Limetown

by Cote Smith

  As he walked across his room—an attic Jacob had converted into the world’s smallest loft, the floor creaked. Or was that someone on the stairs?

  “Emile?” Claire said.

  He turned to hide his bag. “Oh,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. Jacob got called into work. I’m going to be late for class.”

  “You need a babysitter.”

  “I’ll find someone. It’s—so . . . you’re leaving?”

  She looked tired. After taking the spring semester off, Claire jumped back into school, enrolling in extra summer classes to make up for lost time. Really, she had explained, it was a lost life. Emile had overheard her discussing it with Jacob one night. The goal was to finish school as quickly as possible, land a good job with a solid salary and benefits for the whole family. No more paying the pediatrician in cash.

  Emile put his bag down. “How many classes?”

  “Four,” Claire said. “Back to back. The last is a lab.”

  They had talked like this before, about their day-to-day lives. Emile never said much, but he did ask courtesy questions—How was the baby doing? Did she sleep?—and in this way they sketched an existence.

  “I’ll watch her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s one more day.”

  He had never been alone with the baby before. After Claire left that morning, when it was just Emile, and Lia, staring wide-eyed at him from the floor, the house was strangely quiet. This lasted for exactly thirty seconds, at which point Lia began to cry, as if she needed to let the whole world know that the man in front of her was in no way qualified to take care of another human being.

  Emile did everything he’d seen Claire do to get her to stop. He picked Lia up and bounced her in his arms. He swaddled. He cradled. He made disingenuous funny faces. None of it worked. He carried her around the house, making laps—kitchen, living room, hallway, bedroom; bedroom, hallway, living room, kitchen—and the only time the crying waned was when they walked by the living room window. It was the only window in the house with its curtains drawn open, and for whatever reason, the filtered daylight appeased Lia. Emile stopped. He bounced her in that spot for over an hour, until his arms deadened, and he had to drag a rocking chair over so he could camp out in front of the window. They spent the rest of the morning like that: Lia, finally calm; Emile, statue still, too afraid to move.

  She eventually fell asleep. Emile was thankful, but bored. He stared out the window, his one-channel color television, which gave him a clear view of the neighbor’s house, their own window, the curtains of which were pulled shut. He glanced at the clock in the kitchen. Not even noon. He played with Lia’s hands, wrapped her tiny fingers around his thumb. They were a tiny version of her mother’s. Emile tried to imagine what Lia would be like when she grew up. He took each feature and stretched it into adulthood, then gave her Claire’s intelligence, her craftiness. Of course, it was possible she would inherit the worst of her parents. Claire’s duplicity, her indifference; Jacob’s cowardice. Lia could end up the sum of her parents’ most awful parts, and Emile thought it would be exactly what they deserved.

  He turned back to the window to see that the curtains of the neighbor’s window had been drawn open, giving Emile a clear view into their home. A moment later, the neighbor wife appeared in the neighbor window. She sat down at a bedroom vanity. She pouted her lips to apply a shocking shade of red lipstick, only to frown at her reflection, wipe her mouth clean, and start the entire process over. Emile felt as though he shouldn’t watch, but there was nothing else for him to do. If he moved, he might wake Lia. When the wife was done making faces, done pulling on her ears and scrunching her nose, she sang into her brush, swaying back and forth to a private tune. Was this what she did all day?

  Eventually the performance ended, and the wife disappeared from the window. When she returned twenty minutes later, her hair was pulled back into a loose bun and her face was more modestly made up. She had a glass of water in her hand and she used it to swallow a pill. Afterward, she stared at herself in the vanity mirror, then calmly picked up a nail file and traced it across her throat.

  Emile jumped out of his seat.

  “Hey!” he shouted, involuntarily. Lia woke up. She began to cry, skipping the whimpering and going straight to a scream. Emile pleaded with her to be quiet. He offered her the pacifier, and when she finally accepted it, when Emile could look back up, the wife was staring at him. The nail file had not drawn blood; it didn’t even leave a mark. Emile felt his face redden.

