The Other Mrs (ARC)

by Mary Kubica

  Otto. We could have talked it through. We could have come

  up with a solution.”

  “I did,” he interjects, voice quivering. “I did come to you.

  You’re the only one I told,” and I try not to imagine Otto open-

  ing up to me about what was happening at school and me giving

  him the brush-off. I struggle to remember it, as I have every day

  and night since it happened. What was I doing when Otto told

  me about the bullying? What was I so busy doing that I couldn’t

  pay attention when he confessed to me that kids at school called

  him heinous names; that they shoved him into lockers, plunged

  his head into dirty toilet bowls?

  “Otto,” I say under my breath, full of shame for not being

  there when Otto needed me most. “If I wasn’t listening. If I

  wasn’t paying attention. I’m so sorry,” I tell him, and I start to

  tell him how I was completely inundated with work in those

  days, tired and overwhelmed. But that’s little consolation to a

  fourteen-year-old boy who needed his mother. I don’t make

  excuses for my behavior. It wouldn’t feel right.

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  Before I can say more, Otto is speaking and for the first time

  there are details I’ve never heard before. How we were outside

  when he told me about the bullying. How it was late at night.

  How Otto couldn’t sleep. He came looking for me. He tells me

  he found me outside on our building’s fire escape, just outside

  the kitchen window, dressed in all black, smoking a cigarette.

  The details, they’re ludicrous.

  “I don’t smoke, Otto,” I tell him. “You know that. And heights,”

  I shake my head, shuddering. I don’t need to say more; he knows

  what I mean. I’m acrophobic. I’ve always been.

  We lived on the sixth floor of our condo in Chicago, the top

  floor of a Printers Row midrise. I never took the elevator, only

  the stairs. I never stepped foot on the balcony where Will spent

  his mornings sipping coffee and enjoying the sweeping city

  views. Come with me, Will used to say, smiling mischievously while tugging on my hand. I’ll keep you safe. Don’t I always keep you safe? he asked. But I never went with him.

  “But you were,” Otto claims, and I ask, “How did you know I

  was there if it was the middle of the night? How did you see me?”

  “The flame. From the cigarette lighter.”

  But I don’t own a cigarette lighter. Because I don’t smoke.

  But I go quiet anyway. I let him go on.

  Otto says that he climbed out the window and sat beside me.

  It’d taken him weeks to work up the courage to come and tell

  me. Otto says I went ballistic when he told me what the kids

  were doing to him at school. That I was totally worked up.

  “We plotted revenge. We made a list of the best ways.”

  “The best ways for what?” I ask.

  He says it unambiguously, like it’s the most obvious thing in

  the world. “The best way to kill them,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “The kids at school,” he tells me. Because even the kids that

  didn’t mock him still laughed. And so, he and I decided that

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  MARY KUBICA

  night that they all needed to go. I blanch. I humor him only

  because I think that this is cathartic somehow for Otto.

  “And how were we going to do that?” I ask, not certain I

  want to know the ways he and I supposedly came up with to

  kill his classmates. Because they’re Otto’s ideas, every last one

  of them. And I want to believe that somewhere inside of him

  is still my son.

  He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I dunno. A whole bunch

  of ways. We talked about starting the school on fire. Using

  lighter fluid or gasoline. You said I could poison the cafeteria

  food. We talked about that for awhile. For awhile that seemed

  like the way to go. Take out a whole bunch of them at once.”

  “How did we plan to do that?” I ask as he grows lax and his

  hand loses its grip on my wrist. I try to pull free, but just like

  that, he reengages, clinging tighter to me.

  His answer is so sure. “Botox,” he says with another shrug.

  “You said you could get it.”

  Botox. Botulinum toxin. Which we stocked at the hospital

  because it treats migraines, symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and

  a host of other conditions. But it can be fatal too. It’s one of the deadliest substances in the world.

  “Or stabbing them all,” he says, telling me how we’d decided

  that was the best way because he didn’t have to wait for poi-

  son, and a knife was easier to hide in his backpack than bottles

  of lighter fluid. He could do it right away. The very next day.

  “We went inside,” Otto reminds me. “Remember, Mom?

  We climbed back in the window and went to look over all the

  knives, to see which would be best. You decided,” he tells me,

  explaining how I chose the chef knife because of its size.

  According to Otto, I then took out Will’s whetstone and sharp-

  ened the knife. I said something canny about how a sharp knife

  is safer than a dull one, before smiling at him. Then I slipped it

  in his backpack in the soft laptop sleeve, behind all of his other

  belongings. As I zipped the backpack closed, I winked at him.

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  You don’t have to worry about getting an organ, Otto says that I said. Any old artery will do.

