by Mary Kubica
how much her father loved Fake Mom. She could see it in his
eyes every time he looked at her. Mouse didn’t want his feel-
ings to be hurt. Because he would be sad if he knew what Fake
Mom had done, even sadder than Mouse felt. Mouse was an
empathetic little girl. She didn’t ever want to make anyone sad.
Especially her father.
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Sadie
I commit the address to memory. I get in my own car and drive
to Courtney’s home. I parallel park on the street, sliding easily
between two cars. I step from my car. I bring Courtney’s keys
with me.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t do something like this. But my back
is to a wall.
I knock before attempting to let myself inside. No one comes
to the door.
I finger the keys in my hands. It could be any one of them. I
try the first key. It doesn’t fit.
I glance over my shoulder, seeing a woman and her dog near
the end of the park where it meets with the street. The woman
is bent at the waist, cleaning the dog’s mess from the snow with
a plastic bag; she doesn’t see me.
I fiddle with the second key. This one fits. The knob turns
and the door opens, and I find myself standing in the doorway
of Courtney Baines’s home. I step inside; I close the door. The
interior of the house is charming. It bursts with character: arched doorways, wall niches and wooden built-ins. But it’s also ne-9780778369110_RHC_txt(ENT_ID=269160).indd 228
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glected and unloved. There isn’t much in the way of things. The house is unkempt. Stacks of mail are strewn across the sofa, two
empty coffee cups on the wooden floor. A basket of unfolded
laundry waits at the base of the stairs. Kids’ toys wither in the
corner of the room; they haven’t been played with in awhile.
But there are photographs. They hang from the wall slightly
askew, a layer of dust coating the top ledge of them.
I go to the pictures, nearly run my hands through the dust.
But then, in the nick of time, I think of fingerprints, of evi-
dence, and pull quickly back. I search my coat pockets for a pair of winter gloves and slip them on.
The photographs are of Jeffrey, Courtney and their little girl.
This strikes me as odd. If Will and I had gone through with a di-
vorce in the aftermath of his affair, I would have rid my home of
photographs of him, so I wouldn’t be reminded of him every day.
Not only does Courtney keep family photographs in her
home, but there are wedding photographs too. Romantic scenes
of Jeffrey and her kissing. I wonder what this means. If she still
has feelings for him. Is she in denial about his affair, the divorce, his remarriage? Does she think there’s a chance they might get
back together again, or is she only pining for the love the love
they once had?
I wander the halls, looking in bedrooms, in bathrooms, in
the kitchen. The home is three narrow floors tall, each room as
Spartan as the next. In the child’s bedroom, the bed is covered
with woodland creatures, deer and squirrels and such. There’s
a rug on the floor.
Another room is an office with a desk inside. I go to the desk,
pull the drawers out at random. I’m not looking for anything in
particular. But there are things I see, like felt tip pens and reams of paper and a box of stationery.
I return downstairs. I open and close the refrigerator door. I
peel back a curtain and look outside to be sure no one is coming.
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MARY KUBICA
How long do I have until Courtney realizes that her keys
are missing?
I sit lightly on the sofa, paying attention not to disturb the
careful order of things. I thumb through the mail, keeping it
in the same order that it is, in case there’s some method to the
madness that I can’t see. It’s bills and junk mail mostly. But there are other things too, like legal petitions. State of Maine is typed across the envelopes, and that’s what makes me peel the flaps
back, slide the documents out with my gloved hands.
I was never very good with legalese, but words like child en-
dangerment and immediate physical custody leap out at me. It takes but a minute to realize Jeffrey and Morgan Baines were attempting to gain full custody of his and Courtney’s child.
The thought of someone taking Otto or Tate from me makes
me instantly upset. If someone tried to take my children from
me, I don’t know what I’d do.
But if I know one thing, it’s that getting between a woman
and her child will never end well.
I slide the documents back into their envelopes, but not be-
fore first snapping a photo of them on my phone. I put the mail
back how it was. I rise from the sofa and slip back out the front
door, done with my search for now. I’m not sure if what I found
was enough to suspect Courtney of murder. But it is enough
to raise questions.
I drop the keys into a zipped compartment in my bag. I’ll
dispose of them later.
People lose their keys all the time, don’t they? It’s not such
an unusual thing.
I’m halfway to my car parked on the other side of the street
when my cell phone rings. I pull it from my bag and answer
the call. “Mrs. Foust?” the caller asks. Not everyone knows that
I’m a doctor.
“Yes,” I say. “This is she.”
