“Everything’s okay.” Mark moves to the spot where the man stood just a moment ago. “The mountain does that sometimes. They’re called microseismic events…” He can’t see anything. The man has left no trace. Even the wet earth—there should be footprints—appears untouched.
He turns back to the kids. “Everything’s okay,” he repeats. “I would know if there was any real danger. My frogs would tell me.”
But their faces aren’t convinced.
On the hike back to the car Mark’s alert to every twig snap, every rustle of an animal in the brush. The trees and rocks and logs have taken on a sinister cast. When they reach the Jeep, he hurries the kids into their seats. He locks the doors, blasts the heat, and puts the car in gear. A creeping doubt has come over him. He told the kids the microseismic event meant nothing. It happened all the time. And that was true. But the two things have become ominously linked in his mind—the shaking and the man. The shaking, the man. He pulls away from the trailhead and speeds down the mountain, his tires hissing on the wet road.
SIX
WHEN SAMARA GETS home she finds her father in the kitchen, kneeling in front of a low drawer, Tupperware piled on the floor beside him. She perches in a chair at the kitchen table and watches him try to match clear Tupperware bottoms to blue or green or red tops. She turns the lazy Susan in the center of the table and her mother’s pill containers go round and round with an uneven squeak. “What are you doing?”
“Cleaning. How was your listing appointment?”
“It was Mrs. Kells’s house. Remember her?”
“I remember how beautifully you used to play her piano.” He gives up matching tops and bottoms, gathers the Tupperware, and drops it into an empty cardboard box. “Does her husband still live there?”
“Nobody lives there. What are you doing with those?”
“Just sorting through some things. What’s the condition of the house?”
“Dated.” She chooses a word her mother would use. “Almost like no one ever lived there…” She thinks of the sunburst doorbell, the pastel bathroom tiles.
“Tough sell?”
She draws herself up. “I’ll be able to sell it, no problem.” She affects a confidence she doesn’t feel.
“Sammy, you don’t have to carry on with it. She didn’t expect you to.”
She turns the whining lazy Susan again.
“You’ll be wanting to get back to your life in Seattle.” He opens another drawer, this one full of napkin rings. Metal, wood, glass, ceramic; little beads dangle from some, miniature silver squirrels adorn others. He takes them out, one by one, and sets them on the counter.
“If I leave who’s going to stop you?” She grabs one of the squirrel napkin rings and holds it protectively.
“Stop me from what?”
“From pitching it all out.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“You are.”
“I’m organizing.”
“You always hated the clutter, and now you’re thrilled to get rid of it.”
His face sags. “I’d carry every object in this house on my back if it meant I could have one more day with your mother.”
“She cared about this stuff.”
He takes the squirrel napkin ring from her and frowns at it. “Did she?”
“Why can’t they stay in that drawer?” She points at the open cabinet. “It’s not like we need to use it for anything else.”
He picks up the box of mismatched Tupperware. “They’re just things, Sammy. They’re not her.”
After her father leaves the house, Samara turns on the kettle. She doesn’t understand him. How he can be so calm, so methodical, so practical. He’s not angry at all. Out the kitchen window Ginny and Mark’s driveway shines with rain. Ginny’s probably at the hospital right now, going about her day, like she’s done nothing wrong. Samara imagines her striding down the hallway in her white coat followed by three or four residents. She pictures her face, with no makeup and an arrogant expression.
The kettle clicks off. She opens the cabinet where they keep the tea, and where this morning there were at least twenty containers. Now there are three. She starts to open another cabinet, and the mountain rumbles. She has a bad taste in her mouth.
She hears the tapping of a woodpecker from outside. But it’s too loud to be a woodpecker. Out the window, in the front yard—
A woman hammers a FOR SALE sign into the bright grass with a large mallet. A pink and orange scarf drapes her shoulders; a long brown braid swishes down her back. Her mother. Her mother is out in the yard. She looks…like herself. Before she got sick. Tamp, tamp, tamp. She drives the sign into the ground with gusto.
