The Black Widow

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “All right, officer. Thanks so much. You have a great day now, okay?”

  Was the last part overkill? Alex wonders, carefully making a K-turn and making sure to use directional signals. Is being too polite and friendly a blatant red flag to the cop?

  Nah. People always tell each other to have a great day.

  Even if Alex were summoned back—and for what?—there’s nothing in the car that would alert the cop that anything is amiss. Even if the officer were to examine the contents of the plastic drugstore shopping bag on the passenger’s seat, there still wouldn’t be any reason for suspicion. Of course not.

  And of course it was Alex’s imagination—an overactive one, Carmen used to say—that the clerk back at the store had raised her eyebrow when she rang up the purchases: Advil, Band-Aids, Rolling Stone magazine, a pack of gum. Decoy items all, meant to distract attention from the main objective: an over-the-counter pregnancy test.

  “Find everything?” the clerk had asked—routine question, yet Alex worried for a moment that it was a precursor to something more probing, less discreet.

  But of course that was pure paranoia. No clerk would ever question a total stranger about something so personal.

  No clerk had any way of knowing that a random customer—paying with cash—had purchased the same test countless times before all over the tristate area.

  You have nothing at all to worry about. Just get home and take care of business.

  Alex keeps the speedometer precisely at the posted limit all the way up Bridge Road and around to the other side and stops at the intersection, staring unseeingly at the traffic light until it blurs and doubles. Now there are two red lights, glowing elliptical red, a disturbing reminder of—

  The light turns green and Alex drives on, past familiar rows of old maples framing well-kept suburban houses that line block after block here in Vanderwaal. Most of them are occupied by young, upper-middle-class families who can afford the astronomical housing costs and property taxes and who take advantage of the high quality public schools. The older people in the neighborhood, who lived here when Carmen was growing up, have either died off or retired someplace where the cost of living is low and the weather is warm.

  All is quieter than usual on Cherry Street this morning. It’s well within walking distance of Main Street, and the stroller-and-leash brigade has most likely headed out early to claim prime spots along the parade route.

  Noticing the flags flying from poles and porches, Alex makes a mental note to put up a flag, too, back home. There’s one somewhere in the basement.

  The basement.

  Back when the Realtor showed them the brick cape at 42 Cherry Street—long before Alex and Carmen were married—there were a couple of major selling points. One was that they’d be able to keep a close eye on Carmen’s aging mother, who lived alone in a house right down the street. Another was that it was affordable—smaller than most of the homes in the area, many of which had been renovated and enlarged.

  And then there was the basement. The house looked small from the outside, and it was small, with only two bedrooms tucked beneath the low, gabled ceilings of the second floor. But the basement was large and finished.

  “The family that lived here in the sixties added over five hundred square feet of living space when they turned this into a rec room,” the Realtor said, flicking a light switch and leading the way down the flight into a large open area where a familiar scent wafted in the air.

  Once, living in a rural foster home—not the gingerbread cottage—Alex had forgotten to roll up a backseat car window. It rained overnight, and the carpet and upholstery got soaked. After that the car’s interior was permeated by a strong mildew odor, much to the foster mother’s disgust and fury.

  The basement smelled the same way. It didn’t bring back good memories. But the added space was undeniably attractive.

  “This would make a great home gym,” Carmen mused, glancing around. “A treadmill, some weight machines . . .”

  “Absolutely!” the Realtor agreed, bobbing her blond head enthusiastically. “But let me show you the rest.”

  She was mostly talking to Alex, which annoyed Carmen. But Alex was the one buying the house, even though they had every intention of getting married at some point. Carmen was essentially broke at the time, facing massive loans for all those years of undergrad and graduate school. Alex had been working at the hospital for a few years by then and was financially solvent.

  The Realtor led them across the basement. The walls were paneled in brown wood, the floors covered in green indoor-outdoor carpeting that gave way to linoleum in one corner, where an old olive-green washer and dryer sat alongside a slop sink. Small horizontal rectangular windows were scattered high on three walls. On the fourth there was just a door.

