by Mary Kubica
But instead he says, “As you can expect, at eighty-some years old, George and Poppy were asleep,” and I release my withheld breath. The Nilssons didn’t see a thing.
“I don’t understand, Officer,” I say, glancing at the time on the car’s dash, knowing I’ll need to leave soon. “If the Nilssons were asleep, then...what?”
Because clearly if they were asleep, then they saw and heard nothing.
“I also asked the Nilssons if they’d seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days. Strangers lurking about, unfamiliar cars parked along the street.”
“Yes, yes,” I say, nodding my head quickly because he also asked this question of Will and me. “And?” I ask, trying to hurry things along so that I can get on to work.
“Well, it just so happens that they did see something out of the ordinary. Something they haven’t seen before. Which is saying a lot, seeing as they’ve lived half their lives on that street.” And then he taps away at that tablet screen to find his interview with Mr. and Mrs. Nilsson.
He goes on to describe for me an afternoon just last week. It was Friday, the first of December. It was a clear day, the sky painted blue, not a cloud to be seen. The temperatures were cool, crisp, but nothing a heavy sweater or a light jacket wouldn’t fix. George and Poppy had gone for an afternoon walk, Officer Berg says, and were headed back up the steep incline of our street. Once they reached the top, George stopped to catch his breath, pausing before the Baineses’ home.
Officer Berg goes on to tell me how there Mr. Nilsson rearranged the blanket on Poppy’s lap so that she didn’t catch a draft. As he did, something caught his attention. It was the sound of women hollering at one another, though what they were hollering about he wasn’t sure.
“Oh, how awful,” I say, and he says it was because poor George was really shaken up about it. He’d never heard anything like that before. And that’s saying a lot for a man his age.
“But what does this have to do with me?” I ask, and he reaches again for the tablet.
“George and Poppy stayed there in the street for a moment only, but that’s all it took before the women stepped out from the shade of a tree and into view and George could see for himself who they were.”
“Who?” I ask, slightly breathless, and he waits a beat before he replies.
“It was Mrs. Baines,” he says, “and you.”
And then, from some recording app on his device, he plays for me the testimonial of Mr. Nilsson, which states, “She was fighting with the new doctor lady on the street. The both of them were hooting and hollering, mad as a hornet. Before I could intercede, the doctor lady grabbed a handful of Ms. Morgan’s hair right out of her head and left with it in her fist. Poppy and I turned and walked quickly home. Didn’t want her to think we were snooping or she might do the same thing to us.”
Officer Berg stops it there and turns to me, asking, “Does this sound to you like an altercation between two women who’d never met?”
But I’m speechless.
I can’t reply.
Why would George Nilsson say such an awful thing about me?
Officer Berg doesn’t give me a chance to speak. He goes on without me.
He asks, “Is it often, Dr. Foust, that you swipe handfuls of hair from women you don’t know?”
The answer, of course, is no. Though still I can’t find my voice to speak.
He decides, “I’ll take your silence as a no.”
His hand falls to the door and he pushes it open against the weight of the wind. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, “so that you can get on with your day.”
“I never spoke to Morgan Baines” is what I manage to say just then before he leaves, though the words that emerge are limp.
He shrugs. “All right, then,” he says, stepping back out into the rain.
He never said if he believed me.
He didn’t need to.
MOUSE
Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father had called her that.
The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it was something special between her father and her, even if she didn’t know why.
Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.
She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse. If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip, ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom, climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but she didn’t see any whiskers there.
Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.
But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cookies that he called her Mouse.
Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing its way through wood.
Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night, when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pockets for a late-night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.
Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would taste just as good as the cookie had.
But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her. There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.
But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called her Mouse.
Because by then, she already was Mouse.
Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even cartwheels on the moon if that was what she wanted to do because Mouse didn’t need silly things like oxygen or gravity. She was afraid of nothing because she was immortal. No matter what she did, no harm could come to imaginary Mouse.
Mouse loved to draw. Her bedroom walls were covered in pictures of her father and her, her and her teddy bears. Mouse spent her days playing pretend. Her bedroom, the only one on the second floor of the old home, was full of dolls, toys and stuffed animals. Each animal had a name. Her favorite was a stuffed brown bear named Mr. Bear. Mouse had a dollhouse, a toy kitchen set with pretend pots and pans and crates of plastic food. She had a tea set. Mouse loved to set her dolls and animals in a circle on her floor, on the edge of her striped rag rug, and serve them each a tiny mug of tea and a plastic doughnut. She would find a book on her shelf and read it aloud to her friends before tucking them into bed.
