by Mary Kubica
I told her everything there was to tell about Will. I smiled as I did, reliving each moment, one at a time. The day we met beneath the tracks. His hand on my wrist, saving my life. Coffee in the coffee shop. Us leaned up against a building, Will’s voice in my ear, his hand on my thigh.
But then my mood turned sour. I reached for a tissue, blotted my eyes. I went on, telling her how hard it was being that other woman. How lonely. How I didn’t have the promise of daily contact. No check-in phone calls, no late-night confessions as we drifted to sleep. There was no one to talk to about my feelings. Alone, I tried not to ruminate on it. But there are only so many times you can be called by another woman’s name and not get a complex.
She encouraged me to end the affair.
But he says he loves me, I told her.
A man who is willing to cheat on his wife, she said, will often make promises to you that he can’t keep. When he tells you he loves you, it’s a form of entrapment. Cheating spouses are masters at manipulation, she said. He may tell you things to keep you from ending the affair. He has both a wife and a lover on the side. He has no incentive to change.
It wasn’t her intent, but I found relief in that.
Will had no reason to leave me.
Will would never leave me.
SADIE
I lay there half-asleep, shaken from a dream. In the dream, I was lying in a bed that wasn’t mine, staring up at a ceiling that was also not mine. The ceiling above me was a trey ceiling with a fan that dropped from the center of it. The blades of the fan were shaped like palm leaves. I’d never seen it before. The bed sagged in the middle so that there was a trench my body slipped easily into, making it hard to move. I lay in the strange bed, trapped in the crevasse.
It happened so fast there wasn’t time to wonder where I was, to worry about it, only to realize that I was not in my own bed. I reached a hand across either side of it, feeling for Will. But the bed was empty other than me. My own body was cocooned in a blanket beneath the quilt and I lay there, watching the inert fan above me, illuminated only by a streak of moonlight that came through the window. It was hot in the bed. I wished that the fan would move, that it would send a rush of air to my body to cool me off.
And then suddenly I was no longer in the bed. I was standing beside it, watching myself sleep. The room around me became distorted. The colors began to fade. All at once, everything was monochrome. The walls of the room warped to odd shapes, trapezoids and parallelograms. It was no longer square.
I felt a headache coming on.
In my dream, I forced my eyes closed to stop the room from changing shapes.
When I opened them again, I was in my own bed with an image of Morgan Baines in my mind. I’d been dreaming about her. I can’t remember the details of it, but I know for certain that she was there.
Before he left the bedroom a while ago, Will kissed me. He offered to drive the boys to school so that I could sleep in. You had trouble sleeping last night, he said, and I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. I didn’t have trouble sleeping per se, but my dreams were so vivid I must have tossed and turned in my sleep.
Will kissed me on the head. He wished me a good day and he left.
Downstairs now I hear the rustle of breakfast being served, of backpacks being packed. The front door opens and they’re gone. Only then do I sit upright in bed. As I do, I see my nightgown lying at the end of it, no longer on me.
I rise to my feet, the covers sliding from my body. I discover that I’m naked. The realization of it startles me. My hand goes inadvertently to my chest. I’m not averse to sleeping nude. It was the way Will and I often slept before the boys started toddling into our room when they were young. But it’s not something I’ve often done since. The idea of sleeping naked when there are kids in my home embarrasses me. What if Otto had seen me like this? Or worse yet, Imogen?
The thought of Imogen suddenly gives me pause, because I heard Will and the boys leave. But I never heard Imogen leave.
I tell myself that Will wouldn’t leave before she did. He would have made sure she was gone first, headed to school. Imogen doesn’t always make her comings and goings known, which tells me now that she’s not here, that she slipped out quietly long before Will and the boys did.
There’s dried sweat beneath my arms and between my legs, a result of the inequitable heat in the old home. I remember how hot I was in my dream. I must have whipped off the nightgown unconsciously.
