The Wrong Family

by Tarryn Fisher

  “Hey! What are you doing?” She turned to see Joe trailing her down the alley, a filthy Mariners hat perched at a cocky angle on his head. He was walking a little loose limbed, his head wobbling around like his brains were too heavy for his neck. Juno knew that wasn’t the case, which meant he’d probably had a recent hit. Joe liked some crack to go with his soda. She slipped back out, pretending she hadn’t heard him, and continued on her way toward the street. Her heart was doing a jackrabbit run in her chest. Why had she called out to him earlier? She looked around for the dog, expecting to see it, but Joe was on his own and by the look on his face, he had an appetite for some trouble.

  “Juno! Juno, you motherfucker!” She sped up, turning right down the street toward Greenlake Park. If she crossed the street fast, she could lose him. But when she turned around to see how close he was, she couldn’t see him at all. Juno backtracked, peeking around the corner. Joe was standing in front of the Crouches’ open gate, swaying as he stared in. It was a frightening sight. If Sam came into the kitchen and saw—

  “Hey! I’m here, Joe. What do you want?” He didn’t seem to hear her this time; his attention was focused on the house. Dear God, Juno thought. What’s happening in those drug-addled brains of his? Now Juno wished Mr. Nevins were looking out of his window.

  “Joe!” she called. “Hey, shithead! Let’s go get a doughnut, you motherfucker, before they’re out.” Joe still didn’t move, his attention for once laser focused. Juno had met Joe at the doughnut shop, which was no more than a one-room fry house that smelled like heaven. The owner was a former addict and sold anyone without a roof over their head doughnuts for twenty-five cents apiece; first come, first served. He was a lot younger than her, so it wasn’t like they were friends, but when you were homeless, you became part of a community you hadn’t exactly asked for. She took a few steps closer to where Joe stood, careful to keep out of his reach. Crack made him unpredictable. “Joe,” she said again. “I’ll buy you a—”

  His head swiveled toward Juno so suddenly she jumped back. “What was in there?”

  “What?” Suddenly he looked a lot more coherent than she’d initially thought. Maybe he’s not high. Joe took a step toward the gate, extending his hand to push it all the way open.

  “Come on, idiot,” she said through her teeth. “What if they’re home? Come on...” The sound of a car punctuated Juno’s sentence, and suddenly Joe started moving. Hesitantly. She dug her fingers into the underside of his arm and hauled him away. He allowed himself to be pulled out of the alley and a few steps down the sidewalk. Juno stopped in front of the little wall she’d once sat on to watch the construction on the Crouches’ house and glanced around nervously.

  “What are you doing following me?”

  Joe had a look on his pale face Juno didn’t like. As she looked at him, she noticed the skin was burned pink around his cheeks and nose. What she’d mistaken for him being high was actually him being perfectly sober.

  “You lifting something from that house, Juno...?”

  “Yeah, sure, Joe. I was trying to get to the TV,” she joked. “Thought I could carry it down to the pawn shop to—”

  “You were a shrink in your last fancy life, weren’t you. Yeah, I remember.”

  Juno emptied her eyes and smiled dully at him. “Sure, yeah.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but Joe’s questions were making her heart run fast. He had that knowing smile on his thin, crusted lips. He took a moment to turn his head back to the Crouches’ house and study it, picking at the dead skin near his mouth.

  “Yeah, I think you’ve got something going on, you old motherfucker.” He leaned all the way down so that she smelled the rot in his mouth and saw the pockmarks on his nose. “I think you’ve got something...” And then he walked off toward the park in the same loll-headed walk. She stared after him, tiny pinpricks of fear tickling at her stomach. He’s just a junkie. He’d forget they even had this conversation by tonight, she told herself. But he hadn’t asked her again where she’d been; it was like he...knew. And if she wanted to get inside the house before Winnie and Nigel came home, she was running out of time.

  “Hurry up, you old motherfucker,” she whispered to herself, echoing Joe, as she made her way once more toward the alley. She glanced up at Sam’s window and saw the light on. What would Sam do if he caught her sneaking through his house?