Sometimes she stood on her bed and pretended the floor around her was hot lava oozing from the volcano at the other end of the room. She couldn’t step on the floor for risk of death. Those days, Mouse would scramble from her bed to a desk, climbing to safety. She’d tread precariously across the top of the small white desk—the legs of it wobbling beneath her, threatening to break. Mouse wasn’t a big girl but the desk was old, fragile. It wasn’t meant to hold a six-year-old child.
But it didn’t matter because soon enough Mouse was clambering into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the bedroom floor. As she did, she took extra care not to step on the floor, breathing a sigh of relief when she was safely inside the basket. Because even though the basket was on the floor, it was safe. The basket couldn’t get swallowed up by lava, because it was made of titanium, and Mouse knew that titanium wouldn’t melt. She was a smart girl, smarter than any other girl her age that she knew.
Inside the laundry basket, the girl rode the waves of the volcano until the lava itself cooled and crusted over, and the land was safe enough to walk on again. Only then did she venture out of the basket and go back to playing along the edge of the rag rug with Mr. Bear and her dolls.
Sometimes Mouse thought that that, her tendency to disappear to her bedroom—quiet as a church mouse, as her father put it—and play all day, was the reason he called her Mouse.
It was hard to say.
But one thing was certain.
Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And then she no longer did.
SADIE
I’m sitting on the floor in the lobby of the clinic. Before me is an activity table, the kind meant to keep kids entertained while they wait. The dark carpet beneath me is thin and cheap. It’s unraveling in spots, with stains that blend into the nylon so you wouldn’t see them unless you were as close to it as I am.
I’m cross-legged on the floor, sitting on the side of the activity table that faces a shape sorter. I watch on as my hand drops a heart-shaped block into the appropriate opening.
There’s a girl on the other side of the table. At first glance, she looks to be about four years old. She wears a pair of crooked pigtails. Strands of blond hair have come loose from the elastics. They fall to her face, hang into her eyes where she leaves them be, not bothering to shove them away. Her sweatshirt is red. Her shoes don’t match. One is a black patent leather Mary Jane and the other a black ballet flat. An easy enough mistake to make.
My own legs have begun to ache. I unknot them, find a different position to sit in, one better suited for a thirty-nine-year-old woman. The waiting room chair catches my eye, but I can’t rise from the floor and leave, not yet, because the little girl across the table is watching me expectantly.
“Go,” she says, grinning oddly, and I ask, “Go where?” though my voice is strangled when I speak. I clear my throat, try again.
“Go where?” I ask, this time sounding more like myself.
On the floor, my body is stiff. My legs hurt. My head hurts. I’m hot. I didn’t catch a wink of sleep last night and am paying for it today. I’m tired and disoriented. This morning’s conversation with Officer Berg has rattled my nerves, made a bad day even worse.
“Go,” the girl says again. When I stare at her, doing nothing, she says, “It’s your turn,” pronouncing none of the r’s, but turning them to w’s instead.
“My turn?” I ask, taken aback, and she says to me, “Yeah. You’re the red, remember?” Except she doesn’t say red. She says wed. Wed, wemember?
I shake my head. I must not have been paying attention because I don’t remember. Because I don’t know what she’s talking about until she points it out for me, the red beads at the top of the roller-coaster table, the ones that go up and down the red wire hills, around the red corkscrew turns.
“Oh,” I say, reaching out to touch the red wooden beads before me. “Okay. What should I do with the red?” I ask the girl, her nose oozing snot, eyes a bit glazed over as if febrile, and I don’t have to think hard to know why she’s here. She’s my patient. She’s come to see me. She coughs hard, forgetting to cover her mouth. The little ones always do.
“You do it like this,” she says as she takes her dirty, germy hand and grasps a train of yellow beads with it, driving the beads over the yellow hill and around the yellow corkscrew turns.
“You do it like that,” she says when the beads finally reach the other end and she lets go of them. Her hands fall to her hips as she stares at me, again expectantly.
I smile at the girl as I start to move the red beads.
But before they’ve gone far, I hear “Dr. Foust” hissed at me from behind. It’s a woman’s voice, clearly annoyed. “What are you doing down there, Dr. Foust?”
