by Mary Kubica
for it today. I’m tired and disoriented. This morning’s conver-
sation with Officer Berg has rattled my nerves, made a bad day
even worse.
“Go,” the girl says again. When I stare at her, doing noth-
ing, she says, “It’s your turn,” pronouncing none of the r’s, but turning them to w’s instead.
“My turn?” I ask, taken aback, and she says to me, “Yeah.
You’re the red, remember?” Except she doesn’t say red. She says wed. Wed, wemember?
I shake my head. I must not have been paying attention be-
cause I don’t remember. Because I don’t know what she’s talk-
ing about until she points it out for me, the red beads at the top
of the roller-coaster table, the ones that go up and down the red
wire hills, around the red corkscrew turns.
“Oh,” I say, reaching out to touch the red wooden beads be-
fore me. “Okay. What should I do with the red?” I ask the girl,
her nose oozing snot, eyes a bit glazed over as if febrile, and I
don’t have to think hard to know why she’s here. She’s my pa-
tient. She’s come to see me. She coughs hard, forgetting to cover
her mouth. The little ones always do.
“You do it like this,” she says as she takes her dirty, germy
hand and grasps a train of yellow beads with it, driving the beads
over the yellow hill and around the yellow corkscrew turns.
“You do it like that,” she says when the beads finally reach
the other end and she lets go of them. Her hands fall to her hips
as she stares at me, again expectantly.
I smile at the girl as I start to move the red beads.
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But before they’ve gone far, I hear, “Dr. Foust,” hissed at me from behind. It’s a woman’s voice, clearly annoyed. “What are
you doing down there, Dr. Foust?”
I turn to see Joyce standing behind me. Her posture is straight,
her expression firm. She tells me that my eleven o’clock appoint-
ment is here, waiting for me in exam room three. I rise slowly to
standing, shake out my stiff legs. I have no idea why I thought
it would be a good idea to get down on the ground and play
with the little girl. I tell her I have to get back to work. I say that maybe we can play again later and she smiles shyly at me. She
wasn’t shy before but she’s shy now. She’s changed, and I think
it has something to do with my height. Now that I’m standing,
I’m no longer three feet tall like her. I’m different.
She rushes to her momma’s side, wraps her arms around her
mother’s knees.
I say to her mother, “What a sweet girl,” and her mother
thanks me for playing with her.
Around me, the waiting room is crawling with patients. I fol-
low Joyce through the lobby doors and down the hall. But once
there, I head the other way from the exam room, going to the
kitchen instead, where I help myself to a sip of water from the
water cooler, taking a moment to catch my breath. I’m tired.
I’m hungry. My head still hurts.
Joyce follows me into the kitchen. She gives me this look,
like I have some nerve to drink water at a time like this, when
we have a patient waiting. I can see it in her eyes every time
she looks at me: Joyce doesn’t like me. I don’t know why Joyce
doesn’t like me. There’s nothing I’ve done that would make her
not like me. I tell myself it has nothing to do with what hap-
pened back in Chicago, that there’s no way she can know about
that. No, that stayed there, because I resigned. It was the only
way a claim of negligence didn’t end my medical career. But
whether I’d practice emergency medicine again, I didn’t know.
It was a blot on my confidence, if not my resume.
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I tell Joyce that I’ll be right there, but she stands watching in
teal-blue scrubs and nursing clogs, with her hands on her hips.
She pouts, and only then do I take note of the clock on the wall
behind her where red numbers inform me that it’s one fifteen
in the afternoon.
“Oh,” I say, though that can’t be. I couldn’t possibly have
fallen that far behind schedule. My bedside manner is decent
enough—I’ve been known to go on a tad too long with pa-
tients—but not like this.
I glance down at my watch, sure that it’s slow, that my watch
is to blame for my falling behind schedule. But the time on my
watch mirrors the time on the clock.
I feel a frustration start to well inside of me. Emma has mis-
takenly scheduled too many patients in not enough time, so that
I’ll spend the rest of the day scrambling to catch up and we’ll
pay for it, the whole lot of us, Joyce, Emma, the patients and
me. But mainly me.
It’s a short drive home. The entirety of the island is only
about a mile by a mile and a half wide—which means that on
a bad day such as this, I don’t have time to decompress before I
arrive home. I drive slowly, taking my time, needing an extra
lap around the block to catch my breath before I pull into my
own driveway.
This far north in the world, night falls early. The sun begins
to set at just past four o’clock, leaving us with only nine hours
of daylight this time of year, the rest of the day various shades
of twilight and dark. The sky is dark now.
