The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  “You OK?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I admitted. “Not used to the idea that I may have to defend my family against wild animals.”

  “I think they are mostly harmless.”

  “Maybe, but there’s a big gap between mostly and completely, and I don’t want Veronica falling through it.”

  Even as I said it, I knew I was being melodramatic. What are you doing? I wondered. Is this a performance of what a good mother you are because you’re feeling guilty about hiring a nanny?

  I shook my head, and Oaklynn gave me a worried look.

  “Can I do anything?” she asked.

  “Look after the girls. Maybe take them for a walk. I’m going to call Eduardo, my yard guy, to see if he can do something about that fence. What do people do in Utah?” I added. “To keep the coyotes away, I mean.”

  “Everyone has guns out West.” Oaklynn shrugged. “I bet a lot of your neighbors here . . .”

  “Not in our house,” I said, more forcefully than I meant to, so that Oaklynn looked chastened. “I’m just not comfortable with them. Especially with kids in the house.”

  “I get that.”

  “Is there an alternative?”

  “Well, putting poison down is probably against city ordinances . . .”

  I shook my head vehemently.

  “I’m not looking to wipe them out,” I said. “I just want something that would be helpful if I felt the need. Put my mind at ease.”

  Oaklynn shrugged again. “Bows are hard to use,” she said. “A crossbow?”

  “Aren’t they dangerous, too?”

  “To whatever you point them at, yeah,” said Oaklynn. “But they take a lot of strength to cock, and you wouldn’t leave one lying around loaded.”

  I couldn’t help but be impressed.

  “Cooking and crossbows,” I remarked, smiling for the first time since I’d come downstairs. “If I’d known you would be this versatile, I would have hired you years ago.”

  Oaklynn grinned bashfully.

  “You pick a lot of things up in the country,” she said.

  It was a slightly odd remark, layered somehow, as if I’d cast a stone into a pool whose ripples somehow concealed its depth, but then she was smiling and cleaning up breakfast, all ordinary efficiency, and I put it down to my uneven night.

  “You need a nap?” asked Oaklynn.

  I made a scoffing noise.

  “Yes, but no,” I said, giving her an appreciative look. “That’s not what you are here for. I need to do some work. Can I leave you with the girls till lunchtime, and then maybe we could go to the park together?”

  “Perfect,” said Oaklynn. “I thought we’d take a walk. Veronica says she has things to show me.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” I said.

  And I went upstairs. It wasn’t even nine in the morning, and I went up to my little book-crammed office and closed the door, ready to work. It felt . . . OK. There was the smallest tug of guilt as I climbed the stairs, a twinge of regret like the one I experienced when Grace turned six months old and I decided to stop nursing. But then I was at my computer and working through my email, and I felt the rush of being my own person again.

  In my first few years at Ramkins and Deale, I had begun to cultivate a stable of writers in various genres, particularly in the slightly more literary end of the mystery and thriller market and, in nonfiction, in history and biography. When I went on hiatus, however, most of my writers were switched over to Bob Greene and Rachel Martinez, who had joined the company around the same time I had. Some of my writers had stayed in touch, and it was easy for me to check on their progress through my colleagues, but it had been made clear to me that when I came back full-time, I would not be getting them back.

  “It’s been nearly three years,” said Theresa Ramkins when we’d first started to wrangle weeks ago with the specifics of my return. “Your clients have been with their present representation longer than they were with you. It’s not fair to ask them to come back. We’ll keep the door open, of course, for those who really want to make the move, but I’m not comfortable putting them on the spot.”

  She was right, of course, and it wasn’t surprising, but it was still hard to hear, and not just because I was the one who had gotten them their first publishing deals. It was daunting to feel that, despite my years of experience, I was effectively starting from scratch. It felt like a demotion, like the detective who gets busted down to traffic in a seventies cop show. Everything I had achieved so far felt oddly irrelevant, like I was a newcomer, some intern hired straight from school to sift through the slush looking for the impossibly rare gold nugget. Worse, I had to do it not from the heart of a bustling community where agents discussed their submissions with each other and met with acquisitions editors over lunch at Manhattan sidewalk cafés, but from the wilds of North Carolina. The coyotes prowling my yard might have been symptoms of my professional isolation. It was demoralizing.

