The Other Mrs (ARC)
Page 3
only a handful of blocks. It takes less than five minutes from the
time I drop Otto off until I pull up to the humble, low-slung
blue building that was once a house.
From the front, it still resembles a house, though the back
opens up far wider than any home ever would, attaching to a
low-cost, independent living center for senior citizens with easy
access to our medical services. Long ago someone donated their
home for the clinic. Years later, the independent living center
was an addition.
The state of Maine is home to some four thousand islands. I
didn’t know this before we arrived. There’s a dearth of doctors
on the more rural of them, such as this one. Many of the older
physicians are in the process of retiring, leaving vacancies that
prove difficult to fill.
The isolation of island living isn’t for everyone, present com-
pany included. There’s something unsettling in knowing that
when the last ferry leaves for the night, we’re quite literally
trapped. Even in daylight, the island is rocky around its edges,
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overcome with tall pines that make it suffocating and small.
When winter comes, as it soon will, the harsh weather will shut
much of the island down, and the bay around us may freeze,
trapping us here.
Will and I got our house for free. We got a tax credit for me
to work at the clinic. I said no to the idea, but Will said yes,
though it wasn’t the money we needed. My background is in
emergency medicine. I’m not board-certified in general prac-
tice, though I have a temporary license while I go through the
process of becoming fully licensed in Maine.
Inside, the blue building no longer resembles a house. Walls
have been put up and knocked down to create a reception desk,
exam rooms, a lobby. There’s a smell to the building, something
heavy and damp. It clings to me even after I leave. Will smells
it too. It doesn’t help that Emma, the receptionist, is a smoker,
consuming about a pack a day of cigarettes. Though she smokes
outside, she hangs her coat on the same rack as mine. The smell
roves from coat to coat.
Will looks curiously at me some nights after I’ve come home.
He asks, Have you been smoking? which I might as well be for the smell of nicotine and tobacco that follows me home.
Of course not, I’ve told him. You know I don’t smoke, and then I tell him about Emma.
Leave your coat out. I’ll wash it, Will has told me countless times.
I do and he washes it, but it makes no difference because the
next day it happens all over again.
Today I step into the clinic to find Joyce, the head nurse, and
Emma waiting for me.
“You’re late,” Joyce says, but if I am, I’m only a minute late.
Joyce must be sixty-five years old, close to retirement, and a
bit of a shrew. She’s been here far longer than either Emma or
me, which makes her top dog at the clinic, in her mind at least.
“Didn’t they teach you punctuality where you came from?”
she asks.
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MARY KUBICA
I’ve found that the minds of the people are as small as the
island itself.
I step past her and start my day.
Hours later, I’m with a patient when I see Will’s face sur-
face on my cell phone, five feet away. It’s silenced. I can’t hear
the phone’s ring, though Will’s name appears above the picture
of him: the attractive, chiseled face, the bright hazel eyes. He’s
handsome, in a take-your-breath-away way, and I think that it’s
the eyes. Or maybe the fact that at forty, he could still pass for
twenty-five. Will wears his dark hair long, swept back into a
low bun that’s growing in popularity these days, giving off an
intellectual, hipster vibe that his students seem to like.
I ignore the image of Will on my phone and attend to my
patient, a forty-three-year-old woman presenting with a fever,
chest pain, a cough. Undoubtedly bronchitis. But still, I press
my stethoscope to her lungs for a listen.
I practiced emergency medicine for years before coming here.
There, at a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in the heart of Chi-
cago, I went into each shift without any idea of what I might
see, every patient coming in in distress. The victims of multi-
ple-vehicle collisions, women hemorrhaging excessively follow-
ing a home birth, three-hundred-pound men in the midst of a
psychotic break. It was tense and dramatic. There, in a constant
state of high alert, I felt alive.
Here, it is different. Here, every day I know what I will see,
the same rotation of bronchitis, diarrhea and warts.
When I finally get the chance to call Will back, there’s a hitch
to his voice. “Sadie,” he says, and, from the way that he says it,
I know that something is wrong. He stops there, my mind en-
gineering scenarios to make up for that which he doesn’t say. It
settles on Otto and the way I left him at the ferry terminal this
morning. I got him there just in time, a minute or two before
the ferry would leave. I said goodbye, my car idling a hundred
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feet from the waiting boat, watching as Otto moped off for an-
other day of school.
It was then that my eyes caught sight of Imogen, standing at
the edge of the pier with her friends. Imogen is a beautiful girl.