  The Realtor opened it, and an even stronger dank smell greeted their nostrils. “Wait until you see this,” she trilled, as if she were about to reveal something utterly dazzling: a stocked wine cellar, or fully equipped home theater . . .

  “What is it?” Carmen asked, nose wrinkled, peering into the dank—apparently vacant—interior.

  “A bomb shelter. The house was built back in the cold war era. People were afraid Russia was going to drop a nuclear bomb.”

  Alex had seen the black and yellow fallout shelter signs on sturdy public buildings all over the city, but . . .

  “A nuclear bomb here?”

  The Realtor shrugged. “New York is always a major target, and we’re right in the suburbs. The assumption was that the radiation contamination would spread up here if the city were hit. People wanted to protect their families. Back in the day, this room was filled with canned goods, bottled water, lamps, cots, a space heater, even a toilet.”

  “That explains the smell,” Carmen murmured. “It’s even worse than cat.”

  The last house they’d looked at had smelled strongly of feline urine, and there was visible fur everywhere, though the pets—and their elderly owner—were long gone. Being severely allergic, Carmen had vetoed it immediately.

  “Oh, this is just musty and damp from being closed up for all these years,” the Realtor assured them as they sniffed around the bomb shelter room at 42 Cherry. “A dehumidifier would take care of it. But it’s a piece of history. Isn’t it fabulous?”

  Fabulous wasn’t quite the right word. Not back then.

  Not now either.

  Now . . .

  Well, the word godsend comes to mind.

  Alex never imagined, buying this house, that the underground bunker would ever be used for anything more than extra storage . . . and perhaps a conversation piece.

  But then, there were a lot of things Alex never imagined back in those days.

  Ordinarily at this hour Gaby would be forty-odd blocks south of here in her office on East 53rd Street, dealing with the usual deluge of Monday morning messages and e-mail.

  As a senior editor at Winslow Publishing, she technically works only Monday through Friday, but some of her authors assume she’s available 24/7, in keeping with their own unorthodox work schedules. E-mails and voice mails pour in all weekend long, sometimes increasingly frantic ones. Gaby learned early on that there are very few, if any, true editorial emergencies that require weekend attention, though a couple of literary divas might beg to differ.

  Today the office is closed for the holiday. Instead of tending to flooded in-boxes, she’s home, just pouring her first cup of coffee. According to the microwave clock it’s almost ten-thirty, which means she got . . .

  Let’s see, that would be a whole five hours’ sleep—six, counting the first hour.

  As always, she’d drifted off soon after climbing into bed at eleven, only to be jerked back to consciousness at midnight.

  She wasn’t awakened by a thunderstorm, though they were in the forecast last night. Nor was she alerted by the incessant sirens, horns, and car alarms in the street four stories below—she’s accustomed to city noise, having been born and raised in M
anhattan. And God knows it wasn’t Ben’s snoring that woke her.

  Back when they lived together that never bothered her—a claim that flummoxed both Ben’s older brother and his former college roommate, who only half jokingly presented her with noise-canceling headphones at their wedding rehearsal dinner.

  Back then she found the rhythmic sound of her husband’s snoring as soothing and reassuring as the warmth of his hand resting on her back as she drifted off. It wasn’t until later—toward the end of their marriage—that it filled her with rage.

  How, she’d wonder, could he be sleeping so soundly, as if nothing had happened? It wasn’t fair.

  His snoring, which wasn’t—and then was—a problem is no longer a problem. Not hers, anyway. Maybe it’s somebody else’s, in the new apartment he rented in their old neighborhood. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe he still sleeps alone, just as she does . . . when she actually manages to sleep.

  It’s been years since she made it through a night without waking in the wee hours. Two and a half years, to be exact.

  November twelfth—that was the day everything changed. The night everything changed.

