The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  I stood for a long time, eyes squeezed shut, listening for more, or for any signs of distress from the girls, but there was nothing. A minute or two later, Josh emerged from the bedroom in his shorts. He had put the crossbow down and looked like a bad actor who didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “They’re gone.”

  For now, I thought, forcing myself to nod and smile while he gushed about how cool it was.

  For now.

  The next day was hard. Vronny kept finding new ways to ask if there was a way Oaklynn might come back, and the third time—when she suggested selling some of her less used toys, as if this might somehow compensate for the inconvenience—I snapped at her and told her Oaklynn had gone because she didn’t really want to be here, an unworthy distortion I immediately regretted. Veronica gave me a wide-eyed stare, her face contorted as the tears built up.

  “Miss Oaklynn didn’t like it here?” she said.

  “She loved it here, Vronny,” I said, squatting down and getting hold of her shoulders so I could look her steadily in the eye. It was something I’d seen Oaklynn do countless times, and the gesture felt both labored and borrowed, so I dropped my eyes and talked to the carpet. “She loved you. But she had some problems she couldn’t fix here. That’s why she had to go.”

  “So when she’s fixed her problems, she maybe could come back?”

  I looked at her, feeling defeated, spineless.

  “Maybe,” I said. “If she gets everything taken care of. But for now, it’s just us, OK? And I need you to help me with Gracie. Think you can do that?”

  Veronica nodded solemnly, as if assigned a sacred trust, and I thanked her, feeling duplicitous. It was, I thought spitefully, part of Oaklynn’s special talent that even in her absence and disgrace, she’d managed to make me feel like a bad mother.

  And the truth was that I did need Vronny’s help with Gracie. Over the last few months, I had lost track of all that Oaklynn had done routinely and unbidden, taking on chores and responsibilities far in excess of what she had technically been employed to do. When Vronny announced that we were out of her favorite cereal, I had—to my shame—to ask her what it was and promise to get more.

  “And don’t forget the strawberries,” said Vronny.

  “Strawberries?”

  “Honey Nut Cheerios with strawberries, Mommy,” she said, mock-scolding me, as if nothing could be more self-evident. “Cut up small and with no leaves on them.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sure.”

  So we drove down to the Harris Teeter at Morrocroft Village, the one Oaklynn had said had the best selection in the area, a phrase Veronica pronounced like it was the word of an oracle. I had forgotten what a production shopping with two young children could be. The parking lot was just about full, and the oversize carts with the plastic bus seats and fake steering wheels were all gone.

  “But we always ride in the store taxi,” said Veronica, as if this were my fault.

  “They are all gone, sweetie,” I said. “Gracie will sit up in the basket. You’ll have to walk.”

  “But why are they all gone?”

  “I’m not sure, honey,” I said.

  Which was, depressingly, true. It was only once we were inside and I saw the russet-colored trimmings and turkey displays that I processed the obvious: we were only a week from Thanksgiving, a fact I had all but forgotten with everything else that had been going on.

  The store was packed. It didn’t have the frenzied quality that kicked in before hurricanes and ice storms, but it still felt overwhelming. Everyone but me seemed efficient, businesslike, moving swiftly and decisively down the aisles, stocking their carts, and moving on like people on a mission. I wandered, unsure where everything was, backtracking, getting lost, feeling stupid, incompetent. Gracie had to be changed midway through, and I agonized over leaving my half-full cart outside the bathroom, fearing a staff member would assume it had been abandoned and would set about restocking its contents, making me start over. Add to this Veronica’s constant admonitions about which brands Oaklynn used to buy, and my nerves were already ragged. As I pored over the packages of ground beef scanning sell-by dates, I heard someone say, “Hey! You’re Oaklynn’s friend, right?”