  My stomach roils at the thought of it. My free hand rises to

  my mouth as bile inches up my esophagus. I want to scream,

  No! That he’s wrong. That I never said such a thing. That he’s making this all up.

  But before I can reply, Otto is telling me that before he went

  to bed that night I said to him, Don’t let anyone laugh at you. You shut them up if they do.

  That night Otto slept better than he had in a long time.

  But the next morning, he had second thoughts about it. He

  was suddenly scared.

  But I wasn’t there to talk it through. I’d gone in to work for

  the day. He called me. That I remember, a voice mail on my

  phone that I didn’t discover until later that night. Mom, he’d said. It’s me. I real y need to talk to you.

  But by the time I heard the voice mail, it was done. Otto had

  taken that knife to school. By the grace of God, no one was hurt.

  Listening to Otto speak, I realize one gut-wrenching truth.

  He doesn’t think that he’s made this story up. He believes it. In

  his mind, I am the one who packed the knife in his backpack; I am the one who lied.

  I can’t help myself. I reach up with my one free hand and trace

  his jawline. His body stiffens but he doesn’t retreat. He lets me

  touch him. There is hair there, only a small patch of it that will

  one day grow to a beard. How did the little boy who once lac-

  erated his thumb on the blade of Will’s razor, grow old enough

  to shave? His hair ha
ngs in his eyes. I brush it back, seeing that

  his eyes lack all the hostility they usually have, but are instead

  drowning in pain.

  “If I hurt you in any way,” I whisper, “I’m sorry. I would

  never do anything to intentionally hurt you.”

  Only then does he acquiesce. He lets go of my wrist and I

  step quickly back.

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  “Why don’t you go lie down in your room,” I suggest. “I’ll

  bring you toast.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Otto grunts.

  “How about juice, then?”

  He ignores me.

  I watch, grateful that he turns and lumbers up the stairs to

  his bedroom, backpack still clinging to his back.

  I go to the first-floor study and close the door. I hurry to the

  computer on the desk and open the browser. I go to look up the

  website to the ferry company to search for news on delays. I’m

  anxious for Will to be home. I want to tell him about my con-

  versation with Otto. I want to go to the police. I don’t want to

  wait anymore to do these things.

  If it wasn’t for the weather, I’d leave. Tell Otto I’m running

  out on an errand and not come back until Will is here.

  As I begin to type in the browser, a history of past internet

  searches greets me.

  My breath leaves me. Because Erin Sabine’s name is in the

  search history. Someone has been looking up Will’s former fi-

  ancée. Will, I assume, feeling nostalgic on the twenty-year an-

  niversary of her death.

  I have no self control. I click on the link.

  Images greet me. An article too, a report from twenty years

  ago on Erin’s death. There are photographs included in the ar-

  ticle. One is of a car being excavated from an icy pond. Emer-

  gency crews hover solemnly in the background while a wrecker

  truck lugs the car from the water. I read through the article.

  It’s just as Will told me. Erin lost control of her car in a wicked winter storm like the one we’re having today; she drowned.

  The second image is of Erin with her family. There are four

  of them: a mother, a father, Erin and a younger sister who looks

  to me somewhere in between Otto and Tate’s ages. Ten, maybe

  eleven. The photograph is professional-looking. The family is in

  a street between an avenue of trees. The mother sits on a garish

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  yellow chair that’s been placed there for purposes of this photo-

  graph. Her family stands around her, the girls leaning into their

  mother indulgently.

  It’s the mother I can’t take my eyes off of. There’s something

  about her that nags at me, a round woman with shoulder-length

  brunette hair. Something strikes a chord, but I don’t know what.

  Something that hovers just out of the periphery of my mind.

  Who is she?

  The dogs begin to howl just then. I hear it all the way from

  here. They’ve finally had enough of this storm. They want to

  come inside.

  I rise from the desk. I let myself out of the study, padding

  quickly to the kitchen, where I yank open the back door. I step

  outside, onto the deck, hissing to the dogs to come. But they

  don’t come.

  I move across the yard. The dogs are both frozen like statues

  in the corner. They’ve caught something, a rabbit or a squir-

  rel. I have to stop them before they eat the poor thing, and in

  my mind’s eye I see the white snow riddled with animal blood.

  The yard is covered in snow drifts. They rise a foot high in

  some spots, the grass barely flecked with snow in others. The

  wind tries hard to push me down as I trek through the yard,

  making my way out to the dogs. The property is large, and

  they’re far away, pawing at something. I clap my hands and call

  to them again, but still they don’t come. The snow blows side-

  ways. It gusts up the leg of my pajama pants and into the neck-

  line of my shirt. My feet, covered in slippers alone, ache from the bitter cold. I didn’t think to put shoes on before I came outside.

