A Woman Alone

by Nina Laurin

  As I make the turn onto the highway, I’m reminded of something Clarisse’s assistant said to us, offhandedly, as everything was being finalized and signed, i’s dotted and t’s crossed. I felt awkward, overcome by all the information, not to mention all the overwhelming legalese of the documents, releases, and authorizations I’d just signed. With Clarisse and Scott beaming and shaking hands and that self-satisfied girl with that robotic smile looking on, I felt the way I hadn’t in a long time. Like the poorest, stupidest person in the room, the one the others only pretend to include because it’s the polite thing to do. I sought to compensate but, naturally, only ended up digging my own grave ever deeper. I giggled like an idiot and said something along the lines of This is too good to be true, it feels like living in a utopia. So the assistant gave me another perfect smile, put her manicured hand soothingly on my forearm, and said, “Don’t worry too much about it. Soon everyone will be living this way.”

  It accomplished its purpose; it shut me up. But as I look around me, I start to mull over those words. Will everyone really live like us someday, in a hyperconnected reality that’s so far removed from the natural world? Then I think about ever-widening income inequalities, the First and Third World, planned obsolescence and toxic waste dumps where all the discarded devices rot, leaking poison into the earth, half a world away.

  There aren’t enough resources on earth for everyone to live this way. She didn’t mean everyone. She meant everyone like us, the people in that room that day.

  I take the exit, make one turn, another, and feel something close to surprise when I arrive on our old street. Not at the view, which has changed so little it’s like I was never gone at all, but at the pain in my heart. It’s hard to breathe. I slow down, trying not to be conspicuous as I crane my neck to look. The centennial trees, the other houses float by like movies on a screen. At the very end is our beautiful place, and for a moment, I’m ready to do a U-turn and get the hell out of here. I don’t think I can handle seeing it standing empty, windows dark.

  But my hands are steady on the steering wheel as the car crawls down the street. To my surprise, I spot a couple of FOR SALE signs next door. I hope it’s not because of what happened back then.

  And then I’m in front of our house.

  At once, I’m hit with a disorienting feeling. But a moment later, I understand that I hadn’t in fact tumbled into the past, watching my old life from behind a pane of glass. The house is not deserted. There are curtains on the windows, different curtains, and people are moving around inside. In the front yard, the rock garden I put together is gone—now there’s a green foam mat and one of those plastic playhouses with toys scattered all around. There’s no FOR SALE sign in sight.

  I know that what I’m doing is stupid but I pull the car into the nearest parking space and get out. From the sidewalk, I can already see that the locks have been changed. So has the doorbell. They have one of the new ones with a video feed. I ring it, not expecting anyone to open, but a minute later, someone does, a woman about my age. I don’t need to wonder what she’s doing at home in the middle of a weekday because she’s holding a young toddler in her left arm. He can’t be much more than a year old.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for someone,” I say. Mercifully, my brain is quick to come up with the words. “Someone who used to live here.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, her face a generic mask of empathy. “They moved out a while back, and I’m afraid I don’t have a forwarding address.”

  “How—” I stumble over my own words and have to start over. “When did you move in?”

  “Just a month ago. Houses don’t go on sale in this area very often so we pounced.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Very much.”

  “Good,” I say. “But one thing: You really shouldn’t open the door to strangers. Not when you have a young child at home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Jessica arrives at the meet-up spot late. At a dive bar like this one, not a chance she’ll ever run into anyone she knows from work. She storms to the back of the bar, to the dimly lit area that houses the pool tables, and pauses just outside the zone lit by the low-hanging lamps.

  In that moment, before the others notice her, she’s overcome by how silly they look. One of them aims the cue at a red ball for a good minute, then strikes. The ball bounces all around the table, barely brushing against the others. The guy groans and rubs his hipster beard. One of the girls laughs. Jess can’t shake the impression that their so-called cause is a game to them, like this game of pool. Something to tide them over until something else catches their attention.

  The guy with the cue is their self-styled leader, Colin, and he’s twenty-two years old. He reminds her of her brother, sometimes painfully so. The same carefree attitude, the same overconfidence—except with a golden safety net, well-connected parents, and a trust fund. Her brother never had a safety net. That’s what made all the difference.

  She sought out Colin and his group not long after the Holmeses moved into 32 Rosemary Road. Finding them was way too easy, which was the first thing she told Colin. The situation hadn’t much improved, because most of them love their cause but not as much as they love their Instagram accounts. Jess stands there, watching, for a moment longer, until Colin turns around and notices her.

  A silence falls over the group, like she’s a teacher who just walked into a classroom of second graders. She doesn’t belong. She knows it, and they know it. They feel it under their skin. She suspects that before she arrived, they were happy enough to keep their activism to social media posts and flashy protests meant to attract attention: According to their bios, they’re a radical anti-gentrification and anti-capitalism collective—even though most of them, in real life, are closer to the proverbial 1 percent. Now, they have to do real, tangible things, things they can’t talk about, let alone brag on Twitter, and obey an outsider. They probably resent her. Let them. Hopefully, she won’t need them for long.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” she asks. “You nearly ran her off the road.”