  I turned to find a great bear of a man bent over and talking to Veronica. He was perhaps forty, pale and craggy, with a bushy auburn beard and a mane of matching hair. He wore a red plaid shirt under a windbreaker and looked like a lumberjack or a construction worker. His cart was half-full: domestic beer, toilet paper, steak, and cornflakes.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I spoke cautiously, questioningly, so that the word was just this side of “Can I help you?”

  He looked up at me and smiled broadly, guilelessly, so that by the time he had straightened up and offered me a massive hand, I had already relaxed a little.

  “I’m Martin,” he said, his voice a low, throaty rumble. “Martin King.”

  “And you knew Oaklynn?”

  “Yeah, a little. I used to see her when I took my nephews to the park. She works for you, right?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “She had some things she had to fix,” Veronica volunteered. “She doesn’t live with us now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the man said.

  “Me, too,” said Veronica. “She was nice.”

  “Moved on, huh?” he said, turning to me. “She still in town or . . .”

  “I really couldn’t say,” I said. “We’re not in touch.”

  “That’s too bad,” he answered, putting his hands on his hips and looking strangely downcast. I wondered with a shock of realization if he had been romantically interested in her. “Tell you what, can I give you my number? So you can have her call me if she gets in touch. If she wants, of course.”

  I hesitated, feeling cornered.

  “OK,” I said, at last. “Though I don’t think I’ll hear from her.”

  “Just in case,” he said, fishing a square of lined paper with a few groceries penciled on it from his pocket. He pulled a pen from inside his windbreaker and wrote his name and number in block capitals on the bottom of the sheet, then carefully tore the strip off and handed it to me. For a big man, his fingers were deft. He smiled again as he handed it to me, and thinking he looked bashful, exposed, I did my best to smile.

  “You know,” I said, “if you want to find her, you might try the local Mormon church. They may have more information about where she is now.”

  His eyes narrowed fractionally, and he seemed to smile, but his beard was so vast that at first I couldn’t read the look.

  “The church,” he said.

  “Yeah. The one down on Carmel Road. She was a regular.”

  “Uh-huh.” He considered me, still smiling unreadably, so that I began to feel awkward. Then he leaned in close, as if he was going to hug me. I started to shrink away, but he took hold of my wrist with one powerful hand and held me in place. I couldn’t pull back as he came so close that his rough beard brushed the side of my neck. I felt an impulse to run but was struck dumb with confusion and alarm. Slowly, deliberately, he whispered, “You really didn’t know her at all, did you?”

  For a second as he held me, I felt only numbness and dread, powerless in spite of the crowded store. Then, while I stood frozen to the spot, he leaned away again, still holding my wrist, reading the fear in my face, still smiling blandly. Then he let go.

  “It was nice to meet you,” he said. “You, too, little lady.”

  Veronica grinned at that, oblivious to my confused panic.

  I stayed where I was, trembling, blinking back tears I didn’t fully understand while he walked away from his half-full cart as if it belonged to someone else, rounded the corner, and vanished. I wasn’t sure what had just happened.

  Ben Lodging sent his last chapter, or rather what I hoped would actually turn out to be the penultimate chapter, the fake ending and not the real one. We had discussed an ending in which
the broken, sociopathic protagonist of the novel appeared to act out one of his murderous fantasies. We would then, however, get an epilogue revealing the previous chapter’s killing to be a kind of fantasy that hadn’t actually happened, so that the book would end in uncertainty about what might yet occur. As I read the latest sample, I became desperate to know that such an epilogue was still to come, because in the pages I opened that evening on my laptop, Carried, the bland accountant, became a monster responsible for a bloodbath so appalling and indiscriminate that I could barely stand to read it.

  He didn’t select a single victim. He laid waste to the entire cast of the book, mixing savagery with something horribly close to playfulness so that the violence of the final paragraphs was made unspeakably horrific because it was so casual.

