by Andrew Hart
“I did,” I said. “Don’t think I don’t know it.” I grinned, shook my head as if to clear it, and concluded, “Coffee. I need coffee.”
“I’ll make it.”
“You don’t even drink coffee. I’m not having you make something you won’t share.”
“There’s some lemonade in the fridge,” she answered. “I’ll have some of that.”
Oaklynn made the world’s best lemonade. She added orange zest and got the sweet-and-sour balance just right.
“Hmm,” I mused. “Then coffee can wait. I’ll join you.”
We had upped her wages by $150 a week because of the cooking and other extras she had volunteered that went way beyond the letter of her contract. She had said it wasn’t necessary, but it hadn’t seemed fair, and we began by offering her twice as much. She had argued us down, if you can believe that, and accepted the extra gratefully but with a touch of something else I didn’t understand that almost seemed like disappointment. Later, I wondered if we had insulted her by insisting on paying her more, as if we were deliberately reminding her that she worked for the family rather than being a member of it. I made a note to get her something nice for the holidays. I didn’t know what that would be, but I still had a couple of months to find out. The idea pleased me.
“You are such a sweet couple,” she said out of the blue, still gazing vaguely down the street where Josh had driven away, one hand on the fridge door. “I said you were lucky to snag Josh, but you weren’t.” She turned to face me but kept her eyes down. Her cheeks were pinker than usual, and she looked embarrassed and awkward, like she was confessing a crush. “You guys are perfect together. You match each other so well. You’re so smart and elegant. That hair . . .”
She looked up and grinned. She was always going on about how much she liked my hair, which is, unsurprisingly, straight and black, worn just longer than shoulder length. I’ve always thought it pretty ordinary, but Oaklynn had a way of making me feel like a swan.
“What about you?” I asked, catching something of her embarrassment. “No man in your life waiting for you to move in with him and make him lemonade?”
“Hardly,” she said. She still smiled, but she opened the fridge and got the pitcher out as if a spell had broken.
“How come?” I said.
She shot me a knowing look that, for a split second, flickered down at herself, her funny “witchy shoes” (Veronica’s words), her oversize body in its frumpy floral dress, and shrugged. For that tiny moment, she looked sad and lost and then, almost as quickly, wry and self-knowing so that the following smile had a tang of sourness to it.
“You’d be quite the catch yourself,” I said deliberately.
“I’m the kind of catch that breaks the line and tears the nets,” she murmured, flashing me another smile, this one mischievous as she set a pair of glass tumblers on the counter and splashed some lemonade into each. A few weeks ago, the joke would have surprised me, not because of its deprecation but because of its wit. I knew her better now, knew there was a cleverness below the down-home “Oh cripes!” Mormon would-be housewife. I laughed and shook my head as she added, “The men who like me . . . Well, there was only ever one, to be honest, and he turned out not to be very nice. Not nice at all. Believe me, I’m better by myself.”
“But you are so warm and loving!” I exclaimed. “So good with people, with kids. People can see that. One day . . .”
She held up a single finger and for a moment said nothing, so that I could hear the girls running around upstairs, hear Veronica’s big-sister voice as she instructed Grace on the proper way to play. I wanted to say more to Oaklynn, but we had stumbled into honesty, and I knew that trying to finish the sentence I had begun with romantic platitudes would violate that. For a long moment, we seemed to just look at each other, and then she smiled again, unreadably but maybe—maybe—gratefully, and chinked my glass with hers.
Chapter Sixteen
That night, Oaklynn/Nadine sat in the basement with Mr. Quietly sleeping in her lap as she scrolled through Anna’s Facebook page. It was amazing how much you could learn about someone from social media if you went back far enough, the picture of a person’s life and opinions you could build out of its fragments and offhand remarks. One of the first things she’d learned way back in the first week of September was Anna’s fascination with Charles Dickens, and not a moment too soon: it had taken Oaklynn the rest of the summer just to get through a few of the novels. But long though they were, the books had already proved useful, even if she felt that this simulation of closeness to another person was a risk that could easily unravel. Nadine wasn’t good at intimacy of any kind. She knew that. She wanted to be better at it and thought that if she practiced it, faked it, it might come more naturally, but doing so always felt like she was venturing out onto ice. The impulse to say she had been an only child had felt especially risky, a long step out onto the frozen lake, waiting for the telltale groan underfoot, the spreading cracks that presaged disaster as the lie collapsed.
What would you have said about that, Mom? she wondered, her mouth buckling into a hard, mirthless smile. Nothing good.
Today’s conversation with Anna about men and settling down had been a still more dangerous step out onto the ice, but for the opposite reason: not because what she was saying was a lie, but because it was true. Another few moments, and she knew the ice would have split beneath her, all her carefully constructed Oaklynness crashing, splashing through to a muddy death, the closeness unsustainable in the face of all the old terror and hurt. As Oaklynn vanished through the frozen pond, Nadine would have somehow been left standing, exposed for all she was, like some monstrous cicada crawling slick and foul out of its shell. Thinking back on the moment now, she felt awash with confused emotions, angry at herself for letting her guard down, touched that her pretty young employer seemed to care so much about her well-being, and caught in old and bitter memories.
