The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  MOUSE

  Mouse froze. She waited for the sound of the bedroom door to open on the first floor, for Fake Mom to come for her. Mouse was scared, though it wasn’t Mouse’s fault she’d made noise. It’s not like a person can stop themselves from sneezing.

  Her legs shook in fear. Her teeth began to chatter, though Mouse wasn’t cold.

  How long she waited there on the stairs, Mouse didn’t know. She counted to nearly three hundred in her head, except she lost count twice and had to start all over again.

  When Fake Mom didn’t come, Mouse thought maybe she hadn’t heard her. Maybe Fake Mom had slept right through that sneeze. She didn’t know how that was possible—the sneeze had been loud—but Mouse thanked her lucky stars if she had.

  She continued on to her bedroom and climbed into bed. There, in her bed, she talked to her real mom, same as she always did. She told her what Fake Mom had done, how she had hurt Mouse and Mr. Bear. She told her real mom how she was scared and how she wanted her father to come home. She said it in her head. Mouse’s father always told her that she could talk to her real mom whenever she wanted to. He told her that wherever she was, her mom was listening. And so Mouse did. She talked to her all the time.

  Though sometimes Mouse took it a step further than that and imagined what her real mom said back. Sometimes she imagined her real mom was in the very same room as her and they were having a conversation, like the kind of conversations Mouse had with her father, the kind where he talked back. But that was only pretend. Because there was no way to know what her mother said back, but it made Mouse feel less alone.

  For a while Mouse felt satisfied knowing her stomach had food, though three butter cookies was hardly the same thing as dinner. Mouse knew those cookies wouldn’t hold her off for long. But for now, at least, she was content.

  For now, she could sleep.

  SADIE

  “How are you feeling?” Will leans over me and asks.

  “Not good,” I tell him, still tasting vomit in my mouth.

  He tells me to sleep in, that he’ll call me in sick to work, and drive the boys to school. He sits on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair, and I want to tell him about the washcloth. But I can’t say anything to Will when the kids are just down the hall getting ready for school. Through our open door, I see them move in and out of the bedrooms, the bathroom.

  But then a moment comes when they’re all in their bedrooms, out of earshot, and I think that I’ll come right out and say it.

  “Will,” I say, the words on my lips, but then, just like that, Tate comes scampering into the bedroom, asking Will to help him find his favorite socks. Will grabs him by the hand, catches him before he has a chance to jump on the bed.

  “What?” Will asks, turning toward me.

  I shake my head, tell him, “Never mind.”

  “You sure?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  Together Will and Tate go to leave, to head to Tate’s bedroom in search of the missing socks. Will glances over his shoulder as he leaves, tells me to sleep as long as I can. He pulls the door closed behind himself.

  I’ll tell Will later.

  I hear Will, Otto, Tate and Imogen moving about in the house. From upstairs I hear ordinary, everyday conversations ensue about ham-and-cheese sandwiches and history tests. Their words come to me through the floor vents. Tate tosses out a riddle, and by God, it’s Imogen who answers it, Imogen who knows that in the one-story blue house where everything is blue—blue walls, blue floor, blue desk and chairs—the stairs are not blue because there are no stairs.

  “How did you know?” Tate asks her.

  “I just knew.”

  “That’s a good one, Tater Tot,” Will declares, his nickname for Tate, as he tells him to find his backpack before they’re late for school.

  The wind outside is ferocious. It flogs the clapboard siding, threatening to tear it right off the house. It’s cold in the house now, the kind of cold that gets under the skin. I can’t warm up.

  “Let’s get going, guys,” Will calls, and I rise from the bed and stand at the door, listening as Tate noses around the coat closet for his hat and boots. I hear Imogen’s voice in the foyer with them. She is riding along to the ferry with them, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s only the weather’s doing, but I can’t help but notice the irony of it. She’ll let Will drive her to the ferry, but not me.

