EQMM, January 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Waiting.

  They sat like that for a full minute before he couldn't take it anymore. So much for the impassive PI routine.

  "Your husband is always working,” he repeated dully, unsure how to move this along.

  "Yes."

  Jesus. It was like pulling teeth.

  "Could you be more specific about why you're here?” Carver wondered if he and Max should bring a TV into the office, start watching Dr. Phil or Oprah to gain more insight into their clients.

  "I've tried calling, but he's always busy,” she said.

  "Too busy to talk to his wife."

  "Exactly."

  "So you decided to leave work in the middle of the day, come to a private investigator's office."

  She held out her nails, examined them one by one before deeming them worthy. She returned her gaze to Carver, clearly undecided if he met the same standard.

  "My husband,” she said. “He's been ... distant."

  "Distant?"

  "Preoccupied."

  "With what?"

  "I was hoping you could tell me,” she replied.

  "Have you been following him?"

  She sat up straighter as she asked, “Why on earth would you think that?"

  Carver shrugged. “Some women do.” Then he added, “Before they come here."

  She relaxed. Not much, but a little. “They play at private investigator before hiring one?"

  Carver nodded. “Something like that."

  She shook her head. “I'm not that suspicious."

  "Yet you left work to come here,” replied Carver. “To see me."

  "Fair enough.” She pursed her lips. Even though they weren't smiling, Carver had to admit they were nice lips. “Maybe I am worried."

  "You say he's preoccupied,” said Carver. “Has your husband always worked long hours?"

  "Yes ... no. Not always.” She exhaled loudly. “Maybe, when we used to work together at the law firm."

  Carver nodded. “Did he work long hours then?"

  "No ... yes.” She shrugged. “I guess we both did. Maybe I didn't notice as much."

  "But now it's different."

  She held Carver's gaze for a minute, as if she understood why he was asking but still resented him for it. She'd come here for answers, not for a look in the mirror.

  "Since he started his own business,” she said, “he almost never comes home for dinner. Some nights he doesn't come home at all."

  "That must be hard,” said Carver, trying to pump as much empathy into his voice as possible. Clients loved empathy.

  She gave him a stern look. “You've no idea."

  Some clients loved empathy. Apparently not this one.

  "You're right,” he said, a little too quickly. “I don't."

  "I've been worried,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  "You're not jealous?” asked Carver. “Just worried?"

  "I'm not the jealous type."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "Maybe a little,” she said, frowning. “He's living his dream, I'm still in the same old job. He's meeting new people. You know...” She let her voice trail off.

  "Okay,” said Carver. “What do you want me to do?"

  "This is going to sound strange...” She let her voice trail off, suddenly shy. It didn't suit her. Carver wondered if he was being played.

  "Try me,” he said. “Neither one of us is getting any younger, sitting here talking."

  "Fine,” she said. “I want my husband home in time for dinner."

  "That's it?” Carver waited a beat, waiting for the catch, the punch line, the other shoe to drop.

  "Is that too much to ask?"

  Carver was nonplussed. “You want your husband home in time for dinner."

  "Yes."

  "That's it."

  "Yes."

  "You're not going to shoot him when he gets there?"

  "No,” she replied, a disconcerting smile dancing around the edges of her mouth.

  "Berate him?"

  "No,” she said. “I just want to talk to him."

  She made it sound so simple. Carver rubbed his hands together and said, “Okay, I'll see what I can do."

  "Thanks,” she said. “I know I just walked in here, and you must be busy."

  Carver gestured at the paperwork on his desk and shrugged. “Anything else?"

  She glanced over her shoulder to see if they were still alone. No sign of Max. Before Carver could say anything, the blonde stood and came around the desk, leaned in close, her lips only inches from his ear.

  "Don't be late, Mr. Carver."

  Carver turned in his chair and gave her a long kiss before saying, “Whatever you say, Mrs. Carver."

  She smiled, so quickly Carver thought he might have imagined it. “If you're good, maybe I'll even cook you breakfast.” Then she blew him a kiss and sashayed out the door.

