by Jen Waite
Anne ran to his car and pulled open the back door. Thea sat in her car seat, quiet, perfectly still. As Anne unbuckled her daughter, Thea stayed quiet. “Thea,” she said, fumbling awkwardly for words. “How are you?” In Thea’s silence, Ethan spoke, “The kid cries a lot. You should do something about that.”
Anne lifted Thea out of the car seat, turned, and walked back to their apartment, barefoot on the warm concrete walkway, talking to Thea the entire way, asking her questions, naming the insects buzzing in the air and moving through the grass, in hopes that her daughter would suddenly animate. She sat with her on the couch, stroking her hair, checking her face, the top of her head, her arms, discreetly, telling her about the trip they were going to take soon, until finally Anne stopped talking as well, and they sat silently together, resuming the vigil from last night.
“I’m tired, Mama,” Thea said, breaking the silence. She reached her arms toward her bedroom and Anne carried her to her crib.
“You’ll feel better when you wake up,” she said, lowering Thea down. She cupped her hand under her daughter’s head and placed it on the pillow. Before she could straighten her body, Thea screamed and clawed at her, climbing back up into her arms. “No, no, no!” She had never heard this voice come out of Thea before—the marrow of the tone was not anger but fear.
“What’s wrong?” Anne asked, pulling back the blanket, ready to smash a spider with her bare hand. She lifted the pillow next and looked underneath; Thea’s fingernails dug farther into her neck and Anne felt a tremor run through Thea’s body. There was nothing in the crib but a white fitted sheet. Anne held the pillow by her side and then dropped it. “No,” Anne said out loud. She kicked the pillow out of the door. Thea’s breathing started to slow and she released her grip on Anne’s neck. “Thank you, Mama,” she whispered. Anne kissed her hair over and over. “Go to sleep, love,” she told her as she set her back into the crib.
She walked into the bathroom and threw up. Then she called her babysitter—she knew it was last minute, she said, but she was desperate to do some grocery shopping while Thea napped. The babysitter said she was free for a couple of hours. Anne hurried to get ready. If Megan, the eighteen-year-old babysitter, thought her outfit was odd, she didn’t say anything. “You look so nice,” she chirped as she walked past Anne through the front door. “I love those shoes.”
“Thanks! I’ll be back soon,” Anne called over her shoulder. She took the front steps slowly, grasping the handrail. As she drove, she fiddled with her phone on her lap, careful to only look down for more than half a second while stopped at red lights. By the time she arrived at Ethan’s, the app had downloaded. All Anne had to do was press play. She tested it in the car, recording herself and then playing it back. She put the phone in her pocket and spoke both loudly and softly. She listened again—static filled the car punctuated by a faint voice; certain words were unintelligible, but this was her last resort, her Hail Mary, and it would have to do.
She checked her reflection in the rearview mirror and then stepped out of the car. At Ethan’s door, she adjusted her jeans, the waistband dug into her skin and the material clung to her legs in a claustrophobic way she hadn’t felt since before Thea was born. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket, hit Play, and tucked it carefully back in.
Ethan opened the door and Anne took in his surprised expression, saw herself through his arched eyebrows and slight smile. He was seeing the Anne from that first brunch date. Makeup carefully placed, hair falling in waves, white sleeveless blouse open in a V on her chest. She hoped that her appearance would work to her advantage somehow, disarm him.
“May I come in?” she asked. She could taste acid with each swallow but kept her face smooth and pleasant. Ethan stepped back and opened the door wider, the small smile still playing on his face. “Thanks,” she said, crossing past him into his entryway. When he closed the door to the outside, she felt sweat drip down her armpits to her sides. “I want to talk to you about Thea again.” She made her way into his kitchen, filled with white cabinets that contrasted starkly with a large, black marble island in the middle of the open room. It was immaculate, every surface gleamed and the appliances were all high-end, stainless steel, but it felt cold, like a staged house that had never been lived in. She leaned against the island, feeling the side of it press against the outline of her phone.
