Just the Nicest Couple(43)

I don’t know that I feel afraid, but I notice that, by instinct, I’ve sped up. I walk with more urgency now. I don’t even know that I’ve done it until my breathing becomes heavy. I throw a glance again over a shoulder, relieved to see that I’ve put distance between the car and me. Still, I’m overcome with a feeling of seclusion, of the greatest sense of being alone. The street is empty but for me.

If something happened to me right now, no one would know. No one would see.

I try and shake it off, to reason with myself. I’m too old to be scared.

Three houses up is a path through the woods. It cuts between two homes, leading to the neighborhood park. It’s a small path, the kind meant for bikes and pedestrians. It’s not wide enough for cars which, in this moment, feels advantageous.

When I get to the path, I take it, slipping behind an open chain-link fence. There are quite a few trees as the path cuts through a section of woods. Ordinarily the woods don’t faze me, but I feel more restless than usual today. I keep looking back, over my shoulder, to make sure I’m alone. I’ve lost the car. I don’t see it anymore. Still, I’m on edge, thinking about Jake and wondering why he came home this morning. What did he want from the house? What did he take?

What is going on with him?

For a while before our fight, Jake hadn’t been himself. He’d been solemn, withdrawn. We’d been fighting. It used to be that Jake and I didn’t ever fight. We always got along. But Jake needs to be in control. He isn’t used to being told no. Being told no is Jake’s kryptonite. It’s never been a problem in our marriage because, until recently, when things got so messy with my mother, I almost never told Jake no, to anything. Jake and I had a whirlwind romance. We met, we fell in love. Three months later we were married. Jake asked and I said yes. He didn’t want to deal with a big, extravagant wedding, with all that pomp and circumstance. I said okay, that I didn’t either though I’d been planning for my wedding day since I was something like six years old, cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them down in a notebook. Jake and I eloped, which my mother took hard because she’d always imagined walking me down the aisle on my wedding day in lieu of the father I didn’t have. Instead, Jake and I got married alone in Ibiza because it was one of those bucket list places he always wanted to visit. I didn’t know where Ibiza was at the time. I thought it was somewhere in Mexico, maybe near Cancun. I’d always wanted to go to Mexico. It wasn’t. Spain was nice too.

Now, as I pass through the woods, I think again of that night just a couple weeks ago, of Jake glowering at me over his whiskey sour, talking about the gunshot victim who died on the operating table. Who shot her? I’d asked. Her husband, said Jake.

I remember that it had upset me, thinking of a husband shooting his wife in the head. It was unthinkable. It left me feeling sick to my stomach and I couldn’t stop wondering what she did that made him react like that.

But it wasn’t Jake saying the husband had shot her that got to me. It was what happened next that really got under my skin. It happened so fast, it was like subliminal advertising: something the conscious mind can’t perceive but gets picked up by the subconscious. I didn’t notice it at the time. I thought about it later, at night, after Jake was asleep. I lay there in bed beside him and it came to me, what was bothering me so much. What my subconscious had seen was a smile that played on the edges of Jake’s lips when he said how this man had shot his wife, as if something about that made him happy.

I didn’t know what made me do it, but I got out of bed that night. I leaned over and made sure Jake was dead asleep, and then I crept from the bedroom. I moved unnoticed down the stairs and into Jake’s office. Silently, I lifted the painting from the wall. I went into Jake’s safe, to be sure our gun was still there, and it was. Only then, when I knew where our gun was, could I sleep.

I leave the woods now. On the other side of the trees, the land opens up into a field. The playground is in the field, though the playground, when I come to it, is completely empty, as if it’s been evacuated. There are no happy, laughing kids running across the rope bridge and sliding down the slides. There are no despondent teenagers smoking weed in the little hidey-holes. There is no one. I would have expected someone to be at the park, but there’s not and I blame it on the weather. The day has gotten darker in the short amount of time I’ve been out. It isn’t the setting sun—it’s too early for the sun to set. It’s the incoming storm. The wind has picked up. I walk around the path, in the same direction as the wind, so that it pushes from behind, sweeping me along the sidewalk. I have to fight to keep from going too fast. The swings at the park move in the wind as if driven by ghosts. The carousel spins. It’s subtle. I don’t know that I would have noticed the carousel spinning if not for the raspy creak of it as it goes round.

The path around the park is hoop-shaped. Trees surround it. I follow the path, wanting to go home, to be home, but realizing there is no point in turning around because the path is spherical. The distance would be the same whether I turned back or kept going, so I may as well keep going. There is only one way in or out of the park, and that’s through the woods and the chain-link fence. Eventually I have to go back the way I came.

I pass through the trees again. They darken around me. It takes longer than I remember to get through the woods.

I come out of the trees. At the same time, the car I saw earlier labors down the street going the opposite way as before, as if searching for me.