by Mary Kubica
tune to The Addams Family theme song, clapping twice between each line. Though I hear him, I don’t reply. “Do you like it?”
he asks, louder this time, nearly screaming.
I nod my head, but I’m just barely listening. I hear his song,
but my mind can’t process it because all I’m thinking about is
the missing knife.
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Tate doesn’t like the brush-off. His posture shifts; he throws
his arms across himself and begins to pout.
Will turns to me, wrapping his arms around me. It feels good,
being held.
“I’ve looked into home security systems,” he tells me, return-
ing to the conversation we started on the phone earlier today,
about whether or not we’re safe here. “I set up an appointment
to have one installed. And let’s give Officer Berg a chance to get
to the bottom of this, before we cut and run. This is our home,
Sadie. Whether we like it or not, for now this is our home. We
have to make do.”
I pull back from his embrace. He’s trying to be reassuring.
But I don’t feel reassured. I meet his eye, and ask, “But what if
a security system can’t protect us?”
His look is quizzical. “What do you mean?” he asks.
“What if there’s a threat inside our home?”
“You mean as if someone got past the security system?” he
asks, assuring me that we could keep the house armed at all
times, that these things are monitored twenty-four hours a day.
If the alarm was triggered, help would be on its way almost in-
stantly.
“It’s not an intruder I’m thinking about,” I say. “It’s Imogen.”
Will shakes his head, disbelieving. “Imogen?” he asks, and
I say yes. “You can’t possibly think—” he begins, but I inter-
rupt him.
“Our k-n-i-f-e,” I tell him, spelling the word out for Tate’s benefit. Tate can spell, but not well enough. “Our boning k-n-i-f-e isn’t here. I can’t find it,” I say, admitting in a forced whisper, “She scares me, Will.”
I think about her in our bedroom the other night, watch-
ing us sleep. The strange exchange we had in the hallway. The
photograph of her dead mother that she carries around on her
phone. These are abnormal behaviors.
And then there’s the padlock on her bedroom door. “There’s
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something in there she doesn’t want us to find,” I say, finally ad-
mitting to him that I was in there the other day, before the lock
was installed. I tell him about the picture I found with the man’s
face scratched off, the Dear John note, the condoms. “She’s been
sleeping with someone,” I tell him. “A married man, I think,”
based on the content of the note.
Will doesn’t say much to this. He’s more disappointed that I
would violate her privacy by snooping through her room. What
he does say, however, is that there’s nothing criminal about sleep-
ing with a married man. “She’s sixteen,” Will reminds me. “Six-
teen-year-olds do stupid things all the time. You know why she
put that lock on the door?” Will asks, saying before I can reply,
“She’s a teenager, Sadie. That’s why. She doesn’t want people
coming into her room. How would you feel if she went snoop-
ing through your stuff?” he asks.
“It wouldn’t matter,” I tell him. “I have nothing to hide. But
Imogen is an angry girl with a short fuse, Will,” I argue. “She
worries me.”
“Try putting yourself in her shoes, Sadie. You don’t think
you’d be angry?” he asks, and of course I’d be grieving and un-
comfortable—my mother dead by her own hand, me forced
to live with people I don’t know—but would I be angry? “We
have no idea what Imogen saw that day,” he asserts. “If we’d
seen what she must have seen, we’d be on a short fuse too. You
can’t unsee that.
“Besides,” Will tells me, coming back to the knife, “I used
the boning knife just the other day to skin chicken for a casse-
role. You’re all worked up for nothing, Sadie,” he says, asking
if I checked the dishwasher for the knife. I didn’t. I didn’t even
think to look in the dishwasher.
But it doesn’t matter right now, because my mind has moved
on from the knife and to the picture on Imogen’s cell phone.
The one of Alice dead. I know exactly what Imogen saw the
day her mother died, though I’m reluctant to tell Will because
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the last thing he needs to see is what Alice went through. And
yet I tell him anyway because it isn’t right, it isn’t normal, for Imogen to have taken a picture of Alice postmortem and for
her to be carrying it around. What is she doing with it anyway?
Showing her friends?
I look away from Will. I confess to him that I do know what
Imogen saw. “Imogen took a picture that day before the coro-
ner took Alice away. She showed it to me,” I say.
Will grows suddenly silent for a moment. He swallows hard.
“She took a picture?” he asks after some time. I nod. “What
did she look like?” he asks, meaning Alice.