I find clothes in the dresser drawer, running tights and a long-sleeved shirt that I slip on. As I do, another thought comes to me, about Imogen. What if, like me, Will only assumed she’d gone to school, because of her tendency to slip in and out unnoticed?
My fear of Imogen colors my judgment and I find myself wondering: Is she still home? Are Imogen and I the only ones here?
I cautiously leave the bedroom. Imogen’s door is closed, the padlock on the new locking mechanism securely fastened, which tells me she’s not there in her room. Because she couldn’t lock it if she was inside.
The purpose of the lock: to keep me out. It seems like an innocuous enough thing, but at second glance, I wonder if it would as easily lock someone in as lock someone out.
I call out to Imogen as I make my way down the steps, just to be sure. Downstairs, her shoes and her backpack are gone, as is her jacket.
Will has left breakfast for me on the counter and an empty mug for coffee. I fill the coffee mug and take it and my crepes to the table to eat. Only there do I see that Will has left his book behind, the true crime novel. He’s finished it, I assume, and left it for me to read.
I reach for the book and slide it toward myself. But it isn’t the book that I’m thinking about. Not really. It’s the photograph inside, that of his former fiancée. I take the book into my hands, take a deep breath and leaf through the pages, expecting Erin’s photo to fall out.
When it doesn’t, I leaf through again, a second and a third time.
I set the book down. I look up and sigh.
Will has taken the photograph. He’s taken the photograph and left the book for me.
Where has Will put the photograph?
I can’t ask Will. To bring Erin up again would be in poor taste. I can’t possibly nag him over and over again about his dead fiancée. She was long gone before I arrived. But the fact that he hangs on to her photograph after all these years is hard to stomach.
Will grew up on the Atlantic coast, not far from where we now live. He transferred colleges during his sophomore and junior years, leaving the East Coast for a school in Chicago. Between Erin’s death and his stepfather’s, Will told me, he couldn’t stand to stay out east anymore. He had to leave. Shortly after he did, his mother married for the third time (far too soon, in Will’s opinion; she’s the kind of woman who can’t ever be alone) and moved south. His brother joined the Peace Corps and now lives in Cameroon. Then Alice died. Will doesn’t have family on the East Coast anymore.
Erin and Will were high school sweethearts. He never used that term when he told me about her because it was too sentimental, too endearing. But they were. High school sweethearts. Erin was nineteen when she died; he’d just turned twenty. They’d been together since they were fifteen and sixteen. The way Will tells it, Erin, home from college for Christmas break—Will went to community college those first two years—had been missing overnight by the time her body was found. She was supposed to pick him up at six for dinner, but she never showed. By six thirty Will was getting worried. Near seven, he called her parents, her friends in quick succession. No one knew where she was.
Around eight o’clock, Erin’s parents made a call to the police. But Erin had only been gone two hours at that point and the police weren’t quick to issue a search. It was winter. It had snowed and the roads were slick. Accidents were plenty. The police had their work cut out for them that night. In the mean
time, the police suggested Will and her parents keep calling around, checking out any place Erin was liable to be—which was ridiculous since a winter weather warning had been issued, urging drivers to stay off the roads that night.
The route Erin often took to Will’s was hilly and meandering, covered in a thin layer of ice and snow that wrapped around a large pond. It was off the beaten path, a scenic route best avoided when the weather took a turn for the worse as it had that night.
But Erin was always foolhardy, not the type, according to Will, that you could tell what to do.
At just thirty-two degrees, the pond where they later found her hadn’t had a chance to freeze through. It couldn’t bear the weight of the car when Erin hit a patch of ice and went soaring off the road.
That night, Will looked everywhere for Erin. The gym, the library, the studio where she danced. He drove every route he could possibly think of to get from Erin’s house to his. But it was dark out, and the pond was only a black abyss.
It wasn’t until early morning that a jogger spied the car’s fender sticking out of the ice and snow. Erin’s parents were notified first. By the time Will heard the news, more than twelve hours had passed since she hadn’t shown up for their date. Her parents were devastated, as was a little sister, only nine years old when she died. As was Will.