  The woman waved at him, then closed the curtain.

  * * *

  When Claire got home a few hours later, Emile told her about the neighbor.

  “Who, Sue? Susie Q?”

  “I guess.”

  “That’s odd. She’s always seemed pretty boring to me. Robert too. Couple of real normals.”

  Emile tried to shake the thought off. He didn’t tell Claire that he’d spent the rest of the afternoon peeking through windows, first in the living room, then in the kitchen. He even went outside and thought about sneaking up to the neighbor’s house to see if he could see anything. And he would have, if he weren’t watching Lia. But there was something off about Sue. He kept picturing the placid way she’d looked at him after he saw her put the nail file to her throat. She reminded him of the woman at the Eldridge, the one who’d given him the shot during his final experiment with Brenda.

  “We could have them over for dinner,” Claire said. “That way you could get a better read on them.” Emile shook his head. “Well, what do you care? Your bag’s packed, right?”

  But he didn’t leave. He volunteered to watch Lia the following day. Claire didn’t push it; she and Jacob needed the help.

  “I think she likes you,” Claire said.

  A wide-awake Lia stared at her uncle. Emile had forgotten she was there.

  “She just likes to be held,” he said.

  * * *

  The following morning, Emile returned with Lia to the window. He knocked on the glass when he saw Sue sit at the vanity and take out the nail file. “Hey,” he said. “Hey!” Lia stirred in his arms. With one arm, Emile raised the window.

  Sue finally heard him. She came to her window and lifted it open.

  “Hello neighbor,” she said.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sue looked at the nail file, back at the vanity. She smiled sheepishly. “Oh, you caught me,” she said. She shook her head in fake shame. “But I just love Patsy Cline. I have all her records. Robert doesn’t care for them, so I have to do all my singing while he’s at work.”

  “I saw you,” Emile said. “Yesterday.”

  Sue’s smile did not falter, though something flickered in her eyes. A small alarm, maybe. “Did you like it? If you didn’t like it, maybe you shouldn’t be watching.”

  Her mind washed to a memory. It was nighttime. She stood before a door, turned its engraved brass knob. Steam wafted out. It was a bathroom. Robert, her husband, stood in front of the mirror, shaving with a straight razor. His face was covered with cuts, small nicks along his cheeks, across his throat. He did nothing to stop the bleeding. He wiped the steam off the mirror, and when he saw Sue’s shocked face, he said, “If you don’t like it, maybe you shouldn’t be watching.” Sue shut the door, her hand lingering just long enough.

  “Where are you from?” Emile asked.

  Sue tilted her head at the subject change. “Omaha.”

  “And your husband?”

  “He’s from Virginia. Like Patsy Cline.”

  “Why did you come here?” Sue looked at him with that placid expression, and Emile recalled the night he met her and Robert, when he first returned to Lawrence. How calm they had seemed, even though it was late at night and he was yelling at Jacob’s house with a rock in his hand.

  “What do you mean? To the window?”

  A car door slammed. Sue’s thoughts shifted to her husband, coming h
ome from work. “I better go,” she said. “It was nice seeing you, Emile.”

  She shut the window. Emile did not see her the rest of the week.

  * * *

  The doorknob. The initials, at first obscured by Sue’s hand, but when she took her palm away, there they were. SE. Shalor Eldridge.

  Emile tried explaining it to Claire, catching her in the kitchen that night. She was making dinner, peeling potatoes and dumping them in a pot. She wore an apron and, standing over the sink, looked so domestic, something Emile could have never imagined when they first met.

  “You know I don’t like calling people paranoid,” she said. “Especially people who have a right to be paranoid.” She took out another pot and filled it with water. “So they went to the Eldridge? It’s not that long a drive, as I’m sure you remember.”

  “Did I tell you I went back there? Do you know who’s in char—?”

