by Mary Kubica
My heart thumps inside my chest. I stand in the hallway,
breathless. I clear my voice, try and recover from the shock of
it. I step closer, rap my knuckles on the wood and say, “I’m leav-
ing for the ferry in a few minutes. If you want a ride,” knowing
she won’t accept my offer. My voice is tumultuous in a way that
I despise. Imogen doesn’t answer.
I turn and follow the scent of breakfast downstairs. Will is
by the stove when I come down. He stands, flipping pancakes
in an apron, while singing one of those songs from the jaunty
CDs Tate likes to listen to, something far too merry for seven
fifteen in the morning.
He stops when he sees me. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, voice strained.
The dogs circle Will’s feet, hoping he’ll drop something.
They’re big dogs and the kitchen is small. There isn’t enough
room for four of us in here, let alone six. I call to the dogs and, when they come, send them into the backyard to play.
Will smiles at me when I return and offers me a plate. I opt
only for coffee, telling Otto to hurry up and finish. He sits at
the kitchen table, hunched over his pancakes, shoulders slumped
forward to make himself appear small. His lack of confidence
worries me, though I tell myself that this is normal for fourteen.
Every child goes through this, but I wonder if they do.
Imogen stomps through the kitchen. There are tears up the
thighs and in the knees of her black jeans. Her boots are black
leather combat boots, with nearly a two-inch heel. Even with-
out the boots, she’s taller than me. Raven skulls dangle from
her ears. Her shirt reads, Normal people suck. Tate, at the table, 9780778369110_RHC_txt(ENT_ID=269160).indd 16
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tries to sound it out, as he does all of Imogen’s graphic t-shirts.
He’s a good reader, but she doesn’t stand still long enough for
him to get a look at it. Imogen reaches for a cabinet pull. She
yanks open the door, scanning the inside of the cabinet before
slamming it shut.
“What are you looking for?” Will asks, always eager to please,
but Imogen finds it then in the form of a Kit-Kat bar, which she
tears open and bites into.
“I made breakfast,” Will says, but Imogen, blue eyes drifting
past Otto and Tate at the kitchen table, seeing the third, vacant
place setting set for her, says only, “Good for you.”
She turns and leaves the room. We hear her boots stomp across
the wooden floors. We hear the front door open and close, and
only then, when she’s gone, can I breathe.
I help myself to coffee, filling a travel mug before making
an effort to stretch past Will for my things: the keys and a bag
that sit on the countertop just out of reach. He leans in to kiss
me before I go. I don’t mean to, and yet it’s instinctive when I
hesitate, when I draw back from his kiss.
“You okay?” Will asks again, looking at me curiously, and I
blame a bout of nausea for my hesitation. It’s not entirely un-
true. It’s been months now since the affair, and yet his hands
are still like sandpaper when he touches me and, as he does, I
can’t help but wonder where those hands have been before they
were on me.
A fresh start, he’d said, one of the many reasons we find ourselves transported to this home in Maine, which belonged to
Will’s only sister, Alice, before she died. Alice had suffered for
years from fibromyalgia before the symptoms got the best of
her and she decided to end her life. The pain of fibromyalgia is
deep. It’s diffused throughout the body and often accompanied
by incapacitating exhaustion and fatigue. From what I’ve heard
and seen, the pain is intense—a sometimes stabbing, sometimes
throbbing pain—worse in the morning than later in the day,
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MARY KUBICA
but never going completely away. It’s a silent disease because no
one can see pain. And yet it’s debilitating.
There was only one thing Alice could do to counter the pain
and fatigue, and that was to head into the home’s attic with a
rope and stepstool. But not before first meeting with a lawyer
and preparing a will, leaving her house and everything inside
of it to Will. Leaving her child to Will.
Sixteen-year-old Imogen spends her days doing only God
knows what. School, presumably, for part of it at least, because
we only get truancy calls on occasion. But how she spends the
rest of the day I don’t know. When Will or I ask, she either ig-
nores us or she has something smart to say: that she’s off fight-
ing crime, promoting world peace, saving the fucking whales.
Fuck is one of her favorite words. She uses it often.
Suicide can leave survivors like Imogen feeling angry and
resentful, rejected, abandoned, full of rage. I’ve tried to be un-
derstanding. It’s getting hard to do.
Growing up, Will and Alice were close but they grew apart
over the years. He was rattled by her death, but he didn’t ex-
actly grieve. In truth, I think he felt more guilty than anything:
that he did a negligent job of keeping in touch, that he wasn’t
involved in Imogen’s life, and that he never grasped the gravity
of Alice’s disease. He feels he let them down.
