by Mary Kubica
it was. I ran my hands over the countertop. I opened and closed
drawers, fiddled with the knobs of the gas range.
I turned the dial, bypassed the ignition valve.
It didn’t take long for the smell of gas to reach my nose.
I moved to the living room, laid my fingers on photographs,
sat on the sofa, played the piano.
I turned and headed toward the stairs, where I gripped the
handrail, climbed the steps up. The steps were wooden, sunken
in the middle. They were old, as old as the house was old.
I moved down the hall, looked in each room.
It didn’t take long to figure out which bedroom was his.
The bed was wide. A pair of his pants was draped over the
edge of a laundry basket. Inside were his shirts, his socks, her
bras. I thumbed the lace of her bra, dropped it back in the bas-
ket, dug through until I found a sweater. It was brown wool, a
cardigan, ugly and worn, but warm. I slipped my arms into it,
ran my fingers along the ribbed trim, touched the buttons. I sank
my hands into the big apron pockets, did a little spin.
I went to Sadie’s dresser, where her jewelry hung from a
stand. I draped a necklace over my neck, slipped a bracelet over
my wrist. I slid open a drawer, found makeup there. I watched
on in the attached mirror as I patted my nose with her powder
puff, as I swept her blush across my cheeks.
Don’t you look lovely, Mrs. Foust, I said to my reflection, though I’d always been so much prettier than Sadie. But even so, if I
wanted to, I could do my hair like hers, I could dress like her,
pass myself off as Mrs. Foust. Persuade others to believe that I
was Will’s wife, his chosen one. If I wanted to.
I went to the bed, grabbed ahold of the top sheet and pulled
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it back. The sheets were soft, gray, the kind with a high thread
count, no doubt expensive.
I ran my hands over the sheets, I fingered the hem. I sat on
the edge of the bed. I couldn’t help myself, I had to get inside.
I slipped my feet under the sheets, moved down beneath the
covers. I lay on my side, closed my eyes awhile. Pretended Will
was beside me in bed.
I was gone before he came back. He never knew I was there.
I was there at the pier when he came. The day was dingy,
gray. The clouds sunk from the sky, they fell to street level, like smog. Everyone and everything was blurred because of it. Everyone was gray.
There were people outside just for the hell of it. As if they
liked this, the dreary cold. They stood, staring at the ocean,
watching a dot at sea that may or may not have been the ferry.
It moved in, getting closer, leaving small boats behind. They
rolled back and forth in the ship’s wake.
The wind cut through me like a knife. I stood with my ticket
in hand, holed up behind the ticket booth, waiting for Will to
come. I spotted him as he made his way down the street for
the dock.
His smile was electric. My heart beat hard.
But he wasn’t smiling at me.
He was smiling at the hoi polloi, making small talk with the
commoners.
I waited behind the ticket booth, watched him take his place
at the end of the line. I waited, then fell in line behind him, a
handful of people between us.
I draped a hood over my head. With sunglasses, I hid my eyes.
The ferry was the last of us to arrive. We paraded across the
bridge, prisoners on a death march. There were holes in the
bridge, one of those you see straight through to the churning
water below. I saw seaweed. I smelled fish.
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Will went up the steps to the upper deck. I sat where I could
watch him without being seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I watched as he stood at the stern of the ship; as he gripped the
guardrail; as he stared at the shoreline as it slipped from view.
The water beneath us was briny and brown. Ducks circled
the boat.
I watched the whole time. Will stood like a ship’s figurehead,
Poseidon, god of the sea, keeping watch over the ocean. My eyes
orbited his body, traced the shape of his silhouette. They circled
his windblown hair, rounded his broad shoulder, slipped down
an arm, counted each fingertip. They followed the seam of his
jeans from his thighs to his feet. Dropped beneath the soles of
his shoes, went up the other side, the same way they came down.
Feet to thighs to fingers. I ran my hands through his hair. Re-
membered what it felt like when his hair got tangled up in the
webs of my hands.
Twenty minutes or so, it went on this way.
The shore came closer. Buildings got larger. All the while,
they were there, blocks on the horizon. But all of a sudden, they
were big and gray like everything else that day.
When the ferry docked, I followed Will from the boat, and
across a pier. Somewhere on the other side of it, we hopped a
bus. I dug in my bag, happy to see I had a Metra card.
I climbed aboard. I found a seat behind him.
The bus clomped along, shuttling us across town.
It wasn’t long before we arrived. Another college campus.
More buildings covered in brick. I fell back into my usual rou-
tine, following Will as he walked, mirroring him, keeping
twenty paces behind all the time.
