The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  Will has yet to call me out on this. And yet I see it there in the unspoken words. Silently, he’s castigating me. He thinks it’s my fault Otto took that knife to school because I didn’t offer a more reasonable alternative, a more appropriate alternative for our fourteen-year-old son.

  Otto isn’t a murderer. He would never have hurt those kids, I don’t think.

  He’s a troubled boy, a scared boy.

  There’s a difference.

  “I’m scared, Will,” I admit, and he says, voice softening, “I know you are, Sadie. We both are.”

  “I have to turn the washcloth in to the police,” I tell him, voice cracking, on the verge of tears, and only then does Will relent. Because of the tone of my voice. He knows as well as I that I’ve become discomposed. “It isn’t right for us to keep it.”

  “All right, then,” he says. “As soon as I get to campus I’ll cancel my classes. Give me an hour, Sadie, and then I’ll be home. Don’t do anything with the washcloth until then,” he pleads, before his voice takes on a different tone, a softer tone, and he says, “We’ll go see Officer Berg together. Just wait until I get home and we’ll speak to Officer Berg together.”

  I end the call and move into the living room to wait. I drop down onto the marigold sofa. I stretch my legs before me, thinking that if I close my eyes, I will sleep. The weight of worry and fatigue come bearing down on me, and suddenly I’m tired. My eyes sink shut.

  Before I can fall asleep, they bolt open again.

  The sound of the front door startles me. It shifts in its casing, getting jostled around.

  It’s only the wind blowing against it, agitating the door, I tell myself.

  But then comes the sound of a key jiggling in the lock.

  It’s only been a few minutes since Will and I hung up the phone. No more than ten or fifteen. He would have scarcely reached the mainland by now, much less waited for passengers to disembark and then board the boat. He wouldn’t have had time to make the twenty-minute commute back across the bay, or drive home from the ferry dock.

  It’s not Will.

  Someone else is here.

  I inch myself away from the door, searching for a place to hide. But before I’ve gone a step or two, the door presses violently open. It ricochets off the rubber stopper on the other side.

  There, standing in the foyer, is Otto. His backpack is slung across a shoulder. His hair is covered with snow. It’s white with it. His cheeks are rosy and red from the cold outside. The tip of his nose is also red. Everything else is pallid.

  Otto slams the door shut.

  “Otto,” I breathe out midstride, pressing my hand to my chest. “What are you doing here?” I ask, and he says, “I’m sick.” He does look peaked to me, yes. But I’m not certain he looks sick.

  “The school didn’t call,” I tell him because this is the way it’s supposed to happen. The school nurse is supposed to call and tell me my son is sick and then I go to the school and pick him up. But this isn’t what happened.

  “The nurse just sent you home?” I ask, feeling cross at her for allowing a child to walk off campus in the middle of the school day, but also scared. Because the look on Otto’s face is alarming. He shouldn’t be here. Why is he here?

  His reply is offhand. He takes a step into the room. “I didn’t ask,” he says. “I just left.”

  “I see,” I say, feeling my feet inch backward.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks. “I told you I was sick. You don’t believe me?” It isn’t like Otto to be antagonistic with me.

  Otto stares at me with his jaw clenched, chin forward. He runs his fingers through his hair, then jams them into the pockets of his jeans.

  “What doesn’t feel good?” I ask, a lump forming in the pit of my stomach.

  Otto moves another step closer and says, “My throat,” though his voice isn’t raspy. He doesn’t clutch a hand to his throat as one does when it hurts.

  But it’s conceivable, of course. His throat could hurt. He could be telling the truth. Strep throat is going around, as is the flu.

  “Your father is on his way home,” I force out, though I don’t know why.

  “No, he’s not,” he says, voice chillingly composed. “Dad’s at work.”

  “He canceled his classes,” I say, shambling backward. “He’s coming home. He should be here soon.”

  “Why?” Otto asks as, in my subtle retreat, I bump softly into the fireplace mantel.