I push the book away from me. I don’t have the stomach to read it because I can’t see the book without thinking of the photo that was once tucked inside.
Where is he keeping Erin’s photograph? I wonder, but at the same time comes another thought: Why do I care?
Will married me. We have children together.
He loves me.
I leave my breakfast dishes where they are. I step from the kitchen, slip into a windproof jacket that hangs from a hallway hook. I need to go for a run, to blow off steam.
I head out onto the street. The skies this morning are gray, the ground moist from an early rainfall that’s drifted somewhere out to sea. I see the rain in the distance. Streaks of it hover beneath the base of the clouds. The world looks hopeless and bleak. By the end of the day, forecasters predict the rain will turn to snow.
I jog down the street. It’s a rare day off work. What I have in mind for it is a jog followed by a quiet morning alone. Otto and Tate have gone to school, Will to work. Will has no doubt caught the ferry by now, getting shuttled to the mainland. There he’ll catch a bus to campus, where he’ll rivet nineteen-year-olds about alternative energy sources and bioremediation for half the day, before gathering Tate from school and coming home.
I jog down the hill. I take the street that follows the perimeter of the island, moving past oceanfront properties. They’re not lavish, not by any means. Rather, they’re well-worn, lived in for generations, easily a hundred years old. Breezy cottages, rough around the edges, hidden amid the ample trees. It’s a five-mile loop around the island. The landscape isn’t manicured. It’s far more rural than that, with long stretches of backwoods and public beaches that are not only rugged and seaweed-swept, but eerily vacant this time of year.
I run fast. I have so much on my mind. I find myself thinking about Imogen, about Erin; about Jeffrey Baines and his ex-wife hiding in the church’s sanctuary. What were they talking about, I wonder, and where is Erin’s photograph? Has Will hidden it from me, or is he using it as a bookmark in his next novel? Is it something as auspicious as that?
I pass cliffs that inhabit the east side of the island. They’re precarious and steep, jutting out and over the Atlantic. I try not to think about Erin. As I watch, the ocean’s waves come crashing furiously into the rocks. All at once, a flock of migrating birds moves past me in a deranged mass as they do this time of year. The sudden movement of them startles me and I scream. Dozens, if not hundreds, of black birds pulsate as if one, and then flee.
The ocean is tempestuous this morning. The wind blows across it, sending the waves crashing to shore. Angry whitecaps assail the rocky shoreline, throwing upward a ten-or twenty-foot spray.
I imagine the waters this time of year are icy, the depth of the ocean deep.
I pause in my run to stretch. I reach down to touch my toes, loosening my hamstrings. The world around me is so quiet it’s unsettling. The only sound I hear is that of the wind slipping around me, whispering into my ear.
All at once I’m startled by words that get carried to me on the jet stream.
I hate you. You’re a loser. Die, die, die.
I jolt upright, scanning the horizon for the source of the noise.
But I see nothing, no one. And yet I can’t shake the idea that someone is out there, that someone is watching me. A chill goes dashing up my spine. My hands start to shake.
I call out a feeble “Hello?” but no one replies.
I look around, see nothing in the distance. No one hiding behind the corners of homes or the trunks of trees. The beach is without people, the windows and doors of the homes shut tight as they should be on a day like this.
It’s my imagination only. No one is here. No one is speaking to me.
What I hear is the rustle of the wind.
My mind has mistaken the wind for words.
* * *
I continue on my run. By the time I reach the fringes of town—a quintessential small town with the Methodist church, an inn, a post office, and a handful of places to eat, including a seasonal ice cream shop, boarded up with panels of plywood this time of year—it’s begun to rain. What starts as a drizzle soon comes down in sheets. I run as fast as my legs will carry me, ducking into a café to wait the storm out.