  Colin gives her a look from under his brow bone. “Isn’t that what you asked us to do?”

  “No. I asked you to try and get her to pull over so we could talk to her, not get her into a car crash. We need her, remember?”

  “Why?” chimes in the girl who is Colin’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. By the way she moves to stand by his side possessively, Jess guesses that today they’re on again. The girl also seems to think Jess has her sights set on Colin, which couldn’t be further from the truth. “Don’t you have access to everything at Venture, anyway? Why do we need some boring housewife?”

  “I told you this. I’m conspicuous. IntelTech can’t suspect me, that’s why we need her to do the work for us. And we’re not going to get there by endangering her life.”

  The girlfriend stretches her arms over her head. “Boring.”

  Colin shoots her a look. She lowers her arms.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” he says. “But we’ve been at it for months now, and nothing is happening. We’re not moving forward. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really helping us at all.”

  “Well, you don’t have anyone better,” Jess snaps. Dumb, spoiled brats, she thinks, clenching her teeth. “You’ll have to deal with me. And it is moving forward. Everything in that place is under surveillance so excuse me if we can’t just barge in with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Just—stay away from Cecelia Holmes from now on, okay? I’ll be dealing with her. She trusts me.”

  “Does she now?” Colin frowns. “You said she doesn’t trust anyone at IntelTech because she thinks the house is trying to kill her.”

  Jess smirks grimly. “She doesn’t have a choice not to trust me. She’ll find that out soon enough.”

  * * *

  As soon as daylight starts to fade, sensors all over Rosemary Road pick up on it and the lights flicker on. Not just the streetlights but
the decorative lights along the façades of the houses and in the gardens. Even the looming construction of dark glass behind our house has subtle decorative lights that flicker on, cold and bluish. There’s a string of fairy lights woven with calculated carelessness into a tree on someone’s front lawn, lanterns next to doors and mailboxes and inside decorative fountains. Even the unoccupied house has them, a string of tiny lamps shedding warm yellow light that line the path to the front door. It’s supposed to make the street look welcoming.

  When we just moved in, I stood by the living room window every evening and watched them all go on progressively until the whole street was lit up like on Christmas. Tonight, that’s where Scott finds me when he gets home from work. I don’t need to turn around. I hear the front door opening with a soft click, the hiss of the hinges, the thud as he puts down his briefcase and his gym bag. Then soft steps that stop a few feet behind me.

  “What are you up to?” he asks at last.

  In my sweat-damp hand, I’m clutching the key. The moment I got home I went up to his office and retrieved it from the drawer. I was going to throw it in his face and demand explanations, which, to be fair, wouldn’t be such an unreasonable thing to do. But now, I subtly slip the key into the pocket of my jeans.

  “I didn’t realize someone else was living in the house,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant. Then I listen to the silence. His breath quickens.

  “Oh,” he says after a long pause.

  That’s it? That’s what I get? Oh.

  “How do you—”

  “I went there today.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  I turn around. It’s an unsettling sight. I’ve never seen Scott look like this, guilty as a dog. His gaze shifts back and forth. Even his posture, which has gained confidence over the years as his efforts at work and in the weight room paid off, looks slack, shoulders rounded, reminding me of the shy, pudgy guy I met years ago. He’s not a good liar. At least I’ve always thought so.

  “I was visiting my mom, and I just wanted to drive by it. I certainly didn’t expect to see people living in it.”

  “Your mom? I thought you didn’t want to see her.”

  “Scott, that’s not the problem.” The problem is that you lied to me, and you’re lying to me right now.

  “I thought, if we’re not selling straightaway, we might as well get some sort of profit,” he stammers, too fast. “So I decided—”

  “I talked to the woman who lives there now,” I say, putting an end to it. “You sold it. And you never told me.”

  “Cece, there’s…there’s some stuff I have to tell you that I’m not proud of.”

  I’m stunned. Literally stunned, like someone hit me over the head with something heavy. I have to go sit down. In my jeans pocket, the key pokes me in the hip.

  “There’s no money in the bank account,” I say.

  “I’ll transfer some,” he assures me. “It’s…it’s not as bad as it looks. We’re not completely broke.”

  “Broke?” I echo. This is nuts. How can we be broke? And another thought dances in the back of my mind, just out of reach, a much less charitable thought.

  He launches into an explanation. He’s been stressed out. Everything that happened in the last year, plus pressures at work, and he first got into the online poker just for fun. He won big when he first played, and he has no idea how it all got so far out of hand. But it will all be fine. He will bring it up at our next appointment with Dr. Alice. He will get treatment. There are steps. Like for alcoholism.

  “Scott,” I say, “our old house. Our house. It’s gone. That’s the real reason we’re stuck here, isn’t it? Not the contract.”

  He goes off again, about how he’s sorry and he’s going to make it right and this and that.

  “For God’s sake.”

