Kitabı oku: «The Other Mrs», sayfa 2
But I also can’t stand to consider the animosity Imogen has toward us. We have to get to the bottom of this without making things worse. “But if it happens again, if anything like this happens again,” I say, pulling my hand from my bag, “we go to the police.”
“Deal,” Will agrees, and he kisses me on the forehead. “We’ll get this taken care of,” he says, “before it has a chance to go too far.”
“Do you promise?” I ask, wishing Will could snap his fingers and make everything better, just like that.
“I promise,” he says as I watch him skip back up the stairs and inside the house, disappearing behind the door. I scribble my hand through the letters. I wipe my hands on the thighs of my pants before letting myself into the cold car. I start the engine and blast the defrost, watching as it takes the last traces of the message away, though it’ll stay with me all day.
The minutes on the car’s dash pass by, two and then three. I stare at the front door, waiting for it to open back up, for Otto to appear this time, slogging to the car with an unreadable expression on his face that gives no indication of what’s going on inside his mind. Because that’s the only face he makes these days.
They say that parents should know these things—what our kids are thinking—but we don’t. Not always. We can never really know what anyone else is thinking.
And yet when children make poor choices, parents are the first to be blamed.
How didn’t they know? critics often ask. How did they overlook the warning signs?
Why weren’t they paying attention to what their kids were doing?—which is a favorite of mine because it implies we weren’t.
But I was.
Before, Otto was quiet and introverted. He liked to draw, cartoons mostly, with a fondness for anime, the hip characters with their wild hair and their larger-than-life eyes. He named them, the images in his sketch pad—and had a dream to one day create his own graphic novel based on the adventures of Asa and Ken.
Before, Otto had only a couple of friends—exactly two—but those that he had called me ma’am. When they came for dinner, they brought their dishes to the kitchen sink. They left their shoes by the front door. Otto’s friends were kind. They were polite.
Otto did well in school. He wasn’t a straight A student, but average was good enough for him and Will and me. His grades fell in the B/C range. He did his homework and turned it in on time. He never slept through class. His teachers liked him, and only ever had one complaint: they’d like to see Otto participate more.
I didn’t overlook the warning signs because there were none to overlook.
I stare at the house now, waiting for Otto to come. After four minutes, my eyes give up on the front door. As they do, something out the car window catches my eye. Mr. Nilsson pushing Mrs. Nilsson in her wheelchair, down the street. The slope is steep; it takes great effort to hang on to the rubbery handles of the wheelchair. He walks slowly, more on the heels of his feet, as if they are car brakes and he’s riding the brakes all the way down the street.
Not yet seven twenty in the morning, and they’re both completely done up, him in twill slacks and a sweater, her in some sort of knit set where everything is a light pink. Her hair is curled, tightly woven and set with spray, and I think of him, scrupulously wrapping each lock of hair around a roller and securing the pin. Poppy is her name, I think. His might be Charles. Or George.
Right before our home, Mr. Nilsson makes a diagonal turn, going to the opposite side of the street from ours.
As he does, his eyes remain on the rear of my car where the exhaust comes out in clouds.
All at once the sound of last night’s siren returns to me, the waning bellow of it as it passed by our home and disappeared somewhere down the street.
A dull pain forms in the pit of my stomach, but I don’t know why.
SADIE
The drive from the ferry dock to the medical clinic is short, only a handful of blocks. It takes less than five minutes from the time I drop Otto off until I pull up to the humble, low-slung blue building that was once a house.
From the front, it still resembles a house, though the back opens up far wider than any home ever would, attaching to a low-cost independent living center for senior citizens with easy access to our medical services. Long ago someone donated their home for the clinic. Years later, the independent living center was an addition.
The state of Maine is home to some four thousand islands. I didn’t know this before we arrived. There’s a dearth of doctors on the more rural of them, such as this one. Many of the older physicians are in the process of retiring, leaving vacancies that prove difficult to fill.