  18

  WINNIE

  Winnie hadn’t looked through the mail in three days. That wasn’t the only thing she hadn’t done: dishes were stacked around the sink, and there was a load of moldy wet clothes in the washer she’d been too lazy to transfer over to the dryer. Lazy wasn’t the right word, no, she was spent. Meanwhile, she lay awake all night waiting for the dark figure to materialize next to the window so she could shake Nigel awake and prove she wasn’t crazy. There’d been no apparitions after that day, and Winnie had spent a good portion of her nights convincing herself that what she’d seen had been a figure of her imagination. This was an old house, after all. She was standing with her foot propped on the pedal of the garbage can, dumping various store catalogs and flyers inside, when she came across the envelope.

  It was the hand-scrawled address that drew her attention. There was no return, just Winnie’s name and address and a stamp.

  She ripped it open, and a flurry of paper drifted out, landing across the kitchen floor. Swearing, Winnie knelt to pick up the pieces. They were cut in different-sized rectangles. She held one up to her face and saw that they were printouts of online news stories. The first one read: Baby abducted in supermarket!

  The story was of Rosie Jhou, taken from her stroller in the late nineties from a chain grocery store. Winnie remembered the story. As far as she knew, Rosie Jhou had never been found. That would make her over twenty today. But why would someone send Winnie this? She reached for another clipping, this one asking, Where is Karlie Karhoff? in bold across the top. Eight-month-old Karlie Karhoff had last been seen in the nursery of her family’s home in Montana. Her distraught parents said they’d put her to bed the night before, like usual. “She had a cold and was sleepy,” her mother, Hillary Karhoff, told authorities. But to their horror, they found her crib empty the next morning, baby Karlie gone.

  Winnie reached for another, this time her stomach in her throat; it was about a missing Detroit girl named Hellie Armstrong. Hellie hadn’t made it to her second birthday party; she was taken from her yard a week shy of it while wearing her yellow Princess Belle dress. Her mother said it was going to be a Disney Princess party. By the time Winnie was finished picking up the pieces of paper, she held over a dozen clippings in her hands, which were shaking so hard she dropped them all over again. She stuffed everything back into the envelope, every child who had never been found, and quickly dropped it into the trash. The lid closed and Winnie placed a hand over her racing heart.

  Rosie Jhou’s little face was in her mind as she took deep, gulping breaths. But she paused, the toe of her shoe pressing hard on the pedal of the trash can so that the lid sprang back. She stared down into the peels and rubbish, at her name and address handwritten on the envelope, and a chill swept across her body. That was a woman’s handwriting, she was sure of it. She shoved the envelope farther down, pushing the rest of the trash over it. Someone knew.

  * * *

  She spent the rest of the week and the weekend in a kind of shocked stupor. Everything made her jump, and the sound of Samuel’s loud TV shows set her on edge, their laugh tracks making her want to scream. Why did kids have to watch things that were so obnoxiously loud? On Friday night she put her hair into a ponytail, got into her sweats, and hid in the bathroom, citing cramps. Nigel and Samuel retreated to the den to play video games, leaving her to her own devices, which included obsessively Googling the stories of the kids in those articles. None of them had been found. None. She paced the bathroom floor in her socks, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other over her m
outh. It was Josalyn she was thinking of, the petite blonde with the thin, ratty hair. The girl had one of those faces; she’d looked insolent and angry even when she hadn’t meant to. She’d looked no more than fourteen, though she’d been a woman of eighteen when she came to the program at Illuminations. Winnie remembered the bitten down fingernails, and the sleepy way her eyes looked when she’d first sat in Winnie’s car on the way to a doctor’s appointment. She had two STIs and half of her teeth were rotting in her mouth; other than that, Josalyn had been healthy of body. Her mind, on the other hand, was a stewpot of issues and she was often suicidal—the evidence of that on her wrists, scars slashed the wrong way, the way a fourteen-year-old girl might attempt. Sitting at a little table in Starbucks, Josalyn told Winnie that she’d almost overdosed on sleeping pills the year before in California. Winnie distinctly remembered the flat way she’d told her about her suicide attempts—very matter-of-factly. Her therapist said she was suffering from PTSD and handed her a diagnosis for Bipolar-1. She’d just been a kid to Winnie, some kid who needed help. Winnie had come home each night thinking—no, obsessing over Josalyn’s fate. Her coworkers told her that it was normal to have those feelings when you started out. But she’d gotten under Winnie’s skin, for whatever reason. Did it matter? She wanted to help her. She’d done the opposite.