  I lie, telling Otto that Will also didn’t feel well. “He was turning around just as soon as his ferry reached the mainland.” I glance at the clock and say, “Any minute, he should be home.”

  “No, he won’t,” Otto says again. It’s irrefutable the way that he says it.

  I suck in a breath, release it slowly. “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Ferries are delayed ’cause of the storm,” he tells me, thrusting that hair of his back again with a hand.

  “How’d you get home?” I ask.

  “Mine was the last to leave.”

  “Oh,” I say, thinking of Otto and me trapped together in this house until ferry traffic resumes. How long will that take? I wonder why Will hasn’t called to tell me about the ferries, though my phone is in the other room. I wouldn’t have heard it if he did.

  A gust of wind rattles the house just then, making the whole thing shake. As it does, the lamp on the end table flickers. I hold my breath, waiting for the room to go dark. There’s a meager amount of light coming through the windows, but as they fill with snow it gets harder to see. The world outside turns a charcoal gray. The dogs bark.

  “Do you want me to look at your throat?” I ask Otto. When he doesn’t reply, I retrieve my penlight from my bag in the foyer and go to him. Standing beside Otto, I see how he’s surpassed me in height nearly overnight. He looks down on me now. He isn’t heavily built. Rather, he’s lanky. He smells of teenage boy: all those hormones they secrete in their sweat during puberty. But he’s handsome, the spitting image of Will, just younger and thinner.

  I reach up and press my fingers to his lymph nodes. They’re enlarged. He might be sick.

  “Open up,” I tell him, and though he hesitates, he complies. Otto opens his mouth. It’s lazy at best, just barely enough for me to see inside.

  I shine my penlight in, seeing a red, irritated throat. I press the back of my hand to his forehead, feeling for a fever. As I do, I feel a sudden rush of nostalgia, bringing me back to a four-or a five-year-old Otto, sick as a dog with the flu. Instead of a hand, it used to be my lips, a far more accurate measure of temperature to me. One quick kiss and I could tell if my boys were febrile or not. That and the way they’d lie limp and helpless in my arms, wanting to be coddled. Those days are gone.

  All at once Otto’s strong hand latches down on my wrist and I jerk immediately back.

  His grasp is strong. I can’t free myself from his hold.

  The penlight drops from my hand, batteries skidding across the floor.

  “What are you doing, Otto? Let go of me,” I cry out, trying desperately to wiggle free from his grasp. “You’re hurting me,” I tell him. His grip is tight.

  I look up to find his eyes watching me. They’re more brown than blue today, more sad than mad. Otto speaks, his words nothing more than a whisper. “I’ll never forgive you,” he says, and I stop fighting.

  “For what, Otto?” I breathe, still thinking about the washcloth and the necklace, as again the lights in the home flicker and I hold my breath, waiting for them to go out. My eyes move to a lamp, wishing I had something to protect myself with. The lamp has a beautiful glazed ceramic base, sturdy, solid enough to do damage but not so heavy that I can’t pick it up. But it’s six feet away now, out of reach, and I don’t know that I’d have it in me anyway, to clutch the lamp by the neck and bash the heavy end into my own son’s
head. Even in self-defense. I don’t know that I could.

  Otto’s Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “You know,” he says, fighting back the urge to cry.

  I shake my head and say, “I don’t know,” though I realize in the next moment that I do. He’ll never forgive me for not standing up for him that day in the principal’s office. For not complying with his lie.

  “For lying,” he hollers, composure waning, “about the knife.”

  “I never lied,” I tell him. What I want to say is that he’s the one who lied, but it doesn’t seem a smart time to lay blame. Instead, “If only you’d have come to me. I could have helped you, Otto. We could have talked it through. We could have come up with a solution.”

  “I did,” he interjects, voice quivering. “I did come to you. You’re the only one I told,” and I try not to imagine Otto opening up to me about what was happening at school and me giving him the brush-off. I struggle to remember it, as I have every day and night since it happened. What was I doing when Otto told me about the bullying? What was I so busy doing that I couldn’t pay attention when he confessed to me that kids at school called him heinous names; that they shoved him into lockers, plunged his head into dirty toilet bowls?

