Just the Nicest Couple(32)

In her head she knows that he’s dead. She just can’t make the rest of herself believe it.

Sometimes she wakes up crying from nightmares. In her dreams, she can’t run fast enough. He catches her this time, yanking her by the ankles, pulling her back, dragging her facedown across the hard earth. She feels it on her skin, on her face, as he hauls her over rocks and debris, further into the trees where it’s dark as night, the sun eclipsed by trees. He uses the palm of his hand to press her face into the earth. She inhales dirt as she tries to breathe. She’s always gasping for air when she comes to.

When I’m convinced there is no alarm in the Hayes’s house, I walk further inside, into a kitchen, which is overwhelmingly large and modern and white. I’ve been here before. I’ve stood in this very kitchen, around the island, talking to Lily, Nina and Jake, laughing and drinking to excess. I’m no stranger to their house, but still, it’s peculiar to be in someone else’s house when you haven’t been invited in. It feels as if the walls have eyes. I feel a phantom presence, like I’m not alone, though I am. I tell myself that no one else is here. It’s not possible. Nina is at breakfast with Lily and Jake is dead. Neither of their cars was in the garage or on the driveway. I am alone. I just don’t know why it feels like I’m not. Maybe it’s my guilty conscience.

In the kitchen, a cat comes from out of nowhere, meowing at me. It curls itself around my ankles. I go to touch it and it hisses at me. I jerk back, my elbow knocking into a glass of water by mistake. The glass slips from the edge of the countertop and falls. I catch it on the way down. I don’t even know how. Quick reflexes. The glass doesn’t break, but the water spills, running down the face of the cabinet and pooling on the floor.

“Fuck,” I mutter. The cat runs away. I’ve never liked cats. They’re mercurial. One minute they’re your friend, the next they’re biting you.

I quickly unroll paper towels from a holder by the sink. I sop up the mess. I can’t throw the paper towels in the trash, because I have to leave no evidence that I’ve been here. I force the paper towels in my jacket pocket so I can take them with me when I go.

I look at my phone. Lily said she would text when they left the restaurant. They haven’t been gone long enough to be seated, much less have eaten. I have plenty of time. Still, I don’t want to be here. I want to find what I need and leave.

Lily and I made a plan before she left our house. We talked about it. I told her I didn’t want her texting things like Leave now or Nina is on the way, anything that would make us look guilty of wrongdoing or suggest that I was here, in case later someone, like the police, looked at our texts. I’m trying to be smart about this, to think five steps ahead. Lily and I have code words. Pizza tonight? means Nina is on her way home, but that I have a couple minutes to spare. Thai? is a code red. In other words, get out now.

It’s like we have our own secret language.

I think about where, if Lily didn’t carry my spare key, we would keep it.

A junk drawer comes to mind. I search the kitchen drawers for a junk drawer, finding one, but without a key fob in it. Instead batteries, an eyeglass tool kit, birthday candles and matches. The dining room or living room don’t make sense. I step back into the mudroom and sink my hands into the pockets of a jacket on a coatrack, coming up with only gloves. A bag also hangs from the rack. I unzip the pockets of the bag one by one but they’re mostly empty inside, with things like tissues and coins.

The master bedroom, maybe. My dad used to keep his wallet and keys on his dresser at night. Jake could too. I start to head for the stairs when I remember that Jake has an office. It’s toward the front of the house. It’s one of the rooms you see when you first come in through the front door. The first time we had dinner here, he showed me his office. He and Nina had just moved in and we were getting the grand tour of the house, the massive master bedroom, the finished basement with wet bar, the workout room. Jake was most proud of his office. It was masculine and luxurious and more importantly, all his, like a man cave but with prestigious diplomas and a bar cart full of top-shelf liquor.

I remember that Nina and Lily skipped the office part of the tour. They went back to the kitchen for more wine and appetizers, which they took out onto the patio that overlooks a golf course. Jake and I stayed for a while in his office, him sitting at the incredibly large executive desk and me on the small leather chair opposite it, feeling just as small as the chair. We sat there, sipping some kind of gin that he told me sold for almost three hundred dollars a bottle. “Good, isn’t it?” he’d asked, gloating from behind his lowball glass. I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t tell him, because that’s not me. Instead I said it was good, the best gin I’d ever had.

I leave the kitchen for the office now, cutting through the foyer. I let myself in through the frosted glass door, which is closed but not locked. I leave the door open behind me.

At first I carefully float around the room. I run my fingers over things. I want to know Jake Hayes. Not the Jake Hayes who was arrogant but funny and fun to be around, like a rich frat boy, but the one Lily bumped into this week. That’s a man neither of us knew.

Jake was a man who was hard to get a read on. Lily and I talked about that and agreed. For a doctor, he wasn’t compassionate or empathetic. After a few drinks, he had a tendency to make light of things that happened on the operating table. Maybe it was his way to cope with the stress of it all or maybe he was just cold. I’ve read his reviews online, mostly because I was curious and they were there, public and easily accessible. Patients complained about things like appointments being rushed or feeling not listened to, but they said that he was highly competent, that they trusted his decisions. I’ve also read that people with a higher IQ have a lower emotional intelligence than people with a lower IQ. Jake is the classic example of this. Smart but emotionless. The red flags are more obvious now, in light of what’s happened. They’re less easy to dismiss. From the things Nina has told Lily, smart but emotionless is not an unfair assessment of him. It’s practically spot-on. Even in their marriage, he could be cold.