The isolation of island living isn’t for everyone, present company included. There’s something unsettling in knowing that when the last ferry leaves for the night, we’re quite literally trapped. Even in daylight, the island is rocky around its edges, overcome with tall pines that make it suffocating and small. When winter comes, as it soon will, the harsh weather will shut much of the island down, and the bay around us may freeze, trapping us here.
Will and I got our house for free. We got a tax credit for me to work at the clinic. I said no to the idea, but Will said yes, though it wasn’t the money we needed. My background is in emergency medicine. I’m not board-certified in general practice, though I have a temporary license while I go through the process of becoming fully licensed in Maine.
Inside, the blue building no longer resembles a house. Walls have been put up and knocked down to create a reception desk, exam rooms, a lobby. There’s a smell to the building, something heavy and damp. It clings to me even after I leave. Will smells it, too. It doesn’t help that Emma, the receptionist, is a smoker, consuming about a pack a day of cigarettes. Though she smokes outside, she hangs her coat on the same rack as mine. The smell roves from coat to coat.
Will looks curiously at me some nights after I’ve come home. He asks, Have you been smoking? I might as well be for the smell of nicotine and tobacco that follows me home.
Of course not, I’ve told him. You know I don’t smoke, and then I tell him about Emma.
Leave your coat out. I’ll wash it, Will has told me countless times. I do and he washes it, but it makes no difference because the next day it happens all over again.
Today I step into the clinic to find Joyce, the head nurse, and Emma waiting for me.
“You’re late,” Joyce says, but if I am, I’m only a minute late. Joyce must be sixty-five years old, close to retirement, and a bit of a shrew. She’s been here far longer than either Emma or me, which makes her top dog at the clinic, in her mind at least. “Didn’t they teach you punctuality where you came from?” she asks.
I’ve found that the minds of the people are as small as the island itself.
I step past her and start my day.
Hours later, I’m with a patient when I see Will’s face surface on my cell phone, five feet away. It’s silenced. I can’t hear the phone’s ring, though Will’s name appears above the picture of him: the attractive, chiseled face, the bright hazel eyes. He’s handsome, in a take-your-breath-away way, and I think that it’s the eyes. Or maybe the fact that at forty, he could still pass for twenty-five. Will wears his dark hair long, swept back into a low bun that’s growing in popularity these days, giving off an intellectual, hipster vibe that his students seem to like.
I ignore the image of Will on my phone and attend to my patient, a forty-three-year-old woman presenting with a fever, chest pain, a cough. Undoubtedly bronchitis. But still, I press my stethoscope to her lungs for a listen.
I practiced emergency medicine for years before coming here. There, at a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in the heart of Chicago, I went into each shift without any idea of what I might see, every patient coming in in distress. The victims of multiple-vehicle collisions, women hemorrhaging excessively following a home birth, three-hundred-pound men in the midst of a psychotic break. It was tense and dramatic. There, in a constant state of high alert, I felt alive.
Here, it is different. Here, every day I know what I will see, the same rotation of bronchitis, diarrhea and warts.
When I finally get the chance to call Will back, there’s a hitch to his voice. “Sadie,” he says, and, from the way that he says it, I know that something is wrong. He stops there, my mind engineering scenarios to make up for that which he doesn’t say. It settles on Otto and the way I left him at the ferry terminal this morning. I got him there just in time, a minute or two before the ferry would leave. I said goodbye, my car idling a hundred feet from the waiting boat, watching as Otto moped off for another day of school.
It was then that my eyes caught sight of Imogen, standing at the edge of the pier with her friends. Imogen is a beautiful girl. There’s no rebutting that. Her skin is naturally fair; she doesn’t need to cover it in talcum powder, as her friends must do, to make herself look white. The piercing through her nose has taken some getting used to. Her eyes, in contrast to the skin, are an icy blue, her former brunette showing through the unkempt eyebrows. Imogen eschews the dark, bold lipstick the other girls like her wear, but instead wears a tasteful rosy beige. It’s actually quite lovely.