  Claire held her hand up, cutting him off. “Emile. Stop. It’s probably just a coincidence.”

  She didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted, what, to pretend that that part of her life never happened? Emile stepped behind her. Outside the kitchen window, Jacob was overseeing the grill. Emile watched his brother, to see if he would turn around.

  “Emile,” she said.

  Emile took a breath. Her hair still smelled the same, the same flower he didn’t know the name of. Eucalyptus, maybe. He’d once read that it meant well-hidden.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me.”

  Claire turned around and faced Emile. It was the closest they’d been since she left him. She put her hand to his chest. “Please. He’ll see.” She pushed him away, gently, a small reminder that she had chosen his brother. That she would continue to choose him.

  Emile retreated. He stayed in the attic through dinner. His bag remained packed, watching him from the corner. He was kidding himself, wasn’t he, by staying here. His feelings would never change. The bitterness, the jealousy. Why did he have such a tough time letting go? He lay there in the attic, as Claire and Jacob dined happily below, clacking their dishes, cleaning their plates. Afterward, they would settle down to bathe Lia and read stories to her, before tucking her, then each other, into bed.

  He should leave. Make a promise he had no intention of keeping and dare Claire to call him on it. He knew she was counting on him to watch Lia again tomorrow. Maybe when she came to wake him, he’d be gone, his bed in the attic neatly made, a note resting on his pillow. Wait here, it could say. I’ll be right back.

  All this he imagined.

  Instead she came to him in the middle of the night. He was nearly asleep when she appeared, in between blinks. She lay next to him. The floral smell from before was even stronger. Her hair was wet. She had just gotten out of the shower, even though it was after midnight. He had loved her once, he was sure of it, but now his feelings were more complicated: he loved the life she had given his brother, and, for whatever reason, could not get over the fact that it could have been him.

  “This is my life now,” Claire said. “This is how it turned out.”

  “You act like it’s over.”

  Claire rolled on her back. She stared at the ceiling as if it were made of stars. “Part of it needs to be.”

  “I know what I saw,” Emile said. “Sue’s been there. At the Eldridge.”

  “So what?” Claire said. “If you think they’re spies or something, then do something about it. You don’t need me.”

  “But I want you,” Emile said, before he could stop the words from escaping his mouth. There was a long silence, long enough that Emile turned to Claire to make sure she was still there, that she hadn’t left him and gone back to Jacob.

  A loud cry erupted beneath them. Lia, waking for a night feeding.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said. “She needs me.”

  * * *

  That Sunday Claire invited Robert and Sue Gilmore out to the lake. Robert was out of town, with the baby; Sue readily accepted; Emile politely declined. He had other plans. The Gilmores left both the front and back doors locked, but not the bedroom window. Emile pushed it open by the frame, careful not to leave any fingerprints on the spotless pane, and pulled himself inside. The bedroom was as expected—a couple of dressers, his and hers, a neatly made bed, above which hung a framed cliché about love—I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart. Poetry that Emile might’ve appreciated once upon a time. Emile sat at the vanity and opened its drawers. He found the brush Sue sang into, and the nail file. The only thing missing were her pills.

  The hallway was lined with framed family photos of older relatives who lived in a more serious time. Their stern gazes followed Emile down the hall and into another bedroom Robert must have used as his office. Emile spent a good amount of time here, opening desk drawers, sifting through papers and folders, all of which revealed Robert to be a boring college professor, guilty of no crime other than recycling the same assignments year after year. There were no postcards from Archer Park, no Eldridge souvenirs.

  The room across from the office was some sort of art studio, presumably Sue’s, filled with unfinished sketches and paintings, jointed models and mannequins. Emile checked the living room, the kitchen, before realizing he had yet to find a single baby toy. He went back down the hall, turning on the light to make sure he didn’t miss a closed door. He glanced at the family photos, and here he noticed a strange thing. Robert and Sue were in none of them. Nor their baby. He returned to the art studio and turned on the light. Most of Sue’s work was quite good: a couple of watercolors, a few acrylics. In the corner behind an easel, Emile found a stack of what must have been dozens of charcoal portraits. He flipped through them, face after face, all of them strangers. Each face belonged to an adult, save one. Emile pulled the sheet out of the stack and held it up to the blue daylight. The face belonged to baby Lia, her eyes closed.