  It’s hard to see much of anything. The trees, the houses, the

  horizon disappear in the snow. I find it hard to open my eyes. I

  think of the kids still in school. How will they get home?

  Halfway to the dogs, I think about turning around. I don’t

  know that I have it in me to make it all the way there. I clap

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  again; I call to them. They don’t come. If Will was here, they

  would come.

  I force myself to go on. It hurts to breathe; the air is so cold

  it burns my throat and lungs.

  The dogs bark again and I run the last twenty feet to them.

  They look sheepishly at me as I come, and I expect to find a

  half eaten cadaver lying between their feet.

  I reach out, grabbing a hold of one of the girls’ collars and pull, saying, “Come on, let’s go,” not caring if there’s a maimed squirrel there, but just needing to be back inside. But she just stands

  there, whining at me, refusing to come. She’s much too big for

  me to lug all the way home. I try, but as I do I stagger from the

  weight of her, losing balance. I fall forward to my hands and

  knees where there, before me, between the dogs’ paws, some-

  thing sparkles in the snow. It’s not a rabbit. It’s not a squirrel.

  It’s much too small to be a rabbit or a squirrel.

  And then there’s the shape of it, long and slender and sharp.

  My heart races. My fingers tingle. The black specks return,

  dancing before my eyes. I feel like I could be sick. And then

  suddenly I am. On my hands and knees, I retch into the snow.

  My diaphragm contracts but it’s a dry heave only. I’ve had noth-

  ing to eat but a few sips of coffee. My stomach is empty. There’s

  nothing there to come back up.

  One of the dogs nudges me with her nose. I latch onto her,

  steadying myself, seeing plainly that the object between the dogs’

  feet is a knife. The missing boning knife. The blood on it is what’s piqued the dogs’ interest. The blade of the knife is approximately

  six inches long, same as the one that killed Morgan Baines.

  Beside the knife sits a hole that the dogs have carved into

  the earth.

  The dogs dug up this knife. This knife was buried in our

  backyard. All this time, they’ve been digging into the backyard

  to unearth this knife.

  I glance quickly back to the house. Though in reality I see

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  nothing, just barely the softened periphery of the house itself,

  I imagine Otto standing at the kitchen window, watching me.

  I can’t go home.

  I leave the dogs where they are. I leave the knife where it is.

  I don’t touch it. I limp across the yard. My feet tingle from the

  cold, losing feelin
g. It makes it hard for them to move. I lumber

  around the side of the house, missing my footing because of my

  frozen feet. I fall into snow drifts and then force myself back up.

  It’s a quarter mile hike to the bottom of our hill. That’s where

  the town and the public safety building are located, where I’ll

  find Officer Berg.

  Will said to wait. But I can no longer wait.

  There’s no telling what time Will will be home, or what may

  happen to me by the time he is.

  The street is barren and bleak. It’s saturated in white. There’s

  no one here but me. I shamble down the hill, nose oozing with

  snot. I wipe it away with a sleeve. I’m wearing only pajamas,

  not a coat or a hat. Not gloves. The pajamas do nothing to keep

  me warm, to protect me. My teeth chatter. I can barely keep my

  eyes open because of the wind. The snow blows from all ways

  simultaneously, constantly airborne, swirling in circles like the

  vortex of a tornado. My fingers freeze. They’re blotchy and red.

  I can’t feel my face.

  Off in the distance, the blade of a shovel scrapes a sidewalk.

  There’s the littlest bit of hope that comes with it.

  There is someone else on this island besides Otto and me.

  I go on only because I have no choice but to go on.

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  Mouse

  In the middle of the night, Mouse heard a noise she knew well.

  It was the squeak of the stairs, which had no reason to be

  squeaking since Mouse was already in her bed. As Mouse knew,

  there was one bedroom on the second floor of the old house.

  At night, after she was in bed, there was no reason for anyone

  to be upstairs but her.

  But someone was coming up the stairs. Fake Mom was com-

  ing upstairs, and the stairs themselves were calling out a warn-

  ing for Mouse, telling her to run. Telling her to hide.

  But Mouse didn’t have a chance to run or hide.

  Because it happened too fast and she was disoriented from

  sleep. Mouse barely had time to open her eyes before the bed-

  room door pressed open, and there Fake Mom stood, backlit

  by the hallway light.

  Bert, in her cage on the bedroom floor, emitted a pierc-

  ing screech. She rushed under her translucent dome for safety.

  There she held still like a statue, mistakenly believing no one

  would see her on the other side of the opaque plastic, so long