There’s no rebutting that. Her skin is naturally fair; she doesn’t
need to cover it in talcum powder, as her friends must do, to
make herself look white. The piercing through her nose has
taken some getting used to. Her eyes, in contrast to the skin,
are an icy blue, her former brunette showing through the un-
kempt eyebrows. Imogen eschews the dark, bold lipstick the
other girls like her wear, but instead wears a tasteful rosy beige.
It’s actually quite lovely.
Otto has never lived in such close proximity to a girl before.
His curiosity has gotten the better of him. The two of them
don’t talk much, no more than Imogen and I speak. She won’t
ride with us to the ferry dock; she doesn’t speak to him at school.
As far as I know, she doesn’t acknowledge him on the commute
there. Their interactions are brief. Otto at the kitchen table
working on math homework last night, for example, and Imo-
gen passing through, seeing his binder, noting the teacher’s name
on the front of it, commenting: Mr. Jansen is a fucking douche.
Otto had just stared back wide-eyed in reply. The word fuck is not yet in his repertoire. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.
This morning, Imogen and her friends were standing at the
edge of the pier, smoking cigarettes. The smoke encircled their
heads, loitering, white in the frosty air. I watched as Imogen<
br />
brought a cigarette to her mouth, inhaled deeply with the ex-
pertise of someone who’d done this before, who knew what she
was doing. She held it in and then exhaled slowly and, as she
did, I was certain her eyes came to me.
Did she see me sitting there in my car, watching her?
Or was she just staring vacantly into space?
I’d been so busy watching Imogen that, now that I think back
on it, I never saw Otto board the ferry. I only assumed he would.
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MARY KUBICA
“It’s Otto,” I say aloud now, at the same time that Will says,
“It wasn’t the Nilssons,” and at first I don’t know what he means
by that. What does Otto have to do with the elderly couple who
lives down the street?
“What about the Nilssons?” I ask but my mind has trouble
going there, because—at the sudden realization that I didn’t see
Otto board the ferry—all I can think about is Otto in the sin-
gle seat across from the principal’s office with handcuffs on his
wrists, a police officer standing three feet away, watching him.
On the corner of the principal’s desk, an evidence bag, though
what was inside, I couldn’t yet see.
Mr. and Mrs. Foust, the principal had said to us that day and, for the first time in my life, I attempted some clout. Doctor, I said to him, face deadpan as Will and I stood behind Otto, Will
dropping a hand to Otto’s shoulder to let him know that what-
ever he’d done, we were there for him.
I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I was quite certain
I saw the police officer smirk.
“The siren last night,” Will explains now over the phone,
bringing me back to the present. That was before, I remind my-
self, and this is now. What happened to Otto in Chicago is in
the past. Over and done with. “It wasn’t the Nilssons after all.
The Nilssons are perfectly fine. It was Morgan.”
“Morgan Baines?” I ask, though I’m not sure why. There isn’t
another Morgan on our block as far as I know. Morgan Baines is
a neighbor, one I’ve never spoken to but Will has. She and her
family live just up the street from us in a foursquare farmhouse
not unlike our own, Morgan, her husband, and their little girl.
Living at the top of the hill, Will and I often speculated that
their views of the sea were splendid, three hundred sixty degrees
of our little island and the ocean that walls us in.
And then one day Will slipped and told me they were. The
views. Splendid.
I tried not to feel insecure. I told myself that Will wouldn’t
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have admitted to being inside her home if there was something
going on between them. But Will has a past with women; he
has a history. A year ago I would have said Will would never
cheat on me. But I couldn’t put anything past him now.
“Yes, Sadie,” Will says. “Morgan Baines,” and only then do
I make out her face, though I’ve not seen her up close before.
Only from a distance. Long hair, the color of milk chocolate, and
bangs, the type that hang too long, that spend their time wedged
behind an ear.
“What happened?” I ask as I find a place to sit, and, “Is ev-
erything alright?” I wonder if Morgan is diabetic, if she’s asth-
matic, if she has an autoimmune condition that would trigger
a middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room. There are
only two physicians here, myself and my colleague, Dr. Sand-
ers. Last night she was on call, not me.
There are no EMTs on the island, only police officers who
know how to drive an ambulance and are minimally trained
in lifesaving measures. There are no hospitals as well, and so
a rescue boat would have been called in from the mainland to
meet the ambulance down by the dock to cart Morgan away
for treatment, while another waited on shore for the third leg
of her commute.