I turn to see Joyce standing behind me. Her posture is straight, her expression firm. She tells me that my eleven o’clock appointment is here, waiting for me in exam room three. I rise slowly to standing, shake out my stiff legs. I have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea to get down on the ground and play with the little girl. I tell her I have to get back to work. I say that maybe we can play again later and she smiles shyly at me. She wasn’t shy before but she’s shy now. She’s changed, and I think it has something to do with my height. Now that I’m standing, I’m no longer three feet tall like her. I’m different.
She rushes to her mama’s side, wraps her arms around her mother’s knees.
I say to her mother, “What a sweet girl,” and her mother thanks me for playing with her.
Around me, the waiting room is crawling with patients. I follow Joyce through the lobby doors and down the hall. But once there, I head the other way from the exam room, going to the kitchen instead, where I help myself to a sip of water from the watercooler, taking a moment to catch my breath. I’m tired. I’m hungry. My head still hurts.
Joyce follows me into the kitchen. She gives me this look, like I have some nerve to drink water at a time like this, when we have a patient waiting. I can see it in her eyes every time she looks at me: Joyce doesn’t like me. I don’t know why Joyce doesn’t like me. There’s nothing I’ve done that would make her not like me. I tell myself it has nothing to do with what happened back in Chicago, that there’s no way she can know about that. No, that stayed there, because I resigned. It was the only way a claim of negligence didn’t end my medical career. But whether I’d practice emergency medicine again, I didn’t know. It was a blot on my confidence, if not my résumé.
I tell Joyce that I’ll be right there, but she stands watching in teal blue scrubs and nursing clogs, with her hands on her hips. She pouts, and only then do I take note of the clock on the wall behind her where red numbers inform me that it’s one fifteen in the afternoon.
“Oh,” I say, though that can’t be. I couldn’t possibly have fallen that far behind schedule. My bedside manner is decent enough—I’ve been known to go on a tad too long with patients—but not like this.
I glance down at my watch, sure that it’s slow, that my watch is to blame for my falling behind schedule. But the time on my watch mirrors the time on the clock.
I feel a frustration start to well inside of me. Emma has mistakenly scheduled too many patients in not enough time, so that I’ll spend the rest of the day scrambling to catch up and we’ll pay for it, the whole lot of us, Joyce, Emma, the patients and me. But mainly me.
* * *
It’s a short drive home. The entirety of the island is only about a mile by a mile and a half wide—which means that on a bad day such as this, I don’t have time to decompress before I arrive home. I drive slowly, taking my time, needing an extra lap around the block to catch my breath before I pull into my own driveway.
This far north in the world, night falls early. The sun begins to set at just past four o’clock, leaving us with only nine h
ours of daylight this time of year, the rest of the day various shades of twilight and dark. The sky is dark now.
I don’t know most of my neighbors. Some I’ve seen in passing, but most I’ve never seen because it’s late fall, early winter, the time of year people have a tendency to hide indoors. The home next door to ours is a summer property only, someone’s second home. It’s unoccupied this time of year. The owners—Will learned and told to me—move to the mainland as soon as fall comes, leaving their home abandoned for Old Man Winter. Which makes me think now that a home like that could be vulnerable to break-ins, making for an easy place for a killer to hide.
As I go by it, the house is dark as it always is until just after seven o’clock when a light flicks on. The light is set on a timer. It goes off near midnight. The timer is meant to serve as a deterrent for burglars and yet so predictable, it’s not.
I go on. I bypass my own home and head up the hill. The Baineses’ house is dark as I drive past. Across the street, at the home of the Nilssons, a light is on, the soft glow of it just barely breaking through the periphery of the heavy drapes. I pause before the home, car idling, my eyes set on the picture window in front. There’s a car in the drive, Mr. Nilsson’s rusty sedan. Puffs of smoke spew from the chimney and into the winter night. Someone is home.
I have half a mind to pull into the drive, park the car, knock on the front door and ask about what Officer Berg told me. How Mr. Nilsson claimed he saw me arguing with Morgan in the days before she died.
But I also have enough self-awareness to know that if I do, it might come off as brash—threatening even—and that’s not the message I want to send.
I make my way around the block before going home.
Moments later, I stand alone in the kitchen, peeking beneath the lid of a skillet to see what Will’s cooking tonight. Pork chops. It smells divine.