“What about her?” Ethan asked. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen. His frame took up almost the entire space and made him seem bigger.
“She started crying as soon as I put her down for a nap. After you dropped her off.” Anne took a breath and then let the pain spread through her voice. “She started crying when her head touched the pillow in her crib.” This had worked the first time—Ethan had responded to her raw emotion, had seemed proud even that he could get away with abusing their daughter. She kept going, her voice mounting. “What the fuck did you do to her, Ethan?”
His voice, when it came out, did not match his mouth, which was set in a wide grin. “Anne, she’s still getting used to coming here. And being away from you. Please, you have to understand that it will take some time for us to bond, for her to grow comfortable with me.” His reasonable tone made hers seem harsh and dramatic. “I’m sure the more time we spend together, the easier this will be, for all of us.” He walked toward her slowly until he was right in front of her, pressing her into the island. His placed one hand on her chest and one in between her legs.
“Ethan, stop.” Her voice was caught somewhere in her body, and she could barely get the words out. She struggled to move against him but he pinned her harder into the island.
“What? What are you talking about?” He sounded confused, concerned. He leaned into her harder, bending her back over the island. His face was inches away from hers, and he stared at her and said, “Anne, what’s wrong? Are you ok? What’s going on with you?” He grabbed her harder with both hands and she inhaled at the sharp pain and then he let go abruptly. She pushed past him, breathing hard, focused on getting to the front door.
“Don’t worry about Thea,” Ethan called after her from the kitchen. “She just needs more time with me.” Anne got to the front door and pulled. Her hands were so sweaty that they slid off the doorknob. She wiped them on her jeans and pulled again; this time the door flung open and she raced through, gulping the rose-scented air as she ran down the walkway. She started her car and drove as far as she could before she had to pull over and wait for the shaking to subside. She cried into her steering wheel and then she called Rose.
TEN YEARS
BEFORE THE CABIN
ROSE
Rose hummed softly as she walked the four miles to Ethan’s. The humming made her feel less alone in the darkness of the night. It was only eight p.m. but the street was quiet, the only sounds were Rose’s humming and the click of toenails on the pavement. She held the leash loosely that connected to Sal, the border collie that trotted ahead of her. The cars that normally took this road had long since pulled into driveways, the drivers tucked away in cozy, softly lit houses. Even on a warm fall night like this one, the residents of sleepy Charlotte hunkered down as soon as the sun set. If a car were to drive by, she merely looked like a woman taking her dog for a stroll, stealing some moments of solitude for herself before heading back home to join her husband in front of the TV. There were streetlamps hovering over the road but only every hundred feet or so, leaving large swaths of sidewalk dark; their flickering dim light fell directly onto the parts they serviced. She thought of Sam driving to Burlington. He’d be there by now, on his second or third beer, talking to Bob on the couch. She wondered what they talked about—memories from their time serving, surely, or maybe not at all; she realized she had no idea if her husband made these trips to Bob’s house as a way to remember the past, or as a way to bury it—paper collaging new memories over the old. She pictured his face in her mind and his lips moving beside her as she aimed. “One shot,
Rose, that’s all you’ll need if you do it right.” She thought how it felt, during their last lessons, when everything else fell away and it was just her and the target.
The first morning that Sam took her into their woods, six months ago, she’d barely said a word. Her stomach was twisted into knots and every time she felt the gun against her side, her heart sped up and she felt dizzy. She’d followed him out into the middle of their woods, crunching past the NO HUNTING, PRIVATE PROPERTY signs.
“Little farther,” Sam had called back to her. She didn’t respond, just followed, trusting that he knew where to go, exactly how to do this. She smiled now at the thought, placing one black sneaker in front of the other, as if a man could know exactly how to prepare his wife for something like this. Before he took her into the woods, Sam had spent a week teaching her about the gun. Each night they sat at the kitchen table with the blinds closed and two guns in front of them, his and hers. “What kind of gun is that?” Rose asked, nodding to the one Sam had positioned in front of her. She wasn’t sure why she asked; the answer wouldn’t mean anything to her, yet she felt the need to know anyway.
