The Things We Don't See

by Jessi Brazzell

  The rising sun wipes away any hope of a restful night’s sleep and I give up trying. Instead I indulge in emotional torture. No matter how much I have studied human emotions, I will never understand why we naturally choose to surround ourselves with the things that remind us most of the pain we are feeling. But we do. Like losing someone isn’t enough, we submerse ourselves in their belongings, which in turn only makes us reflect on the reality of their absence. I slowly walk through Carson’s closet, letting my hand run across his abundance of suit jackets. His closet smells like him and I breathe in the scent deeply, realizing for the first time in years how precious that smell actually is to me. I stop when I get to the suit that he wore the night we met and I carefully pull the jacket from the hanger. I bury my face in it, collapsing onto the floor, like the weight of my own body was impossible to support, and think back on our first date:

  I had agreed to have dinner with him that same evening without hesitation. Being in the moment, it just felt right. But by the time I got home, my stomach was twisted into knots worrying about actually committing to a date with a man I had never even had a conversation with. But those eyes were all the validation I needed. I tried on every outfit in my wardrobe before deciding on a short, form fitting blue dress with black heels, not because it looked better than the other outfits, but because I had about ten minutes before his driver would be out front. My blonde curls hung down the bare skin of my back, with only a small piece braded and pinned to the side. And I rushed to get my makeup on before the doorbell rang. I grabbed my diamond stud earrings from the vanity and ran to the door shoving them in while giving myself a quiet pep talk.

  I stopped to catch my breath and looked down over my dress one last time before I pulled the door open. My face burned red when I saw Carson standing there, dressed just as dashing as he had been at the wine bar. But this time he wore a black suit with a blue silk tie that was so vibrant, I was sure it had only been worn once. I was expecting his driver, but there was Carson. He didn’t smile as he looked over my figure and I followed his gaze, feeling uncomfortable from his lack of compliments.

  Our eyes met again and he was softly biting his bottom lip as he stared back at me.

  “Is this okay?” I asked him shyly and he finally gave the first hint of a smile.

  He reached and took my hand in his and kept his eyes on mine while he softly kissed the back of my hand. “You are perfect,” he said. Even the tone of his voice was sexy.

  He walked me out to his car, or his driver’s, I am still not sure which, and held the door for me, like a real gentleman. The leather seat was cold against the back of my thighs and I watched an elderly man sitting behind the wheel completely motionless. I debated telling him hello but the way his neck seemed to be fixed in that forward position, I decided against it. I had never been driven somewhere by someone other than a taxi driver with a dirty ball cap. Carson fell in beside me and a fabulously faint scent followed. The same scent that hangs on the jacket now.

  The statuesque driver chauffeured us to The Capital Grille and we were instantly seated with a bottle of chilled chardonnay. That was the beginning of my wine appreciation. It was the beginning of a lot of things.

  We talked about life and what we wanted to find in it, we talked about everything and nothing at all. Carson seemed so perfect to me that night with our conversation effortlessly running deep. We danced next to our table while the music played. As we spun, I looked into his eyes and I knew that my life would never be the same.

  We shared the perfect evening together and when he walked me to my door, he kissed my hand sweetly before turning away. My heart skipped a beat watching him leave and I was completely swept off my feet. The next morning my porch was covered with vases of white roses and the rest was history.

  All these years, I have been so focused on what we weren’t that I never took the time to appreciate what we were. I hadn’t thought back on that night for years and now, my heart breaks knowing that his bright eyes will only ever be a memory to me. It is so easy to get caught up in life and forget that it isn’t guaranteed, to forget to appreciate what we have. We are naturally entitled in the way we just assume that tomorrow will always come.

  I watch my tears fall onto the black material of my dress and realize that I haven’t even showered or changed clothes since Sunday. I gently lay his jacket on our bed and walk to the shower.

  I let my own tears mix with the water and I can still smell the lingering scent of his body wash. Thinking of how much I loved this shower, it just seems so meaningless compared to the family that we never started. Carson will never get to be a father. We will never start a family. I had thought we had so much time. He and I both wanted to wait and I know that our reasoning was the same even though we would have never admitted it to each other. Deep down, we both knew that we would not have been good parents because we wouldn’t have been a good example of what a marriage should be.

  I pull on a pair of gray jersey pants and my old college t-shirt and grab his jacket before going back into the living room. I wrap it around me and turn on the coffee pot, feeling a guilty freedom in the elastic waistband. Carson would have never let me wear sweatpants during the day. “Women were created to be beautiful. It is your obligation to honor that, Chloe,” he would say. I hated it, but what woman wouldn’t?