  Or rather, it had been, and there had been days when the whole idea of going back to work had seemed more trouble than it was worth. But now the nanny was here—efficient, likable, and oozing competence—and, coyotes notwithstanding, the landscape suddenly looked quite different. I felt the old excitement, the eagerness to get started, to find some remarkable writer and share his or her work with the reading public. That was the real thrill: not the commission, not having clients hitting bestseller lists or coming home from awards shows with little statuettes. It was the electricity of finding magical, compelling words, stories, and ideas, all entrusted to me to put them where they could be seen. I sat down at my laptop and powered it on, licking my lips and flexing my neck and shoulders like a sprinter in the blocks. As the computer came to life, I felt ready, as I had been four years ago, to take on the world.

  Doing so with what was in my in-box, however, was going to prove tricky. I had reactivated my portion of the R&D site a week ago and had been pleased to see that twelve submissions had come in since, but my optimism stalled quickly. Two were offering vague story ideas that their authors would like to sell to “one of your other writers.” Three were projects I had no experience with and no interest in representing (an “in the tradition of” Louis L’Amour Western, some hilariously awkward BDSM erotica, and a Native American cookbook). One was a picture book about a cantankerous rabbit that promised that the author’s spouse would provide the illustrations, and one consisted of a seven-page query letter expounding the writer’s Ayn Rand–derived philosophy structured as a self-help book. Of the remaining five, one had a decent query but an impenetrably self-absorbed writing sample; another could turn a sentence but had no story to speak of; and a third was almost a carbon copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a subgenre whose day in the sun was long past its expiration date. That left two. One was a solid if not especially original police procedural set in New Orleans featuring a heavy-drinking divorced cop and the murder of a Realtor who may have been connected to shady dealings at city hall. As I shaped a boilerplate “thanks but no thanks” to the other writers, I opted to put that one aside and mull on it a little, turning in the meantime to the last submission, sent only this morning.

  It was called Hell Is Empty, not an original title—a quick Amazon search showed it had been used several times before, though that wasn’t why I recognized it. I punched the words into Google and got the rest of the half-remembered quotation. It was from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

  A resonant phrase. The author, Ben Lodging, described himself as a writing instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. He had a few short stories in minor journals and had self-published another novel two years earlier, the sales of which he was brutally—endearingly—candid about. The current novel was a thriller told from the perspective of an absolutely average man called Joseph Carried, an accountant who found himself increasingly drawn to murder to relieve the tedium of his loveless existence. The query came with two
chapters totaling thirty pages. The story’s bleakness was countered by a dry, self-deprecating wit, and by the query’s tantalizing promise that the final sections had not yet been written, so whether Mr. Carried actually committed murder had not been decided yet.

  It was an unconventional tease, and though I found myself immediately skeptical about whether anyone could write a thriller in which—perhaps—no one actually died, I could see the power of the premise in marketing. Anyone who studies bestseller lists and reads a lot knows that the innate quality of a book is only one of the factors that shape its success or failure in the marketplace. Lots of other things can propel a mediocre novel into the spotlight. Sometimes details of the author’s own experience made a better story than his or her book. Sometimes a cultural coincidence, an accident of timing, made an ordinary book seem strangely prescient or compellingly relevant. Any number of things could be the lead for articles and interviews that might be the difference between massive bestseller status, sequels, international fame, and movie deals, and—on the other hand—utter oblivion, the book vanishing without a trace in a matter of weeks, never earning out its meager advance and actually harming the chance of the author ever selling a second book.