I don’t know most of my neighbors. Some I’ve seen in pass-
ing, but most I’ve never seen because it’s late fall, early winter, the time of year people have a tendency to hide indoors. The
home next door to ours is a summer property only, someone’s
second home. It’s unoccupied this time of year. The owners—
Will learned and told to me—move to the mainland as soon as
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fall comes, leaving their home abandoned for Old Man Winter.
Which makes me think now that a home like that could be vul-
nerable to break-ins, making for an easy place for a killer to hide.
As I go by it, the house is dark as it always is until just after
seven o’clock when a light flicks on. The light is set on a timer.
It goes off near midnight. The timer is meant to serve as a de-
terrent for burglars and yet so predictable, it’s not.
I go on. I bypass my own home and head up the hill. The
Baines’s house is dark as I drive past. Across the street, at the
home of the Nilssons, a light is on, the soft glow of it just barely breaking through the periphery of the heavy drapes. I pause before the home, car idling, my eyes set on the picture window in
front. There’s a car in the drive, Mr. Nilsson’s rusty sedan. Puffs of smoke spew from the chimney and into the winter night.
Someone is home.
I have half a mind to pull into the drive, park the car, knock
on the front door and ask about what Officer Berg told me.
How Mr. Nilsson claimed he saw me arguing with Mo
rgan in
the days before she died.
But I also have enough self-awareness to know that if I do, it
might come off as brash—threatening even—and that’s not the
message I want to send.
I make my way around the block before going home.
Moments later, I stand alone in the kitchen, peeking beneath
the lid of a skillet to see what Will’s cooking tonight. Pork
chops. It smells divine.
I stand, with my shoes still on my feet, a bag slung across me.
The bag is heavy. The strap burrows deeply into my skin, though
I hardly feel the weight of it because it’s my stomach that hurts
the most. I’m hungry, completely famished, my day getting away
from me so that I never had time for lunch.
Without a word, Will slips silently into the kitchen and curls
up behind me. He nestles his chin onto my shoulder. He slips
his warm hands beneath the waistline of my shirt, wrapping
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them around me. A single thumb sweeps up and down my navel,
strumming me like a guitar. I feel myself tense up at Will’s touch.
“How was your day?” he asks.
I think back to the days when Will’s arms around me made
me feel safe, invulnerable and loved. For a moment, I want noth-
ing more than to turn and face him, to unload about the dreary
workday; the run-in with Officer Berg. I know just exactly what
would happen if I did. Will would stroke my hair before lift-
ing the heavy workbag from my shoulder and setting it to the
ground. He’d say something empathetic like, That sounds rough,
as he poured me a glass of wine. He wouldn’t attempt to fix
things for me as other men might do. Instead, he’d lead me to
the single spindle-back chair pressed against a kitchen wall and
hand me the wine. He’d drop to the kitchen floor before me
and remove my shoes, massage my feet. And he’d listen.
But I don’t tell Will about my day because I can’t. Because
there on the countertop sits his true crime novel and in an in-
stant, last night comes tumbling back to me all over again. From
where I stand, I see the edge of Erin’s photograph jutting out
from the pages of the book, just a couple millimeters of blue
trim, and even though I can’t see it, I still imagine the blue eyes, blond hair, rounded shoulders. The willowy woman who stands
with her hands on her hips, pouting at the camera, baiting who-
ever’s on the other side of it.
“What’s wrong?” Will asks and though I hesitate—thinking
I might just say nothing and leave the room, too exhausted for this conversation right now, I say, “I started reading your book
last night. When I couldn’t sleep,” motioning to it there on the
countertop.
Will doesn’t pick up the innuendo. He draws away from me
and begins tending to dinner while asking, “Oh yeah? What
do you think of it so far?” with his side now turned toward me.
“Well,” I say, hesitating. “I didn’t actually have a chance to
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read it. I opened it up and Erin’s picture fell out,” feeling shame-faced for admitting this, as if I’ve done something wrong.
Only then does he put the tongs down and turn to me.
“Sadie,” he says, reaching for me, and I say, “It’s fine, really
it is,” trying my hardest to be diplomatic because, for heaven’s
sake, Erin is dead. I can’t be outwardly angry or jealous that Will’s been carrying her photograph around after all this time.
That just wouldn’t feel right. Besides, there’s no reason for me
to be concerned. I, too, had a high school sweetheart once. We
broke up when he went off to college. He didn’t die, but we
severed ties just the same. I never think of him. If I were to pass him on the street, I wouldn’t know.
Will married me, I remind myself. He has children with me.