  Suddenly all I hear is feet, like the rush of animals, before the front door opens and then closes again, and the house is nearly still. The only sounds are the whistling of the furnace, the rush of water through pipes, the wind scourging the outside of our home.

  It’s only after they’re gone that I rise from bed and leave the room. I’ve only just stepped into the hallway when something catches my eye. Two things actually, though it’s the doll’s marble-like eyes that get my attention first. It’s the same doll of Tate’s that I found in the foyer the other day, the one he carried roughly to his room at Will’s request.

  She’s perched at the edge of the hallway where the wooden floor meets the wall. She sits nicely on her bum, wearing floral leggings and a knit print. Her frizzy hair lies over her shoulders in two neat braids, hands set in her lap. Someone has found her missing shoe.

  Beside the doll’s feet is a pencil and paper. I go to it, reaching for the scrap of paper.

  I brace myself, knowing what it is before I look. I turn the paper over in my hand, seeing exactly what I expected to see on the other side. The same crying, dismembered body as on the drawings I found in the attic. Beside the dismembered body, an angry woman clutches a knife. Charcoal blobs fill in the excess white space, tears or blood, though I don’t know which. Maybe both.

  I wonder if these were here early this morning when I carried the laundry down. But it was dark then; I wouldn’t have seen if they were. And on the way back up, I was nauseous, running to the toilet, barely getting there in time. I wouldn’t have noticed them then either.

  I wonder if Will saw these things before he left. But the doll he’ll have assumed was Tate’s and the drawings were upside down. He wouldn’t have seen the content.

  These things terrify me, because I think that if they do belong to Otto, he is regressing. It’s a defense mechanism, a way to cope. Taking on childish behavior to avoid facing a problem head-on. My own therapist used to say this about me, telling me I acted like a child at times when I didn’t want to tackle adult issues in my life. Perhaps Otto is doing the very same thing. But why? On the surface he seems happy enough. But he’s the quiet type; I never know what’s going on inside his mind.

  I think back on that therapist of mine. I was never very fond of her. I didn’t like the way she made me feel silly and small, the way she denigrated me when I expressed my feelings. It wasn’t just that. She also confused me with other patients.

  Once I sank down into her leather swivel armchair and crossed my legs, took a sip of the water she always left on the table for me. She asked what had been happening lately, in that way she always did. Tell me what’s been happening. Before I could reply, she began to counsel me on how to sever ties with some married man I was seeing, though I wasn’t seeing a married man. I was married already. To Will.

  I blanched in embarrassment for her other client, the one whose secrets she’d just shared.

  There is no married man, I explained.

  She asked, No? You broke it off already?

  There was never a married man.

  I stopped seeing her soon after.

  Otto had a therapist back in Chicago. We swore we’d pick up the therapy when we moved to Maine. We never did. But I think it’s time we do.

  I step past the doll. I go downstairs. I take the drawing with me.

  A plate of French toast sits on the kitchen counter. That and a pot of coffee, keeping hot on the coffee maker’s warming plate. I help
myself to the coffee but I can’t bring myself to eat a thing. As I lift the mug to my lips, my hands tremble, casting waves across the coffee.

  Beside the plate of French toast is a note. Feel better, it reads, with Will’s signature closing, the ever-present Xo. He’s set my pills out for me. I leave them where they are, not wanting to take them until I’ve gotten some food inside of me.

  Out the kitchen window, I see the dogs. Will must have let them outside before he left, which is fine. They’re snow dogs—huskies—in their element in weather like this. It’d be nearly impossible to get them back in before they’re ready to come.

  In the backyard, the wind beats through the naked trees, making their limbs bend. It’s snowing, a heavy snow. I hadn’t expected so much. I’m surprised that school wasn’t canceled today. But I’m also grateful for it because I need this time alone.

  The snow doesn’t fall vertically, because of the wind. It falls sideways instead, with abandon, forging snowdrifts across the yard. The sill of the kitchen window begins to collect with snow, burying me alive inside. I feel the weight of it on my chest. It’s harder to breathe.