  “You had something to do with it too, you know. You mope around here all day and won’t get help.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” I exclaim. “Now it’s my fault? I…I didn’t—”

  Just as I’m about to blurt out the thought I haven’t been able to get rid of this whole time, the lights go out all at once. Silently and without warning, everything sinks into darkness, in which my shriek and Scott’s disembodied exclamation ring hollowly. Darkness is inky and thick, smothering the words that were just on my tongue: I didn’t sign up for this.

  “Saya!” Scott yells, his voice raw and furious, and I know the fury isn’t meant for Saya at all. “Lights! Right now!”

  The lights flicker on in unison. If not for the red swimming before my eyes, and if not for Scott, who was also here to see it, I might have thought nothing happened at all and my mind is playing tricks on me.

  “See?” I say hoarsely. Scott blinks.

  “It’s just the lights, Cecelia. It’s not such a big fucking deal.”

  “Don’t tell me what is or isn’t a big fucking deal!”

  “Stop shouting. You’ll wake Taryn.”

  I storm past him into the kitchen. My mouth is parched, and a headache hammers away behind my eyes. I rub my temples with a groan.

  “I’ll get you an Advil,” Scott says, and hurries off to the bathroom. I listen idly to his steps, hoping that at any moment I might wake up and all this will have been just a dream.

  Scott comes downstairs, bottle of Advil in hand. I take a glass from a cabinet and fill it from the filter. Then I take the bottle from him and dump two pills into my palm.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” he’s saying as I pop them into my mouth and swallow. They stick in my throat, and I bring the glass to my lips to take a sip.

  The second the liquid touches my tongue, I spit it out, violently, all over the counter. My eyes are burning, tears running down my cheeks as I lean over the sink and gag uncontrollably.

  “Cece?” Scott’s voice comes from behind me. “Oh my God. What’s happening? Are you okay?”

  I’m not okay, not even close, because whatever was inside that glass, it sure as hell wasn’t water.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Scott is the one who calls the IntelTech personnel, who arrive just minutes later. Silent and efficient workers take over the kitchen while an assistant guides us gently but firmly out of the kitchen and into the living room.

  “Did you ingest any of it?” the woman asks. She could be the other one’s sister—God, I forgot her name again. At least it seems so at first glance. Then I realize it’s just the style, generic office-casual, that’s nearly identical; she looks nothing like her.

  “Where’s Jessica?” Scott asks. Right. That’s got to be her name.

  “She’s off the clock,” the woman replies with a smile. “Everything will be logged into your file so she can pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

  Great. I do forget that they’re not actually robots. I try to imagine Jessica having a life somewhere out there, and fail.

  “I didn’t ingest any,” I say. “I spat it out.”

  “If you feel any distress—”

  “Oh, I feel a lot of distress. Nothing your hospital can fix,” I snarl.

  “Cece,” my husband chides me in a guilty, hushed voice. How dare he?

  “What was it? What did this house of yours try to poison me with?”

  “It’s not important. A setting got disconnected.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I know. I assure you we’re doing our due diligence.”

  “Just tell me what it was!”

  Her gaze shifts. “It appears that, through some malfunction we’re currently working hard to identify, the water filter became contaminated with sodium hypochlorite.”

  “Bleach,” I say. “That’s bleach. So just say bleach.”

  “We’re terribly sorry—”

  “You know, this could have been my three-year-old daughter,” Scott pipes up. I bet he’s happy to be able to change the subject—to have an excuse to bond with me against some external wrongdoing. I want to tell him to shut his mouth.


  “Clarisse will contact you and discuss compensation,” says the woman. Scott looks guiltily away.

  I think I’ve had enough. I get up and push past the two of them, heading for the stairs. Through the kitchen doorway, I see the IntelTech people poking and prodding. My mind is abuzz.

  Upstairs, I throw open the doors of the bedroom closet. There’s an old duffel bag of Scott’s, which will do. I go through the drawers, gathering up underwear, socks, T-shirts, a couple of pairs of jeans—just the essentials.

  “Cecelia.” He’s standing in the doorway.

  “Move.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just because you gambled away our house doesn’t mean I have to stand another minute of this. I’m going to Therese’s.”

  “You can’t be serious. What about Taryn?”

  “What about her? Why don’t you take care of her for one evening? See what you’ve been missing out on.”

  “Cece,” he says as I zip up the bag and go past him, down the stairs and into the garage. “You don’t have to do this. I understand you’re mad but you can at least go to a hotel.”

  “And who’s going to pay for it?”

  “I’ll transfer you some money.”

  “Oh. So we do have money, stashed away somewhere. Good to know.”

  * * *

  When I’m outside the gates of Venture and I check the banking app, I see that Scott kept his word. There is indeed some more money in the account. But the first thing I do is track down the nearest ATM machine and withdraw as much as the daily limit allows. First, what’s to stop him from transferring it away at any moment, and second, I need it.

  I drive to Therese’s but the moment I park the car, I realize I can’t bring myself to go up there. So I do something I’ve never done before. I fall asleep in my car, with the seat reclined as far as it can go. It’s a strange, fitful sleep, the kind where I can hardly tell I was asleep at all, let alone for how long. It feels as though I had only closed my eyes for a moment. Yet the next thing I know, someone raps on the glass, and I snap awake.