Samara presses her hands to one pane of glass and then another, her eyes fixed on the figure outside. When she reaches the front door, she grasps the handle and swings it wide. She lunges into the front yard before she realizes…she’s gone. The yard’s empty. There’s no Ashmina. No FOR SALE sign. No mallet. Just a stretch of bright green lawn littered with big yellow leaves.
Samara stands in the yard and stares at the spot where her mother appeared until her bare feet turn numb in the wet grass. Until her new neighbor, Cass, comes out of her house with her dog. She waves at Samara as she passes. Samara doesn’t wave back. She hurries into the house and locks herself inside.
* * *
—
Mark lingers in Noah’s room at bedtime. He asks him about the book he’s reading, and he changes the bulb in the lizard-shaped night-light he no longer needs. All the while, the man he saw, the Other Mark, haunts him, harasses him. Demands his attention.
The Other Mark keeps asking and asking and asking the same question. What’s going to happen, Mark, what?
What?
What?
His evening routines—feeding the cats, checking the doors are locked and the garage shut—provide no relief. He tries to drown out the questions with the television, switching between Nova on PBS and CNN. But nothing holds his attention. The news is tame tonight, the world quiet.
He goes into his study, sits down at his computer, and curses the fact that he has no recording of this morning’s Pond F video feed. He’s certain the man he saw was the same man from the feed.
He opens the real-time data from his frog ponds, E, F, L, and P, little green dots flickering against a gray screen. They’re all there, within a few yards of the ponds. He watches the green specks creep, a quarter of an inch this way, a quarter of an inch that way, for a long time.
When he goes upstairs just after eleven, Ginny’s in bed reading. He lies down on the bed with his clothes still on, and props himself up on his elbow. He stares at his wife’s unpolished fingernails, their perfect pink half-moons. He thinks about all the pale skin under her fuzzy robe, warm and smooth, covered in tiny hairs. He feels possessive of that skin. It’s always too covered up. If he could just run his hands across her shoulders, inside her elbows and her knees, over the shallow dimple at the top of her rump, he’s certain that would quiet the Other Mark, would silence the constant what what what’s?
“Are you coming to bed?” She rests her hand on his shoulder for a too-brief moment.
“In a minute.” He reaches under the covers and tugs at the tie of her robe. “Mark.” She nudges his hand away. “This is the first time I’ve sat down all day.”
The skin under her eyes appears bruised. She never gets enough sleep.
“Did you eat any dinner?” he asks.
“I had a bowl of soup in the doctors’ lounge.”
“That’s not a real dinner.”
She shrugs. “I’d rather sleep than eat.”
“You’re not sleeping now.”
On the cover of her book two figures stand together on a snowy street, their coats drawn around them.
“Did you have th
e meeting about Ashmina?” he asks. “What did they say?”
“It was—” She runs her hand over her face. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
One of the cats scratches at the door and he stands up to let him in. “Tell me.”
“You haven’t said anything about your talk.”
Mark hesitates. “It was all right.”
She turns off her light. “Was the dean there?”
Mark doesn’t answer. The Other Mark’s dirty face surfaces in his mind.
“And what’s the story with the mold?” Ginny’s eyes are closing. “It’s just one room, right?”
“That they’ve found.” He thinks of Livi’s arm around Noah’s waist. “It makes you wonder what else is slipping through the cracks at that school.”
“If you’re that concerned we can tour the private school again,” she says.
He sighs. “They don’t have football, and you know what Noah will say about that.”
Ginny rolls over and her breathing slows. “I’m sure they’ll figure it out,” she murmurs.
“Yeah,” he says flatly. He gets up and goes into the bathroom, closes the door without switching on the light.
In the dark bathroom, away from Ginny’s skin, he feels tired and dull. Shaves of light sneak through the window blinds—his new neighbors, Cass and Amar, have left their porch light on again. Rain patters softly on the roof. He turns on the shower.