“It’s a glock 26. I picked it because it’s light and compact.”
“Picked it? Where did you—” Rose paused.
“It can’t be traced to me,” Sam said, answering her unspoken question, and then, with a sheepish grin, “Yard sale.”
He showed her the correct grip: pointer finger on the frame, thumbs one over the other, pointing toward the target. “We’ll start shooting when you can load this in under ten seconds.”
He told her to carry the gun around with her that entire week, just to get a feel for it, and she did, checking to make sure the magazine was empty and then shoving it into her waistband before she left for the bakery each morning. She hated having it on her body, this cold, solid thing that wrought death, violence, and tragedy. She was sure that her employees, a couple of kids just out of college and the manager who’d been with her since she opened, would immediately be able to sense the gun tucked away under her baggy clothes. Rose could feel the foreign bulk with every move she made, chafing against her stomach; it felt wrong, like a part of her body had been lazily sewn on and the threads were threatening to unravel with every step. The first time she went to the bathroom, she reached for the gun while unzipping her pants and it slipped out of her hands, dropping to the ground with force and then skittering across the small bathroom beside the sink. She froze, listening for her employees, but there was silence. When she emerged a few minutes later, face burning, no one said anything about a strange thud.
That afternoon, Rose drove to a sporting goods store a couple towns over. She found the section she was looking for and marveled at the selection. She picked out a light blue bra and brought it behind the small dressing curtain in the middle of the store. “Oh, that’s nice,” Rose said softly to herself as she adjusted the bra on her body. Underneath the cups, an additional six inches or so of material fit snug around her rib cage with a pouch opening diagonally across her body. She dropped her gun into the pouch. “Oh!” she exclaimed again, pleasantly surprised at the Velcro band that secured the gun in place. “Well isn’t this nice.” She picked up one more bra on her way to the register, a light pink, and paid cash to the skinny ginger-headed boy.
“These are super popular,” the boy said as she riffled through her purse, his newly postpubescent voice cracking upward on the word popular.
Rose smiled and ignored the flush rising to the boy’s face. “I can see why. They’re very comfortable!”
From then on, Rose rotated between her two holster bras. She tucked the gun neatly into the pouch every morning. The gun lay slanted vertically on her right side, completely undetectable underneath the large sweatshirts she wore to the bakery. She wondered if it was all part of Sam’s plan, not giving her any tips, letting her figure it out herself, but either way, after a week of wearing the holster and loading and unloading the magazine every night, Sam handed her a cup of coffee as she was getting ready to go to the bakery. “Call in sick,” he said. “Last night I timed you at 9.8 seconds. Today, we shoot.”
* * *
—
Rose had hated shooting that first afternoon. Everything about it made her feel sick. The noise, the recoil, the aching in her arms and hands. Half the time, the hot casings flew backward right into the loose neck of her sweatshirt and tumbled along her body, burning her belly and causing her to do a frantic dance each time it happened. All of these things swelled to form a tidal wave of fear in her mind. Every time, right before the bullet left the gun, there was a suspended moment, an in-between moment, before the gun fired and after her finger started to squeeze the trigger; in that moment, the panic rose to a crescendo, thick and oppressive. “I can’t,” Rose panted after firing all ten bullets. “I can’t do this.”
“We can stop.” Sam put his hand on her shoulder. “You decide.”
Rose paused. “No.”
“Ok, magazine out. I’ll load it this time.” Sam looked at the target on the tree. There were holes in the paper but they were scattered all over, mostly on the very outside edges. “You’re anticipating. It’s the pothole effect. You’re bracing yourself for impact. Just let it happen.”
