by Mary Kubica
She turns and leaves the room. We hear her boots stomp across the wooden floors. We hear the front door open and close, and only then, when she’s gone, can I breathe.
I help myself to coffee, filling a travel mug before making an effort to stretch past Will for my things: the keys and a bag that sit on the countertop just out of reach. He leans in to kiss me before I go. I don’t mean to, and yet it’s instinctive when I hesitate, when I draw back from his kiss.
“You okay?” Will asks again, looking at me curiously, and I blame a bout of nausea for my hesitation. It’s not entirely untrue. It’s been months now since the affair, and yet his hands are still like sandpaper when he touches me and, as he does, I can’t help but wonder where those hands have been before they were on me.
A fresh start, he’d said, one of the many reasons we find ourselves transported to this home in Maine, which belonged to Will’s only sister, Alice, before she died. Alice had suffered for years from fibromyalgia before the symptoms got the best of her and she decided to end her life. The pain of fibromyalgia is deep. It’s diffused throughout the body and often accompanied by incapacitating exhaustion and fatigue. From what I’ve heard and seen, the pain is intense—a sometimes stabbing, sometimes throbbing pain—worse in the morning than later in the day, but never going completely away. It’s a silent disease because no one can see pain. And yet it’s debilitating.
There was only one thing Alice could do to counter the pain and fatigue, and that was to head into the home’s attic with a rope and step stool. But not before first meeting with a lawyer and preparing a will, leaving her house and everything inside of it to Will. Leaving her child to Will.
Sixteen-year-old Imogen spends her days doing only God knows what. School, presumably, for part of it at least, because we only get truancy calls on occasion. But how she spends the rest of the day I don’t know. When Will or I ask, she either ignores us or she has something smart to say: that she’s off fighting crime, promoting world peace, saving the fucking whales. Fuck is one of her favorite words. She uses it often.
Suicide can leave survivors like Imogen feeling angry and resentful, rejected, abandoned, full of rage. I’ve tried to be understanding. It’s getting hard to do.
Growing up, Will and Alice were close, but they grew apart over the years. He was rattled by her death, but he didn’t exactly grieve. In truth, I think he felt more guilty than anything: that he did a negligent job of keeping in touch, that he wasn’t involved in Imogen’s life and that he never grasped the gravity of Alice’s disease. He feels he let them down.
At first, when we’d learned of our inheritance, I suggested to Will that we sell the home, bring Imogen to Chicago to live with us, but after what happened in Chicago—not just the affair alone, but all of it, everything—it was our chance to make a new beginning, a fresh start. Or so Will said.
We’ve been here less than two months, so that we’re still getting the lay of the land, though we found jobs quickly, Will and me, he working as an adjunct professor teaching human ecology two days a week, over on the mainland.
As one of only two physicians on the island, they practically paid me to come.
I press my lips to Will’s mouth this time, my ticket to leave.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I say, calling again to Otto to hurry up or we’ll be late. I grab my things from the countertop and tell him I’ll be in the car waiting. “Two minutes,” I say, knowing he’ll stretch two to five or six as he always does.
I kiss little Tate goodbye before I go. He stands on his chair, wraps his sticky arms around my neck and screams into an ear, “I love you, Mommy,” and somewhere inside of me my heart skips a beat because I know that at least one of them still loves me.
* * *
My car sits on the driveway beside Will’s sedan. Though we have a garage attached to the house, it’s overrun with boxes that we have yet to unpack.
The car is cold when I arrive, covered in a thin layer of frost that has settled on the windows overnight. I unlock the door with my key fob. The headlights blink; a light turns on inside.
I reach for the door handle. But before I can give it a tug, I catch sight of something on the window that stops me. There are lines streaked through the frost on the driver’s side. They’ve started to liquefy in the warmth of the morning’s sunlight, softening at their edges. But still, they’re there. I step closer. As I do, I see that the lines are not lines at all, but letters traced into the frost on the window, coming together to form a single word: Die.
A hand shoots to my mouth. I don’t have to think hard to know who left this message for me to find. Imogen doesn’t want us here. She wants us to leave.
I’ve tried to be understanding because of how awful the situation must be for her. Her life has been upended. She lost her mother and now must share her home with people she doesn’t know. But that doesn’t justify threatening me. Because Imogen doesn’t mince words. She means just what she said. She wants me to die.
I make my way back up the porch steps and call through the front door for Will.
“What is it?” he asks, making his way from the kitchen. “Did you forget something?” he asks as he cocks his head to the side, taking in my keys, my bag, my coffee. I didn’t forget something.
“You have to see this,” I say, whispering now so the boys don’t hear.
Will follows me barefoot out the front door, though the concrete is bitterly cold. Three feet from the car I point at it, the word inscribed in the frost of the window. “You see it?” I ask, turning my eyes to Will’s. He sees it. I can tell as much in his expression, in the way it turns instantly distressed, mirroring mine.
“Shit,” he says because he, like me, knows who left that there. He rubs at his forehead, thinking this through. “I’ll talk to her,” he says, and I ask defensively, “What good will that do?”
We’ve talked to Imogen many times over the last few weeks. We’ve discussed the language she uses, especially around Tate; the need for a curfew; more. Though talking at would be a more fitting term than talking to because it isn’t a conversation we have. It’s a lecture. She stands while Will or I speak. She listens, maybe. She rarely replies. She takes nothing to heart and then she leaves.
Will’s voice is quiet when he speaks. “We don’t know for certain that she left this here,” he says softly, floating an idea by me, one I’d rather not consider. “Isn’t it possible,” Will asks, “that someone left that message for Otto?”
“You think someone left a death threat on my window for our fourteen-year-old child?” I ask, in case Will has somehow misconstrued the meaning of that word Die.
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” he asks, and though I know that it is, I tell him, “No.” I say it with more conviction in my voice than I feel, because I don’t want to believe it. “Not again,” I insist. “We left all that behind when we moved.”
But did we? It isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that someone is being mean to Otto. That someone’s bullying him. It’s happened before. It can happen again.
I say to Will, “Maybe we should call the police.”
But Will shakes his head. “Not until we know who did this. If it’s Imogen, is that really a reason to involve the police? She’s just an angry girl, Sadie. She’s grieving, lashing out. She’d never do anything to hurt any of us.”
“Wouldn’t she?” I ask, far less sure than Will. Imogen has become another point of contention in our marriage. She and Will are related by blood; there’s a connection there that I don’t have.
When Will doesn’t reply, I go on, arguing, “No matter who the intended recipient, Will, it’s still a death threat. That’s a very serious thing.”
“I know, I know,” he says, glancing over his shoulder to be sure Otto isn’t on his way out. He speaks quickly, says, “But if we get the police involved, Sadie, it will draw attention to Ot
to. Unwanted attention. The kids will look at him differently, if they don’t already. He won’t stand a chance. Let me call the school first. Speak to his teacher, the principal, make sure Otto isn’t having trouble with anyone. I know you’re worried,” he says, voice softening as he reaches out, runs a comforting hand along my arm. “I’m worried, too,” he says. “But can we do that first,” he asks, “before calling the police? And can I at least have a conversation with Imogen before we just assume this was her?”
This is Will. Always the voice of reason in our marriage.
“Fine,” I tell him, relenting, admitting that he might be right. I hate to think of Otto as an outcast in a new school, of him being bullied like this.
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 fort
y, 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.