  Carver looked at the chair where his wife had been sitting and thought about his priorities. Max would understand if he took the night off. They couldn't keep up this pace forever, not if they were in this for the long haul.

  Carver put his feet on the desk and looked around the small office, the boxes still waiting to be unpacked. He thought about how far they'd come since doing background checks for his wife's law firm. Another six months, maybe a year, they could hire an assistant. He could never have done this without his wife. She was supportive, sexy, and patient. So very patient. How did he get so lucky?

  He thought about breakfast and smiled.

  She already knew how he liked his eggs.

  ©2008 by Tim Maleeny

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  Novelette: SNOW BLANKET by Eileen Anderson

  Born and raised in Brooklyn, Eileen Anderson moved to Washington, D.C., after college and worked in magazine advertising while she earned an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University. When her husband became a JAG officer earlier this year, she moved with him to Norfolk, Virginia, and began work on her first novel. This debut story was inspired by winter trips home to New York.

  A thumbnail-clip of moon watched thick, wet snowflakes hurtle to the ground and cling to the world in heavy clots. Stiff limbs, cloaked in white, rattled with ice-breath before they fell, splintering the silence.

  With Kelly molded to his back, Andrew lay in bed, watching the sky pelt the fluorescent orange-tinged earth through horizontal slats. One muscle at a time, he peeled his calves from Kelly's shins and slid his feet out from under the blanket. Cool air licked his toes. He mopped his forehead and inched forward. Kelly shifted, curling in on herself for warmth. Once she settled, Andrew slipped from the bed and walked to the window, barefoot and relieved. The wind shrilled through the branches, and he felt the cold fingers of a slight draft creep through the window frame. In the morning, he'd undoubtedly find a Post-It note stuck to the refrigerator, requesting that he tape up the cracks.

  While lacing up his sneakers, Andrew watched his wife sleep. He did not see how prettily the orange light played in her hair-shine. The balloon of flesh under her chin swelled persistently each time she inhaled. He only ever noticed the weight she'd put on at night, while she was asleep and unguarded. Andrew knew that someday—probably soon—Kelly would be laughing with one of the supermarket checkout girls, and she'd be unable to control this extra swell of neck flesh. It was just the first sign of what Andrew assumed would be a lifetime of mysterious bulges he never saw coming. He wished he'd noticed when they were dating.

  But he hadn't. Looking through the blind slats, he tried to remember any red flags. None came to mind. Not even in retrospect. Kelly used to love working out. She'd had a tight stomach, with a soft ass and an easy smile. It made her day when someone thanked her for holding the elevator, and she cheerfully hummed her way through chores. She was happy. Until June, that is, when the doctor called with Andrew's test results and confirmed his sterility. Kelly stopped going to the gym. Andrew felt, when his wife began to leave notes for him, asking hi
m to fix the toilet and the squeak in the pantry door, empty the gutter and stop up the hole the squirrels had eaten into the attic, that he owed her that much. He was getting tired of it, though, and was beginning to feel that he'd paid off his debt. If he complained, she'd toss an acid “What's the matter? Can't do it?” over her shoulder, and the conversation would end. Andrew learned not to complain.

  Kelly nuzzled her face into her pillow (the bed's fluffiest) and mumbled something that sounded like “pygmy.” When she was restless, Kelly spoke in her sleep. Andrew never understood the words. When it first started, he'd lay awake, searching for meaning in the sounds. After two months of sleepless nights, he learned to block her out.

  Andrew tiptoed to the living-room closet and slid his jacket off its hanger. The coat had been a Christmas present from Kelly. She'd said the dark chocolate lambskin reminded her of his eyes. Andrew couldn't deny that he looked damn good in it.