  Would a backstory about a novelist not knowing whether his character was a killer till the very end be nothing more than noise, or the hook that would draw real attention to what promised to be an intriguing and at least competently written novel?

  “Taking the girls out!” called Oaklynn from the downstairs hall.

  “Great,” I shouted back. “Have fun! Call me if you get lost.”

  “Will do.”

  I heard the snap as the front door opened, the smatter of conversation between Oaklynn and Veronica, the latter babbling cheerfully and relentlessly about where birds went to sleep. Then it shut with a thunk, and I was alone in the house for the first time in what felt like years.

  Unnerved by the stillness, I got up, went to the window, and watched Oaklynn maneuver the baby buggy down the steps and into the driveway, feeling a pang of guilt that I wasn’t helping, though it was clear she didn’t need it. She was strong and resourceful. I could almost sense her concentration from here, though her face was shaded by the wide brim of the navy blue floppy hat she had been wearing when she’d arrived. I watched her check the brakes of the buggy, then hitch the diaper bag with the blue cartoon elephant head on it over her shoulder, a study in competence. I breathed in and out, waiting for the urge to run after them to pass as they set off down the driveway and into the empty road. Finally, deliberately, I turned away from the window and went back to my desk.

  The silence of the house thickened about me, and there was only the computer and Ben Lodging’s odd experiment of a story, the sample of which I read and reread with no sense that twenty minutes had turned into an hour, then two, until the morning was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  The big man showed his badge in one hand and the photograph in the other.

  “Edward Flanders,” he said. “FBI. Do you think you’ve seen this woman? Maybe working here as an orderly. Maybe just in the patient waiting room. She could be a volunteer.”

  He was in the labor-and-delivery department at Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City, Missouri.

  “What’s her name?” asked the OB-GYN nurse. She was middle-aged, heavy, and pink, her blonde hair dark at the roots. Her name badge read Shelly.

  “She goes by different names,” said Flanders.

  Shelly’s eyes got wide and interested.

  “Is she dangerous?” she said.

  “I can’t discuss that,” said Flanders. “Does she look familiar to you?”

  Shelly stared hard at the picture, then shook her head, reluctant to let the drama go.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “And you’ve been here how long?”

  “Five years. Nearly six.”

  “OK,” said Flanders, pocketing the picture. “Thanks, anyway. Can you point me to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit?”

  “Through those doors down there, then along the corridor to the end and turn left. You’ll see the signs.”

  It was almost certainly a waste of time, but he would check it out, anyway. Hospitals were pretty compartmentalized these days, so it was just possible that someone working in one department would be unknown to those in another. Not likely, but possible.

  He couldn’t get beyond the duty nurse at the NICU’s reception desk, but his badge cut through some of her professional gatekeeper demeanor, and she took a long look at the picture. She shook her head, but as Flanders was thanking her for her time, another nurse, black and coat-hanger thin, came in and picked up a clipboard.

  “Hey, Marcie,” said the first, whose name was Corinne. “You seen her?”

  Marcie made a skeptical face, brows knitted like a cartoon character, then looked up, the puzzlement clearing like the sun breaking through clouds.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen her. Not here. At Mercy. I transferred. She was an orderly in peds.” She pronounced it peeds. “Pediatrics.”

  “When?”

  “Not sure. I think she finished before I came here. So . . . five months ago, maybe.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  The nurse shook her head slowly.

  “It wasn’t, by chance, Nadine, was it?” asked Flanders.

  Another head shake. Then the woman raised an index finger in triumph.

  “Charlene!” she said. “That was it. I remember now. She seemed so nice. She’s not in trouble, is she?”

  Charlene? thought Flanders, amused. Good one.

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,” said Flanders.

  “But she seemed so nice,” said Marcie again.

  “Guess you can never tell with people, huh?” said the other.

  Flanders nodded at that.

  “You may be right there,” he said.

  He gave them a broad smile of gratitude. It was impossible not to feel flattered by their awed glee at being close to something that felt like television. “You’ve been very helpful, ladies. Thank you.”

