The Waiting Room

by Emily Bleeker

  Gillian’s shuffled steps followed closely behind as the officer picked up his pace, maybe tired of being in the sun in his stiff black uniform.

  The front door was ajar.

  “So was it like this?”

  “No, ma’am. All doors and windows were secure,” he said politely but also with enough of an edge to remind Veronica that he’d already told her that information. “I just need to know if anything is missing.”

  Veronica walked inside and scanned the room, but nothing was out of place; it was neat and tidy just like her mother always kept it. Before her mom moved in, there were piles of randomness all over the house. In her grief, Veronica couldn’t seem to manage anything but breathing and keeping things as close to perfection as possible for Sophie. Now she’d gotten used to the neat interior and found comfort in the structure of it.

  There were smiling pictures of Sophie and Nick on the mantel of the fireplace, the few that they had of them together from the first weeks of her life. They were still in the same expertly dusted spot as this morning. The runner down the middle of the large mahogany dining room table still sat in a flawless blue line. The carpet that traced a path from the front door to the kitchen across the polished hardwood floors was in the right position, vacuum lines from her mother’s morning chores undisturbed.

  The kitchen, family room, and breakfast nook all sat untouched. Other than a bottle-drying rack and a high chair in the corner of the kitchen, no traces of babies or childhood existed. It bothered Veronica sometimes. A little toy on the floor or used burp rag across the armrest of the couch occasionally might be nice.

  “Your house is beautiful,” Gillian whispered as though she were walking through a cathedral.

  Veronica had almost forgotten she was still tagging along. Almost everything the mourning mother said made Veronica sad. Her house was tidy and well taken care of, but it was no palace. The wonder on Gillian’s face drew an image of what her home must be like; if Veronica had her charcoal, she could sketch it easily. She’d smudge every edge until it felt like the room was closing in on a solitary form, crying into her hands on a twin bed, framed pictures on the walls, all pictures of the same face but changing slightly through age.

  “Thanks,” Veronica managed to mutter to Gillian as she scanned the room one last time. It all seemed incredibly normal. She pointed toward the stairs. “Did you look up there?”

  Officer Burdick gave her that stare again that said, “I know how to do my job.”

  “Okay, okay . . .” Veronica put one foot on the stairs but stopped. “I know you already looked, but maybe you should go up first . . . you know . . . just in case.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Officer Burdick didn’t betray his annoyance if he felt any. He walked briskly upstairs to the bedrooms, his hand on his gun, which made Veronica nervous and relieved at the same time.

  The first room was Sophie’s, a beautiful soft pink with cream and light-blue accents. The room felt like snuggling into a banana split covered in whipped cream. This time of the day, the sun hit the front of the house, leaving the rear cool and shaded by the giant oaks in the backyard. The crib was neatly made, comforter hanging off the edge of the railing as decoration with little bluebirds embroidered on it. The lifesaving swing that kept Sophie calm during those long nights of colic sat across from the crib, and the tidy wicker changing table with all necessary supplies stacked in neat piles sat in the corner.

  Mostly, Veronica loved the aesthetic of the nursery. She created it out of what must’ve been an office for the previous owners. Her mother had watched tiny, recovering Baby Sophie in the first weeks after Nick’s death, throughout the hasty move, and after Sophie’s homecoming while Veronica painted the walls and filled the room with all her hopes and dreams of what a perfect life she’d give that little girl.

  It had taken years of trying and months of medication before the positive test came back, but it finally did, and her world had changed. The warmth of that room had nothing to do with temperature; it was about the love she still had for Nick and Sophie. She swore bits of that love were trapped under the paint and between the wainscoting and the wall. It seeped out and surrounded whoever stepped inside it.

  But as soon as Sophie had moved into her cozy, impeccably designed room, Veronica never entered it again. She stood just outside its threshold so often she swore there was an imprint where her socked feet would rub as she watched Sophie’s crib and wished she could hold her one more time.