  He grabbed his hat and the car keys from the kitchen table, gently closed the back door—being farther away from the bedroom—behind him, and crunched his way to their Saturn. He rounded the house and sank to his ankles at the point where his lawn normally began its gentle downward slope. The world looked flat, clean. Although the cold bit his nose and made his eyes water, he unzipped his jacket and stood still, his body hair bristling. Andrew bent over and scooped a wedge of snow from behind the tongue of each of his sneakers. Kelly once told him that the bigger the snowflakes, the wetter the snow. She'd grown up in Minnesota, and knew a lot more than he did about winter. Andrew reasoned that if the flakes were wet instead of icy while it was still dark out, they would melt quickly as the sun rose. “Shouldn't be too bad,” he said, but the wind whisked his words and their fog away as soon as they slipped through his parted lips. He re-zipped his jacket and leaped the rest of the way to the Saturn, looking back after every jump to see how far he had come.

  Easing the car away from the curb and inching into the middle of the undefined, smooth road, Andrew headed north.

  * * * *

  Hank plowed up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in his ‘86 Oldsmobile. She was nothing to look at—a real clunker, Angie said when Hank bought it. She may be old, he'd said, but this bitch'll run forever. And she had. Outrun Angie, at least. Hank nestled back into the body crease ten years had worn into the bucket seat, and remembered how his wife used to sit right close to him while he drove—so close he could smell a trace of her body salt hiding beneath layers of floral scent: soap, shampoo, deodorant, perfume. She said she needed to stay close and hold on to him or else she'd fall between the cushions and never climb back out.

  "Wouldn't that have been lucky,” Hank grumbled, scraping the inside curve of each fingernail against his fang-tooth. The fang freaked most people out, but Angie used to beg him to trace designs with it across the base of her neck, the back of her left knee, harder and harder until he broke skin. Even now, when he concentrated really hard, he could still taste the rusty bite of her blood. He tasted it now.

  A near-empty bottle of sleeping pills rattled in the passenger seat, rolling with the turn of the road. He reached over and tossed it in the glove compartment. If there was one thing Hank hated, it was unnecessary noise.

  In the backseat, Suzie slept as sweetly as an angel. Hank matched his breath to her rhythm, and mimicked the little “puh” noise she made before the slow rattle of each thick exhalation. Hank reached behind him and squeezed his daughter's knee. He was relieved that she hadn't completely outgrown her baby fat since the last time he'd seen her, fifteen months ago. She was taller, sure. But she still had round cheeks, soft knees, and silk-fine hair. She'd wailed for the first hour, but Hank had calmed her down, and now she was sleeping as peaceful as could be. There would be time for him to gain her trust later. For now, he just needed her quiet.

  The first time Suzie stood on her own, and the last time he saw her before Angie issued the first in a string of restraining orders, she'd pulled herself upright by gripping on to his jeans. She'd examined the playground bench, dismissed it, and chosen him—him—and nothing Angie said changed that. Hank thought that may have been the first useful moment of his life. Because she was so damn pig-headed, Angie refused to understand, when she came downstairs with a can of Coke and found them missing, that he was just taking Suzie for a walk. No matter how many times he explained it to her, how simply he phrased it, she just wouldn't listen. The police had found Hank a mile away, jogging down a back street with Suzie tucked inside his tucked-in shirt.

  He imagined Suzie wriggling through the bars of Angie's fourth-floor balcony, and nodded. “No place for a child,” he said to no one. “Kids need their fathers. Period.” He felt the weight of his switchblade snug in his pocket, smiled, and inhaled the fog from his cigarette. Oldsie accelerated down the empty highway. She was a tank in the snow.

  * * * *

  Untouched, gentle slopes blanketed the parkway. The wind swept through the open window and beat Andrew's cheeks ruddy, burning icy tears from the corner of his eyes. The farther Andrew drove, the thicker the silence, and he realized that for the first time in his life, if he stopped moving, he would hear nothing. It was as if the entire forest had crouched down, waiting to spring. He saw no hawks, no deer. Even the clouds seemed to hold their breath as snowflakes slowed their kamikaze hurtle and drifted lazily to rest on his windshield.

  Andrew's tracks stretched out behind him, and he wondered if the man in his moon-hammock cared enough about this solitary disturbance in the new snow to trace the tire line back to Kelly, muttering to her subconscious in their dark home.