At first, when we’d learned of our inheritance, I suggested
to Will that we sell the home, bring Imogen to Chicago to live
with us, but after what happened in Chicago—not just the af-
fair alone, but all of it, everything—it was our chance to make a new beginning, a fresh start. Or so Will said.
We’ve been here less than two months, so that we’re still get-
ting the lay of the land, though we found jobs quickly, Will and
me, he working as an adjunct professor teaching human ecol-
ogy two days a week, over on the mainland.
As one of only two physicians on the island, they practically
paid me to come.
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I press my lips to Will’s mouth this time, my ticket to leave.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I say, calling again to Otto to hurry up
or we’ll be late. I grab my things from the countertop and tell
him I’ll be in the car waiting. “Two minutes,” I say, knowing
he’ll stretch two to five or six as he always does.
I kiss little Tate goodbye before I go. He stands on his chair,
wraps his sticky arms around my neck and screams into an ear, “I
love you, Mommy,” and somewhere inside of me my heart skips
a beat because I know that at least one of them still loves me.
My car sits on the driveway beside Will’s sedan. Though we
have a garage attached to the house, it’s overrun with boxes that
we have yet to unpack.
The car is cold when I arrive, covered in a thin layer of frost
that has settled on the windows overnight. I unlock the door
I reach for the door handle. But before I can give it a tug, I
catch sight of something on the window that stops me. There
are lines streaked through the frost on the driver’s side. They’ve
started to liquefy in the warmth of the morning’s sunlight, soft-
ening at their edges. But still, they’re there. I step closer. As I do, I see that the lines are not lines at all, but letters traced into the frost on the window, coming together to form a single word : Die.
A hand shoots to my mouth. I don’t have to think hard to
know who left this message for me to find. Imogen doesn’t want
us here. She wants us to leave.
I’ve tried to be understanding because of how awful the sit-
uation must be for her. Her life has been upended. She lost her
mother and now must share her home with people she doesn’t
know. But that doesn’t justify threatening me. Because Imogen
doesn’t mince words. She means just what she said. She wants
me to die.
I make my way back up the porch steps and call through the
front door for Will.
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MARY KUBICA
“What is it?” he asks, making his way from the kitchen. “Did
you forget something?” he asks as he cocks his head to the side,
taking in my keys, my bag, my coffee. I didn’t forget something.
“You have to see this,” I say, whispering now so the boys
don’t hear.
Will follows me barefoot out the front door, though the con-
crete is bitterly cold. Three feet from the car I point at it, the
word inscribed in the frost of the window. “You see it?” I ask,
turning my eyes to Will’s. He sees it. I can tell as much in his expression, in the way it turns instantly distressed, mirroring mine.
“Shit,” he says because he, like me, knows who left that there.
He rubs at his forehead, thinking this through. “I’ll talk to her,”
he says, and I ask defensively, “What good will that do?”
We’ve talked to Imogen many times over the last few weeks.
We’ve discussed the language she uses, especially around Tate;
the need for a curfew; more. Though talking at would be a
more fitting term than talking to because it isn’t a conversation we have. It’s a lecture. She stands while Will or I speak. She listens, maybe. She rarely replies. She takes nothing to heart and
then she leaves.
Will’s voice is quiet when he speaks. “We don’t know for
certain that she left this here,” he says softly, floating an idea
by me, one I’d rather not consider. “Isn’t it possible,” Will asks,
“that someone left that message for Otto?”
“You think someone left a death threat on my window for
our fourteen-year-old child?” I ask, in case Will has somehow
misconstrued the meaning of that word Die.
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” he asks, and though I know that it is, I tell him, “No.” I say it with more conviction in my voice than
I feel, because I don’t want to believe it. “Not again,” I insist.
“We left all that behind when we moved.”
But did we? It isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility
that someone is being mean to Otto. That someone’s bullying
him. It’s happened before. It can happen again.
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I say to Will, “Maybe we should call the police.”
But Will shakes his head. “Not until we know who did this. If
it’s Imogen, is that really a reason to involve the police? She’s just an angry girl, Sadie. She’s grieving, lashing out. She’d never do
anything to hurt any of us.”
“Wouldn’t she?” I ask, far less sure than Will. Imogen has be-
come another point of contention in our marriage. She and Will
are related by blood; there’s a connection there that I don’t have.