  Nothing hinted at the sensor and invisible tripwire across the threshold of Sophie’s room. She’d gotten the device installed in the nursery almost on a whim. When the technician suggested it as an extra precaution for the future, her mind had flashed to obvious worries that could plague her life as a single mother, like if Sophie learned how to climb out of her crib and suddenly wandered off during nap time. Until those days of dangerous mischief, the alarm sat dormant, only armed by default when the whole house alarm was turned on.

  Alarm or no alarm, she hadn’t stepped inside the room in months. But Veronica still knew every detail of the room’s content, and once again nothing was out of place. Except—the carpet just inside the nursery door—the corner was flipped up.

  “I think someone was here.” She stepped back from the open door and bumped into Gillian, who was craning her neck to see inside. “Don’t go in there. Maybe there are fingerprints.”

  Officer Burdick cocked his head and took a step forward in front of the two women and then stepped over the wooden threshold as though it wasn’t even difficult. Veronica held her breath, wondering if he could feel what she used to in that room. But if he did, he didn’t let on. Burdick scanned the room slowly, turning in a circle, stopping after a few quarter turns.

  “What is that?” He pointed at the bookshelf in the rear corner of the room, next to the window. Besides some decorative knickknacks and a book or two from the baby shower, there was a white-and-black glassy lens pointed across the room.

  “Oh, it’s the baby-monitor camera. I have it set up so my mom and I can watch Sophie from other parts of the house or if I’m on a business trip or something.”

  “Does that thing record?”

  “Oh . . . oh!” Veronica gasped. “I’m so stupid. Of course. They are stored online. I can get them on my phone, but I usually watch on my computer monitor. It’s so much easier to see clearly. I can review them every night if I want to. Damn it—why didn’t I think of this earlier? Come on.” She waved to both Gillian and the officer. “We can watch in my studio.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The door to her studio was always closed with her mom living here, and usually no one was allowed inside. When Veronica pushed open the heavy door, papers fluttered, hanging from the wall with tacks and tape, some filled with color, some completely painted black, some with childlike paintings of flowers and rainbows but others filled with dark, scary faces like the gargoyles she used to be so obsessed with. Her workspaces were always a mess, but since her loss and moving to the house on Mayfair Lane, the walls and floors and tabletops of this one room had become blanketed in artwork. It was like the creative chaos of her mind, layered and unexpected and always moving, like the way each step Veronica made set a shimmer of movement through the pages.

  “Excuse the mess,” she said halfheartedly. No part of her was embarrassed by her chaos. Wasn’t that the beauty of art—taking the chaos of a blot of paint or a streak of chalk and turning it into something more? One day she had found her mother in here, rifling through papers and taking pictures off the wall as though she had any right to say what had value and what didn’t. That was the problem with her relationship with her mom. She always thought she knew better than Veronica until Veronica had no choices left to make but her mother’s choices. When she was younger, there were big fights and days of passive-aggressive silence, but now she skipped the fight and just installed a lock. In fact, she had learned to shut her mom out of any part of her life she attempted to push her way into before Vero
nica was ready.

  “The mess? This is amazin’, hon.” Gillian was lost in a daze. She traced the lines of each piece as if she wanted to know exactly what the images had to say to her. It reminded Veronica of how she felt the first time she went to the Louvre, the echoing halls holding paintings that had been touched and created by her idols. Somehow Gillian seemed to feel that same emotion inside Veronica’s studio.

  Shuffling papers into a few makeshift stacks on her desk, Veronica retrieved her closed laptop and placed it on top of the pages in front of her. Officer Burdick also seemed taken aback by the ten-by-twelve workspace. While Veronica’s computer powered on, he stopped by the easel where she did her watercolors. There one of her work projects sat, untouched for days. The proofs had been due a month ago. Missing her deadline was hard at first, but every day that went by, her shame was deadened by necessity. How could she work on anything but herself and her family right now?

