the rope in advance, to be certain that when she stepped off the stool, her feet would not touch the ground. She dropped by only a couple of inches at best. The fall was small; her neck wouldn’t have broken from the height, which means that death was painful and slow. The evidence of that is there, in the picture. The broken lamp, the claw marks, the nearly severed tongue.

  “Why’d you take this?” I ask, trying to remain calm. I don’t want to give her what she wants.

  She shrugs her shoulders, asks, with a blatant disregard for her mother’s life, “Why the hell not?”

  I hide my shock as Imogen takes the phone and turns slowly from me. She goes back into her room, leaving me shaken. I pray that Otto, in his own room just next door, has his earbuds in. I pray that he didn’t hear that awful exchange.

  I retreat to the bedroom where I change into my pajamas and stand at the window, waiting for Will to come home. I stare into the home next door. There’s a light on inside, the very same light that goes on at seven and off near midnight each night. No one lives in that home this time of year and I think of it, empty on the inside, for months on end. What’s to keep a person from letting themselves inside?

  When a car pulls into the drive, I can’t help but watch. The inside of the car becomes flooded with light as the door opens. Tate and his friend are buckled in the back seat, Will in the front beside a woman who is most definitely not a toothless hag but rather a shadowy brunette whom I can’t fully see.

  Tate is bubbly, bouncy, when they step inside the house. He runs up the stairs to greet me. He proudly announces, “You came to see me at school today!” as he bursts through the bedroom door in his Star Wars hoodie and a pair of knit pants. These pants, like all the others, are too short for him, exposing ankles. Will and I can’t keep up. There’s a hole in the toe of his sock.

  Will, half a step behind him, turns to me and asks, “You did?”

  But I shake my head at Will. “I didn’t,” I say, not knowing what Tate means by this. My eyes go to Tate’s, and I say, “I was at work today, Tate. I wasn’t at your school.”

  “Yes, you were,” he says, on the verge of getting upset. I play along, only to appease him.

  “Well, what was I doing?” I ask him. “What did I say?”

  “You didn’t say anything,” he says, and I ask, “Don’t you think if I was at your school today, I would have said something to you?”

  Tate explains that I stood on the other side of the playground fence, watching the kids at recess. I asked what I had on, and he tells me my black coat and my black hat, which is e
xactly what I would be wearing. It’s what he’s used to seeing me in, but there’s hardly a woman in town who doesn’t wear a black coat and hat.

  “I think maybe that was someone else’s mommy, Tate,” I say, but he just stares, saying nothing.

  I find the idea of any woman standing on the periphery of the playground watching kids play a bit unnerving. I wonder how secure the school is, especially when the kids are at recess. How many teachers are on recess duty? Is the fence locked, or can anyone open the gate and step right in? The school seems easy enough to contain when the kids are indoors, but outdoors is a different matter.

  Will ruffles his hair, says to him, “I think it’s about time we get that vision of yours checked.”

  I reroute the conversation. “What’s this you’ve got?” I ask. In his hands Tate proudly totes a mini figure he assembled himself at the library event. He shows it to me, before climbing onto the bed to kiss me good-night at Will’s request. Will ushers him to his own bedroom, where he reads Tate a story and tucks him into bed snug as a bug in a rug. On the way back to our bedroom, Will stops by Otto’s and Imogen’s bedrooms to say good-night.

  “You didn’t eat the casserole,” Will says seconds later after he returns to our bedroom. He’s concerned, and I tell him I wasn’t hungry. “You feeling okay?” he asks, running a warm hand the length of my hair, and I shake my head and tell him no. I think what it would feel like to lean into him. To let his strong arms envelop me. To be vulnerable for once, to fall to pieces before him and let him pick them up.

  “How safe is Tate’s elementary school?” I ask instead.

  He assures me it’s safe. “It was probably just some mother dropping off a forgotten lunch,” he says. “It’s not like Tate is the most observant kid, Sadie. I’m the only dad at school pickup, and still, every day he has trouble finding me in the crowd.”

  “You’re sure?” I ask, trying not to let my imagination get the best of me. Besides, there’s something less disconcerting about it because she was a woman. If she had been a man, watching kids play on a playground, I would already be perusing the internet by now, trying to determine how many registered sex offenders live on the island with us.

  He tells me, “I’m sure.”

  I slide the drawings I found in the attic to him. He takes a look at them and believes right away that they’re Otto’s. Unlike me, Will seems sure. “Why not Imogen?” I ask, wishing they could belong to Imogen.

  “Because Otto,” he tells me unquestioningly, “is our artist. Remember Occam’s razor,” he says, reminding me of the belief that states the easiest explanation is most often right.

  “But why?” I ask, meaning why would Otto draw like this.

  At first he denies the gravity of the situation, saying, “It’s a form of self-expression, Sadie. This is natural for a child in pain.”

  But that alone is disconcerting. Because it’s not natural for a child to be in pain.

  “You think he’s being bullied?” I ask, but Will only shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t know. But he’ll call the school in the morning. He’ll find out.

  “We need to talk to Otto about this,” I tell him, but Will says, “Let me do some investigating first. The more we know, the better prepared we’ll be.”

  I say okay. I trust his instinct.

  I tell him, “I think it would be good for Imogen to speak with someone.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks, taken aback, though I’m not sure why. Will isn’t averse to therapy, though she’s his niece by blood, not mine. This is for him to decide. “Like a psychiatrist?” he asks.