Otto has never lived in such close proximity to a girl before. His curiosity has gotten the better of him. The two of them don’t talk much, no more than Imogen and I speak. She won’t ride with us to the ferry dock; she doesn’t speak to him at school. As far as I know, she doesn’t acknowledge him on the commute there. Their interactions are brief. Otto at the kitchen table working on math homework last night, for example, and Imogen passing through, seeing his binder, noting the teacher’s name on the front of it, commenting: Mr. Jansen is a fucking douche.
Otto had just stared back wide-eyed in reply. The word fuck is not yet in his repertoire. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.
This morning, Imogen and her friends were standing at the edge of the pier, smoking cigarettes. The smoke encircled their heads, loitering, white in the frosty air. I watched as Imogen brought a cigarette to her mouth, inhaled deeply with the expertise of someone who’d done this before, who knew what she was doing. She held it in and then exhaled slowly and, as she did, I was certain her eyes came to me.
Did she see me sitting there in my car, watching her?
Or was she just staring vacantly into space?
I’d been so busy watching Imogen that, now that I think back on it, I never saw Otto board the ferry. I only assumed he would.
“It’s Otto,” I say aloud now, at the same time that Will says, “It wasn’t the Nilssons,” and at first I don’t know what he means by that. What does Otto have to do with the elderly couple who lives down the street?
“What about the Nilssons?” I ask, but my mind has trouble going there, because—at the sudden realization that I didn’t see Otto board the ferry—all I can think about is Otto in the single seat across from the principal’s office with handcuffs on his wrists, a police officer standing three feet away, watching him. On the corner of the principal’s desk, an evidence bag, though what was inside, I couldn’t yet see.
Mr. and Mrs. Foust, the principal had said to us that day and, for the first time in my life, I attempted some clout. Doctor, I said to him, face deadpan as Will and I stood behind Otto, Will dropping a hand to Otto’s shoulder to let him know that whatever he’d done, we were there for him.
I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I was quite certain I saw the police officer smirk.
“The siren last night,” Will explains now over the phone, bringing me back to the present. That was before, I remind myself, and this is now. What happened to Otto in Chicago is in the past. Over and done with. “It wasn’t the Nilssons after all. The Nilssons are perfectly fine. It was Morgan.”
“Morgan Baines?” I ask, though I’m not sure why. There isn’t another Morgan on our block, as far as I know. Morgan Baines is a neighbor, one I’ve never spoken to but Will has. She and her family live just up the street from us in a foursquare farmhouse not unlike our own, Morgan, her husband and their little girl. Because they lived at the top of the hill, Will and I often speculated that their views of the sea were splendid, three hundred sixty degrees of our little island and the ocean that walls us in.
And then one day Will slipped and told me they were. The views. Splendid.
I tried not to feel insecure. I told myself that Will wouldn’t have admitted to being inside her home if there was something going on between them. But Will has a past with women; he has a history. A year ago I would have said Will would never cheat on me. But I couldn’t put anything past him now.
“Yes, Sadie,” Will says. “Morgan Baines,” and only then do I make out her face, though I’ve not seen her up close before. Only from a distance. Long hair, the color of milk chocolate, and bangs, the type that hang too long, that spend their time wedged behind an ear.
“What happened?” I ask as I find a place to sit, and, “Is everything all right?” I wonder if Morgan is diabetic, if she’s asthmatic, if she has an autoimmune condition that would trigger a middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room. There are only two physicians here, myself and my colleague, Dr. Sanders. Last night she was on call, not me.
There are no EMTs on the island, only police officers who know how to drive an ambulance and are minimally trained in lifesaving measures. There are no hospitals as well, and so a rescue boat would have been called in from the mainland to meet the ambulance down by the dock to cart Morgan away for treatment, while another waited on shore for the third leg of her commute.
I think of the amount of time that would have taken in sum. What I’ve heard is that the system works like a well-oiled machine and yet it’s nearly three miles to the mainland. Those rescue boats can only go so fast and are dependent on the cooperation of the sea.