  “Wait, I recognize these. This is Mia’s Travels.” He said the title of the series with a smile as though he suddenly remembered they were friends. “Wait, are you the Veronica Shelton? You write the Mia books?”

  Veronica blushed. People rarely remembered her name.

  “I’m the illustrator, not the author,” she said dismissively. The computer chimed on, and she toggled through the open tabs, looking for the right file.

  “My daughter loves these books!” He wasn’t just smiling now; he was all-out grinning and grasping at his pocket for the notebook he’d been writing notes in. “I didn’t know you moved to Sanford. She will never believe me.”

  As Officer Burdick chattered on about his six-year-old daughter, Gloria, and her love of the main character of the book, Mia, a little Latina girl with a pet dog that only spoke Spanish, Veronica maximized the camera monitoring program, and Sophie’s room came into focus. The storage icon in the corner was flashing a glowing two over the outline of a cardboard box. She hadn’t reviewed and deleted yesterday’s files yet, but both would need to download from the server before she could view. Even with her high-speed internet, it would take a few minutes. She didn’t always watch the video files back at the end of the day. Usually it was the live feed through her computer. The real reason for the camera wasn’t to catch an intruder but so Veronica could feel connected to Sophie through the screen.

  “I really shouldn’t ask, but can I take a picture of this? Is this the new book?”

  The painting on the easel was just the landscape of the fictional world the characters lived in, half real world with cars and streets and half fantasy with magic trees that could transport the characters to other countries and, in later editions, different times in a blink of an eye.

  “For Gloria?” she asked, glad she remembered his daughter’s name. He grinned hearing her name come out of Veronica’s mouth. It was strange feeling as though his whole opinion of her had changed in the two minutes since he had found out what she did for a living. “As long as you don’t post it on social media, take any pictures you like. There are more new ones in that portfolio.” She pointed at the large rectangular art portfolio leaning against the wall next to the easel and checking the slowly loading status bar.

  “Just for Gloria, I swear. I don’t even have a Facebook page,” Officer Burdick said, smiling as he pulled his phone out of a back pocket and clicked a quick picture of the half-finished painting in front of him first. Then he started to flip through the collection of paintings in an open black portfolio on the floor to the right. He went through them slowly, one stiff page at a time, pausing to take a picture occasionally. She should care about the possibility of the images being leaked, but the officer was more cooperative now than he had been all afternoon, and anyway, she liked the way he smiled when he talked about his daughter.

  Gillian didn’t seem distracted by the mention of Veronica’s renown and instead studied some of the older charcoal and chalk pictures on the walls. It was funny how each creation could spark feelings in the person viewing it, but it brought the artist back to the moment she made each stroke, and sometimes, if she tried very hard, she could remember how she felt as the brush or chalk touched the page. It was almost like time travel.

  The computer dinged, and every head in the room whipped over to look at the computer, reminding them why they were really there.

  “I found it,” Veronica called. Officer Burdick gently closed the portfolio and put his phone away reluctantly, as though he could’ve looked at the wordless pages of a children’s picture book for the rest of the day. The officer stood by Veronica’s side, leaning over slightly to get a better look at the screen. Gillian didn’t even try to get behind the desk. She stayed in her spot, arms crossed in front of her, watching their faces as though she could see the video just by witnessing their reactions.

  The recordings always started at midnight, but Veronica quickly clicked to the very end of the file so they could work backward instead. Using the rewind button, she backed through the afternoon thirty seconds at a time. The camera was focused on the crib, and the only time there was a flicker of movement from the doorway was when Officer Burdick stepped inside and located the camera. Other than that, even their own visit was marked with no more than a few shadows flitting over the crib’s mattress and a murmur of conversation from the hall.

  “Oh, it has sound?” he asked, straining to hear.

  “Yeah, you need it on?”

  “Couldn’t hurt. Why don’t you rewind to the last time you know someone was in the house and see what we can find.”