  I take a careful sip of the coffee, noticing that the pendant necklace I left on the counter early this morning is gone. I search the floor, behind the canisters, the junk drawer where we keep random things. The necklace is nowhere. Someone has taken it. I picture it lying there how I left it, the dainty chain coiled into a mound with the M on top.

  The fact that it’s now missing only adds to my suspicion. This morning while I lay in bed, the four of them—Will, Otto, Tate and Imogen—were in the kitchen together. It would have been so easy for Imogen to slip that necklace from the countertop when no one was looking. I consider the threatening notes Morgan received. Would Imogen have sent those? Why, I wonder at first, and then just as quickly: Why not? I think of the way Imogen treats me. The way she scares me. If she could do this to me, she could just as easily do it to Morgan.

  I leave the drawing where it is and carry my coffee to the laundry room. There I see that this morning, after I went back to bed, Will finished the laundry for me. The piles of clothes I left are gone. They’ve been replaced instead with an empty laundry basket and a clean tile floor.

  I drop to my hands and knees beside the washing machine, looking beneath, grateful to find the bloodstained washcloth still there, and yet just as horrified as I was at seeing it for the first time. All the emotions come rushing back to me, and I know that I have to tell Will about this.

  I leave the washcloth where it is. I go back to the kitchen to wait. I sit at the table. Otto’s drawing sits six feet away, the eyes of the decapitated head staring at me. I can’t stand to look at it.

  I wait until nearly nine o’clock to call Will, knowing that by then he’ll have taken Tate to school. He’ll have dropped him off. He will be alone by now and we’ll be able to speak in private.

  When Will answers, he’s on the ferry, heading to campus.

  He asks how I’m feeling as he answers the call. I tell him, “Not good.” I hear the sound of the wind whipping around him, gusting into the handset. He’s outside, standing on the outer deck of the ferry getting peppered with snow. Will could be inside in the nicely heated cabin, but he isn’t. Instead he’s relinquished his seat indoors for someone else, and I think that this is so classic Will, to be selfless.

  “We need to talk, Will,” I say, and though he tells me that it’s loud on the ferry, that this isn’t the best time, I say it again. “We need to talk.”

  “Can I call when I get to campus?” he asks. Will talks loudly through the phone, trying to counter the noise of the wind.

  I say no. I tell him this is important. That this can’t wait.

  “What is it?” he asks, and I come outright and say that I think Imogen had something to do with Morgan’s murder. His sigh is long, exasperated, but he humors me nonetheless, asking why I think this now.

  “I found a bloody washcloth, Will. In the laundry. Completely saturated in blood.”

  From the other end of the line comes an earsplitting silence.

  I go on, because he says nothing. I feel the words rattle in my throat. Before me, my hands have turned sweaty, though inside I’m so cold I shake. I tell him how I discovered it as I was doing the laundry. How I found the washcloth and hid it beneath the washing machine because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

  “Where is this washcloth now?” he asks, concern in his voice.

  “Still under the washing machine. The thing is, Will, I’m thinking about turning the washcloth over to Officer Berg.”

  “Whoa,” he says. “Stop right there, Sadie. You’re not making any sense. Are you sure it’s blood?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Will tries to make excuses. Maybe someone had wiped up a spill with it. Paint, mud, some mess the dogs made. “Maybe dog shit,” he says, and it’s so unlike Will to be crass like that. But perhaps, like me, he’s scared. “Maybe one of the boys cut himself,” he suggests, and he reminds me then of the time Otto was small and ran the pad of his thumb across the razor’s sharp blade just to see what it would feel like, though he had been told before to never touch Daddy’s razor. The razor sliced through his skin. There was a surge of blood that Otto tried to hide from us. He didn’t want to get in trouble. We found bloodstained tissues packed in the garbage can, an infection festering days later on his thumb.