  The night Joshua died.

  Her baby. Her beautiful baby with a cherubic face and a pile of soft black curls and round dark brown eyes so like her own and Ben’s—they looked alike, as so many married couples do, and so their son resembled both of them.

  Gaby abruptly lifts the cup she just filled from the carafe. Coffee splashes onto the countertop.

  She grabs a sponge to wipe it up right away. If she doesn’t, it’ll stain the ugly white laminate.

  Her old kitchen, the spacious one in the last apartment where she lived with Ben, had granite counters. The polished stone never stained.

  “See that?” Ben said when they first moved in. “This stuff is indestructible.”

  “Nothing is indestructible.”

  “Really? Look. You can set down a cookie sheet right out of the oven.”

  She cringed when he did just that, with a steaming tray of those horrible freezer french fries he loved so much. But soon enough she, too, was putting hot cookware directly on the counter.

  Then she moved in here, forgot, and did the same thing. Now there’s a faint scorch mark on the laminate that no amount of scrubbing will completely erase. Every time she looks at the scar, she thinks of those granite countertops, of Ben, of Josh . . .

  And she remembers that nothing—nothing—is indestructible.

  She tosses aside the sponge and lifts the coffee cup to her lips, sipping so that the cup won’t be so full. The liquid is hot—much too hot—burning the back of her tongue, blistering the roof of her mouth.

  Perhaps it will leave another scar. No shortage of those around here.

  Gaby carries the coffee away from the tiny kitchen alcove, past her unmade futon. When she moved into the studio six months ago, she promised herself that she’d fold up the pullout every morning and stash the bedding in the closet.

  She hasn’t done it once. Why bother? No one but Jaz has ever visited her here, and that was only once, when her cousin insisted on coming to see the new place.

  “It’s nice, mami,” Jaz said, handing over the potted plant she’d brought as a housewarming gift. “Tiny, but nice. With some curtains, some new furniture, pictures on the wall, it’ll be cute and cozy.”

  Maybe. But there are still no curtains, new furniture, or pictures. There is, however, plenty of evidence of her hobby, her livelihood, her passion—though passion is a strong word for anything that pertains to her life these days. But she’s an avid reader, and an editor. The shelves in her apartment are lined with books, and there are stacks of them everywhere—towering on the tables, on the floor, and, precariously, atop the cardboard carton shoved into the corner.

  Inside that box: a collection of Ben’s belongings. She never opened it, but she watched him pack it with his high school yearbook, old family photo albums, a few precious childhood toys, and his baseball card collection. Somehow it got mixed in with her belongings when they separated.

  She’s always meant to call him and tell him that she has it. But that would mean opening the door that had slammed shut between them, and she hasn’t felt ready to do that yet.

  The box is too large to tuck away on a closet shelf, and she’s not hardhearted enough to throw away his mementos, so there it sits, where she has to look at it every day, taking up four precious square feet of the apartment’s measly few hundred.

  Gaby sinks into a chair by the open window, clutching her coffee cup with both hands, stifling a yawn. She got more rest last night than she usually does, but it still wasn’t enough.

  An hour or so after drifting off she was awakened, as always, by a familiar stab of dread: the awareness that something was terribly wrong.

  If only it had happened that night, November twelfth.

  But back then she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow and stayed that way until something tangible—the baby’s cries, the alarm clock, Ben, in the mood for wee-hour romance—woke her.

  That night, she slept straight through, opening her eyes to bright light streaming in beneath the drawn blinds. Ben was snoring beside her, still with a half hour to go before the alarm would rouse him for work. Josh was in his crib in the next room.

  The doctors, the marriage counselor, and her own therapist all said that even if Josh had been sleeping right beside their bed that night, he still would have died.

  But what about the cold he’d had in the days before? The damned cold he’d caught from Ben, who got sick after he insisted on running the New York Marathon as planned, even though he wasn’t feeling up to it.