In the half-light the tiled shower is a pearly gray cave. He undresses. There’s a funny feeling, down at the base of his spine. He stands, naked, leaning forward against the shower door. As he waits for the water to warm, the floor shakes; he tastes metal. Headlights sweep the window blinds, and there’s the sound of an idling engine—
Outside his Jeep is running. He approaches the window. Someone sits inside the Jeep, the man. The Other Mark. His mouth is a thin dark line behind the rain-speckled windshield. His head twitches nervously back and forth. Mark backs away, nausea rising in his throat. He crouches down and grips the toilet’s cold porcelain. He tells himself to turn around. He needs to see everything there is to see.
He gets up, his hand clamped over his mouth. He moves to the window again. But the Jeep’s headlights are off. Its engine is quiet, still. He stares hard at the front seat. There’s no one there.
* * *
—
Ginny’s phone buzzes and she grabs for it without opening her eyes. She blinks in its blue glow. It’s not work, but a text from Edith.
I waited for you after our case last night. Where did you go?
Ginny’s thumb hovers over the screen. The sound of the shower comes from the bathroom. She starts to type, stops, and then deletes. There’s a flutter in her chest. She turns to Mark’s empty side of the bed, and remembers how Edith appeared in that exact spot last night. What she looked like with her hair down, how she reached for Ginny. The shower switches off in the bathroom. Ginny sets her phone aside.
She wonders where Edith is right now. Her house is a yellow bungalow near the university. She’s been there a few times. It’s small, just a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms. It has old-fashioned radiators that click when the heat comes on. Ginny pictures Edith by the kitchen sink, wearing patterned pajama pants and a tank top; she wipes the counters with a dishcloth. Then she puts the cloth down and picks up her phone, expecting Ginny’s reply.
Ginny presses her cheek into her pillow. She feels it beside her—her phone, the unanswered text. She feels Edith in her kitchen, her phone in her hand, waiting.
* * *
—
Mark opens the bathroom door a crack. He should wake Ginny. But instead he turns off the water, gets dressed, and walks unsteadily through the bedroom, past her sleeping form. In the hall he pauses at Noah’s room, watches the rise and fall of his breathing under the covers, and shuts his door tight. Downstairs he pulls on a pair of hiking boots and a raincoat and goes outside. His Jeep sits in the driveway. He shakes his head and walks around it. He touches the hood. Cold. He peers in the front seat, the backseat. Empty.
His neighbors’ light is off now. The three houses in the cul-de-sac are in shadow. Above them the mountain rises up, dark and dense, menacing. The Other Mark is up there somewhere. He might even be watching him, right now, from the trees. Mark backs away from the forest; he goes into the house and locks himself inside.
SEVEN
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT an angry electronic wail wakes Cass from a deep, thirsty sleep. The dog noses open the door and sits, waiting, at her side of the bed. “Hi, Boo-Bear,” she croaks. She swings her legs to the floor, and as she feels her way down the dark hallway her breasts grow taut with a tingling ache.
The baby’s room smells like Burt’s Bees diaper cream and spit-up. In her crib, Leah’s face is a furious scrunch. Scooping her up, Cass settles into the rocking chair and props the baby to her breast. At the first pulling suck, a delicious relief spreads across her chest. Leah’s tiny face is determined now.
“You’re a hungry little teacup,” Cass murmurs. “Yes you are, yes you are.”
She rocks, Leah sucks. The sound machine goes washhha washhha washhha from the corner of the room, a simulacrum of a mother’s heartbeat in the womb. The dog circles three times and settles himself on the floor.
Soon the rhythm of Leah’s sucking slows. Then, as if sensing Cass’s fingers hovering close, ready to unlatch her lips, she starts up again. Cass pushes the rocker back with her heels, stretches her bare toes long. She strokes Leah’s patchy hair with one hand and draws the curtain open with the other.