I watched as he made his way to a building. I climbed the
steps thirty seconds after he did. I followed him to a classroom,
stood in the hallway and listened to him speak. His voice, it was
easy on the ears. Like a babbling brook, the exhilarating rush
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of a waterfall. It excited and subdued me all at the same time,
made me weak in the knees.
Will got all fired up, aroused, talking about population den-
sity, about people living in overcrowded conditions, drinking
dirty water. I pressed my back to the wall and listened. Not to his words, those meant nothing to me, but to the sound of his voice.
There in the hallway, I closed my eyes, made believe every
word out of his mouth was a secret message meant just for me.
When people came tumbling out, they were loud, raucous.
I stepped in when the room was empty.
He stood at the front of the room. A wave of relief washed
over him when he saw me.
He was happy to see me. He was smiling, this full-out smile
that he tried to hide but couldn’t. The corners of his lips turned
up on their own.
I can’t believe it, he said, coming to me, scooping me up into his arms. I can’t believe you’re here. What are you doing here? he asked.
I told him, I came to see you. I missed you.
He asked, How did you know where to find me?
I said with a wink, I followed you here. I think you have a stalker, Professor Foust.
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Sadie
I jog home from the coffee shop. The temperatures have dropped
even more than before. The rain has turned to sleet, striking me
in the eyes so that I stare only at the concrete as I run. It comes down heavy and thick, sticking to my clothing. Before long,
this sleet will be snow.
As I approach our house, I hear the sound of a car engine
idling nearby, up the hill, ahead of me. I lift my eyes in time to
see a Crown Victoria parked at the end of the Nilssons’ drive.
The engine is running, exhaust fumes drifting past the red tail-
lights and into the cold air. There’s a man standing beside the
Nilssons’ mailbox. On a day such as this, no one should be out-
side.
I slow down my pace, put a hand to my brow to repel the
sleet. My view of the man is obstructed because of the weather
and the distance. But it doesn’t matter. I know who it is; I’ve
watched this same scene before.
There, not fifty yards from where I stand, is Officer Berg.
He hovers behind the rear of his Crown Victoria, with an item
in hand. He looks around to be sure no one’s watching before
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forcing it into the Nilssons’ mailbox. I manage to slip behind a
tree just in time.
Officer Berg has done this before, the same day he interro-
gated Will and me in our home. I watched after he left, as he
drove to the Nilssons’ mailbox and left something there that
day too.
It’s the circumspection that piques my interest the most. What
is he leaving in the Nilsson mailbox that he doesn’t want any-
one else to know about?
Berg closes the receptacle door and climbs back into his car.
He pulls away, over the crest of the hill. Curiosity gets the best
of me. I know I shouldn’t and yet I do. I push the wet hair from
my face, jog up the street. I reach in and take the item from the
mailbox with none of the circumspection Officer Berg had.
Nearby, under the canopy of a tree, I see that it’s an unmarked
enveloped, sealed shut, with a sheaf of paper packed inside. I
hold the envelope up to the negligible light. I can’t be certain,
but I’m quite sure it’s a wad of cash.
The rev of a car engine in the distance startles me. I thrust
the envelope back in the mailbox and walk quickly home.
It’s midmorning, but for as dreary as it is outside, it might as
well be the middle of the night. I hurry inside my home, clos-
ing and locking the door behind myself. The dogs come run-
ning to greet me and I’m grateful for their company.
I turn away from the window. In the foyer, I trip over some-
thing. It’s a toy, one of Tate’s toys, which, upon closer inspec-
tion, is a doll. I think nothing of it, the fact that it’s a doll. We’re not into gender-specific toys in our home. If Tate wants to play
with a doll over Transformers, so be it. But it’s the placement of
it that upsets me, lying in the middle of the foyer so that some-
one might trip. I kick the doll aside, taking my anxiety out on
the poor doll.
I call Will but he’s in the middle of a lecture. When he finally
gets a chance to call me back, I tell him about the coroner re-
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MARY KUBICA
port, about the boning knife. But Will already knows because
he read about it once he reached the mainland this morning.
“It’s horrible,” he says, and together we chew over how tragic
and unthinkable the whole thing is.
“Are we safe here?” I ask Will, and when he hesitates—be-
cause how can either of us know if we’re safe?—I say decisively,
“I think that we should leave.”
Before he can argue, I say, “Imogen would come with us, of
course.”
What I don’t say is that on our turf, we’d have the upper hand.
