Just the Nicest Couple(11)

As night falls, Lily moves away from the wall of windows that face the river, telling me she feels exposed in our home. I dim the lights, but short of turning them off, we’re still visible from the outside. There is a vaulted ceiling in the family room, with two floors of windows. We couldn’t figure out how to cover them when we moved in, so we didn’t. We left them bare. We preferred the undisrupted view at the time: the river, the trees.

But now I wonder if it’s possible that Jake is out there somewhere, watching her, watching us.

There are really only two options: that Jake didn’t go home last night because of Nina and because he knew he could get into serious trouble, maybe jail time, for what he’d done, if Lily pressed changes.

Or that Lily hurt him so much that he couldn’t go home.

“Should we call the police?” Lily asks.

“Why?” I ask. I don’t mean it to be hostile. I’m wondering if she wants to call the police to press charges, or if she wants to call the police and confess to something she did. It’s not a silly question. I’d been wondering it too, but I never came to a decision. I want Lily to call the police, to press charges. I want Jake to pay for what he did, or for what he tried to do, for his intentions.

But if Lily hurt him or worse, if she left him there bleeding, if she waited twenty-four hours to report what happened, then, on some level, she’s also in the wrong.

“Let’s not,” I tell her. “Not yet.”

“I should text Nina,” she says.

“Why?”

“To see if he came home. To see if she’s okay.” I think it through. She’s probably right, because that’s what she would do if Jake was missing and she had nothing to do with it. She would check on her friend.

I go through the clothes in the hamper after she’s in bed. I find what Lily was wearing yesterday, buried beneath other things. The pants are black, but the shirt is white. It has dirt on it and debris like from leaves. One of the buttons is missing, a white thread hanging loose. All of that enrages me.

But the thing that worries me most is how the right cuff is wet with blood.



NINA


I have to take my mother to the ophthalmologist after work. She has macular degeneration. She’s losing her central vision, which is what she needs for things like to read and to drive. She’s only sixty-two. She’s not old. She has trouble recognizing people’s faces. That’s how we knew there was a serious problem, though I thought at first that it was something like Alzheimer’s, so when the diagnosis came in, I was somewhat relieved. She can’t even to go the grocery store anymore without help, because she can’t see well enough to get there or to find the items she needs. The thing that’s totally infuriating is how capable and sharp she is despite the declining vision. She has her wits about her still. It’s not fair. Until recently she was completely independent and now she relies on me for everything. It feels sometimes like that changed overnight. She has the wet form of macular degeneration, which is maybe worse. There is blood leaking into the retina. She receives anti-VEGF injections in the eye to stop or slow the progression; it’s horrible to watch. It makes me never want to get old, to want to die young. My mother has her peripheral vision still. It’s not that she’s blind. She doesn’t run into things. She can somewhat see. It’s that, from the way she describes it, there is a blind spot in the center of her field of vision, like someone took a crayon and scribbled over it.

I drive my mother home after her appointment. I walk her into her house. “Why don’t you stay for dinner?” she asks.

“I can’t. Sorry. Not tonight, Mom.”

“Why not? It’s not like Jake will be home,” she says, because Jake is at work and because my mother knows how Jake gets when I spend too much time with her. Still, I say no again, that I can’t, because I’m anxious to get home and see if there is any sign that Jake has been there. I don’t tell my mother this. She doesn’t know about Jake's and my fight and I won’t tell her about it because ultimately what we were fighting about was her.

“I have too many papers to grade,” I say instead, and my mother says okay, but she looks sad, as she always does, when I go. I hate leaving her.

I don’t get back to my house until close to six. When I do, there’s no sign that Jake has been home. None of his clothes are obviously missing, and his toiletries look untouched. It comes as a punch to the gut. I stand in the bathroom doorway, holding on to the doorframe, not sure what to do with myself. It’s getting darker outside. The sun is going down. I can’t stand the idea of another night in this house alone, and wonder how long Jake plans to be mad at me.

I’m used to coming home and Jake not being here. This is nothing new. I’m used to being alone, knowing that eventually Jake always comes home. I’ve never minded being alone before, especially after work, because it’s my me-time, my time to decompress from the day.

But now, standing in the empty house, knowing Jake might not come home all night, I feel more alone and lonely than ever. The house feels suddenly vacant. It’s too large of a house for us because one day, Jake and I think we want kids, though I’m getting older and time is running out. We’re not there yet, because of Jake’s work schedule. The last thing he wants, he’s said, is to be an absentee father, like his had been. He wouldn’t even entertain the idea of kids when he was doing his residency. But now that that’s through, he’s started to ponder it, or at least indulge me when I bring it up. We have three extra bedrooms in the house. I don’t know that I need to fill them all with kids, but at least one would be nice, to experience being a mother once in my life.