Charlotte, still in her bathing suit and boat shoes, rolled around the living room floor with her sister. They were playing some sort of game that only they understood. Seraphina grabbed Charlotte by the ankles and Charlotte retaliated by blowing a raspberry onto her sister’s cheek. Seraphina erupted into shrieks of laughter.
“Why don’t you two go up to your room and play?” I asked as I threaded my way around them and sat on the couch with my briefcase.
“Fiine,” Charlotte said, nailing the type of exasperation that a teen would be proud of, even though she was only seven. Seraphina mimicked her.
“Fiine.”
As the girls laughed and stumbled up the stairs, I heard Grace come in from the back patio.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Grace said. “Want to put burgers on the grill in an hour?”
I looked up from the reports in my lap. “Sure,” I said. “Sounds good.”
I squinted down at the small type on the page and the words blurred slightly around the edges. I glanced around me, hunting for the spare pair of reading glasses that I kept at the lake house. They weren’t on the coffee table. I got up and went into my study across the hall, searched the desk, pulled out the drawers, but the search came up empty. Then I remembered. I’d left them upstairs in the bedroom the other weekend. I’d been reading before bed, and I’d set them on the nightstand.
Upstairs, Grace had closed the door to the bedroom, so I knocked lightly and then tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, so I went in. I heard the bath running. As I walked over to the nightstand, I saw the bathroom door was ajar. I could see through to the mirror behind the vanity, and in the mirror, I caught my wife’s reflection. She was naked, standing outside the shower, her hand under the faucet, testing the temperature of the water. I felt my stomach clench at the sight of her.
The morning after our fight, I’d sent flowers, a bouquet of purple hyacinths and tulips. I called her that evening from the office. I was working late, a carton of Chinese takeout growing cold next to my keyboard. Really, I couldn’t bear to go home to our empty apartment, to the bed where I slept alone and the quiet rooms where Charlotte and Seraphina’s things were pristinely tucked into cubbies and drawers, untouched. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, with the knowledge of what I had done, what Grace had done, of what we had done to each other.
I picked up the phone and called the lake house. Grace answered after several rings, slightly breathless, as if she had run to catch the phone before the call dropped. I pictured her on the cordless in the upstairs hall, ushering the girls through their bedtime routine. I could almost hear them giggling in the bathroom behind her, the water running in the sink as they brushed their teeth. Grace would be wearing that old pale pink silk robe I’d gotten her for Mother’s Day several years ago, the one that was fraying in the sleeves.
“Hello?” she said again into the phone.
“Grace,” I said. “It’s me.”
She was quiet. I could see her in my mind’s eye. She was biting her lip, the phone to her chin, as she debated whether or not to hang up.
“Did you get the flowers?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She sighed. “I was going to throw them out but the girls saw them first. You know how they feel about the color purple.”
I smiled.
“Sera called them princess flowers,” Grace went on, her voice dry and sad. “We spent the afternoon making flower crowns.”
My chest ached. I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it.
“Grace, the person who did those things,” I said after awhile, “it wasn’t me. You know that.”
I could hear her breathing. “Alistair,” she said, “what happened the other night—”
“Won’t ever happen again,” I said. “You have my word.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You and—” I couldn’t bring myself to say his name. “That’s over?”
Grace paused. “Yes,” she said. “It’s over.”
“Okay, then,” I said after a moment, as if we were business partners negotiating a deal, and we’d both given up something that we hadn’t wanted to part with.
Last night, when I got in from the city, the house was dark. The girls were asleep and upstairs, Grace sat on our bed in her robe, watching television. She got up when she saw me come into our room. Neither of us spoke. I walked over to where she stood and got down on my knees in front of her. I wrapped my arms around her waist and said into the silk knot of her robe, “I’m trying. I want to try.”
Grace didn’t say anything. She just reached down and rested her hand in my hair, her fingers grazing my temple.
I slept in the guest bedroom down the hall. I set my alarm for five thirty that morning so I could wake up before the girls and slip into bed with Grace, all to preserve the girls’ cherished Saturday morning ritual of bursting into our room at dawn and waking us to make them breakfast by jumping on the bed. I could feel the weight of Grace’s body beside me as I lay there and we waited, both pretending to be asleep. After a while, I opened my eyes and watched her—her dark hair cascading over the pillow, her lashes still against her cheeks, her lips slightly parted. I almost reached out to touch her, but then I heard the door creak open, and Seraphina’s giggles, and Charlotte shushing her. I felt the bed move as their little bodies climbed onto the mattress.
I don’t think Grace heard me now as I came into the bathroom because when she glanced in the mirror, she seemed startled to find me there behind her.
I stared unabashedly at my wife’s naked body. The swell of her breasts. The curve of the small of her back. Her normally translucent skin had darkened, ripened in the sun. How many times had we made love in that bathroom—in the shower, on the vanity, on the tiled floor? The steam curling the ends of Grace’s hair, the sound of the water thrumming against the granite, muffling her moans? I came up behind her and put my arms around her, cupping her breasts in my hands, pulling her taut against my body, so she could feel the thickness of my want.
I felt her stiffen in my arms.
“Don’t,” she said.