  He took the portrait with him back to Claire’s house, wondering why it existed. He should’ve looked more closely at the others. He’d flipped through them too quickly, but perhaps there were other faces he would’ve recognized. Claire, Jacob. Moyer, Brenda, Vince. He spent the rest of the day debating whether or not he should tell Claire about the portrait. Maybe he was making too big a deal of it. Maybe Claire had commissioned it. If he hadn’t looked inside Sue’s thoughts that day at the window, if he hadn’t seen her at the Eldridge with her husband, would he have thought anything of it?

  Finally, in the early evening, they returned. Emile climbed down the stairs, the portrait rolled up in his hand. He went into the living room, where Claire sat in the rocking chair, feeding Lia.

  “Look who it is,” a voice said. He had not seen the other figure in the room. Sue, sitting on the couch. “Mister I’m-too-good-for-a-good-time.” She grinned at him. “What do you have there?”

  Emile put the portrait behind his back.

  “Emile,” Claire said. “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing.” He should have turned and retreated to the attic. Instead, he said: “Actually, it’s a drawing I’ve been working on.”

  “I didn’t know you were an artist,” Claire said.

  “I picked up a thing or two when I lived in Colorado.”

  Claire arched an eyebrow, but Emile watched Sue, hoping that naming the state would trigger a memory.

  “Oh my god,” Sue said. “Robert loves Colorado. That’s where we met, you know. He drags me back there every chance he gets.”

  “Emile too,” Claire said. “Won’t stop talking about it, in fact.”

  Emile bristled. Claire knew what he was up to.

  “Have you ever visited Archer Park?” Claire asked Sue.

  “We have! They’ve got this spooky hotel, I forget what it’s called. We stayed there a couple of nights. Robert’s idea.” She leaned forward and cupped half her mouth. “Don’t tell Robert,” she whispered, “but I hated it. All that wood and wood paneling—seemed a bit dated to me.”

  “That’s too bad,” Cl
aire said. She shot a quick grin at Emile, as if to say I told you so, then excused herself to change Lia. “Don’t stop gossiping on my account. I’m sure you two have plenty to talk about.”

  After she disappeared down the hall, there was an uncomfortable silence. Alone with Sue, Emile felt unsure of himself, of his theory that Sue was somehow connected to the Eldridge just because she went there once with her husband. The longer he stood there, the more absurd he felt for breaking into their house and stealing her artwork.

  “Can I see?” Sue finally said. “Your drawing.”

  “It’s not finished.”

  Sue stood. “That’s okay.” She crossed the living room. “I have something of an eye myself, you know.” Emile kept the portrait behind him. “C’mon,” Sue said. “Please?” She put a hand on his chest, felt his jumping heart. “Or perhaps you’d like me to sing?”

  Emile froze as Sue slid the portrait from his hand. “Wait,” he said, but it was too late. She unfurled the portrait.

  “Oh my. This is very nice. Very . . . familiar. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  Sue held out the portrait, admiring her work. “There is something special about her, isn’t there? I mean, look at that face.” She handed Emile the picture and wandered over to the rocking chair, stood in front of the window. “Maybe the two of you can come over sometime and pose for me.”

  “Actually,” Emile said. “I might be leaving.”

  “Oh no,” Sue said. “But you seem happy here.”

  “Yes. Well.”

  Sue stared out the window at her own house. “You know, before we started a family, Robert and I made a point to see the world. We thought if we could see everything—Europe and the like—we wouldn’t have any regrets once we settled down and had kids. But I can tell you, we didn’t find anything out there. Nothing better than what we ended up having here.”