  I finished reading in a breathless state of revulsion and immediately sent a new email asking for the next pages, the epilogue that would take back everything I had just read, unsaying the horrors of the final chapter. I was suddenly sure that if such pages did not come, I would not be able to represent Ben Lodging or his book. The darkness at their heart was too great, too disturbing. I couldn’t live with myself for assisting in the birth of such a nightmarish creation.

  For an hour, I sat at the computer waiting for a reply, but none came.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The night-light kept the room from slipping into total darkness, but there were still hollows and pockets where Veronica was careful not to look because she couldn’t be sure what was there. Even her stuffed animals had to be specially placed before bedtime because she had a special terror of seeing eyes in the shadows where they shouldn’t be. In the daytime, she liked nothing more than to picture her plush rabbits and bears coming to life and frolicking around the room with Lamby, freezing when a grown-up came up the stairs so that the secret would stay hers and hers alone, but at night, even that delicious flight of fancy made her uneasy. In daylight, it was fun, a magical delight, but in the dark, it was different, horrible. Mommy said there were no such things as monsters, but she’d seen one of the books in the shelves downstairs, one of the things Mommy had dismissed as “just a scary story for grown-ups.” It was red, and there was a ragged hand on it, the fingers long and pale, ending in nails like bird claws. Veronica couldn’t see what the hand was connected to, but that somehow made it worse, as if the body and face attached to it were too awful to be drawn.

  Still, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  She thought of that whenever she lay in bed, studying the pools of darkness that formed in the corner by the closet, under the tiny desk by the door, and the rocking chair pushed back against the wall by the window: those shadowy holes that the cheery but pallid glow of the night-light couldn’t reach. She stared now, wondering what had woken her, processing the shapeless mass of blackness in the rocker.

  Wasn’t it bigger than it had been when she went to sleep? Didn’t it look heavier, somehow, thicker?

  Normally, even when the shadow was deeper, she could see the pale sleigh-like runner at the bottom where it poked into the middle of the room and caught just a few inches of the light. Tonight, there was only darkness.

  Veronica shifted, half rolling, squeezing her eyes closed and burying her face in Lamby’s soft underbelly, but she couldn’t stay like that for long. When she checked again a moment later, the darkness in the chair was still there, all the way to the bottom. In fact, now that she looked again, she thought the darkness at the foot of the rocking chair had a shape, strange and familiar at the same time, long and dark with the merest hint of shine that—with more of the night-light’s glow upon them—may have amounted to a dull sparkle off silver buckles.

  Witchy shoes.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ANNA

  Josh left first thing. I could tell he wasn’t happy about leaving me alone with the kids, and it was also clear that he wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen in New York. He felt stupid, humiliated, feelings he had never been good at processing, and he was clearly dreading seeing Kurt and Mary Beth, who may or may not be at the meeting. I had caught the look on his face while he was packing the night before—that rubbery, dead look he sometimes got, but when I asked if he was OK, he just shrugged.

  “Want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “Nothing to talk about,” he said. That wasn’t precisely true, but Josh had always wielded words like tools. Some were easy in his grasp, so familiar that using them was second nature and gave him an air of easy confidence: saws and hammers that seemed molded to his grip. But that was only when the task at hand fit easily with his talents and experience. At other times, words became clumsy, unwieldy things, great crowbars that slipped when he leaned on them, or tiny screwdrivers too small to fit his big hands. Sometimes this slightly absurd and clumsy analogy made me laugh, like when I told him that listening to him explain his response to a movie was like watching an expert car mechanic trying to fix a toilet—none of his wrenches fit, and there was suddenly water everywhere. Now it just made me sad. Actually, it reminded me of Veronica drawing, trying to copy the puppies from a jigsaw puzzle and staring at her crayoned efforts with frustrated confusion and a profound disappointment that her bandaged fingers couldn’t replicate what her imagination saw. I don’t think I’d ever seen self-doubt in her before, a sudden and miserable certainty that she would never be good enough at this thing she so loved to do. It was like she had aged right there in front of me, and I felt the pain of it like a knife in my heart. I hugged her fiercely, my misery long outlasting hers so that she started to look bewildered by it. I felt that now with Josh, a surge of feeling I rarely felt for someone who always had seemed so at ease and in control. It was pity and compassion, and when I hugged him suddenly from behind, in spite of everything that had passed between us over the last few weeks, I felt sure he knew as much, though he did not, could not, say so.