I’d feel a sense of control over Imogen that I don’t feel now.
“Leave and go where?” Will asks, but it seems so obvious to
me, the way that our fresh start isn’t so fresh after all. Our stay in Maine has been stormy to say the least. If anything, our lives
have gotten worse since being here.
“Home,” I tell him, but he only asks, “Where is home any-
more, Sadie?” and at those words, my heart aches.
Our Chicago condo, the one where Will and I spent our en-
tire married lives until now, is gone, sold to a couple of millen-
nials. My job at the hospital is gone too, no doubt replaced with
some young recent med school grad. Otto can never return to
his public school, nor Tate to his, not because of anything he
did, but because he’s guilty by association. They’d both need to
go to some private school, and on Will’s salary alone—assum-
ing he could even get his old job back—that would never work.
When I say nothing, Will says, “Let’s talk about this when I
get home,” and I say okay. I end the call and make my way into
the kitchen to start the teakettle. As I cross into the kitchen, I
see our knives and am stricken with a morbid curiosity to see
for myself what a boning knife is, what one looks like, to hold
it in my hand. Will has a set of knives he keeps in a wooden
block on the counter, just out of reach of Tate’s inquisitive hands.
I go to the block. I don’t know what a boning knife is, but
an internet search tells me I’m looking for an arched blade with
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a very sharp point, five to nine inches long. I yank on the han-
dles of the knives, pulling them out in turn to examine their
blades. It doesn’t take long to see that there’s no knife matching
the description in the block. Furthermore, I see that one space
on the wooden block is empty. This set of twenty-one knives
only contains twenty. One knife is gone.
My imagination gets the best of me. I try to stay calm, sen-
sible, remembering again about Occam’s razor. Maybe some
other knife belongs here. Maybe Will doesn’t own a boning
knife. Maybe the missing knife is in the sink, though I look and
it’s not. Maybe Will lost that knife long ago, or it got placed
in the cutlery drawer by mistake. I pull open the drawer, rifle
through Alice’s modest collection of knives—steak and dinner
knives mostly, a paring knife, one with a serrated edge—but
it’s not there.
I think of Imogen in our bedroom at night. You hear sto-
ries about children murdering their parents in the middle of the
night. It happens; it’s not that far-fetched. And Imogen is a hos-
tile girl, a damaged girl. I don’t know that I’d put it past her to take that knife to threaten me with, or worse.
I turn and step from the kitchen. I climb the steps to the
second floor, my slick hand gripping the banister. I go to her
room, planning to se
arch it as I did the other night, but my plan
is quickly derailed when I come to her door and realize there’s
no getting in without the padlock key.
I curse, shaking on the door handle. I try another call to
Will to tell him about the missing knife, but he’s on his way
home now, likely on the ferry where reception is spotty. My
call doesn’t go through. I put my phone away, relieved to know
that he’ll be home soon.
I find something to keep myself busy. I dust the house. I strip
the sheets from the beds. I start to gather them in a pile to lug
down to the laundry room.
In our bedroom, I tug on the fitted sheet. As I do, something
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black comes skidding out from my side of the bed, something
that had been wedged between the mattress and the bed frame
for some time. As the object slews halfway across the bedroom
floor, my first instinct is to think it’s the remote control for the bedroom TV we rarely use. I go to pick it up. As I do, I realize
that it’s not a remote, but rather a phone, one which is neither
Will’s nor mine. I turn it over in my hands. There’s nothing dis-
cernible about it. It’s simply a phone, an older generation iPhone.
Perhaps Alice’s, I think, noting that the phone is not-surprisingly dead. Alice herself has been dead for quite some time. Of course
the phone would be dead, too.
Back downstairs in a drawer full of gadgets, I find a charger
that fits. I plug it into an outlet in the living room wall, stretching the phone to the fireplace mantel.
I go back to straightening the house until Will arrives soon
after with Tate in tow. I greet them in the foyer, and Will sees
it in my eyes straightaway: Something is wrong.
Both he and Tate are wet with snow. It’s on their coats, on
their hair, melting quickly. Tate stomps it from his feet, creat-
ing a puddle on the wood. He’s trying to tell me a story about
something that happened at school today, something he learned.
He starts to sing a song but I’m not listening, and neither is Will.
“Take your shoes off,” Will tells him, before helping Tate out
of his coat. He hangs it from the hook in the darkened foyer,
and it occurs to me that I should turn on a light, but I don’t.
“Do you like it, Mommy?” Tate asks about the song. “Days
of the week, days of the week, days of the week,” he sings in
