by Mary Kubica
She doesn’t have to tell me why she’s there; I know what she’s come to do. She moves quickly, her hands on me, her lips on mine, stating in an undertone, “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to do this,” and I say, “Cassidy,” though I’m not sure if the word comes out argumentative or inviting. I make a feeble attempt to slide away, out of reach, though deep inside my mind screams at me to let her. To push those forgotten memories of another Heidi out of my mind, and let Cassidy do as she pleases, whatever she came here to do.
And then she’s touching me, but her hands are cold, different from Heidi’s in so many ways. They are bold and presumptuous, not waiting to get acquainted before they dive right in, full steam ahead. She’s doing everything wrong, not the way Heidi would do it, Heidi who is indulgent in the way she touches me, tender, and I find myself thinking about Heidi, suddenly, desperately, longing for Heidi, wishing it were Heidi here in this hotel room, with me.
I’m thinking what Heidi would say if she knew what was happening right now, how it would make her feel. Heidi who is wholesome, generous beyond belief; Heidi who refuses to smash a spider with a shoe.
“Stop,” I say, pushing her away, gently at first, and then harder. “Stop, Cassidy,” I say, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this to Heidi.”
I want Heidi. I miss Heidi.
I miss my wife.
But Cassidy is staring at me with this morose look on her face, and she says, “You’ve got to be kidding, Chris,” and it’s not that she’s had her feelings hurt or that she’s feeling embarrassed that she’s been refused. “Heidi?” she asks. She stares at me with puppy-dog eyes, big and blue, pouting, saying my wife’s name as if it is low-grade.
It isn’t that Cassidy can’t believe she’s been turned down.
It’s that she can’t believe she’s been turned down for Heidi.
I miss Heidi and her goodness, her virtue. I miss that she cares for homeless cats, and illiterate men, and children in countries whose names I can’t say. Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan and Bahrain.
I can’t stand to stay there, in that room, with Cassidy. My pulse beats loudly in my ear. My hands are clammy, my balance off, as I thrust my feet into a pair of loafers waiting by the door, Cassidy’s voice in the background calling me by name, laughing, saying Don’t go, leaving me dizzy. Vertigo. I lay a hand on the wall to steady myself as Cassidy continues to incant my name, to reveal herself to me as if it might just change my mind.
WILLOW
What I tell Ms. Flores is that Joseph brought me meals twice a day, and twice a day he removed them from my room. I tell her that he wouldn’t let me out, even to pee. From time to time he’d come to empty a jar he had given me (though the smell of my own pee never went with it), and that every night he came to call, unlocking and thrusting open that bedroom door and telling me to undress.
I tell her that every night, after he’d gone to bed, I checked that door to make sure it was locked.
I tell her that I sat there, day in and day out, praying that one day he might forget to lock the door.
I tell her that Matthew never came around, that I didn’t see him again after that day he limped out the front door.
I tell her that I didn’t see Isaac, though I heard his voice, echoing throughout the home, and knew that he was there, moving in and out of a world I could no longer see.
I tell her that I watched out the bedroom window as the snow melted away, leaving gaping puddles along the sidewalks and in the potholed street.
I tell her that once a day I was allowed to leave the room, only to defecate. I tell her how Joseph stood in the doorway and watched me go. I tell her how once I didn’t make it to the toilet in time, and how Joseph made me sit in it for days, until my rear end was covered in a rash meant only for babies. I tell her how he laughed, how I heard Joseph and Isaac talking later about how I shit my pants.
I tell her how one night, by the grace of God, after Joseph paid me a visit, he slipped out the bedroom door and forgot to lock it as he left. I sat on the bed, waiting for the awful sound of the metallic key jingling in the lock, but there was none. Just the whine of floorboards as he moved through the home, the heavy sound of him climbing into his bed, the fuss of the mattress springs when he laid his immense body upon it. I waited for an hour at least, just to make sure, before I stood from the bed and wandered across the cold room, before I inched a shaking hand onto that bronze lever and opened the door.