Now she cut purposefully off the road and into a field, the last mile stretching before her as a series of ups and downs over rolling hills. She forced herself to walk at a steady pace; there was no rush and no need to expend her, or Sal’s, energy prematurely. She shivered against the warm breeze and reached to her side, instinctively, for her cell phone that was at her house, pinging its location to the satellites in the sky. “Almost there,” she said to Sal, whose head was held up regally, nose pointing up in the air to take in the unknown scents emanating from the field. They both stopped suddenly to watch a deer wander through the grass ahead of them; Rose held her breath and Sal seemingly did, too—rather than barking. “Beautiful,” Rose said softly to herself and to reassure Sal that this graceful creature was a friend.
“Come on,” she told Sal. She kept them pointed toward the house on the other side of the field, pinpricks of light spilling out from the windows. A few hundred feet from the house, she told Sal to sit. “Stay here.” Rose stroked the dog’s head and ears. “I’ll be back soon.” Sal was used to waiting for Rose outside of the bakery, and the dog lowered himself to the ground almost immediately, settling in. Rose was glad to walk the last part alone. When she reached Ethan’s porch, she closed her eyes and pictured herself in the woods one last time, before knocking lightly on the door. She heard footsteps approach the door and then stop, and she pictured him looking down at her through the glass panes at the top of the door, though she kept her body turned away and to the right, as if appreciating the beauty of the structure.
The door opened.
“Rose? God, it’s good to see you!” The warm curiosity in Ethan’s voice unnerved her. “Please, come in.”
“Thank you,” she said pleasantly, melting into her past role of mother-in-law. “I’m sorry to drop by unannounced, but I have something important to discuss with you. I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you before now,” she said, removing her sneakers carefully and placing them on his welcome mat. If Ethan noticed they looked large, men’s size 10 to be exact, he didn’t say anything. She kept on her gloves. “But, well, you know, Anne . . .” She shrugged and let her voice drift off, as if the relationship between her daughter and ex–son-in-law had morphed into the uncomfortable yet predictable post-divorce calamity.
“Of course, I understand. You have to take your daughter’s side, I get it,” Ethan said. “But it’s too bad there have to be ‘sides.’” Ethan crossed his arms. “I’m actually very worried about Anne.” He motioned for Rose to follow him into the living room. With his back turned toward her, Rose readied and positioned herself. Ethan stopped abruptly and turned around. “I’m sorry, I didn’t offer you anything to drink.”
“Oh no. I’m fine, thank you,” Rose said, maintaining her stance. “Actually, I really can’t stay long. Sal’s waiting for me outside.”
Ethan stayed rooted to his spot, an expression of amusement spreading over his face. Rose saw herself as Ethan saw her: an out-of-shape grandmother in an oversize old sweatshirt, pointing a gun at his head.
“Rose,” Ethan said gently. “What are you doing?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, I really have, and I can’t see any other way around this.” Rose wasn’t sure why she felt the need to explain herself, but it seemed like the polite thing to do. Ethan was only ten or so feet away, standing perfectly still, and Rose couldn’t help but think, All that training for nothing.
“This is ridiculous,” Ethan said. Rose opened up her peripheral vision to see Ethan’s whole body, which was motionless but tensed, just as Sam had taught her. “Anne and I haven’t gotten along great lately, but come on.” His mouth curved into a smile. “Don’t you think this is a little bit extreme?”
“Do you remember what I said to you at your wedding? During our dance.” Rose’s voice had turned to ice, and Ethan shifted uncomfortably, holding up his hands in surrender.
“Ok, ok, let’s calm down.” Ethan laughed but his eyes stayed focused on the gun.
“I told you not to hurt my daughter,” Rose continued, “or I would kill you. To be honest, I didn’t think I would have to make good on that threat, but here we are.” Now Rose was talking more to herself than to Ethan, in a low murmur, “The problem is that it seems I have to wait for you to kill my daughter or granddaughter for the courts to get involved. I’m not going to do that.”
“I think Anne’s been telling you some things that aren’t true.” Ethan still held his hands up in the air, but he shifted his gaze to meet Rose’s eyes. “You know how she is. She has a vivid imagination.”