by Andrew Hart
Chapter Thirty-Six
Oaklynn sat in the dark basement with her laptop on her knee, typing, typing, typing, her face bluish in the glow of the screen and fierce in its frown of concentration. On the bed beside her chair, Mr. Quietly purred softly—his steady, knowing eyes on her. This was her usual nighttime activity. She had never slept much, and the habit—a single-minded hour or two at the computer before getting into bed—helped empty her mind before the attempt. Tonight she got under the duvet and lay still, but her writing had triggered memories she normally kept boxed and stacked away, and now she could not help but turn them over in her mind.
Her sister, Maddie, had been five years older than she, and Oaklynn’s—which was to say Nadine’s—earliest memories were of being with her in the hospital. She supposed her parents were there, too, but she remembered very little about her parents in the hospital, and their father might already have gone. It was a nice room, warm and surprisingly inviting, full of bright colors and things from home: toys, pictures, books. A kid’s room, and not one for a short-term stay. Maddie had been there for months, enduring test after test and therapy after therapy, while Nadine sat by to keep her spirits up, holding her bruised, feverish fingers . . . teasing, playing, and Being Strong.
The nurses loved her, said she was a Trouper and a Good Sister. Even her mother smiled at her from time to time.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. They were the first long words Nadine had learned. Sometimes she felt she was born knowing them. They meant that her sister suffered pain and exhaustion all the time, even between bouts of chemo and radiation. They meant misery, confinement, fragility, and—eventually—death. Nadine learned this early.
And one day, she was offered the chance to take it all away.
Her mother came to her, squatted down beside her bed, and looked at her, smiling and excited. They were due to go to the hospital, and Nadine was unused to seeing this look of thrilled anticipation in her mother’s watery-blue eyes. She sat up, sensing that something was coming, something that her mother had been thinking about for a long time. Later, much later, Nadine would wonder if she had been thinking of it before Nadine was even born—if it was why Nadine had been born.
All her sister’s pain, all the misery and heartache of the failed treatments might be fixed at a stroke, and Nadine could be the person to do it. All she had to do, her mother explained, was give Maddie some of what was in her bones. Nadine had been confused by that because she hadn’t known there was anything in her bones, but then she had caught that whisper of exhilaration from her mother, that hint of magic, that she, Nadine, was a kind of angel, using her special power to swoop in and save her sister, her family.
Nadine still remembered the feeling across three and a half decades, and the promise of it still thrilled her, even though she knew what had happened. Those hours as they prepared her for the transplant had been the pinnacle of her life, the way she had become the center of everything, borne upon a wave of hope and support, of love—and not just from her family. The doctors and nurses and staff in their scrubs and tennis shoes, stethoscopes, and blood-pressure cuffs swinging as they moved efficiently around—even they pulsed with whatever they had in place of love, that professional, walled-off space they kept in their heads and hearts for the good, selfless caregivers, the saviors of the sick and dying. She felt it like warmth coming off them. In those shining moments, Nadine was at the very center of all that mattered, and all it had taken was a willingness to sacrifice a little part of herself, a little pain and discomfort, a little time . . .
It was glorious, like walking a red carpet, like standing under hot lights in front of a cheering crowd, like receiving an award or a trophy and holding it up so that the world could scream with one voice, “Yes! This is what you deserve. This is who you are.”
But it hadn’t worked.
There had been complications from the transplant. As an adult, Nadine had spent countless hours studying precisely what had happened, learning the terms she needed to understand the reports, but none of it made any difference. Maddie was dead within the month, and her mother had never really looked at her surviving daughter again. She remembered coming to visit her mother as the woman lay dying in another hospital years later. By then, she was shrunken and stinking of sweat and the vodka that leeched out of her pores, lying on her side, her ratty gray hair in her face, her eyes on nothing. Nadine had sat beside her for three days before her mother spoke, and when she did, it was in a kind of fever dream in which she clutched at Nadine’s fingers with a feeble, bony talon of a hand, only to open her eyes, their focus swimming, and say, “Oh. It’s you.”
Now Nadine—Oaklynn now—lay on the bed, listening to Mr. Quietly and the sibilant hiss of breathing on the baby monitors, and she repacked the memories into the little boxes of her mind, closing the lids and pushing them back into the dark. Then she stared at the ceiling, just visible through the gloom, and tried to think of nothing.
“Thank you for helping to look after things,” said Josh, after the following day’s dinner of Chinese takeout. “I know Anna was really grateful.”
Oaklynn smiled her usual smile and said that she was just doing her job, but she watched him carefully, sensing something cautious and apologetic in his manner. He had been back from his trip only a few hours, so he wasn’t apologizing for himself.
Anna, then. She must have said something since he got back, some whispered bedroom something that had made him think he had to cover for her. But what? That she hadn’t wanted her at the hospital?
“How was your trip?” Oaklynn asked.
“Fine, fine,” said Josh, reaching for his glass in the way he did when he was lying.
“Oh, that’s good to hear,” said Oaklynn, humoring him. “I know Anna was worried.”