When Will doesn’t reply, I go on, arguing, “No matter who
the intended recipient, Will, it’s still a death threat. That’s a very serious thing.”
“I know, I know,” he says, glancing over his shoulder to be
sure Otto isn’t on his way out. He speaks quickly, says, “But if
we get the police involved, Sadie, it will draw attention to Otto.
Unwanted attention. The kids will look at him differently, if
they don’t already. He won’t stand a chance. Let me call the
school first. Speak to his teacher, the principal, make sure Otto
isn’t having trouble with anyone. I know you’re worried,” he
says, voice softening as he reaches out, runs a comforting hand
along my arm. “I’m worried too,” he says. “But can we do that
first,” he asks, “before calling the police? And can I at least have a conversation with Imogen before we just assume this was her?”
This is Will. Always the voice of reason in our marriage.
“Fine,” I tell him, relenting, admitting that he might be right.
I hate to think of Otto as an outcast in a new school, of him
being bullied like this.
But I also can’t stand to consider the animosity Imogen has
toward us. We have to get to the bottom of this without mak-
ing things worse. “But if it happens again, if anything like this
happens again,” I say, pulling my hand from my bag, “we go
to the police.”
“Deal,” Will agrees, and he kisses me on the forehead. “We’ll get
this taken care of,” he says, “before it has a chance to go too far.”
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MARY KUBICA
“Do you promise?” I ask, wishing Will could snap his fingers
and make everything better, just like that.
“I promise,” he says as I watch him skip back up the stairs
and inside the house, disappearing behind the door. I scribble
my hand through the letters. I wipe my hands on the thighs of
my pants before letting myself into the cold car. I start the en-
gine and blast the defrost, watching as it takes the last traces of the message away, though it’ll stay with me all day.
The minutes on the car’s dash pass by, two and then three. I
stare at the front door, waiting for it to open back up, for Otto
to appear this time, slogging to the car with an unreadable ex-
pression on his face that gives no indication of what’s going on
inside his mind. Because that’s the only face he makes these days.
They say that parents should know these things—what our
kids are thinking—but we don’t. Not always. We can never re-
ally know what anyone else is thinking.
And yet when children make poor choices, parents are the
first to be blamed.
How didn’t they know? critics often ask. How did they overlook the warning signs?
Why weren’t they paying attention to what their kids were doing?—
which is a favorite of mine because it implies we weren’t.
But I was.
Before, Otto was quiet and introverted. He liked to draw, cartoons mostly, with a fondness for anime, the hip characters with
their wild hair and their larger-than-life eye
s. He named them,
the images in his sketch pad—and had a dream to one day create
his own graphic novel based on the adventures of Asa and Ken.
Before, Otto had only a couple friends—exactly two—but those that he had called me ma’am. When they came for dinner, they brought their dishes to the kitchen sink. They left their shoes
by the front door. Otto’s friends were kind. They were polite.
Otto did well in school. He wasn’t a straight A student, but
average was good enough for him and Will and me. His grades 9780778369110_RHC_txt(ENT_ID=269160).indd 22
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fell in the B/C range. He did his homework and turned it in
on time. He never slept through class. His teachers liked him,
and only ever had one complaint: they’d like to see Otto par-
ticipate more.
I didn’t overlook the warning signs because there were none
to overlook.
I stare at the house now, waiting for Otto to come. After four
minutes, my eyes give up on the front door. As they do, some-
thing out the car window catches my eye. Mr. Nilsson pushing
Mrs. Nilsson in her wheelchair, down the street. The slope is
steep; it takes great effort to hang onto the rubbery handles of
the wheelchair. He walks slowly, more on the heels of his feet,
as if they are car brakes and he’s riding the brakes all the way
down the street.
Not yet seven twenty in the morning, and they’re both com-
pletely done up, him in twill slacks and a sweater, her in some
sort of knit set where everything is a light pink. Her hair is
curled, tightly woven and set with spray, and I think of him,
scrupulously wrapping each lock of hair around a roller and
securing the pin. Poppy is her name, I think. His might be
Charles. Or George.
Right before our home, Mr. Nilsson makes a diagonal turn,
going to the opposite side of the street from ours.
As he does, his eyes remain on the rear of my car where the
exhaust comes out in clouds.
All at once the sound of last night’s siren returns to me, the
waning bellow of it as it passed by our home and disappeared
somewhere down the street.
A dull pain forms in the pit of my stomach, but I don’t know
why.
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Sadie
The drive from the ferry dock to the medical clinic is short,