Carl.
If Anna knew even the smallest part of Nadine’s past, their little chat would have been an altogether different beast.
That was, however, water under the bridge. Or the ice. She smiled wryly to herself, but before she could stop it, the metaphor shifted again. Not water under the bridge, but blood. It was more fitting, even if she didn’t want to think about it. And instead of the icy lake she had been picturing only moments before, she now thought of the creek at the bottom of the garden only yards from where she sat, in the house with Anna and Josh and Veronica and Grace, seeing it in her mind not as a brown and sluggish worm but a raging, foaming torrent of vivid crimson. She could almost smell its coppery, rank sweetness, and though she tried to push the image away, it wouldn’t completely leave her. She spent an hour tapping away at her computer keyboard merely to banish the idea, but when she finally went to bed, she dreamed of it all the same, the blood creek rising higher and higher till it lapped at the ankles of Grace and Veronica, who stood barefoot on its bank, lost and afraid.
Chapter Seventeen
ANNA
The moment I logged on, I saw Ben Lodging’s email in the block of bold-typed new messages, but I waded through the other six before opening it, like a child deliberately putting off dessert so that it would taste the sweeter. It was simple and to the point:
Dear Ms. Klein, it read.
I am delighted that you are enjoying the book. I am attaching the rest of what I have written so far (some 200 pages). I continue to wonder what Mr. Carried will do at the end of the book, how many—if any—bodies will litter the final pages, and whether his will be among them. I really do not know, and can but wait and see. In any case, I hope you enjoy this substantial addition to what you already have, and I look forward to hearing from you. The first chapters are currently out with a couple of other agents, so I’m not in a position to make the submission exclusive to you right now, but I will keep you informed on any movement with the other readers.
Very best wishes, Ben Lodging
I couldn’t he
lp but smile to myself at the tone of the message and its continuing pretense of ignorance as to how the book would end. Could he seriously not know? Or was he waiting for a professional insider like me to nudge him one way or the other, to tell him what the market wanted most? Either way, it was a curious strategy, and I reminded myself not to commit to the writer as a client until I had a good sense of his ability to deliver a finished and marketable product. Agents—reputable ones, at least—are paid exclusively on commissions from sales, so you don’t want to sign clients unless you are pretty sure that one day—after a lot of time and energy finding the right house—you can actually sell their work. Lodging could tease me for a while, and his method would indeed make for good interview material if the book ever got sold, but I wasn’t signing him up till I saw the final chapter and a coherent buildup to those two magical words: The End.
The nonexclusivity of my dealings with him meant that I needed to be ready with a hard offer soon, though. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity because some other agent had beaten me to it. So I dived in to what he had sent with a little deliberate caution, forcing myself to withhold judgment. The prose didn’t have a strong sense of personality, but it was lucid and engaging, and since the book was written in first person, that very lack of a distinctive voice produced an intriguingly odd sense of clinical detachment on the part of the main character. The narrator—the accountant, Joseph Carried—seemed to view the world through a telescope, as if even the coworkers and neighbors around whom his life revolved were miles away. It was a curious effect, but I found it compelling all the same, laced as it was with both ironic humor and an edge of something dangerous. Carried read like one of those experiments in artificial intelligence, a computer masquerading as a human being, faking his way through life but seeing those around him as both irrelevant to his existence and—this was the scary part—not obviously worth anything. When his mind wandered to the possibility of murder, it was no more than a kind of thought experiment. One passage in particular stood out. It took place when Carried was watering plants in a window box on the balcony of his fourth-floor apartment.
I looked down past the plastic watering can and saw the shapeless jacketed shoulders and scarfed, gray head of the woman called Mrs. Winterburn, a retired schoolteacher. I watched her movements as she put out her garbage, the effort and inefficiency. I had heard that she used to teach French. The end result of which was what? Mostly disinterest and frustration, I suspected, her students seeing her merely as an obstacle to their contentment, while the good students, the successful ones, emerged as what? Smaller versions of her, I supposed. Did she think in French as she clumsily manhandled her garbage into the street? Did she think her life well spent, years of inculcating a foreign language into kids who could barely use their own and resented her for the effort? Was that what life was for? I could, I thought, considering one of the ceramic flowerpots, end it for her now. It was a dense terracotta pot, full of dirt clumped together around the bulbous roots of three or four hyacinths and overlaid with teardrop ivy. It was a heavy pot. Dropped from this height, it would surely have the velocity to split her skull. It would need to be a clean hit, but if I timed it just right, it would splash her French-speaking brains across the sidewalk. She’d be dead before she hit the ground probably.
“Hi, Mrs. Winterburn!” I called. Not au revoir. Not today.
She looked up, peered for a second, then smiled, waved, and called back something pleasant but unintelligible, though I assumed it was English, not French. I rested one hand on the hyacinth pot and waved back with the other.
I didn’t kill her. Not today. Tomorrow? Perhaps. Her, or someone else.