Josh hesitated, the wineglass halfway to his lips.
“She was worried?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “About what?”
“She didn’t say,” said Oaklynn. “Not to me. She may have spoken to Tammy about it. She came over the other night.”
Josh shifted uneasily.
“Tammy came over?”
“Yes.”
“And they chatted about . . . what? My trip?”
Oaklynn could almost hear him sweating.
“I think so,” she said. “I didn’t really hear.”
“But she sounded worried?”
“Probably just concerned about managing without you.”
“But she had you to help out.”
“Yes, but I’m just the nanny, not the husband,” said Oaklynn, who had made guilelessness a very particular art form. “And with her friend being away, too . . .”
Josh was very still now.
“Her friend?”
“Mary Beth,” said Oaklynn sweetly. “Kurt, too, of course.”
She saw the moment in his face when he remembered her remark as he had headed off to the airport when she had told him to say hi to everyone, when she had planted the seed in his head. She wondered how long it had taken to sprout, that little insignificant idea, to take root and leap up into a sapling that, when the wind stirred its leaves, whispered, “She knows.”
He blinked, thinking, then tried to sound perplexed, even indignant.
“You think Anna was worried because Mary Beth wasn’t home?” The tone was almost defiant, but Oaklynn noticed the way he had lowered his voice so that Anna, who was putting the girls down upstairs, wouldn’t overhear.
“I told her not to,” said Oaklynn. “But . . .” She smiled, embarrassed, and looked at the table, saying nothing.
“What?” Josh pressed. He was agitated now. He had put the glass down but was fidgeting with it, his fingers flicking restlessly against the tabletop.
“I don’t want to make trouble,” said Oaklynn. “Particularly when it’s unnecessary.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Oh, you know how people get the wrong end of things. These days it seems everyone thinks husbands and wives should
know every detail of each other’s lives. That doesn’t seem healthy to me. And a husband has a right to his privacy, particularly if he’s protecting his family. That’s a man’s job, right?”
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Josh. He was getting red in the face now, though he was still trying to play confused.
“I mean,” said Oaklynn, hunching down and dropping into a stage whisper, “the New York thing with the Wilsons.”
Josh stared, his eyes widening just a fraction.
“How did you know . . . ?”
“Oh, you know how it is,” said Oaklynn airily. “Servants are a bit like pieces of furniture. After a while, you get used to them and stop thinking they are people. So they hear things.”
Josh bit his lip but recovered quickly enough to protest.
“You’re not a servant!” he said, loud as he dared.
“Sure I am,” said Oaklynn, unoffended. “And that’s OK. I knew that when I came here. I work for you, and you pay me.”
“You’re part of the family!”
The untruth caught Oaklynn very slightly off-balance, and if Josh had been more attuned to such things, he might have noticed the wince in her smile, the pained quiver, the hesitation before she said, “Aww. That’s very sweet of you, but you know what I mean.”
She watched Josh let the point go as he committed to the question he had been hoping she would answer, unbidden.
“What did you hear?”
She smiled at that.
“Nothing I need to tell anyone else,” said Oaklynn. “I know my place, and I’m not looking to sow discord.”
“But if there’s something on your mind, perhaps you could tell me, and then . . .”
She waved the thought away as if she was being kind, ignoring the way his agitation increased.
“I’m a very loyal person,” she said. “You don’t know that about me, but it’s true. In this case, that means that you can trust me to keep whatever secrets you might have in the interest of the family.”
“It’s not a secret,” said Josh. He couldn’t let it slide. Not completely. He had to cover a little. “Not really.”
Oaklynn nodded sympathetically, knowing she had already won.
“I know. But it’s probably best if I kept things to myself, wouldn’t you say?”
Josh wavered, looking for another way out, but she would not let him off the hook. He had to say it. Finally, he gave a couple of quick nods.
“Probably,” he agreed. “Yes. Thanks.”
She knew how that pained him, especially the last word.
“Then we’re good,” said Oaklynn. “No harm, no foul.”
“OK,” he said.
“Allies?” she said, smiling with playful innocence.
He bit his lip, but he had no choice.
“Allies,” he said.
“Perfect. Now why don’t you have another glass of your wine there, and I’ll say my good nights to the girls. I’d like to do some reading before bed.”
She left him then, though her smile shifted slightly as she got to the top of the stairs. She stood for a moment, listening to the sounds of the house and to Josh’s stillness most of all.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
It was a nice house, Flanders thought. Not as flashy as some of the others in the neighborhood, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. Some of the neighbors looked like they were trying too hard. He wondered what Nadine made of that.
He had seen her twice this morning. Once at the window when she opened the upstairs drapes, and once in the yard with the two Klein girls. Asian girls, he had been surprised to see. Or half, at least. They had their mother’s features. He had seen her, too, on the phone through the kitchen window and then when she had driven off to do whatever she did for work or fun. Flanders had kept his distance, of course, using field glasses to keep an eye on things and making sure he stayed out of sight. He had to fight the urge to go in there then, not waste another second, but the moment had to be just right. Get it wrong and everything would be blown.