  "I should've left her a note,” Andrew said. If, when he returned, his wife greeted him with another one of her “now that we're married” speeches, he might just strangle her. She drove him mad with her hundred and one questions about his day, and what he'd done, and what he ate and who he saw. He'd never actually hit her, and he never really intended to. “By God, a man can dream, though,” he muttered.

  Andrew leaned back in his seat and rolled his neck to either side. He used a meditation trick he'd learned in tai chi class to consciously uncoil his muscles, starting in his back and spreading down through his arms and legs. It didn't work. “Snow must've tensed me up,” he said.

  Normally, Andrew would be approaching the tunnel into Baltimore by now. Radio blaring, he'd feel himself hover above the road, skimming the earth in his own private bubble. He loved the road, the time alone, the potential chance encounters with like-minded people who drive solely for the thrill of possibility. His imagination forged a path ahead of him up the parkway. Each trip, Andrew turned around one exit farther up the road. “Maryland today, Maine tomorrow,” he'd say out loud, his thoughts winding their way to that first time his fingers would curl their grip around an axe, fell a tree, and build a fire in his very own woodland cabin.He loved to hear his own voice in the car. No traffic, no overtime, no alert levels. However, today the snow was collecting too fast, and he was beginning to think—with much irritation—that he'd have to turn around long before he checked another exit off his progress north.

  Andrew resisted an impulse to pull into the shoulder. He wanted to stop scribbling lines across the sparkling canvas. He wanted the silence to swaddle and rock him to sleep. How long could he survive, just sitting in the car? Would he freeze solid or dehydrate first? When would they find him? What would Kelly wear to his funeral? The only appropriate outfit he knew of was her standard Everywoman “little black dress.” Kelly filled hers out rather nicely—tight in all the right places. Last New Year's, he'd loved watching men aboard their midnight Potomac cruise eye her creamy cleavage, tightly pressed against satin. All night, her smile beamed with “this is the year” excitement. How long after the funeral would Kelly wait before she remarried? Andrew reasoned that once the windshield was covered over, he wouldn't have the attention span to sit still anymore, anyway. He kept driving.

  The tracks in Andrew's rearview mirror were already filling in to shallow dimples.
A brief moment of panic jolted him as he thought that he might not be able to find his way home. He chuckled—of course he would make it home—and lowered his eyes to the road. It took a moment for his brain to catch up to what was—or was not—before him. He should have seen a straight line to the horizon, but he didn't. Everything ahead appeared to be solid, and he was surprised, when he slid into the snowbank, that it gave way under the weight of his car. The world disappeared.

  Andrew sat stock-still. The pulse of his heart pounded in his ears, so he knew he was alive. For a while, at least. He read once that, in an avalanche, you should cup your hands over your mouth to create an air pocket. He never understood how a handful of air could last for more than a few breaths, but he figured that his carful of oxygen should see him through till sunrise. Would he recognize sunlight through the snow-covered windshield? Andrew took tiny breaths to conserve air.

  "This is stupid,” Andrew muttered a minute later. Hesitant, he poked his throbbing forehead, and his fingertips came back bloody. He adjusted the rearview mirror and saw that a round, purple egg was forming just above his eyebrow, dribbling a slow trail of blood. “Piece of shit!” Andrew yelled, punching the plastic steering wheel, from which the air bag had not deployed.

  Andrew fumbled to unhook his seatbelt and open the door. He stood unsteadily as snow wedged itself up his pants, past his socks. His legs were wobbly, but working. They were numb, apart from a dull, swelling pulse in his knee and a sharp pain in his right big toe. He leaned against the car as he tugged his gloves on, then scooped a handful of snow from the ground and held it to his forehead. Deciding that he wouldn't bleed to death, he looked the Saturn over. The whole front half was covered, and he had no way of telling what the damage was.

  Ice scraper in hand, Andrew dizzily climbed onto the roof of the car and started pushing off piles of snow, which landed on the ground with muted thuds. He stopped after every three shoves to rest and reapply packed snow to his forehead. The bleeding had nearly stopped—the last snow scoop was only stained a light, transparent pink—but, either from the injury or the cold, Andrew felt his right eye swelling shut. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.