  “This isn’t the same thing as playing with razors,” I tell Will. “This is far different than that. The washcloth, Will, was wet through with blood. Not a few drops of blood, but it was literally soaked. Imogen killed her,” I say decisively. “She killed her and wiped herself clean with that washcloth.”

  “It isn’t fair what you’re doing to her, Sadie,” he says, voice loud, and I don’t know if he’s yelling at me or yelling over the wind. But he’s most definitely yelling. “This is a witch hunt,” he says.

  “Morgan’s necklace was here, too,” I go on. “I found it on the stairs. I stepped on it. I set it on the kitchen counter and now it’s gone. Imogen took it to hide the evidence.”

  “Sadie,” he says. “I know you don’t like her. I know she hasn’t taken kindly to you. But you can’t keep blaming her for every little thing that goes wrong.”

  His choice of words strikes me as strange. Every little thing.

  Murder is not an inconsequential thing.

  “If not Imogen, then someone in this house killed her,” I tell Will. “That’s a given. Because how else can you explain her necklace on our floor, the bloody washcloth in the laundry. If not her, then who?” I ask, and at first the question is rhetorical. At first I ask it only to make him see that of course it was Imogen because no one else in the house is capable of murder. If she did it once—yanking that stool from beneath her mother’s feet—she could do it again.

  But then, in the silence that follows, my eyes come to land on Otto’s angry drawing with the decapitated head and the blobs of blood. The fact that he’s regressed to playing with dolls. And I think of the way my fourteen-year-old son carried a knife to school.

  I draw in a sudden breath, wondering if Imogen isn’t the only one in this house who is capable of murder. I don’t mean for the thought to leave my head. And yet it does.

  “Could it have been Otto?” I think aloud, wishing as soon as the words are out that I could take them back, put them back in my head where they belong.

  “You can’t be serious,” Will says, and I don’t want to be serious. I don’t want to believe for a second that Otto could do this. But it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Because the same argument rings true: if he did it once, he could do it again.

  “But what about Otto’s history of violence?” I ask.

  “Not a history of violence,” Will insists. “Otto never hurt anyone, remember?”

  “But how do you know he wouldn’t have, i
f he hadn’t been caught first? If that student hadn’t turned him in, how do you know he wouldn’t have hurt his classmates, Will?”

  “We can’t know what he would have done. But I’d like to believe our son isn’t a killer,” Will says. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Will is right. Otto never hurt any of those kids back at his old high school. But the intent was there. The motive. A weapon. He very intentionally took a knife to school. There’s no telling what he might have done if his plan hadn’t been thwarted in time. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I want to believe only the best about our son. Because I won’t let myself think Otto could take another life,” he says, and I’m overcome with the strangest combination of fear and guilt that I don’t know which prevails. Am I more scared that Otto has murdered a woman? Or do I feel more guilty for allowing myself to think this?

  This is my son I’m speaking of. Is my son capable of murder?

  “Don’t you know that, Sadie? Do you really believe Otto could do this?” he asks, and it’s my silence that gets the best of him. My unknowingness. My silent admission that, yes, I do think maybe Otto could have done this.

  Will breathes out loudly, feathers ruffled. His words are clipped. “What Otto did, Sadie,” Will says, words razor-sharp, “is a far cry from murder. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake. He’s a kid. He acted in self-defense. He stood up for himself the only way he knew how. You’re being irrational, Sadie.”

  “But what if I’m not?” I ask.

  Will’s response is immediate. “But you are,” he says. “What Otto did was stand up for himself when no one else would.”

  He stops there but I know he wants to say more. He wants to tell me that Otto took matters into his own hands because of me. Because even though Otto told me about the harassment, I didn’t intervene. Because I wasn’t listening. There was a hotline at the school. A bullying hotline. I could have called and left an anonymous complaint. I could have called a teacher or the school principal and made a not-so-anonymous complaint. But instead I did nothing; I ignored him, even if unintentionally.