I tell Ms. Flores how I found the knife in a kitchen drawer, the biggest one from a twelve-piece cutlery set, a chef’s knife, at least eight inches long or more. I tell her how I stood there in that darkened kitchen, watching the faint glow of the moon in the distance and thinking, though there was no need to think because I’d already decided. The house was quiet, but for the hiss of the furnace and the movement of water through pipes.
But of course, I don’t know one way or another because that night, before Matthew arrived, I didn’t step one foot out of my room.
I tell her how I tiptoed into the bedroom and how I watched Joseph sleep. How I watched his fiendish body upon the big bed, how I heard him snore. Ms. Flores is scribbling maniacally across her paper now, making sure she gets the details just right. The way Joseph’s eyes flew open as I approached the bed, the squeaky floorboards awakening him from sleep. How he sat upright in bed, the look in his eyes not scared but confused. How he mumbled, “How did you...” before I jammed that chef’s knife into his chest. How did you get out of your room? was what he was gonna say. But I didn’t give him a chance. That’s what I tell her. His eyes, his mouth, gaped open and his hands felt blindly for the knife before I tore it out and thrust it in again. And again. Six times they said. That’s what they told me when they found me.
But of course, how would I know because that night, I didn’t step foot in Joseph and Miriam’s room.
What I knew, but what I didn’t tell Ms. Flores, was that someone older than eighteen would be tried as an adult. But not someone who was sixteen, someone like me who’d never been in trouble with the law. I wouldn’t get in as much trouble as Matthew would if they knew, if they knew the truth. I knew that ’cause Daddy had told me, back when I was just a kid and we were watching some story on the news. Some story about a sixteen-year-old who murdered her folks. Daddy said kids sometimes got away with it, while adults went to jail, plain and simple. If they didn’t get executed. I remember that I’d asked Daddy: What’s executed? But he never did say though I figured it out nonetheless.
“And Miriam?” asks Ms. Flores.
“What about Miriam?”
“Tell me what happened to Miriam.”
“She didn’t wake up,” I say. Not that I know one way or the other since I wasn’t there, in that room. I claim that she lay there, sound asleep, while I thrust that chef’s knife in and out of Joseph’s chest.
But Ms. Flores is bound and determined. She sets her pen on the table and double-checks the tape recorder to make sure it’s still working. She’s got to get this on tape. My confession. “Then why did you kill her, too?” she asks and my spit catches in my throat and I choke.
Miriam? I almost ask aloud.
But then I hear Matthew’s voice in my mind and slowly, even slower than molasses in January, it sinks in.
If I was ever a vegetable like my mom, I’d want someone to just shoot me. To take me out of my misery.
And that’s just what he did.
HEIDI
In the early afternoon when Ruby is asleep, I walk through the condo collecting items of clothing thrown at random here and there: Ruby’s jumpsuits stuffed helter-skelter in the cushions of the sofa, discarded socks of Zoe’s left beside the front door. I drop them into a heaping laundry basket, make my way into Chris’s and my bedroom and retrieve an overused bra slung over the door handle. I lift his suitcase from the floor, the one we exchanged at the Asian grill on Michigan Avenue, and begin to sort through its contents: button-down oxfords, work pants stuffed into a ball in t
he corner of the bag. I lift the pants from the bag, checking the pockets for pens and pen caps, handfuls of coins, the type of random things that typically materialize from Chris’s pockets while in the wash. Bottle caps and binder clips, an entire package of travel tissues that disintegrate into a million pieces, and—
My hand lands on something I recognize almost instantly, even before pulling the shiny blue package from the pocket, the words her pleasure socking me in the gut. I double over before the bed, dropping the laundry basket to the floor. Some kind of gravelly sound emerges from me, a gritty, desperate gasp for air. I press a hand—two hands—to my mouth to silence the squall that wells up inside me, a sudden, violent storm brewing deep inside my bowels.
I stare at that condom wrapper, confirming everything I believed to be true.
My husband is having an affair with Cassidy Knudsen.