  Some studies have linked the common cold with sudden infant death syndrome, others are inconclusive.

  But all babies catch cold sooner or later.

  Colds aren’t deadly.

  Intellectually, she gets it: the very nature of sudden infant death syndrome is that it strikes inexplicably and without warning. You lay your baby down to sleep, never imagining that the next time you see him he’ll be stiff and cold, the way Joshua was when she wandered into his room to check on him that terrible morning.

  Wandered—not rushed—because even when she woke up to find that he’d slept through the night, she wasn’t concerned. She took her time in the bathroom and detoured to the kitchen to start coffee before opening the nursery door, never sensing that anything might be wrong.

  She thought he was sleeping, picked him up . . .

  The horror, the utter shock of that moment, will never lose its grip on her soul. Never again will she wake up in the morning and assume that all is right in the world.

  Things are different now, so different . . .

  Now that she knows that terrible things happen in the night.

  The test was negative.

  As in not pregnant.

  Alex tosses the white plastic indicator stick into the wastebasket, along with the packaging promising that it provides the earliest and most accurate over-the-counter test available, capable of detecting pregnancy hormones in urine several days before a missed period.

  Maybe it’s just too early.

  Maybe, in another day or two, with another test, there will be two lines in the little window just like on that happy day years ago—and the one before that.

  The first time, Carmen—ever the pack rat—wanted to save that plastic stick, the one that confirmed they were going to become parents at last, after months of vainly trying to conceive.

  “Are you serious? That’s disgusting! There’s pee on it!”

  “I don’t care.” Of course not. Laid-back Carmen . . .

  Alex turns abruptly away from the wastebasket and heads back downstairs and into the kitchen.

  Hearing the door to the utility cupboard creak open, the cat materializes instantly, knowing that’s where his food is kept.

  “What’s the matter, Gato? Are you hungry again?” With a sigh, Alex grabs a can of Friskies from the shelf, opens it
, dumps it into a bowl, and sets the bowl on the floor. “You’d better eat it this time. Last time, you made a big fuss and then you didn’t even touch your food.”

  Purring loudly, the cat promptly strolls over to the bowl and begins eating.

  “How about some milk, too?”

  Alex carefully opens and closes the fridge, covered in so many magnet-held crayon drawings that not an inch of door remains visible. “There you go. There’s your milk. Good kitty.”

  It’s nice to have a pet in the house. That wasn’t possible back when Carmen was here, but now it doesn’t matter. Alex doesn’t have allergies, thank goodness.

  Once Carmen was gone, Gato showed up meowing on the doorstep, almost as if he’d been waiting until the coast was clear.

  “And I adopted you,” Alex tells the cat, “because that’s what people do when someone needs a home. They take them in and keep them and love them. Right?”

  Gato seems to lift his head and nod in agreement.

  Satisfied, Alex takes a flashlight from the utility cupboard, closes the creaky door, and descends the basement steps.

  Everything—even the mildew smell—is similar to the way it was that first day the Realtor showed them the house. A treadmill and a couple of weight machines take up one half of the room. On the far wall, the one that has no windows, a tall bookshelf seems to have replaced the door that led to the bomb shelter.

  But it hasn’t. Alex constructed it to conceal the door.

  It wasn’t easy for someone lacking in carpentry skills, but thanks to the Internet, it was at least in the realm of possibility. All you had to do was Google the phrase, How do you build a bookcase to hide a door? and a list of instructional links popped up.

  Alex crosses the basement, takes the last book from the row on a middle shelf, and pulls a camouflaged latch. The bookcase swings forward, rolling on castors concealed behind the bottom strip of molding. Alex opens the door to the underground bunker meant to protect a long-gone family from nuclear fallout that never materialized. The flashlight beam reveals the room’s lone occupant, huddled beneath a quilt on the cot across the room. The figure stirs, sitting up with a squeaking of bedsprings and a jangling of wrist and ankle shackles, squinting into the bright light.