But this is catastrophic thinking only, my mind ruminating on worst-case scenarios.
“Is she all right, Will?” I ask again because in all this time, Will has said nothing.
“No, Sadie,” he says, as if I should somehow know that everything is not all right. There’s a pointedness about his reply. A brevity, and then he says no more.
“Well, what happened?” I urge, and he takes a deep breath and tells me.
“She’s dead,” he says.
And if my response is apathetic, it’s only because death and dying are a part of my everyday routine. I’ve seen every unspeakable thing there is to see, and I didn’t know Morgan Baines at all. We’d had no interaction aside from a onetime wave out my window as I drove slowly by her home and she stood there, thrusting the bangs behind an ear before returning the gesture. I’d thought about it long after, overanalyzing as I have a tendency to do. I wondered about that look on her face. If it was meant for me or if she was scowling at something else.
“Dead?” I ask now. “Dead how?” And as Will begins to cry on the other end of the line, he says, “She was murdered, they say.”
“They? Who’s they?” I ask.
“The people, Sadie,” he says. “Everyone. It’s all anyone’s talking about in town,” and as I open the door to the exam room and step into the hall, I find that it’s true. That patients in the waiting room are in the thick of a conversation about the murder, and they look at me with tears in their eyes and ask if I heard the news.
“A murder! On our island!” someone gasps. A hush falls over the room and, as the door opens and a man steps in, an older woman screams. It’s a patient only, and yet with news like this, it’s hard not to think the worst of everyone. It’s hard not to give in to fear.
CAMILLE
I’m not going to tell you everything. Just the things I think you should know.
I met him on the street. The corner of some city street, where it crosses beneath the “L” tracks. It was gritty, grungy there. The buildings, the tracks didn’t let the light in. Parked cars, steel girders, orange construction cones filled the road. The people, they were ordinary Chicago people. Just your everyday eclectic mix of hipsters and steampunk, hobos, trixies, the social elite.
I was walking. I didn’t know where I was going. All around, the city buzzed. Air-conditioning units dripped from up above; a bum begged for cash. A street preacher stood on the curb, foaming at the mouth, telling us we’re all hell-bound.
I passed a guy on the street. I was going the other way. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew his type. The kind of rich former prep school kid who never fraternized with the trashy public school kids like me. Now he was all grown up, working in the Financial District, shopping at Whole Foods. He’s what you’d call a chad, though his name was probably something else like Luke, Miles, Brad. Something smug, uptight, overused. Mundane. He gave me a nod and a smile, one that said women easily fell for his charms. But not me.
I turned away, kept walking, didn’t give him the satisfaction of smiling back.
I felt his eyes follow me from behind.
I spied my reflection in a storefront window. My hair, long, straight, with bangs. Rust-colored, stretching halfway down my back, over the shoulders of an arctic-blue tee that matched my eyes.
I saw what that chad was looking at.
I ran a hand through my hair. I didn’t look half bad.
Overhead, the “L” thundered past. It was loud. But not loud enough to tune out the street preacher. Adulterers, whores, blasphemers, gluttons. We were all doomed.
The day was hot. Not just summer but the dog days of it. Eighty or ninety degrees out. Everything smelled rancid, like sewage. The smell of garbage gagged me as I passed an alley. The hot air trapped the smell so there was no escaping it, just as there was no escaping the heat.
I was looking up, watching the “L,” getting my bearings. I wondered what time it was. I knew every clock in the city. The Peacock clock, Father Time, Marshall Field’s. Four clocks on the Wrigley Building, so that it didn’t matter which way you came at it from, you could still see a clock. But there were no clocks there, on the corner where I was at.
I didn’t see the stoplight before me go red. I didn’t see the cab come hustling past, racing another cab to snatch up a fare down the street. I stepped right into the street with both feet.
I felt him first. I felt the grip of his hand tighten on my wrist like a pipe wrench so that I couldn’t move.