  We parted in better spirits than we had been lately, and his wordless smile as he left, a little wan and harried at what was awaiting him in New York, was one I shared. This was one more thing we had to get through, it said, but afterward, things would begin to get better.

  I set about the girls’ breakfast with a lighter heart, sure that though we had not hit the worst of what was to come, we would face it together and would find a way to move beyond it. I was thinking this when, without preamble of any kind, Veronica, who had been complaining about how the cast on her arm itched, looked up brightly from her cereal and remarked, “Oaklynn was in my room last night.”

  “She’s making it up,” said Josh, sitting at the gate before his flight. “She misses her, so she’s making it up.”

  The call had disturbed a hard-achieved calm, and he couldn’t help but be annoyed. Anna knew he had enough on his mind without this kind of nonsense.

  “I don’t think so,” said Anna. “I think she believes it.”

  “That’s nuts, Anna. You need to be tougher with her. There’s a thin line between a vivid imagination and plain lying for attention.”

  “I really don’t think that’s it. She isn’t making a big deal out of it. She seems, if anything, confused. Like, she thought Oaklynn was gone, but she’s not and doesn’t understand why we didn’t say so.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Anna. Show her the basement where all Oaklynn’s stuff was. Show her the key she left behind. She’s got to get used to the idea that Oaklynn is gone. I know she liked her and was used to her, but that part of our life is over, and she needs to get used to the idea. OK?”

  “I guess. But she seems so sure. If you could hear her say it, if you were here . . .”

  “But I’m not, Anna, and I’m about to board. You’re gonna have to handle this. I’ll talk to her when I get home, but—”

  “Speak to her now. I’ll give her the phone.”

  Josh closed his eyes, then opened them again and watched the line forming by the gate. He checked the boarding zone on his phone.

  “OK,” he
said. “Put her on.”

  There was a muffled fumbling sound. Then Veronica’s voice came on, bright and clear.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hey, sweetie. You OK?”

  “Yes. I’m having breakfast. Mommy is going to make fresh toast.”

  He smiled at the familiar mispronunciation.

  “Wow,” said Josh, feeling—in spite of everything—a pang of jealousy that he wasn’t home with them. “I love French toast. Listen, honey, you know Oaklynn is gone, right? That she doesn’t live with us anymore?”

  “I know.”

  “OK. So why did you tell Mommy you saw her last night?”

  “’Cause she was here.”

  “No, sweetie, she wasn’t.”

  “She was in my room. In the rocking chair where she always used to sit.”

  “I think you must have been dreaming, Vronny. Oaklynn has moved away. I know that makes you sad, but things will be OK. And now you get to spend more time with me and Mommy.”

  “You’re not here.”

  “No, but I will be. I have to take this trip, and then I’ll be home again.”

  “And you won’t go away so much?”

  The question stung him, even as he felt the anxiety tightening in his throat that, with his job on the line, she might get more than her wish.

  “I won’t go away so much,” he said, meaning it. “Promise.”

  “OK. Can I have my fresh toast now?”

  “Sure thing, sweetie. And Vronny?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “Don’t talk so much about Oaklynn to Mommy, OK? It makes her sad.”

  “OK, Daddy.”

  “Love you, sweetie.”

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  And then she was gone. For a moment before Anna came on, cautious, wanting to know what he had told her, he heard the swirling white noise of the static between them, and it felt like the sound of distance, like the mile after mile of cloudy sky between Charlotte and New York he would soon be flying through, so that for a moment he felt unaccountably lost.