I reached up to stroke her neck. I only wanted to make her feel good, to remember how good it was when we were together. We had agreed to try, hadn’t we? My finger slid over the ridge of something and my hand stilled. In our reflection in the mirror I saw it—the bandage on her left shoulder. I hadn’t seen it at first under the harsh fluorescent lights of the bathroom, and Grace had kept her shoulders covered all day. But there it was—the irrefutable proof that our fight earlier that week had happened. The marks that I had left.
It was an accident. She fell. And I had been there, yes, but it wasn’t my fault. Of course I had been upset. Of course I had said terrible things and maybe handled her a little roughly. But she had lied. She had betrayed me, betrayed our family.
Peter Hindsberg. Peter fucking Hindsberg. Why him? Who the fuck was he? An insurance investigator in Hillsborough? What about him was worth forsaking the life Grace and I had built together?
“Alistair,” she said.
I reached down and pulled the knob of the shower to turn off the faucet. Steam peeled off the granite. I could feel the heat coming off the water.
“Get in,” I said.
I saw the fear in Grace’s eyes, but it only fueled my anger. I leaned down and kissed her, cutting off her protests. I watched her close her eyes and go somewhere else in her mind, far away from me. Somewhere I couldn’t follow.
Afterward, I sat under the hot water of the shower for a few minutes by myself. When I got out, the bathroom mirror was coated with steam. I wrapped a towel around my waist and shaved. When I came out of the bathroom, Grace was dressed in jeans and a loose T-shirt. That’s when I noticed that my suitcase was open on the bed, and Grace was by the dresser, the drawer out; she was tossing my collared shirts into it.
“I want you to leave,” Grace said. “You’re never going to do anything like that to me, ever again.”
“So he can touch you, but I can’t?” I asked.
Grace didn’t say anything.
“I thought we said we were going to try,” I said.
“You said we were going to try,” Grace countered, her eyes hard and cold when she looked at me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
But she looked away and didn’t answer me.
“Just go,” she said.
“Damn it, Grace,” I said, coming around to the other side of the bed where she was. She took a step away from me, as if my impending touch repulsed her. I grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her toward me so that she was in my arms.
“Look at me,” I said.
“Get your hands off me,” Grace snapped.
“Mommy?”
We both looked over and saw that our bedroom door was slightly open, and there was Charlotte, her hand on the handle, staring at us.
Grace turned away from her so she couldn’t see her face.
“Why is Mommy crying?” Charlotte asked.
Damn it. Was this really happening?
I let go of my wife and went over to the door and picked up my older daughter.
“What do you say we get an Eskimo Pie?” I asked, putting on a smile.
“Okay,” Charlotte said.
I carried Charlotte downstairs to the kitchen and dug two Eskimo Pies out of the freezer. Then I took her out to the back patio and we sat on the steps, looking out at the lake. Not an hour ago we had all been out there on the water, having the best time. When had everything gone to shit?
“Won’t she be mad we’re eating these?” Charlotte asked, licking a piece of melted chocolate off her finger.
I sighed. I didn’t know how to be there right now. I was too angry—too furious at Grace—and if I stayed, I knew I would do something that I would regret.
“Charlotte, I need you to be a big girl and look after your mother while I’m away,” I said. “Do you think you can do that?”
“You’re going back already?” she asked.
“I have an early meeting in the morning,” I lied.
“Don’t go,” Charlotte begged. “You promised you’d take me out on the boat again tomorrow.”
“Next weekend, okay?” I said.
“Can I come with you?” she asked.
Christ, how bad was it there that Charlotte didn’t want to stay? When I was a kid, I would have killed for a place like that to go to in the summer. But maybe Grace was too preoccupied with licking her wounds from her failed affair to pay attention to our kids.
Part of me wanted to take Charlotte with me. To just pack a bag for her and Seraphina and put them in the car and get out of there. But I knew Grace would cause a scene if I tried to do that. She’d run out crying and screaming and she’d scare the shit out of our kids, and then I’d have to pay for therapy for both of them for the rest of their fucking lives so they could erase that image of their pathetic mother.
“I need you to stay here and look after your mother,” I told Charlotte again. “Can you do that for me?”
Charlotte nodded, and I patted her head and stood. I went inside to finish packing. Grace wasn’t in our room when I returned. I don’t know where she went, but I didn’t bother looking for her to say goodbye. I went straight to my car, threw my bag in the trunk, and peeled out of there.
Peter Hindsberg. Peter fucking Hindsberg. As I drove, I couldn’t get those photographs out of my head, and I couldn’t stop making my own mental pictures of the two of them together.
Halfway to the city, I stopped my car. I thrummed my fingers against the steering wheel. I turned the car around.
Part Four
Thirty-Seven
Charlie Calloway
2017
I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom in the dark and listened to the strange middle-of-the-night noises of Dalton’s home. On the floor above me, I heard a toilet flush, the sound of water rushing through pipes in the walls. I heard footsteps, the creak of floorboards, the shutting of a door. And I waited. I waited for silence, for the stillness that would tell me everyone was sound asleep and I could finally make my move.