  Chapter Ten

  A part of her was still Nadine, of course, but she no longer thought of herself that way. She was Oaklynn Durst. It wasn’t a role as much as it was an identity with which she had bonded at what she thought of as a deep-tissue level, a formative place where the granular specifics of personal experience had twined them into the very muscle and bone of her body. It had to be that way, or all the work—the research into child care, the careful attention with which she had studied the real Oaklynn and her friends (some nannies; others, mothers)—would feel merely like a coat she put on to go outside. That would never do. Eventually, she would be caught without it, lulled into complacency by a break in the weather. Think of it as an act, and one day she would forget she was being watched, judged according to the experience and personality of someone she wasn’t. So she relegated Nadine to passive memory, a person she had once known who no longer had any relevance to her life, and she embraced being Oaklynn Durst even in her most private moments.

  Long ago, when she had been someone quite different, Nadine had read about method acting, about Stanislavski, Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and their various approaches to inhabiting roles so completely that as performers, they married their own experiences to the given circumstances of their parts so that they seemed to truly be the characters. The lines might be scripted, but the emotional realities that fired them as they came from the actors were real; the thoughts, the feelings behind them always true and clear. It was the only way to act, she had decided, however much people warned that you might lose yourself in the performance; that only mattered if you planned to come offstage.

  Oaklynn didn’t.

  Nadine was gone—dead or living in Japan with her husband; it really didn’t matter. The person here, nannying for a literary agent and her banker husband in Charlotte, North Carolina, was Oaklynn Durst. If you believed it, the audience would
believe it, and as those theater types agreed, where there was no deception, there could be no false moments onstage.

  Oaklynn walked the streets with the Klein family’s two-seater buggy, Grace sleeping fitfully, Veronica peering about her and commenting on everything she saw. For her, the stage now extended forever in all directions. She was inside the play now. It encircled her, defined her, until fiction became fact. For Oaklynn Durst, nanny, there was no dressing room, no offstage of any kind.

  They walked up Tanglewood Lane to Harris Road, and Oaklynn marveled at the rising heat and the unwelcome humidity that, she remembered from long ago, was typical of summer in the South. After Salt Lake City, she found the vivid greens of the manicured lawns a little surreal, but the massive, looming trees were what truly unnerved her. She hadn’t seen anything like them in a good while. She thought they were oaks or elms, though she wasn’t sure. Some of them were surely older than any of the buildings, and they towered over the neighborhood, crowding the skyline with a dense canopy of leaves. In some cases, their limbs reached right across the road, casting deep shadows on the asphalt. They seemed to be brooding, watching, in spite of the brightness of the day, and though the cool of the shade was a welcome break, Oaklynn found herself relieved when she stepped out into the direct sunlight again.

  She had been studying the area on Google Maps for weeks and had, after breakfast, outlined her route to Anna, who had approved, impressed and a little overwhelmed, as she should be. As they made the slow climb up Tanglewood, Oaklynn saw what she took to be two other nannies, an older black woman and a Latina, both pushing their white children in strollers. It made her think briefly, unpleasantly, of Carl, who would have had something to say about that. She gritted her teeth, repressed the urge to spit, and swallowed the unpleasantness. Carl was part of Nadine, and Nadine was gone, taking her grim little secrets with her.

  She was Oaklynn now. She smiled and nodded at the other nannies, making a mental note that one day in a week or two, she might exchange pleasantries with them, get to know them a little, but she wasn’t ready for that yet and so said nothing. When the black woman seemed to hesitate outside a big stone-fronted house on the corner of Harris and Tanglewood, Oaklynn paused to fuss with Grace’s sippy cup till the woman went inside and closed the door. From there, Oaklynn picked up the pace all the way down to the corner of Providence and right to the only traffic signal she had seen so far. As they approached the next corner, Veronica, who had been craning to look back and down at the sidewalk, looked up.