The woman on the other end of the line informs me that
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she’s calling from the high school. My mind goes instinctively
to Otto. I think of our short exchange as we drove to the dock
this morning. Something was bothering him but he wouldn’t
say what. Was he trying to tell me something?
“I tried calling your husband first,” the woman tells me, “but
I got his voice mail.” I look at my watch. Will is in the middle of a lecture. “I wanted to check on Imogen. Her teachers marked
her absent today. Did someone forget to call her in?” this woman
asks and—feeling relieved the call isn’t about Otto—I sigh and
tell her no, that Imogen must be playing hooky. I won’t bother
myself with making up lies for Imogen’s absence.
Her tone isn’t kind. She explains to me that Imogen is re-
quired to be in school and that she is quickly closing in on the
number of unexcused absences allowed in a school year.
“It’s your responsibility, Mrs. Foust, to make sure Imogen is in
school,” she says. A meeting will be scheduled with Will and me,
Imogen, teachers and administrators. An intervention of sorts.
If that fails, the school will be forced to follow legal protocol.
I end the call and climb into my car. Before I pull out, I send
Imogen a text. Where are you? I ask. I don’t expect a reply. And yet one comes. Find me, it reads.
Imogen is playing games with me.
A series of photos
comes next. Headstones, a bleak landscape,
a bottle of prescription pills. They’re Alice’s old pills, used to
manage fibromyalgia pain. An antidepressant that doubles as a
nerve blocker. Her name is on the label.
I have to get to Imogen before she does something stupid with
them, before she makes a careless decision she can’t take back.
I speed away, forcing the legal documents I found in Court-
ney’s home out of my mind for now. Finding Morgan’s killer
will have to wait.
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Mouse
Fake Mom didn’t give Mouse any dinner that night, but Mouse
heard her down in the kitchen, making something for herself.
She smelled the scent of it coming up to the second floor through
the floor vents, slipping under the crack of Mouse’s bedroom
door. Mouse didn’t know what it was, but the smell of it got
her tummy rumbling in a good way. She wanted to eat. But she
couldn’t because Fake Mom never offered to share.
By bedtime, Mouse was hungry. But she knew better than
to ask about dinner because Fake Mom told her explicitly that
she did not want to see her until she said it was okay. And Fake
Mom never said it was okay.
As the sun set and the sky went dark, Mouse tried to ignore
the hunger pangs. She heard Fake Mom moving about down-
stairs for a long time after she had finished eating, doing the
dishes, watching TV.
But then the house got quiet.
A door closed and Fake Mom, Mouse thought, had gone to
bed.
Mouse pulled her own door open an inch. She stood just be-
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hind the door, holding her breath, making sure that the house
stayed quiet. That Fake Mom hadn’t only gone in the bedroom
to come right back out again. That Fake Mom wasn’t trying to
trick her into coming down.
Mouse knew she should go to sleep. She tried going to sleep.
She wanted to go to sleep.
But she was hungry.
And, even worse than that, she had to use the bathroom,
which was downstairs. Mouse had to go really badly. She’d been
holding it for a long time, and didn’t think she could hold it
much longer. She certainly couldn’t hold it the whole night. But
she also didn’t want to have an accident in her bedroom because
she was six years old, too old to have accidents in her bedroom.
But Mouse wasn’t allowed to leave her bedroom until Fake
Mom said she could. So she pressed her legs together real tight
and willed the pee to stay inside of her. She used her hand too,
squeezing it into her crotch like a cork, thinking that might
hold the pee in.
But in time her stomach hurt too much, because she was both
hungry and had to pee.
Mouse coaxed herself into going downstairs. It wasn’t easy
to do. Mouse wasn’t the kind of girl who liked breaking rules.
Mouse was the kind of girl who liked to obey the rules, to never
get in trouble.
But, she remembered, Fake Mom didn’t tell her she had to
go to her bedroom. Mouse had decided to do that. What Fake
Mom had said was, Go somewhere I can’t see you. If Fake Mom was asleep, Mouse decided, then she wouldn’t see Mouse on
the first floor, not unless she could see with her eyes closed. In
which case, Mouse wasn’t breaking any rules.
Mouse opened her bedroom door all the way up. It groaned
as she did and Mouse felt her insides freeze, wondering if that
would be enough to rouse Fake Mom from sleep. She counted
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MARY KUBICA
to fifty in her head, and then, when the house stayed quiet, no
sign of Fake Mom waking up, she went.