I look down at my hand. It doesn’t matter that the ring I wear
once belonged to her. As a family heirloom, Will’s mother re-
fused to let Erin be buried with it. He was honest when he gave
it to me. He came clean, told me what the ring had been through
and where it had been. I promised, at the time, to wear the ring
in both his grandmother’s and in Erin’s honor.
“It’s just,” I say, staring at the book as if I can see straight
through the cover to what’s inside, “I never knew you carried
her picture around with you. That you still thought about her.”
“I don’t. I didn’t. Listen,” he says, reaching for my hands. I
don’t pull back, though that’s exactly what I want to do. I want
to be hurt. I am hurt. But I try to be compassionate. “Yes, I have a photograph of her still. I came across it in some of my
stuff when I was unpacking. I didn’t know what to do with it,
so I stuck it in the book. But it’s not what you think. It’s just
that, I realized recently that it will be twenty years next month.
Twenty years since Erin died. That’s all. I don’t think about her,
hardly ever, Sadie. But it got me thinking, and not in a mourn-
ful way. More in a holy shit, twenty years sort of way.” He pauses, runs his hands through his hair, thinks his next words through
before he speaks.
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“Twenty years ago, I was a different man. I wasn’t even a man,”
he says. “I was a boy. The odds that Erin and I would have actu-
ally gone through with it and gotten married aren’t great. Sooner
or later we would have realized how dumb we were. How naive.
What we had was just young love between two stupid kids. What
you and I have,” he says, tapping my chest and then his in turn,
and I have to look away because his stare is so intense it gets in-
side of me. “This, Sadie. This is marriage.”
And then he draws me in and wraps his arms around me and,
for just this once, I let him.
He presses his lips to my ear and whispers, “Whether you
believe me or not, there are times I thank God it happened this
way because if it didn’t, I might have never met you.”
There’s nothing to say to that. It’s not as if I, too, can say that I’m glad she’s dead. What kind of person would that make me?
After a minute, I pull back. Will goes back to the stove. He
reaches for the tongs, flips over the pork chops in the frying
pan. I tell him that I’m running upstairs to change.
In the living room, Tate sits playing with Legos on the nicked-
up coffee table. I say hello and he rises from the floor and
squeezes me tight, calling out, “Mommy’s home!” He asks me
to play with him, and I promise, “After dinner. Mommy’s going
to go change.”
But before I can go, he pulls on my hand, calling out, “Statue
game, statue game.”
I don’t know what he means by this, statue game. But I’m too tired for him to be pulling on me. He doesn’t mean for it to be,
&
nbsp; but his tugging is rough. It hurts my hand.
“Tate,” I say, “be gentle,” as I withdraw my hand from his
and see him pout.
“I want to play the statue game,” he whines, but instead I say,
“We’ll do Legos. After dinner. I promise,” seeing the castle he’s
already begun to create, complete with a tower and gatehouse.
It’s impressive. A mini-figure sits at the top of the tower, keep-
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ing watch over the land, while three more figures stand on the
coffee table, ready to attack.
“You did that all by yourself?” I ask and Tate tells me he did,
beaming proudly as I disappear up the stairs to change.
It’s dim in the house. Aside from the shortage of windows
and, therefore, a scarcity of natural lighting, the house is coated with a dated wooden paneling, which makes everything dark.
Gloomy. It does nothing to bolster our moods, especially on
days like this, which are depressing enough as is.
Upstairs, I find Otto’s bedroom door pulled to. He’s there,
inside, as he always is, listening to music and doing homework.
I rap on the door and call out a quick hello. He says back, “Hi.”
I wonder how Otto’s commute was to school, if he wore wet
clothes all day from the rain-drenched ferry ride to the school
bus waiting on the other side, if he sat with anyone at lunch. I
could ask him, but the truth is I’d rather not know the answer.
As they say, ignorance is bliss.
Imogen’s door is open a smidge. I peek in, but she’s not there.
I head to Will and my bedroom. There I stare at my tired re-
flection in the floor-length mirror, the weary eyes, the poplin
shirt, the skirt. My makeup has nearly worn away. My skin is
washed out, more gray than anything else, or maybe it’s just the
lighting. Crow’s feet sneak from the edges of my eyes. My laugh
lines become more prominent each day. The joys of aging.
I’m pleased to see my hair starting to grow back to its usual
length after an impulsive chop, one of those regrettable hair-
cuts I hated. All I’d ever gotten were the dead ends trimmed.
But then one day my long-time stylist went and sheared off four
inches or more. I stared at her aghast when she was through,
eyeing the clumps of hair on her salon floor.
What? she’d asked, as wide-eyed as me. That’s what you said you wanted, Sadie.