A single humming streetlamp lights the circle of wet pavement outside. To the left is Mrs. Mehta’s blue ranch with shrubs that crowd its small windows and a FOR SALE sign stuck in the front lawn. To the right, Mark and Ginny’s split-level with new cedar shingles and a satiny black garage door. A couple of tennis balls glow from the grass out front, spots of neon in the darkness.
Most nights, when Cass is up with Leah, it feels like she’s the only person awake in the world. There’s something clandestine about it, as if the nighttime is an exotic locale only she’s been granted access to. But tonight it just feels lonely. The note Robby wrote on her old paper tugs at her.
She remembers what it felt like to write that paper—when she was twenty and reading Plato and Aristotle and Longinus, Descartes and Kant and Hume in Philosophy 305. Robby was thinner, then, with hair more brown than gray. Surrounded by twenty copies of Critique of Pure Reason, splayed open on the table like orange tepees, he held his glasses aloft in his hand and danced them through the air to punctuate his sentences. Nothing in that impossibly dense book scared him. Sitting at the wooden seminar table, with Robby at its head, it felt possible to solve the biggest philosophical problems—the existence of the soul, the nature of beauty, the concept of free will—in the span of a ninety-minute class. Like they could be the ones to accomplish what every other philosopher had tried and failed to do—to discover the theory that would explain all theories, what Robby called a TOE, a Theory of Everything.
Leah’s eyelashes flutter; she stops sucking, and then starts again. Cass pulls the curtain farther and she’s startled to see that tonight she’s not the only one awake. Her neighbor Mark sits inside his muddy Jeep.
When they first moved in, she saw Mark all the time. He loaned them things: a ladder, a rake. He brought over sacks of tomatoes from his garden. But she hasn’t seen him in weeks. She assumed he was away on a research trip, like Amar.
He makes no move to get out of his car. Its headlights make two yellow circles on his shiny garage door. How long has he been there? It feels like he’s butting in on a private moment. Taking up space in her nighttime. Of course, he thinks he’s alone. Maybe it’s her who’s interfering with his private moment, and when she thinks about it like that, staring at him through the window feels uncomfortably intimate.
> Leah’s almost asleep now. Her mouth moves halfheartedly. Cass pulls her upright, pats her back with a firm thump, and a series of small burps ripples through her body. Her eyes close. Her little puffs of breath make warm, wet patches on Cass’s skin.
She’s about to start the slow process of rising, walking to the crib, and laying Leah down, when the baby starts to wriggle. Cass stands and bounces her in her arms, trying to get another burp out. But Leah cries out, and lifts her head up with a strength Cass hasn’t seen. She arches her back and her little body looks like it’s curled the wrong way, like a backward C.
As her cries turn to open-mouthed wails, Cass’s breasts tingle and spark. A tender spot below her diaphragm contracts. The dog wakes and lumbers up from the floor. She bounces Leah more energetically. She sits down and rocks her. But the baby only cries harder. It’s painful to watch her pink, squeezed face; even her scalp is flushed. Cass swings her in her arms, which calms her for only a few seconds. She tries to nurse her, but Leah won’t latch. She walks her around the house, slowly at first, and then faster. She thinks about what she ate and drank that could be bothering Leah. Only one cup of weak tea. She had two tomato slices on her sandwich at lunch—could that be it?
In her next circuit, she retrieves her phone from the bedroom and taps out an email to Amar while holding the baby over her shoulder and swaying side to side as if she’s being buffeted by a windstorm.
Dear Amar,
The baby won’t go back to sleep. The baby won’t go back to sleep! It’s almost 1 A.M. I’ve been pacing the house for forty-five minutes. How long can a baby cry? An hour, two? THREE?
Love,
Cass
Every time she slows down, Leah starts back up. She can’t do this all night—can she? Wet spots form in the cups of her nursing tank. Her arms are weary, her bare feet cold. At the bottom of her throat there’s a panicky tightness.
If, Then Page 5