He reached blindly for his cell phone and called Noah, thumbing the call through with practiced fingers as he stared through the binoculars at the house in the trees. It rang eight times before Noah grunted.
“Gonna need that safe house ready,” said Flanders.
“When?”
“Soon,” said Flanders out of the side of his mouth. “Maybe tonight or tomorrow. Not much longer.”
“’K,” said Noah. “It’s yours when you need it.”
“And it’s still quiet? No one likely to come snooping?”
“As the grave, brother man,” said the other man. “As the grave.”
Flanders smirked at that.
Brother man. Where did he get this shit?
“Good,” said Flanders. “Keep your phone on.”
“Everything OK?”
Flanders considered that.
“It will be,” he said, and hung up.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
ANNA
I still had no final chapter from Ben Lodging and had written to him about it, raising the possibility of two alternate endings, one in which Carried killed someone, one in which he didn’t. I wasn’t really sure what to do next. Offer both endings to publishers and let them pick? That smacked of selling out. Suggest that we print both and let readers choose which one they liked best? Too gimmicky. Find a way to include both, perhaps presenting a killing and then revealing it merely to be a dark fantasy generated by Carried’s fevered imagination, followed by the mundane reality where nothing happened but might one day?
I rather liked that last option, but I knew that this was a choice that would have to be made by the author, and I was afraid that if I leaned too hard on Lodging, he’d panic and bolt. I wasn’t sure why, but for all his professionalism, I sensed something taut under the surface—a high-tension wire that sang with every touch. It wasn’t fragility, exactly, more an awkwardness and sensitivity. More than once I wondered if the story of his deafness was no more than that: a story, a kind of dodge so that he wouldn’t have to engage in person. Perhaps I was reading too deeply into our correspondence, which was soon going between us several times a day, but I sensed that I was talking to someone cocooned, separate from the world. How else could he capture Carried’s pathological isolation so perfectly? And in truth, my earlier paranoia about how closely parts of his book had come to my own life had left me cautious. It wasn’t anxiety, precisely. I didn’t really think he was watching me. In the cold light of day, I could see that for the craziness it was. It might have been for a few minutes on the day of Veronica’s accident, but now it was mostly embarrassment that I had allowed myself to think such a thing. Still, I had to force myself to get in touch with him and raise the ideas that I had been kicking around for the book’s ending.
Lodging responded almost immediately. He liked my idea of the false ending, the killing that was wiped out by the last chapter, so the reader was left with a pregnant sense of something that still might happen after the final pages. Even so, I warned him that publishers might balk at this as anticlimactic or too subtle for the genre.
“I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said, which was, I thought, encouraging. It’s important for authors to stand by the integrity of their visions, but sometimes they forget that their art is also a business, so it was nice to see a debut writer who wasn’t digging in his heels or getting overly precious about the fate of his work.
I told him as much, and in a series of swift exchanges, we fell into something less like a business discussion and more like a chat, so that all my former paranoia and anxiety about him fell away. I found myself telling him about my career, my tastes in literature, and the pros and cons of being an agent from outside New York. I even mentioned the oddity of having Oaklynn living with us. He was a good audience, attentive, even fascinated to hear about the ins and outs of the business, and keen to learn. I even managed to put to bed the question that had been bothering me f
or a while.
“Have you ever been to Charlotte?” I asked. “That scene when Carried goes to the park with the train and watches the children felt weirdly familiar.”
The delay in responding was just long enough to awaken my old anxieties again, so that they fluttered around my head mothlike, but the content of his message sent them back to sleep.
“No, I never have,” he said. “But there’s a place called Steamtown in Scranton. I think I must have been thinking of that.”
That was all I needed. My previous anxieties evaporated and became ridiculous. We talked some more about story structure and what was hot in the market right now, but also about the literary life in general, how to make time for reading and writing when you have kids to look after, and—again—the difficulties of adjusting to having a strange woman living in your basement. Before I knew it, we had been chatting for almost two hours: nothing too confessional but friendlier and more intimate than I was used to being with clients.
That came as a shock. I told him I had to go, get some work done, and he said he’d be in touch. I signed off, conscious of an odd exhilaration at all these minor confidences flying between us, and went to the window to clear my head.
There was a car outside the house, an old-fashioned, olive-green thing that some part of my brain branded a muscle car. The windows were heavily tinted, but the engine was running, the brake lights on. I didn’t recognize it, and since Settle Road was a cul-de-sac, we didn’t get through traffic. As I looked out, it lurched into motion and sped away. I wasn’t sure why, but it unsettled me.
I went downstairs and was peering out of the front window when Oaklynn came down from the girls’ room.
“What?” she asked.
The street was usually quiet, so my looking at anything out there was unusual. But I felt a prickle of annoyance. Couldn’t I look out of the window without having to report my findings to Oaklynn?
“Nothing,” I said. “Someone must have gotten lost.”
“I’m getting Vronny a drink,” she said, moving to the fridge.
“OK. Just keep an eye on her. She spills when she’s not paying attention.”