The confidence of the writing and the queasy feeling of the moment left me unsettled and wanting more, torn between the need to know what would happen next and the desire to see the self-assured and disconnected Mr. Carried brought to justice before he could unleash whatever mayhem with which he seemed to be toying. I shuddered and read on, watching the accountant sighting down the barrel of his life at the people who, cheerfully ignorant of who and what he was, drifted in and out of range. It was alarming in a strange, almost comic way, but I couldn’t stop reading, and my instinct said that this might be not just a marketable book but a big book, the kind that gets trumpeted in all the industry publications. The kind that brings Hollywood sniffing around before it’s even in print. The kind buzzing through every book club and cocktail party within days of release . . . It was a guilty pleasure, perhaps, but a well-drawn one, and it dodged the American Psycho stigma by steering clear of grisly and gratuitous violence, being positively Hitchcockian in its building of suspense. If it was merely a potboiler, it was an extremely well-constructed pot, and you couldn’t look away as the temperature rose.
Hooked, I abandoned my previous reservations, stopped reading, and typed the email all writers love to get:
Dear Mr. Lodging,
I’m thoroughly enjoying Hell Is Empty and would like to set up a time to discuss representing this and your other work at your earliest convenience. Shoot me some possible times we can talk in the next couple of days, if possible, or early next week by phone or video conference.
Best,
Anna Klein
Literary Agent
I hit “Send,” then glanced over the material once more, feeling pleased with myself. It was only a few minutes later when I found myself wondering about the mind that could create so dispassionate a killer—or would-be killer. Being his agent meant we would have a relationship, probably one that lasted years. What if he was like his protagonist: odd, distant, socially difficult, and more than a little worrying? All agents had tales of unstable clients, writers who expected the moon and turned their fury on their agents when the deals didn’t come or the books didn’t sell. There was no place in my life for nurturing anyone who might be unbalanced, even dangerous.
Way to overreact, I told myself. You just reached out to what might be your first new client in three years, and you are already looking for ways to derail the process.
I sighed noisily and shook my head at my own nervous stupidity, glad that I couldn’t unsend the message to Ben Lodging. This might be just the book I needed to relaunch my career. I had to learn to stop second-guessing myself, particularly when the roadblocks I started throwing up came from baseless worry and paranoia.
I heard feet on the stairs. I bit my lip, my chest and arms tightening so that my hands hovered over the keyboard like suspended spiders. I had another submission to read and wanted to be left alone.
“Anna?” said Oaklynn, tapping discreetly at the office door I had left ajar and leaning halfway around the jamb, as if not being entirely present made the interruption somehow less.
“What’s up?” I asked, my tone just a little crisper than usual.
“Did Grace eat OK this morning?”
I frowned at her, my irritation increasing slightly. We had agreed that I would continue to give Grace her first feeding each day. It made me feel involved.
“Yes,” I said. “Fine. Why?”
“Well, she spit most of it up about a half hour after, and now she won’t eat at all.”
I rotated the chair to face her properly, my annoyance turning slowly into concern.
“That’s not like her,” I said. Grace’s fussiness had tailed off after she’d reached six months, and since then she had been eating heartily. “Let me have a try.” I got up and crossed the room toward her. “What did you give her?”
“A bottle, then the sweet potatoes and chicken,” said Oaklynn, backing off, her face earnest and careful. “Then the pureed peaches.”
“Which wouldn’t she take?”
“Neither.”
I quickened my step out into the hall and down the stairs, Oaklynn almost jogging to keep up so that I felt her weight on the hardwood steps. The bassinet was set up in the living room. As I entered, Veronica looked up from a scattering of felt-pen drawings that half covered the floor. Grace was crying, n
ot bawling, but a low, cycling whine of distress. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it. I snatched her up, immediately feeling how hot and sweaty she felt.
“She feels feverish,” I gasped, lifting her onto my shoulder, the warm, soft skin of her head against my neck. “I don’t understand. She seemed fine at breakfast.”
“I’ll take her temperature,” said Oaklynn. She rummaged in a translucent plastic storage bin on the floor by the bassinet and came up with a digital thermometer. It beeped once, and Oaklynn stood behind me, guiding it into Grace’s ear. My daughter mewed with distress again, but Oaklynn made soothing noises, and she went quiet again till the thermometer chirped again.
“Well?” I asked.
“One hundred four,” said Oaklynn.
“Christ!” I exclaimed. “OK,” I added, forcing myself to slow down and breathe. “OK. Where’s the phone?”
I was forever losing the handset because it always worked, unlike the one in the bedroom, so I used it all over the house.
“We should go to the emergency room,” said Oaklynn with grim certainty. “You can call your pediatrician, but that’s what they’ll tell you to do.”
“Yes,” I said, starting to pace, agitating Grace up and down in what was supposed to be a calming rhythm. She was still making vague, animal noises of misery. “OK. It’s OK, Grace. It’s going to be OK. All right, sweetheart? Mommy’s here.”
But I didn’t sound OK. I could hear my own panic rising. Veronica had stopped what she was doing and was starting to watch me. She looked unnerved, frightened.
“What’s wrong with Gracie, Mommy?” she asked.
“She’s just not feeling so good, honey,” I said.
“She’s sick?”
“I think she might be,” I said, trying to smile but conscious that my face was stiff and anxious.