I’m generally nondescript. “Well, she was d-e-a-d,” I tell him, treading lightly. “But she looked peaceful,” I lie. I don’t tell him about claw marks, the severed tongue. I don’t tell him about the
state of the attic, the toppled storage boxes, the broken lamp, the pitchpoled telescope. But I recreate them in my mind, imagining Alice’s thrashing body knocking into these things, toppling
them, as her oxygen supply was siphoned off.
As I dredge up the images of them, something gets under
my skin. Because I picture the boxes and the lamp overturned,
and yet the stepstool—the one Alice used to raise herself up to
the height of the noose—stood upright. I remember that now.
How could the very thing that Alice would have needed to
kick away to go through with the suicide not be overturned?
Even more, the stool was out of reach of Alice’s body. Which
makes me think someone else yanked it from beneath her feet.
In which case, was it even a suicide? Or was it murder?
I turn white. A hand goes to my mouth. “What’s wrong?”
Will asks. “Everything alright?” he asks. I shake my head, tell
him no, I don’t think so.
“I just realized something,” I say, and he asks with urgency,
“What?”
“The picture of Alice. On Imogen’s phone,” I say.
“What about it?” he asks.
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“The police hadn’t come yet when Imogen took the picture.
It was only Imogen,” I say, wondering how much time lapsed
in between her arriving home and calling the police. Was it
enough time for Imogen to stage a suici
de? Imogen is tall, but
she’s not heavily built. I can’t imagine she’d have had the strength to haul Alice to the third floor—even if Alice was drugged and
unconscious, unable to fight back—to hoist her up and into the
noose. Not alone. Someone would have had to help her. I con-
sider the friends she smokes with while waiting for the ferry to
arrive. Clad in all black, rebellious and oppositional, full of self-loathing. Would they have helped?
“In the picture, Will, the stepstool we found in the attic. The
one Alice would have had to use to do what she did. Everything
else was knocked over. But the stool remained upright. And it
was too far away for Alice to reach. If she’d been alone, the stool would have been knocked over, and it would have been much
closer to her feet.”
He shakes his head. “What are you getting at?” he asks, and I
see a change come over him. His posture shifts. Ruts form be-
tween his eyes. He frowns at me. He knows what I’m suggesting.
“How can we know for certain,” I ask, “that it was a s-u-i-c-
i-d-e? There was no investigation. But there was also no note.
Don’t people who k-i-l-l themselves usually leave a note? Officer Berg said it himself, remember? He told us he never pegged
Alice for the type.”
“How would Berg know,” Will asks angrily, “if Alice was the
suicide type?” It isn’t like Will to get angry. But this is his sister we’re talking about. His niece. His flesh and blood.
“I don’t trust Imogen,” I admit. “She scares me,” I say again.
“Listen to yourself, Sadie,” Will says. “First you accuse Imo-
gen of taking our knife. Now you’re saying she killed Alice.”
Will is too worked up to spell the words out, though he mouths
them for Tate’s benefit. “You’re all over the place. I know she
hasn’t exactly been welcoming, but she’s done nothing to lead
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me to believe she’s capable of murder,” he says, seemingly hav-
ing already forgotten about the writing on my car window just
the other day. Die.
“Are you really suggesting that this was a murder made to
look like a suicide?” he asks, disbelieving.
Before I can reply, Tate again begs, “Please Mommy, play with
me.” My eyes drop to his, and they look so sad, my heart aches.
“Alright, Tate,” I tell him, feeling guilty that Will and I are
going on like this, ignoring him. “What do you want to play?”
I ask him, voice softening though my insides are still in a tizzy.
“Do you want to play charades, or a board game?”
He tugs hard on my hand and is chanting, “Statue game,
statue game!”
The wrenching on my hand has begun to hurt. It’s wearing
on my nerves, because not only is he pulling on my hand, hurt-
ing me, but he’s trying to turn my body, to make it go ways
it doesn’t want to go. It’s subliminal, the way I yank my hand
suddenly away, holding it above my head, out of reach of his. I
don’t mean to do it. But there’s an immediacy to it. So much so
that Tate flinches like he’s been slapped.
“Please Mommy,” Tate begs, eyes suddenly sad as he stands
before me and leaps for my hand. I try to be patient, I really do,
but my mind is whirling in a dozen different directions and I
don’t know what Tate means by this statue game. He’s begun
to cry. Not a real cry but crocodile tears, which wear on me
even more.
That’s when I catch sight of the doll I kicked aside over an
hour ago. Her limp body is pressed against the wall. “Put your
toys away and then we’ll play,” I tell him, and he asks, “What
toys?”