I envision the two of them in ostentatious hotels in San Francisco, New York City and now Denver, their bodies coalescing between Egyptian cotton sheets. I see them in Chris’s uninhabited office during nonbusiness hours, and me, stupidly falling for another cover story: working on an offering memorandum or writing a prospectus, doing due diligence on one company or another.
These burdens—the long hours, the endless business trips—were his alibi, his attempt to camouflage a secret liaison with another woman.
My head spins, imagining Chris, in the kitchen, humbly admitting that Cassidy Knudsen would be joining him on his last trip. I picture the two of them together, later on in their hotel room, laughing about it, laughing about how piqued I’d been to discover that she’d be there. I picture the two of them taking pleasure in my unease and insecurity, in my jealousy.
It’s a business trip, Chris had said. Strictly business.
And yet...
I put it all together in my head: the unanswered phone call, the contraceptive in the pocket of Chris’s work pants. The proof, finally, that I’ve longed for for so long.
I cross the bedroom to the dresser and remove from the top drawer various items that I lay across the bed: a set of matching underwear—lace bra and panties—in a pale shade of pink.
I stare at those items, long and hard, knowing what needs to be done to settle the score.
WILLOW
Of course everything I told Louise Flores was not the truth.
She had me write it all down, in my own words, on a fresh sheet of notebook paper. She paced the room, her heels clicking on the concrete floors, while I wrote it all down, about the chef’s knife, and Joseph with his gaping eyes. I even made up a thing or two about Miriam, how she was asleep when I went into the room, but I did her in nonetheless, just because I could.
She gazes at me, shaking her head and says, “You’re just lucky you’re a juvenile, Claire. Do you have any idea what would happen to you if you were tried as an adult?”
I shrug my shoulders and say, “There’s no death penalty in Illinois.”
She stops her pacing all of a sudden and peers over a shoulder at me.
“But you didn’t commit the crime in Illinois, Claire,” she says. “You were in Nebraska,” where I know good and well murderers can be put to death by lethal injection.
Especially those over eighteen, those who commit murders that are willful and premeditated.
Like waiting until someone is asleep before creeping into their room with a knife.
I didn’t want Matthew to get in any trouble. ’Cause I knew that what he did, he did for me. Never did I stop thinking of Matthew, not one day since I left. I thought about him every single day, and at night, when I lay down on the bed, I thought of him and cried, quiet-like so Mrs. Wood and Mr. Wood wouldn’t hear. I wondered where he was. Wondered if he was okay.
When she’s got it all, the whole grand confession in writing and on tape, she tells the guard to bring me back to my room where Diva sits on the floor and sings, tapping her long vermillion fingernails against the bars of our cage for a percussion effect though someone screams at her to shut up. I ignore her interrogation—Where have you been all day?—and climb onto my bunk, pulling a thin white sheet over me, all the way up over my head.
I close my eyes and remember that night, the things I didn’t tell Ms. Flores.
HEIDI
Beside me, on the bed, lay a set of matching underwear, lace bra and panties, in a pale shade of pink. I slip into them and drift to the open closet doors, reaching deep inside. In the back I find what I’m looking for, hung from a department store hanger, still covered in plastic sheeting, a knot tied at its base. Never worn. I loosen the knot and gently lift the plastic from the dress. Dropping it to the floor, I remember the day I made the purchase, some seven months ago, the day I called Chris’s favorite steakhouse in the old, refurbished brownstone on Ontario Street, and made reservations for a quieter table away from the bar, the very one where Chris proposed to me. I’d planned for Zoe to stay with Jennifer and Taylor, had left work early to get my hair done, a side-swept chignon to partner with the new dress, a pair of black pumps with a kitten heel.
I release the dress from its hanger, remembering how Chris had called before I ever had a chance to wear it, griping about some last-minute task, and in the background, there was her voice—Cassidy’s—beckoning my husband, stealing him away from our anniversary date.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he’d promised, his disappointment diluted over the phone, as if maybe, just maybe, he didn’t care at all, “Soon.”