I swing open the door and scurry in, dripping wet. I’ve never been here before. This café is rustic and provincial, the kind of place where old men spend the day, drinking coffee, grumbling about local politics and weather.
The café door doesn’t have a chance to close before I overhear a woman ask, “Did anyone go to the memorial service for Morgan?”
This woman sits on a wobbly, broken-spindled chair in the center of the restaurant, eating from a plate of bacon and eggs. “Poor Jeffrey,” she says, shaking her head mournfully. “He must be devastated.” She reaches for a carton of creamer and douses her coffee with it.
“It’s all so awful,” another woman replies. They sit, a troop of middle-aged women at a long laminated table beside the window of the restaurant. “So unspeakable,” the same woman says.
I tell the hostess I need a table for one, by the window. A waitress stops by and asks what she can get for me, and I tell her coffee, please.
The ladies at the table go on. I listen.
“I heard them talking about it on the news this morning,” someone says.
“What did they say?” another asks.
“Police have been speaking to a person of interest.”
Jeffrey, I tell myself, is the person of interest.
“I heard she got stabbed,” I overhear just then, and my stomach lurches at the words. My hand falls to my own abdomen, thinking what it would feel like when the knife punctured the skin, when it slipped inside her organs.
The next voice is incredulous. “How do they know that?” the woman asks, slamming her mug too hard to the table, and the ladies leap, including me. “Police haven’t released any information yet.”
The first voice again. “Well, now they have. That’s what the coroner said. The coroner said she was stabbed.”
“Five times, they said on the news. Once in the chest, twice in the back and the face.”
“The face?” someone asks, aghast. My hand rises up to my cheek, feeling the insubstantiality of it. The thin skin, the hard bones. Nowhere for the blade of the knife to go. “How awful.”
The women wonder aloud what it would feel like to be stabbed. If Morgan felt the pain straightaway or not until the first signs of blood. Or maybe it happened so fast, a woman guesses, the repeated thrust in
and out of her, that she didn’t have time to feel a thing because she was already dead.
What I know as a physician is that if the weapon hit a major artery on the way in, Morgan Baines would have passed mercifully quick. But if it didn’t, though she may have been incapacitated, death by exsanguination, bleeding out, would have taken longer. And, once the shock of it wore off, it would have been painful.
For her sake, I hope Morgan’s assailant hit a major artery. I hope it was quick.
“There were no signs of forced entry. No broken windows. No busted door.”
“Maybe Morgan opened the door for him.”
“Maybe she never locked it in the first place,” someone chirps. “Maybe she was expecting him,” she says, and a discussion follows about how most murder victims know their assailant. Someone quotes a statistic, saying how random crime is relatively rare. “Getting stabbed in the face. That sounds personal to me.”
My mind goes to the ex, Courtney. Courtney had reason to want Morgan dead. I think of her proclamation. I’m not sorry for what I did! What did she mean by that?
“The killer must have known Jeffrey was gone,” one of the ladies speculates.
“Jeffrey travels often. From what I hear, he’s almost always gone. If it isn’t Tokyo then it’s Frankfurt or Toronto.”
“Maybe Morgan was seeing someone else. Maybe she had a boyfriend.”
The incredulous voice returns just then. “It’s all hearsay. All rumor,” she says, admonishing the other women for gossiping this way about a dead woman.
Someone quickly contradicts. “Pamela,” the woman says, tone antagonistic. “It’s not hearsay. It was on the news.”
“They said on the news that Morgan had a boyfriend?” Pamela asks.
“Well, no. Not that. But they said that she was stabbed.”
I wonder if Will knows any of this.
“A knife, they said,” and I find this omniscient they starting to wear on my nerves. Who is they? “That’s what they said was the murder weapon. Can you imagine?” the woman asks, as she latches down on the handle of a butter knife and hoists it indecorously over her head, makes believe she’s stabbing the woman next to her with the blunt edge of the knife. The ladies admonish her. “Jackie,” they say, “stop it. What in the world’s gotten into you? A woman was killed.”