“Your doll, Tate,” I say, losing patience. “Right there,” I
tell him, motioning to the floppy doll with her frizzy hair and
marble-like eyes. She lies on her side, dress torn along a seam,
one shoe missing.
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Tate’s look is leery. “It’s not mine,” he says, as if this is something I should know. But of course it’s his—it’s not like any of
the rest of us still play with toys—and my first thought is that
Tate is embarrassed for having been caught playing with a doll.
“Put it away,” I say, and Tate comes back with a quintessen-
tial childish reply.
“You put your doll away,” he says, hands on hips, tongue thrust out at me. It startles me. It’s not like Tate to act this way. Tate is my good boy, the kind and obedient one. I wonder what’s
gotten into him.
But before I can answer, Will does so for me. “Tate,” he says,
voice stern. “Do as your mother says and put your toy away.
Right now,” he says, “or your mother won’t play with you.”
Having no choice, Tate picks the doll up by a single leg and
carries her upside down to his bedroom. Through the floors, I
hear the thump of her plastic head hitting the hardwood.
When he returns, Tate chants, “Statue game, statue game,”
over and over again until I’m forced to admit that I don’t know
what this statue game is. That I’ve never played it before, that
I’ve never heard of it.
It’s then that he snaps and calls me a liar. “Mommy is a liar!”
is what he screams, taking my breath away. He says, “Yes you
do!” as his crocodile tears turn to real tears. “You do know
what it is, you liar.”
I should reprimand him, I know. But I’m speechless and
stunned. For the next few seconds, I can’t find the words to
speak as Tate scampers from the room, bare feet sliding on the
wooden floors. Before I can catch my breath, he’s gone. In the
next room, I hear his body drop to the ground. He’s thrown
himself down somewhere, as limp as the doll. I do nothing.
Will steps closer, his hand brushing the hair from my eyes.
I close my eyes and lean into his touch. “Maybe a warm bath
would help you relax?” he suggests, and it’s only then that I re-
member I haven’t showered today. That instead I’m wet through
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from the run in the rain. My clothes, my hair have yet to com-
pletely dry. There’s a smell to me. It’s not a good one.
“Take your time,” Will tells me. “Tate and I will be fine. I’ll
take care of this,” he says, and I feel grateful for that. That Will will clean up this mess I’ve made with Tate. By the time I return from my bath, everything will be as good as new.
On the way upstairs I call back to Tate that we’ll play some-
thing just as soon as I’m through. “Okay, buddy?” I ask, lean-
ing over the banister where I see him, body thrown across the
arm of the sofa, tears seeping in the marigold fabric. If he hears
me, he makes no reply.
Beneath my feet, the steps creak. Upstairs in the hall, I find
the sheets stripped from the beds, just where I left them. I’ll re-
place them later, put them back on the beds just as dirty as they
were then I took them off.
The darkness of the outside world seeps into the home, mak-
ing it hard to believe it’s not the middle of the night. I flip a light in the hallway on, but then just as quickly turn it off, on the off chance that someone is standing in the street, staring through
the windows at Will, Tate and me.
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Mouse
Not long after they brought Bert the guinea pig home, he started
getting fat. So fat that he could barely move. He spent his days
laid out, flat on his big belly like a parachute. Her father and
Fake Mom told Mouse she was feeding him too many carrots.
That was why he was getting fat. But Mouse couldn’t help her-
self. Bert loved those carrots. He made a squealing sound every
time Mouse brought him some. Even though she knew she
shouldn’t, she kept on feeding him the carrots.
But then one day, Bert gave birth to babies. That was how
Mouse knew that Bert wasn’t a boy after all, but that he was a
girl, because she knew enough to know that boys don’t have
babies. Those babies must have already been inside Bert when
they got her from the pet store. Mouse wasn’t sure how to take
care of guinea pig babies but it didn’t matter because none of
those babies survived. Not a single one.
Mouse cried. She didn’t like to see anything get hurt. She
didn’t like to see anything die.
Mouse told her real mom what happened to Bert’s babies. She
told her what those babies looked like when they were born and
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how hard it was for Bert to get those babies out of her insides.
She asked her mother how those babies got inside of Bert, but
Mouse’s real mom didn’t say. She asked her father too. He told
her he’d tell her another day, when she was older. But Mouse
didn’t want to know another day. She wanted to know that day.
Fake Mom told her that it was probably Bert’s fault those ba-
bies died, because Bert didn’t take care of them like a good mom
should. But Mouse’s father said to her in private that it wasn’t
really Bert’s fault, because Bert probably just didn’t know any
better because she had never been a mom before. And some-