In an instant, I fell in love with that hand—warm, capable, decisive. Protective. His fingers were thick; his hands big with clean, short nails. There was a tiny tattoo, a glyph on the skin between his fingers and thumb. Something small and pointy, like a mountain peak. For a minute, that was all I saw. That inky mountain peak.
His grip was powerful and swift. In one stroke, he stopped me. A second later, the cab raced past, not six inches from my feet. I felt the rush of it on my face. The wind off the car pushed me away, and then sucked me back in as it passed. I saw a flash of colors only; I felt the breeze. I didn’t see the cab shoot past, not until it was speeding off down the street. Only then did I know how close I came to being roadkill.
Overhead, the “L” screeched to a stop on the tracks.
I looked down. There was his hand. My eyes went up his wrist, his arm; they went to his eyes. His eyes were wide, his eyebrows pulled together in concern. He was worried about me. No one ever worried about me.
The light turned green, but we didn’t move. We didn’t speak. All around, people stepped past us while we stood in the way, blocking them. A minute went by. Two. Still, he didn’t let go of my wrist. His hand was warm, tacky. It was humid outside. So hot it was hard to breathe. There was no fresh air. My thighs were moist with sweat. They stuck to my jeans, made the arctic-blue tee cling to me.
When we finally spoke, we spoke at the same time. That was close.
We laughed together, released a synchronous sigh.
I could feel my heart pound inside of me. It had nothing to do with the cab.
I bought him coffee. It sounds so unimaginative after the fact, doesn’t it? So cliché.
But that was all I could come up with in a pinch.
Let me buy you a coffee, I said. Repay you for saving my life.
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. Put a hand on his chest. Gave him a smile.
Only then did I see that he already had a coffee. There in his other hand sat some iced froufrou drink. Our eyes went to it at the same time. We sniggered. He lobbed it into a trash can, said, Pretend you didn’t just see that.
A coffee would be nice, he said. When he smiled, he smiled with his eyes.
He told me his name was Will. There was a stutter when he said it, so that it came out Wi-Will. He was nervous, shy around girls, shy around me. I liked that about him.
I took his hand into mine, said, It’s nice to meet you, Wi-Will.
We sat in a booth, side by side. We drank our coffees. We talked; we laughed.
That night there was a party, one of those rooftop venues with a city view. An engagement party for Sadie’s friends, Jack and Emily. She was the one who was invited, not me. I don’t think Emily liked me much, but I planned to go anyway, just the same as Cinderella went to the royal ball. I had a dress picked out, one I took from Sadie’s closet. It fit me to a T, though she was bigger than me, Sadie with her broad shoulders and her thick hips. She had no business wearing that dress. I was doing her a favor.
I had a bad habit of shopping in Sadie’s closet. Once, when I was there, all alone or so I thought, I heard the jiggle of keys in the front door lock. I slipped out of the room, into the living room, arriving only a second before she did. There stood my darling roommate, hands on her hips, looking quizzically at me.
You look like you’ve been up to no good, she said. I didn’t say one way or the other whether I’d been being good. It wasn’t often that I was good. Sadie was the rule follower, not me.
That dress wasn’t the only thing I took from her. I also used her credit card to buy new shoes, metallic wedge sandals with a crisscross strap.
I said to Will that day in the coffee shop about the engagement party: We don’t even know each other. But I’d be an idiot not to ask. Come with me?
I’d be honored, he said, making eyes at me in the café booth. He sat close, his elbow brushing against mine.
He’d come to the party.
I gave him the address, told him I’d meet him inside.
We parted ways beneath the “L” tracks. I watched him walk away until he got swallowed up in pedestrian traffic. Even then, I still watched.
I couldn’t wait to see him that night.
But as luck would have it, I didn’t make it to the party after all. Fate had other plans that night.
But Sadie was there. Sadie, who had been invited to Jack and Emily’s engagement party. She was out of this world. He went right up to her, fawned all over her, forgot about me.
I’d made it easy on her, inviting him to that party. I always made things easy for Sadie.
If it wasn’t for me, they never would’ve met. He was mine before he was hers.
She forgets that all the time.
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