  “Well, I got the call at 3:55 p.m. So I’ll go back to that time and see what’s going on.” Veronica dragged the bar backward, making the numbers flash, reducing before her eyes, nothing changing in the room but a flutter of a curtain when the air turned on for a cycle. She stopped the rapid decline when something dark flashed across the screen, but it ended up being a fly that had decided to rest on the lens of the camera. Officer Burdick shifted, and it felt as if she was losing any extended patience she’d gotten from her status as his daughter’s favorite illustrator.

  When the numbers on the screen matched the time the call from the alarm system had come through, Veronica slowed and then stopped. With one very short nail, she tapped at the volume button and let the recording play and leaned in till she was worried her breath would cloud up the computer screen.

  The grainy gray image made her think of Sophie. How many hours had Veronica spent watching that crib through that screen through that camera? Today the room was empty and silent and still.

  With Burdick leaning over behind her, his body heat arched across the thin barrier between his stomach and her back, and that gross, sticky feeling she’d been trying to escape while outside in the sun came back instantly. Thankfully, Gillian had settled in the overused armchair Nick had stolen from his frat house, giving Veronica more space than if both visitors had been staring and breathing and expecting. Gillian looked at home there, and when she was silent, she really was a chameleon that could melt into any scenery, patient from what must have been endless years of waiting for someone else to go first.

  The security footage played at the slow, methodic speed of time passing. At first Veronica held her breath, sure she’d see something or someone, but once the alarm went off and blared in the background, she knew that they’d missed their chance to catch whatever set it off. There was no shadow or crash or really anything during those fifteen minutes before the alarm or even in the minutes after the siren whirred in a deafening cycle. Nothing but that fly and the emptiness of Sophie’s room.

  “Eh.” Officer Burdick made an unsure sound and stood up.

  “Come on, we only looked once,” Veronica pushed, starting to panic. What if they were wrong? What if someone had been there and now the officer would leave and she’d be alone in a house with an old woman and a baby? She messed with the control bar and skipped back again, twenty minutes this time. “Maybe I could rewind it and go through in double time or . . . or get out the headphones
and see if we could hear more?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything here.” He shrugged and rolled his shoulders, stretching after leaning for so long.

  Veronica pushed “Play” and let the video play back at double speed, ignoring his comments. The fly sped from the side of the room, the curtains fluttered faster as if the fan in the air conditioner had been turned up to full blast, but still nothing out of place.

  “Ms. Shelton, it’s probably best to finish our walk-through and then let you ladies get on with your day.”

  Veronica ignored the officer and returned to her watching spot, poised over the keyboard.

  “I’ll bet you it was that damn fly. Anything can trigger those sensors if it gets hit just right,” Officer Burdick offered, this time with sympathy in his voice, as if he were talking to a child who wondered how Santa got into her house when they had no chimney.

  The tense energy of worry and curiosity had sucked out of the room, and Veronica started to feel the uncomfortable prickle of embarrassment with the unfamiliar eyes of the officer and Gillian looking at her as though she were crazy for thinking a fly was someone in her daughter’s room. The gray screen kept flashing ahead on fast-forward, leaving Veronica half-hypnotized and half-desperate. Something. She had to find something. They couldn’t go away yet. Not till she was sure . . .

  A flash of light on the screen caught her eye.

  “There!” Veronica slammed the space bar on her computer, pausing the image. With careful precision, she dragged the toggle back just a fraction of an inch, rewinding a matter of seconds, removed the double-speed feature, and pressed “Play.” It was brief, so brief you could miss it if you blinked, but it was there, she was sure of it—a bright flash like a glass reflecting the sun. “See, right there.”

  Officer Burdick had made it halfway to the hall. He turned slowly on the balls of his feet, the leather of his boots squeaking against the paint-spotted ceramic floors. He didn’t want to look—Veronica didn’t need to be a people pleaser to read that look on his face—but he was going to appease her. She was probably the closest thing to a celebrity he’d ever seen.