  My eye catches the dirty wine glass that still lays in the sink and I think of Rosalie and the dreaded conversation that is inevitable. I don’t think she was necessarily fond of Carson. There were many times I would catch her mumbling Spanish rants when Carson would walk away after criticizing her for something minuscule. Each time, it brought a hearty smile to my face and I wished that I knew how to speak her language. Carson didn’t treat her like a person, but more like an appliance in the way he just expected the job to be done without any real communication or meaningful interactions. But Rosalie is still a very sensitive woman. She is nearly sixty years old and her heart is always kind, which leaves her vulnerable. Regardless of her opinion of Carson, the news is going to be hard for her to hear.

  I’ve always enjoyed talking with Rosalie. She is an interesting and well-travelled woman with a lot of stories to tell, and I happened to have a lot of time to listen. She told me once about her son, Carlos who lives in Venezuela with his wife and four small children. Carlos is forty-two, much older than me and Carson. So, Rosalie always treated me like a child because her own is fifteen years older than me. I assume she views Carson the same way which is why I think she will be emotional, imagining what it would be like to lose her own son so tragically.

  I stop when I open the cabinet to see Carson’s favorite coffee mug sitting next to mine. It really is insignificant which has always made me wonder why he was so adamant about Rosalie keeping it washed and dried. He didn’t want water marks staining the black ceramic. Which was one of the many beginnings to Rosalie’s Spanish rants. I slowly shut the cabinet and try to not think about how that coffee cup will sit there unused now, or even how those coffee cups had a closer relationship than me and my husband. The coffee pot shakes in my hand and I watch the steam rolling around the brim of the mug, remembering the rolling fog from my dream.

  “Damnit,” I mumble, reaching for a towel to clean the result of my trance like train of thought.

  I hear a quiet chiming sound as something falls to the tile. I reach down to pick up a golden hoop earring that has a small hanging diamond. I hold it up to study it. This is not my earring. I would never wear yellow gold. The kind of woman that wears red lipstick would wear yellow gold. And we pay Rosalie very well, but it is unlikely she would spend the money on this kind of jewelry. I shove it into my jacket pocket and stand at the patio door looking out over the coast, staring at the infinitive horizon.

  A knock comes on the door causing me to drop the coffee. It lands loudly against the tile and the mug busts into several small pieces. I jump away as the hot coffee spills onto my feet and look back to the door.

  “Who is
it?”

  “It’s me,” Mila calls back.

  I open the door to her overzealous smile and she holds out a bag of bagels, “I thought you would probably need me to make sure you eat.”

  “Thank you,” I smiled half-heartedly and moved to let her in.

  “How are you?”

  I bitterly thought of what a ridiculous question that was. My husband was having an affair and oh yeah, was just found dead tucked away behind a tree line in the park. I think the how I am doing part would be a bit obvious but I know that she is just trying to be a good friend. “I just don’t know how to feel right now,” I admitted, sitting next to her at the table. “I am just so mad at him, at everything honestly. But I don’t want to be. I know it isn’t right to be so angry with him now.”

  “Sometimes people make mistakes, Chloe. It just isn’t fair that you will never get to hear his explanation.”

  But I don’t want to hear his explanation. Hearing why he chose to have an affair was not going to take away from that betrayal. If anything, him having an explanation at all would make it even harder. I would like to think there was no explanation, that he had no idea why he had done it.

  “What would you do if Brian had an affair? Would you forgive him?” I asked.

  She paused and I knew that I had made her uncomfortable by bringing up the idea of infidelity in her own marriage. “I don’t know what I would do, but I know that I would have wanted to talk with him about it to understand his reasoning,” she said.

  That isn’t a possibility for me now. And even if he were still here, would we even have talked about it at all? Three years ago, I had gotten a phone call from my Behavioral Theories professor asking if I would speak on a paper I authored on personality and emotional behaviors. I couldn’t wait to tell Carson about it, but when he got home, he went straight to the balcony without even acknowledging me. I followed him out and tried telling him but his thoughts were somewhere very far from me. I realized that night that we no longer connected, emotionally or intellectually. Meaningful conversations were something of our past. Talking, actually talking, about anything important was not likely.

  “I hate to bring this up, Chloe, but are they even sure it was lipstick?” asked Mila.

  “Yeah, I mean, I think so. I saw it. It had to have been lipstick.”

  “Well, maybe it was then.” Her words were sharper than usual. “Also, I really think you should consider staying with us. I hate thinking about you being here alone.”

  “Mila, I will be fine.”

  A sweet whiff of cinnamon and butter floated up when I opened the bag of bagels. My stomach growled from my lack of food the past couple days and I silently praised Mila for bringing me a small salvation.

  “How long do you think he was having an affair?” I ask her, watching her eyes fill with discomfort.

  “I don’t know, Chloe. But it doesn’t mean he loved you any less.”

  I took a bite of the bagel and thought about how she could even say that. How could it possibly mean anything other than that? That is the exact definition of an affair, that you love your spouse less than you did when you vowed yourself to only them. Or at least that is what I think it means.

  Another knock came at the door and I looked to Mila desperately. She smiled at me and stood to open it. “Hello…” she said uneasily. I turned to see a strangely familiar man breathing heavily outside my door. The bagel lumped in my mouth while I watched him struggling to steady himself. “Mila, they took Brian. They arrested him!”