  “Otto,” I say under my breath, full of shame for not being there when Otto needed me most. “If I wasn’t listening. If I wasn’t paying attention. I’m so sorry,” I tell him, and I start to tell him how I was completely inundated with work in those days, tired and overwhelmed. But that’s little consolation to a fourteen-year-old boy who needed his mother. I don’t make excuses for my behavior. It wouldn’t feel right.

  Before I can say more, Otto is speaking, and for the first time there are details I’ve never heard before. How we were outside when he told me about the bullying. How it was late at night. How Otto couldn’t sleep. He came looking for me. He tells me he found me outside on our building’s fire escape, just outside the kitchen window, dressed in all black, smoking a cigarette.

  The details, they’re ludicrous.

  “I don’t smoke, Otto,” I tell him. “You know that. And heights.” I shake my head, shuddering. I don’t need to say more; he knows what I mean. I’m acrophobic. I’ve always been.

  We lived on the sixth floor of our condo in Chicago, the top floor of a Printers Row midrise. I never took the elevator, only the stairs. I never stepped foot on the balcony where Will spent his mornings sipping coffee and enjoying the sweeping city views. Come with me, Will used to say, smiling mischievously while tugging on my hand. I’ll keep you safe. Don’t I always keep you safe? he asked. But I never went with him.

  “But you were,” Otto claims, and I ask, “How did you know I was there if it was the middle of the night? How did you see me?”

  “The flame. From the cigarette lighter.”

  But I don’t own a cigarette lighter. Because I don’t smoke. But I go quiet anyway. I let him go on.

  Otto says that he climbed out the window and sat beside me. It’d taken him weeks to work up the courage to come and tell me. Otto says I went ballistic when he told me what the kids were doing to him at school. That I was totally worked up.

  “We plotted revenge. We made a list of the best ways.”

  “The best ways for what?” I ask.

  He says it unambiguously, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The best way to kill them,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “The kids at school,” he tells me. Because even the kids that didn’t mock him still laughed. And so, he and I decided that night that they all needed to go. I blanch. I humor him only because I think that this is cathartic somehow for Otto.

  “And how were we going to do that?” I ask, not certain I want to know the ways he and I supposedly came up with to kill his classmates. Because they’re Otto’s ideas, every last one of them. And I want to believe that somewhere inside of him is still my son.

  He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I dunno. A whole bunch of ways. We talked about starting the school on fire. Using lighter fluid or gasoline. You said I could poison the cafeteria food. We talked about that for a while. For a while that seemed like the way to go. Take out a whole bunch of them at once.”

  “How did we plan to do that?” I ask as he grows lax and his hand loses its grip on my wrist. I try to pull free, but just like that, he reengages, clinging tighter to me.

  His answer is so sure. “Botox,” he says with another shrug. “You said you could get it.”

  Botox. Botulinum toxin. Which we stocked at the hospital because it treats migraines, symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other conditions. But it can be fatal, too. It’s one of the deadliest substances in the world.

  “Or stabbing them all,” he says, telling me how we’d decided that was the best way because he didn’t have to wait for poison, and a knife was easier to hide in his backpack than bottles of lighter fluid. He could do it right away. The very next day.

  “We went inside,” Otto reminds me. “Remember, Mom? We climbed back in the window and went to look over all the knives, to see which would be best. You decided,” he tells me, explaining how I chose the chef knife because of its size.

  According to Otto, I then took out Will’s whetstone and sharpened the knife. I said something canny about how a sharp knife is safer than a dull one, before smiling at him. Then I slipped it in his backpack in the soft laptop sleeve, behind all of his other belongings. As I zipped the backpack closed, I winked at him.

  You don’t have to worry about getting an organ, Otto says that I said. Any old artery will do.