  19

  WINNIE

  When Winnie’s phone lit up on Tuesday morning with a text from Amber, she was crossing Pike Street with her arms full of dried flower arrangements. She’d volunteered to pick up the flowers for the winter banquet at Samuel’s school.

  The flowers, which you could buy from the market in huge, inexpensive bouquets, were sold dried through the winter. Winnie found that depressing. They crunched slightly in her arms as she waited for the light to change. She was freezing, her nose still raw from the cold she’d had last week. She wondered who on the school board thought bouquets of dead flowers were Christmassy, and why hadn’t someone invented a heated coat?

  She had to hike uphill back to the parking garage where she’d left her car, so she didn’t read the text until the flowers were loaded neatly into the trunk, and even then, she was distracted as she glanced at her phone while she walked around to the driver’s side door. She had to read the text again, sure it was a mistake, clearing her throat incessantly as she did when she was anxious. Surely Amber, who routinely drank two glasses of wine with lunch, had it wrong. But Winnie also knew that Amber, who’d grown up in Brooklyn and had once shoved a man down a flight of stairs for touching her rear, was not the type of person to raise false alarms.

  So Winnie typed a reply: Send the photo.

  She waited with her back leaning against the car door, feeling her stomach lurch repeatedly as the seconds ticked by. It was cold four floors up in the parking garage, the wind skating right off the Sound and passing through the open, yawning windows—but Winnie didn’t want to get in the car yet. She shivered, staring at the side of a black Suburban. Someone had written Idiot in the dirt on the passenger door. It would be different if this were coming from someone else, but Amber was her cousin. If she came bearing bad news, chances were, it was valid bad news. Something you had to see but didn’t want to see.

  She opened her eyes to read the text again, just to make sure:

  I debated sending this but I feel it’s the right thing to do. I was at lunch yesterday at Palomino. I spotted Nigel and thought he was with you so I headed over to say hi. When I reached the table I saw that it wasn’t you. He was with some woman. They were sitting on the same side of the booth, very close. Something wasn’t right. They were turned toward each other. They didn’t see me but I took a photo as I walked by. I’m sorry.

  That was Amber; no butter on her toast, she delivered everything dry. Winnie’s hands were shaking—no, her whole body was shaking—as she waited. The photo came, the notification lighting up the phone. She stared at it hard—so hard her eyes hurt. It was there; it was right there in front of her. The photo blurred as soon as it came into view, the faces of the two people disappearing as her eyes filled with tears. But she’d seen them, she knew the faces well: her husband and Dulce Tucker.

  The photo was blurry; Amber had taken it on the move and there was a blur of a red fingernail in the corner of the shot, but there was no mistaking Nigel, whose body was turned sideways toward the woman next to him, his arm thrown casually across the back of the booth behind her. She was wearing a bright red sweater that accentuated the swell of her breasts. The thing that bothered Winnie the most was the hand that rested on her husband’s chest, a hand so comfortable being there that it surely had been there many times before. And where else, Winnie thought. Where else had this woman’s hands been? Both of them were smiling. Isn’t that something, Winnie thought. It’s possible to smile while breaking someone’s heart.

  Thank you, she sent back to Amber, and then she had a panic attack on the cold ground of the parking garage, her car filled with pretty, dead flowers.