I run my fingers over the dress, a crepe shift dress with buttons up the back, black. I drape it over my head, letting it slide down, over the pink bra and panties, and then stare at my reflection in the full-length mirror. I remember that October night, the night of our anniversary, I remember that it was Graham who had come over instead, beckoned by the sound of the TV on a night he knew I shouldn’t be home. He stood in the doorway, sympathy carpeting his face, knowing, without my needing to tell him, what had happened: me, in a robe and slippers in place of the little black dress, my hair dazzling in its side-swept chignon, The Price Is Right on the TV. A frozen TV dinner baking in the oven.
“He doesn’t deserve you,” was all he said, and then, in a throwback to long lost college days, we played a round of century club with Chris’s adored pale ales, until we were drunk and bloated and my memories of being stood up by my work-obsessed husband had become hazy and opaque. I passed out on the sofa, waking the next morning to empty bottles of beer—over a dozen of them strewn upon the coffee table and floor—a vase of flowers set at their center, Chris’s weak attempt at a pardon.
He was out the door before I awoke.
I trace my eyes in a dark liner, sweeping a smoky shadow across the lids. I smear Bordeaux lipstick onto my lips and smack them together, wiping away the excess with a tissue. I tie my hair into a messy knot on the top of my head, sad in comparison to that beautiful sixty-dollar chignon, I think, reaching into the depths of the closet for the box containing the black pumps with their kitten heels. I roll a pair of nylons up my legs and slip into the heels, standing before the mirror.
I pass by the baby, sound asleep on the pink fleece blanket, on the floor. I watch her for a short time, refusing to stay too long and divert my course. I watch to make sure she is asleep, that she will not notice my absence, and then I walk into the hallway and gently close the door.
I don’t take the time to catch my breath; I refuse to slow down and think.
Graham opens the door before my knuckles rap for a second time. There he stands, impeccable and smiling, in a pair of jeans and an undershirt. He takes in the dress and hair, the overblown makeup, eyeing me from top to bottom. “Ooh la la,” he says as I reach back and begin to unfasten the buttons from my dress. His laptop sits on the tufted sofa cushions, abandoned; Nina Simone warbles throughout the room.
“What are you...?” Graham starts, leading me inside and closing the door. I lift that dress up over my head, exposing the pale pink beneath. His eyes fall to the pink, to the la
ce, getting lost long enough to affirm that Chris’s perception of Graham is far from true.
“You don’t want to do this,” he says to me, but I say that I do.
I step toward him, taking in the paragon, the ideal that is Graham, letting his warm hands wander across my midriff, wrapping around to the small of my back.
And Graham, being the good friend that he is, is happy to oblige. He’s more than happy to do me this favor. An act of goodwill. A common courtesy, I think as he leads me past the tufted sofa and onto an unmade bed.
WILLOW
It was late. The house was silent. Joseph had come and gone.
I was awoken by a scream, a thick, throaty scream that forced me straight up in bed.
I remember the moon through the window, incandescent on an otherwise black night. I remember that there was silence following that scream, so much silence that I wondered whether or not it had only been a dream. I lay in bed, staring at that moon, willing my heart to slow down, my breath to return to me from wherever it went when I heard that scream. The clouds floated by the moon slowly, lazily, the knobby arms of the big, old trees now shadows in the night. They stirred in the air, their branches reaching out to touch one another, to clasp hands.
And then I heard it: the clink of a metallic key in the lock, the frantic turning of the door’s handle. What I expected to see was Joseph, his silhouette against the faint glow of some light from down the hall. But instead it was Matthew who tore into my room with a deranged look in his eye, his convulsive hand bearing a sharp knife that dripped blood across my bed as he said, “Come on, Claire. Get up.” And I reached for his outstretched hand and let him pull me from bed.
“You need to go, Claire,” he said to me, sweeping me close, tight, in a bear hug. “You need to run.” He tossed clothes into my hands: the sweatshirt and gym shoes, a pair of enormous pants, and told me to get dressed. “Hurry,” he said, his voice rattling.