  My stomach roils at the thought of it. My free hand rises to my mouth as bile inches up my esophagus. I want to scream, No! That he’s wrong. That I never said such a thing. That he’s making this all up.

  But before I can reply, Otto is telling me that before he went to bed that night I said to him, Don’t let anyone laugh at you. You shut them up if they do.

  That night Otto slept better than he had in a long time.

  But the next morning, he had second thoughts about it. He was suddenly scared.

  But I wasn’t there to talk it through. I’d gone in to work for the day. He called me. That I remember, a voice mail on my phone that I didn’t discover until later that night. Mom, he’d said. It’s me. I really need to talk to you.

  But by the time I heard the voice mail, it was done. Otto had taken that knife to school. By the grace of God, no one was hurt.

  Listening to Otto speak, I realize one gut-wrenching truth. He doesn’t think that he’s made this story up. He believes it. In his mind, I am the one who packed the knife in his backpack; I am the one who lied.

  I can’t help myself. I reach up with my one free hand and trace his jawline. His body stiffens but he doesn’t retreat. He lets me touch him. There is hair there, only a small patch of it that will one day grow to a beard. How did the little boy who once lacerated his thumb on the blade of Will’s razor grow old enough to shave? His hair hangs in his eyes. I brush it back, seeing that his eyes lack all the hostility they usually have, but are instead drowning in pain.

  “If I hurt you in any way,” I whisper, “I’m sorry. I would never do anything to intentionally hurt you.”

  Only then does he acquiesce. He lets go of my wrist and I step quickly back.

  “Why don’t you go lie down in your room,” I suggest. “I’ll bring you toast.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Otto grunts.

  “How about juice, then?”

  He ignores me.

  I watch, grateful that he turns and lumbers up the stairs to his bedroom, backpack still clinging to his back.

  I go to the first-floor study and close the door. I hurry to the computer on the desk and open the browser. I go to look up the website to the ferry company to search for news on delays. I’m anxious for Will to be home. I want to tell him about my
conversation with Otto. I want to go to the police. I don’t want to wait anymore to do these things.

  If it wasn’t for the weather, I’d leave. Tell Otto I’m running out on an errand and not come back until Will is here.

  As I begin to type in the browser, a history of past internet searches greets me.

  My breath leaves me. Because Erin Sabine’s name is in the search history. Someone has been looking up Will’s former fiancée. Will, I assume, feeling nostalgic on the twenty-year anniversary of her death.

  I have no self-control. I click on the link.

  Images greet me. An article, too, a report from twenty years ago on Erin’s death. There are photographs included in the article. One is of a car being excavated from an icy pond. Emergency crews hover solemnly in the background while a wrecker truck lugs the car from the water. I read through the article. It’s just as Will told me. Erin lost control of her car in a wicked winter storm like the one we’re having today; she drowned.

  The second image is of Erin with her family. There are four of them: a mother, a father, Erin and a younger sister who looks to me somewhere in between Otto’s and Tate’s ages. Ten, maybe eleven. The photograph is professional-looking. The family is in a street between an avenue of trees. The mother sits on a garish yellow chair that’s been placed there for purposes of this photograph. Her family stands around her, the girls leaning into their mother indulgently.

  It’s the mother I can’t take my eyes off of. There’s something about her that nags at me, a round woman with shoulder-length brunette hair. Something strikes a chord, but I don’t know what. Something that hovers just out of the periphery of my mind. Who is she?

  The dogs begin to howl just then. I hear it all the way from here. They’ve finally had enough of this storm. They want to come inside.

  I rise from the desk. I let myself out of the study, padding quickly to the kitchen, where I yank open the back door. I step outside, onto the deck, hissing to the dogs to come. But they don’t come.

  I move across the yard. The dogs are both frozen like statues in the corner. They’ve caught something, a rabbit or a squirrel. I have to stop them before they eat the poor thing, and in my mind’s eye I see the white snow riddled with animal blood.