  Winnie dropped the flowers off then drove straight to Nigel’s office. She’d yet to cry, she’d yet to feel anything other than a greasy dread that was working its way through her mind at that very moment. She was no longer in charge; some other woman had access to her husband’s heart. Did he love Dulce? That was the question of the hour, nagging under skin like a splinter. Had her husband fallen in love with someone right under her nose? She’d been distracted, she definitely had been...between work, Samuel, and her volunteer hours. She was a busy person, like everyone else. The truly rotten part about this was that she hadn’t even suspected. What did you think, you idiot? That he really wouldn’t leave you eventually after what you did...?

  Nigel worked in a stout brick building in Belltown just off the railroad tracks. There were always a couple of homeless men wandering around outside at this time of day; Nigel called them the Belltown Hoppers. She saw one of them now shuffling up the sidewalk, holding a can of soda and walking slightly off-kilter. It made her uncomfortable that Nigel nicknamed them, but still, she found herself referring to them by the very name that disturbed her. It was 12:30, Winnie noted on her Apple Watch. Nigel took his lunch around this time; Winnie had often met him for a quick bite at one of the bistros in the area.

  He hated it when Winnie called their lunches a quick bite. “This is a real quick bite—” And then he’d nip Winnie playfully on the neck. Now, apparently, he was nipping other women on the neck, taking bites out of things that weren’t his.

  She took a seat on a bench half a block away and, facing the entrance to Nigel’s building, crossed and uncrossed her legs. If he left for lunch, she’d be able to see him from there. If he left for lunch with Dulce, she’d also be able to see him from there, and she was unsure as to whether or not she wanted to. The man with the can of soda was now feeding a dog scraps of a sandwich a little ways down the street. She renamed him Mr. Soda, thinking that less derogatory than Nigel’s moniker for him. Winnie watched their exchange without really seeing it; Mr. Soda and his dog were just background. She was reviewing the last few months in her mind, looking for some clue to mull over. Exactly how stupidly blind had she been? And how sneaky had he been to pull this off?

  Winnie desperately didn’t want to be the idiot wife who was cheated on by the bored husband, but ten minutes later, she found out that’s exactly what she was. Nigel was wearing the sweater Winnie bought him for his birthday as he held the door open for Dulce. Winnie sat forward on the bench as the five-foot-four brunette stepped past her husband onto the sidewalk, smiling up at him with a surprising sweetness. They fell into step together, talking with their hands in happy gestures. It looked like the end scene to some happy movie, only with Mr. Soda in the background. They were headed to the quick bite places. If he takes her to 360, I’m going to lose it, she thought, standing up to follow them. She stayed on the far side of the street, a few paces back, trotting to keep up with them. All she had with her was a small crossbo
dy bag, and as she walked she held on to the strap across her chest with both hands, her eyes never leaving them. She half expected someone else to join them, calling for them to slow down, but no such thing happened. This was a lunch date, and not of the business variety. You don’t know that yet, she thought. But when they walked into the very restaurant Winnie feared they were headed to, she knew.

  360 was their place, locally sourced and a favorite for date night. He hadn’t told her that he came here during the day with other people. She waited five minutes before crossing the street and walking into the restaurant.

  She didn’t really know what her plan was other than to confirm what she already knew. She didn’t feel crazy or unhinged as women were supposed to feel when they found out their husbands were cheating on them. Winnie felt suspiciously calm. The storm was coming, she knew, but for now there was the eerie stillness inside her.

  They were seated in a cramped booth opposite each other; Winnie could only make out the tops of their heads when she walked in the door. When the hostess greeted her, she pointed to a table near the window where she could see them without them seeing her. As soon as Winnie was seated at her own table, Dulce got up to go to the bathroom, grinning at Nigel like they shared a secret joke. Winnie watched her walk away; Nigel also watched her walk away. He even leaned to the side a little when she was walking out of his line of sight so he could keep his eyes trained on her ass. She was wearing a pinstripe skirt—white with fine gray lines, so tight you could tell that she spent five nights a week in the gym.