I think of the amount of time that would have taken in sum.
What I’ve heard is that the system works like a well-oiled ma-
chine and yet it’s nearly three miles to the mainland. Those
rescue boats can only go so fast and are dependent on the co-
operation of the sea.
But this is catastrophic thinking only, my mind ruminating
on worst-case scenarios.
“Is she alright, Will?” I ask again because in all this time,
Will has said nothing.
“No, Sadie,” he says, as if I should somehow know that ev-
erything is not alright. There’s a pointedness about his reply. A
brevity, and then he says no more.
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MARY KUBICA
“Well, what happened?” I urge, and he takes a deep breath
and tells me.
“She’s dead,” he says.
And if my response is apathetic it’s only because death and
dying are a part of my everyday routine. I’ve seen every un-
speakable thing there is to see, and I didn’t know Morgan Ba-
ines at all. We’d had no interaction aside from a one-time wave
out my window as I drove slowly by her home and she stood
there, thrusting the bangs behind an ear before returning the
gesture. I’d thought about it long after, overanalyzing as I have
a tendency to do. I wondered about that look on her face. If it
was meant for me or if she was scowling at something else.
“Dead?” I ask now. “Dead how?” and as Will begins to cry on
the other end of the line, he says, “She was murdered, they say.”
“They? Who’s they?” I ask.
“The people, Sadie,” he says. “Everyone. It’s all anyone’s talk-
ing about in town,” and as I open the door to the exam room
and step into the hall, I find that it’s true. That patients in the waiting room are in the thick of a conversation about the murder, and they look at me with tears in their eyes and ask if I
heard the news.
“A murder! On our island!” someone gasps. A hush falls over
the room and, as the door opens and a man steps in, an older
woman screams. It’s a patient only, and yet with news like this,
it’s hard not to think the worst of everyone. It’s hard not to give in to fear.
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Camille
I’m not going to tell you everything. Just the things I think you
should know.
I met him on the street. The corner of some city street, where
it crosses beneath the ‘L’ tracks. It was gritty, grungy there. The buildings, the tracks didn’t let the light in. Parked cars, steel
girders, orange construction cones filled the road. The people,
they were ordinary Chicago people. Just your everyday eclectic
mix of hipsters and steampunk, hobos, trixies, the social elite.
I was walking. I didn’t know where I was going. All around,
the city buzzed. Air-conditioning units dripped from up above, a
>
bum begged for cash. A street preacher stood on the curb, foam-
ing at the mouth, telling us we’re all hell-bound.
I passed a guy on the street. I was going the other way as him.
I didn’t know who he was, but I knew his type. The kind of rich
former prep school kid who never fraternized with the trashy
public school kids like me. Now he was all grown up, working
in the Financial District, shopping at Whole Foods. He’s what
you’d call a chad, though his name was probably something else like Luke, Miles, Brad. Something smug, uptight, overused.
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MARY KUBICA
Mundane. He gave me a nod and a smile, one that said women
easily fell for his charms. But not me.
I turned away, kept walking, didn’t give him the satisfaction
of smiling back.
I felt his eyes follow me from behind.
I spied my reflection in a storefront window. My hair, long,
straight, with bangs. Rust-colored, stretching halfway down
my back, over the shoulders of an arctic-blue tee that matched
my eyes.
I saw what that chad was looking at.
I ran a hand through my hair. I didn’t look half bad.
Overhead, the ‘L’ thundered past. It was loud. But not loud
enough to tune out the street preacher. Adulterers, whores, blas-
phemers, gluttons. We were all doomed.
The day was hot. Not just summer but the dog days of it.
Eighty or ninety degrees out. Everything smelled rancid, like
sewage. The smell of garbage gagged me as I passed an alley.
The hot air trapped the smell so there was no escaping it, just
as there was no escaping the heat.
I was looking up, watching the ‘L’, getting my bearings. I
wondered what time it was. I knew every clock in the city. The
Peacock clock, Father Time, Marshall Fields. Four clocks on the
Wrigley Building, so that it didn’t matter which way you came
at it from, you could still see a clock. But there were no clocks
there, on the corner where I was at.
I didn’t see the stoplight before me go red. I didn’t see the
cab come hustling past, racing another cab to snatch up a fare
down the street. I stepped right into the street with both feet.
I felt him first. I felt the grip of his hand tighten on my wrist
like a pipe wrench so that I couldn’t move.
In an instant, I fell in love with that hand—warm, capable,