  I tell him yes. “She’s getting worse. She must be harboring so much inside of her. Anger. Grief. I think it would be good for her to speak with someone,” I say, telling him about our conversation this evening, though I don’t tell him what I saw on Imogen’s phone. He doesn’t need to know I saw a picture of his dead sister. I say only that Imogen described for me in detail what Alice looked like when she found her.

  “Sounds to me like she’s opening up to you, Sadie,” he says. But I have a hard time believing it. I tell him therapy would be better, with someone trained to deal with suicide survivors. Not me.

  “Will?” I ask, my mind going elsewhere, to a thought I had earlier tonight as I stared out the window toward the home next door.

  “What?” he asks.

  “The vacant house next door. Do you think the police searched it when they were canvassing the neighborhood?”

  The look he gives me is confused. “I don’t know,” he says. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just seems an empty home would be an easy place for a killer to hide.”

  “Sadie,” he says in a way that’s both patronizing and reassuring at the same time. “I’m sure there isn’t a killer living next door to us.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I ask.

  “We’d know, wouldn’t we? Something would look off. Lights on, windows broken. We’d hear something. But that house hasn’t changed in all the time we’ve been here.”

  I let myself believe him because it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to sleep tonight.

  CAMILLE

  There were nights I went to Will’s condo that I stood alone in the street, watching from outside. But Will and Sadie lived up too high. It was hard to see inside from the street.

  And so one night I helped myself to the fire escape.

  I dressed in all black, scrambled up six flights like a cat burglar in the night.

  On the sixth floor, I sat on the steel platform, just outside his kitchen window. I looked in, but it was dark inside their home, the dead of night, hard to see much of anything. And so I sat awhile, wishing Will would wake up, that he would come to me.

  I lit up a smoke while I waited. I flicked the lighter awhile, watched the flame burst from the end of the wick. I dragged my finger through the flame, wanting it to hurt, but it didn’t hurt. I just wanted to feel something, anything, pain. All I felt was empty inside. I let the flame burn for a while. I let the lighter get all heated up. I pressed it to my palm and held it there before drawing it away, smiling at my handiwork.

  An angry round burn on the palm of my hand smiled back at me.

  I got to my feet. I wiggled my sleeping legs to get the blood back to flowing. Pins and needles stabbed at me.

  The city around me was bedazzling. There were lights everywhere. In the distance, streets buzzed, buildings gleamed.

  I stayed there all night. Will never came for me. Because our life together wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. We had good days, we had bad.

  There were days we were a match made in heaven. There were days we were incompatible, completely out of sync.

  Our time spent together, no matter how good or bad it may have been, came with the realization that he would never know me as he knew Sadie. Because what the other woman gets is another woman’s table scraps, never the full meal.

  Moments with Will were hidden, rushed. I learned to steal my time wisely with Will, to make moments happen. I went to him in his classroom once, let myself inside the room when it was empty, took him by surprise. He was standing at his desk when I came in. I closed and locked the door behind myself, went to him. I hitched my dress up to my waistline, shimmied onto his desk, parted my legs. Let him see for himself that I had nothing on underneath.

  Will stared down there a moment too long, eyes wide, mouth agape.

  You can’t be serious, Will said. You want to do this here? he asked.

  Of course I do, I told him.

  Right here? he asked again, bearing down on the desk to be sure it could hold the both of us.

  Is that a problem, Professor? I asked, spreading my legs wider.

  There was a twinkle to his eye. He grinned like the Cheshire cat.

  No, he said to me. It’s not a problem.

 
I bounded from the desktop when we were through, let the dress fall back down my thighs, said my goodbyes. I tried not to think about where he would go from there. It’s not easy being the other woman. The only thing there is for us is disdain, never sympathy. No one feels sorry for us. Instead they judge. We’re written off as selfish, scheming, shrewd, when all we’re guilty of is falling in love. People forget we’re human, that we have feelings, too.

  Sometimes when Will pressed his lips to mine, it was magnetic and electric, a current that charged through both of us. His kiss was often impassioned, fiery, but sometimes not. Sometimes it was cold and I would think that was it, the end of our affair. I was wrong. Because that’s the way it is with relationships sometimes. They ebb and they flow.

  One day I found myself speaking to a shrink about it. I was sitting on a swivel chair. The room I was in was tall with floor-to-ceiling windows. Heavy gray drapes bordered the windows, stretched from ceiling to floor. There was a vase of flowers on a coffee table between us, oversized like everything else in the room. Next to the vase were two glasses of water, one for her and one for me.

  My eyes circled the room, went searching for a clock. Instead they found shelves of books on mental illness, emotional intelligence, mind games; graduate school diplomas.

  Tell me, the shrink said, what’s been happening.

  That was where the conversation began.

  I shifted in the chair, adjusted my shirt.

  I cleared my throat, fought for my voice.

  Everything all right? the shrink asked, watching as I shifted in the chair, as if getting comfortable in my own skin.

  I told her everything was all right. I wasn’t shy. I never am. I kicked my feet up on an ottoman, told the woman before me, I’ve been sleeping with a married man.

  She was heavier set, one of those women who carry the weight in their face.

  There was no change in expression other than a slight lift to the left eyebrow. Her brows were thick, heavy.

  Her lips parted. Oh? she asked, showing no emotion at what I’d said. Tell me about him. How did you meet?