All through dinner, I hadn’t been able to look at Margot. We had been seated next to one another, and once, when I went to pass the dish of green beans, my hand grazed her fingers, and I almost dropped the dish. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and in the safety of the washroom on the main floor, I sat on the marble vanity and texted Greyson.
I hadn’t spoken to Greyson since his very dramatic exit from my dorm room a few weeks back, and I didn’t really want to talk to him now, but I didn’t have a choice. Greyson was the only one who knew what was going on, the only person who wouldn’t need a very detailed play-by-play to be brought up to speed. And I needed to talk to someone. I needed to know I wasn’t crazy.
I think I might have found my mother’s suitcases, I texted. The ones she left with.
I knew I wasn’t imagining things or misremembering. I recalled those suitcases vividly—a pair of Burberry cloth suitcases in a paisley print, the luggage my mother used to pack for weekend trips to the city, the ones that disappeared with her. They were mentioned in the PI’s reports.
Though, if they didn’t belong to her, this would not be the first time I had thought I’d spotted my mother’s luggage and been mistaken. Once when I was nine, I had seen those suitcases while going through security at JFK, and I had run after the woman carrying them, sure that she was my mother, until she turned around and revealed herself to be a middle-aged Polish lady (she had stared down at me with sunken eyes, asking in her thick accent, “What, child? What?” as I looked dumbly up at her). Maybe that’s all this was, too: an unlucky coincidence.
I used to imagine my mother with those suitcases, traipsing through foreign airports, on her way to somewhere warm and exotic. But what if all this time, they had been sitting in a dark basement in Southampton? Margot’s basement. But how would they have gotten there? And if they were there in Margot’s basement, where was my mother?
My phone vibrated in my hand, and I looked down to see Greyson’s name on the screen. He was calling me. I cupped my hand over my mouth and answered my phone in a whisper.
“Hello?”
“Charlie, what’s going on?” Greyson asked. “Where are you?” He sounded slightly out of breath.
“Don’t be pissed,” I said. “But I’m at Dalton’s family’s place in Southampton.”
I heard Greyson mutter an expletive under his breath. “What’s the address?”
“You’re not coming down here right now,” I said, much louder than I meant to. My voice echoed in the tiled room. Crap. I lowered my voice again. The Daltons were right down the hall. I couldn’t risk their overhearing. “I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, they might not actually be her suitcases. People have the same luggage. But it’s the same print and brand and it just spooked me.”
“Where’d you find them?” Greyson asked.
“In the basement,” I said. “Next to these boxes and old furniture covered in sheets. Like I said, it could be nothing.”
“Get the hell out of there,” Greyson said. “Charlie, just leave. Right now. Grab your stuff and go. I’ll drive down and get you.”
“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I haven’t gotten to see what’s in them yet. My mother’s suitcases had this tear in the lining. I need to open these up and see if—”
“Charlie, are you crazy?” He sounded angry. “If those are your mother’s suitcases, then that means . . .”
Greyson stopped and I felt the weight of the invisible ellipses, the things he wouldn’t say. That my mother hadn’t taken off of her own accord. That she hadn’t left us. That she was dead, just like they all believed. That she wasn’t coming back.
“We don’t know what it means,” I said. “It could mean anything.”
“Charlie, listen to me,” Greyson said. “Your
father and Margot were engaged. They were in the A’s together; they go way back. Don’t you think it’s possible that if your mother’s suitcases are in Margot’s basement, that maybe she helped him . . .”
“Helped him what?”
“Get rid of the evidence?”
“Maybe Margot helped my mother leave,” I said stupidly.
“If your mother left, why would she leave her suitcases in Margot’s basement?”
“I don’t even know if they’re hers yet,” I said.
“Charlie, don’t—”
I hung up. Greyson called back right away and kept calling back, so I put the “Do Not Disturb” function on for his contact on my phone and went back to the dinner table.
I didn’t have a choice. I had to get back in that basement unnoticed, open those suitcases up, and see if they had that telltale rip in the lining. I had to know if they were really my mother’s.
I had started this whole thing alone and I would finish it alone. Because if I had learned anything over the past several months, it was that I could only rely on myself.
Now, as quietly as I could, I lifted back the bedcovers and shifted my weight onto the floor. The floorboards moaned slightly under me. Why did Dalton have to have an old house that creaked and groaned like an elderly person with every movement?
It was a cold evening and the floorboards were like ice under my bare feet, so I crept over to the dresser and put on socks and a hoodie over my pajamas. Then I tiptoed to the door and slowly opened it, holding my breath when the hinges shrieked in protest.
Making my way down to the basement was a slow and arduous process, as I had to stop every time I made a noise and listen for any sounds elsewhere in the house that might alert me that someone had heard me or woken up. I guess the one good thing about the house being so loud was that, just as anyone could hear me making my way down the old staircase to the ground floor, I could hear anyone making their way down the old staircase after me.
The house was dark, and I made my way forward blindly, relying on my memory of the general layout and my groping hands to guide me. When I reached the ground floor, I kept one hand on the wall, sliding along it as I made a right through the hallway into the den, which housed the door to the basement. Just as my hand grasped the doorknob, the front doorbell rang.
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