Mouse crept down the steps. Across the living room. She tip-
toed toward the kitchen. Just shy of the kitchen was a hallway
that veered off and toward the room Fake Mom was in. Mouse
peeked around the corner, trying to get a glimpse of the door,
grateful to find it all the way closed.
Mouse had to pee more than she was hungry. She went toward
the bathroom first. But the bathroom was just a few feet away
from her father and Fake Mom’s room, and that made Mouse
scared as heck. She skated her socks to that bathroom door, try-
ing hard not to lift her feet from the floor.
The house was darkish. Not entirely dark, but Mouse had to
feel the walls with her fingertips so as not to run into anything.
Mouse wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was the kind of kid who
wasn’t afraid of much of anything because she had always felt
safe in her home. Or at least she had before Fake Mom arrived.
Now she no longer felt safe, though the darkness was the least
of her concerns.
Mouse made it to the bathroom.
Inside, she gently closed the door. She left the light switch off,
so that it was pitch black in the bathroom. There was no win-
dow there, no scant amount of moonlight sneaking in through
glass, no night-light.
Mouse felt her way to the toilet. By the grace of God, the seat
was already up. She didn’t have to risk making noise by lifting it.
Mouse pulled her pants down to her knees. She set herself
so slowly on the toilet seat that it made her thighs burn. Mouse
tried to control her urine, to let it seep out slowly and inaudi-
bly. But she’d been holding it for so long. She couldn’t control
the way it came out. And so instead, once the floodgates were
open, the urine came rushing out of her in a way that was tur-
bulent and loud. Mouse was sure everyone on the whole block
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might’ve heard it, but especially Fake Mom who was right across
the hall in her father’s bed.
Mouse’s heart started to race. Her hands got all sweaty. Her
knees trembled so that, when she was done on the toilet and
pulling her pants back up to her bony hips, it made it hard to
stand. Her own legs wobbled like the desk legs when she tried
to climb over it to avoid the hot lava spewing into her bedroom.
They shook beneath her, threatening to break.
With her bladder emptied and her pants pulled up, Mouse
stood there in the bathroom for a long while with the lights
turned off. She didn’t bother washing her hands. But she wanted
to make sure the sound of her pee hadn’t woken Fake Mom be-
fore she left the bathroom. Because if Fake Mom was in the hall,
then she would see Mouse.
Mouse counted to three hundred in her head. Then she
counted another three hundred.
Only then did she leave. But Mouse didn’t flush the toilet for
fear of the noise it would make. She left everything inside the
toilet bowl where it was, urine, toilet paper and all.
She opened the bathroom door. She skated back out
into the
hallway, grateful to find the bedroom door on the other side of
the hall still closed tight.
In the kitchen, Mouse helped herself to a few Salerno Butter
Cookies from the cabinet, and a glass of milk from the fridge.
She rinsed her glass and set it in the dish rack to dry. She gath-
ered her cookie crumbs in her hand and threw them in the trash.
Because Fake Mom had also said, You pick up after yourself when I’m here, you little rodent, and Mouse wanted to do as she was told.
She did it all in silence.
Mouse climbed the steps.
But on the way up, her nose began to tickle.
Poor Mouse had tried so hard to be quiet, to not make any
noise. But a sneeze is a reflex, one of those things that happens
all on its own. Like breathing and rainbows and full moons.
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MARY KUBICA
Once it began, there was no stopping it, though Mouse tried.
Oh, how Mouse tried. There, on the stairs, she cupped her
hands around her nose. She pinched the bridge of her nose, she
pushed her tongue all the way up to the roof of her mouth and
held her breath and begged God to make it stop. Anything she
could think of to stop that sneeze from coming.
But still the sneeze came.
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Sadie
The space is typical for a cemetery. I drive along the narrow
graveled path and park my car at the chapel. I open the car door
as a gust of wind rushes in to greet me. I climb out and walk
across the graded land, sliding between headstones and full-
grown trees.
The plot where Alice is buried has yet to be covered with
grass. It’s a fresh grave, filled in with dirt and scattered with
snow. There is no headstone, not until the land settles and it
can be installed. For now, Alice is identifiable only by a section
and lot number.
Imogen sits on her knees on the snowy earth. She hears my
footsteps approaching and turns. When she looks at me, I can
see that she’s been crying. The black eyeliner she so painstak-
ingly applies is smeared across her cheeks. Her eyes are red,
swollen. Her lower lip trembles. She bites on it to make it stop.
She doesn’t want me to see her vulnerable side.
She looks suddenly younger than her sixteen years. But also
damaged and angry.
“Took you fucking long enough,” she says. Truth be told,