  Chapter Four

  Mila stood staring out the front door long after the messenger had left. My half-chewed bite of bagel now lay in a mushy mess on my napkin and I sat, hands shielding my eyes, trying to make sense of everything. Brian had been arrested. My husband’s best friend and business partner had just been arrested for his murder. I studied Psychology, not law, but I know that they cannot make an arrest on instinct alone. There was some piece of evidence somewhere that tied Brian to the murder.

  “I am leaving,” I told Mila, going straight to the garage without waiting on her.

  I was backing out when she jumped into the passenger seat. “This is not right, Chloe. This is all wrong.”

  Yeah, no shit. I was driving a woman to the police station to see her husband that had just been arrested for murdering mine. No. It wasn’t right. Before we made it to the first red light, Mila was on the phone trying to hire a lawyer and my heart rate was on the verge of exploding.

  There was only one news crew at the police station and I took that as a win. I ran inside the station and said to the man with the terrible comb over, “I need to speak to Detective Burns,” in an unintentionally raised voice that drew the entire right side of the room’s eyes to me. The wiry red haired man tilted his head back far enough that I could see the unpleasant view of his nose hairs and his eyes pursed uncomfortably. “Well?” I asked impatiently.

  “She is busy.”

  “How long is she going to be busy? Has there been a development in the case?”

  “Like I said, she is busy. You can have a seat if you would like to wait,” he winked, and waved his unusually soft looking hand toward the chair in front of his desk.

  Mila ran to my side, which just caused the smile on Detective Creep’s face to grow. And I grabbed Mila’s arm to walk away. I heard him grunt when we turned away and I pictured him to look like a bull, a very ugly bull. Mila and I sat on the same metal bench in the hall as we had the day before during Brian’s interrogation. “That man probably has women in his basement,” I told Mila. She looked strangely at me and I knew that her dense and dull sense of humor was struggling to come up with an appropriate response. Mila is the kind of woman who is very sweet, but not very intuitive. A lot of things have to be spelled out for her. She lacks the ability to read people and was now sitting next to me trying to decide if I was being literal.

  Detective Burns finally stepped out of the room where they were holding Brian and waved for me to follow her. Mila stood with me and the detective quickly and impolitely dismissed her. I smiled back uncomfortably to Mila and followed Detective Burns into another room next to where they were holding Brian.

  “What is going on?”

  She pulled out her cigarettes and slid the pack across to me. I stared down at them, and shook my head rapidly. I wasn’t interested in filling my lungs with tar, I was interested in what the hell was going on in the other room.

  “We are holding Brian Whitmore for his involvement in your husband’s murder. He has asked for a lawyer and has stopped talking. So unfortunately, right now there is not much information I can give you.” She casually shrugged her shoulders and fell into the chair.

  “Well why do you think he was involved?” I asked as I sat down across from her.

  “The shoe print at the scene, it is the same size shoe as Brian’s.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. There could be thousands of men with the same shoe size in Rhode Island.” I didn’t want it to be Brian. I didn’t want that print to be his. I didn’t want there to be a print at all, but if there was, it couldn’t be Brian’s. Please God, don’t let it Brian’s.

  “Yeah, that is true. But your husband’s cell phone GPS only led us to one of them.”

  “What!? Brian has Carson’s cell phone?” I asked, completely astounded by it even being a possibility.

  “Not on his person. But it is somewhere on his property. We can only narrow it down to an approximate location, not exact.”

  “Oh, my God. This cannot be happening. This just…it just cannot be Brian.” I watched him crying yesterday. I saw that brokenness in his eyes. He was heartbroken, not guilty. “Wait, what if the murderer threw the phone as he was leaving the scene? Brian and Mila do live right by the park. That is possible, right?”

  “Chloe, I am not saying one way or the other. We have Brian here for questioning only. Because he has requested council, we may not get any of those questions answered. We are working on a sea
rch warrant in order to find your husband’s phone. I suspect a lot of the pieces will fall in line when we do.”

  She smashed her cigarette into the metal ashtray between us and jumped to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said, hurrying out of the room. And I turned to watch her shaking the lawyer’s hand in the hall before they disappeared back into the room with Brian. I sat and stared at the cigarette paper disintegrating to ash until it finally went out and walked out to sit with Mila again.

  Either the lawyer was exceptional, or they didn’t have anything on Brian because within ten minutes, Brian was walking out. Mila jumped for him but he walked right passed her and grabbed me in his arms. This time Mila wasn’t only stiff, she let out a long drawn out sigh and turned her back to us like she was a child who had just been put in time out.

  “Chloe, I need you to know that I had nothing to do with this,” Brian said, his voice was stern but his eyes were glistening with tears forming in them. “I know what they are saying looks bad, but I swear to you, Chloe, I have no idea what happened.”