Just the Nicest Couple(45)

There are potted plants on the front porch. Fountain grass grows in them, with giant plumes that sway and bend in the breeze. The speakers capture the sound of the wind, amplifying it so that the audio is incredibly loud, the wind like a tornado.

I watch. I’m expectant, on edge, knowing something is going to happen but not knowing what.

The sound of a car reaches my ears before a black car, a four-door sedan, enters the frame. I’m not any good with types of cars. Jake would know better than me what it is, if he could get a decent view. The quality of the video is good, but I don’t know that the angle is right. You definitely can’t see the make or model on the back end of the car, and you can’t see the license plate.

The car pulls to the side of the road directly across the street from this doorbell camera. It sits there, idle, the driver sedentary behind the wheel so long that I wonder if he’s ever going to get out.

Could it be Jake? Could something have happened to his car? Could Jake be using a rental, or has he borrowed someone else’s car?

The door opens. A man gets out. No, I think to myself, disappointed. That’s not it. This isn’t what I’m looking for. This man isn’t Jake and this isn’t Jake’s car. This man is taller than Jake. He’s leaner too. He wears jeans, a jacket and some kind of hat, and I can tell, even just from the way he walks—confident, hands in his pockets, something just short of a strut—that this man is not my husband. Jake is confident when he walks, but it’s different than this.

The fountain grass plumes keep getting in the way.

The man walks around the back end of the car, fighting the wind. He cuts across the grassy parkway for the sidewalk. With his hands still in his pockets, he keeps walking along the sidewalk, and then he exits the frame. His face is almost always turned the other way, which doesn’t matter because I can tell in a million other ways, without seeing what he looks like, that this man isn’t Jake.

The video ends there.

My heart sinks. This is totally irrelevant. Whoever shared it thought they might have caught my package thief. But there is no package thief. This is just some man, stopping to visit a friend. It has nothing to do with me.

I minimize the screen.

I respond to the video. I say: Many thanks. Anyone closer that has proof of this man actually taking the package? In other words, does anyone have actual footage of my house or door? That’s what I need to see. I want to see Jake. I don’t want to see this man.

I’ll have to wait and hope that someone else caught something more relevant.



CHRISTIAN


In the middle of the night, I jerk upright in bed. I’m not fully awake. I’m somewhere in that void between unconsciousness and consciousness. I don’t know what I heard. I couldn’t describe it to save my life. But in some subliminal way—there just beneath that threshold of conscious perception where it was still able to elicit a response—I know there was a noise that pulled me from sleep.

Beside me, Lily is sound asleep. She snores, gently. I don’t wake her.

I hold my breath, listening for the noise. My eyes are wide.

I’d been sleeping so well. This was the first night in a few nights that I fell asleep when my head hit the pillow. I was lost to oblivion until now. The digital clock across the room reads 4:12.

I look around the room, searching for something off. The room is dark, like charcoal. It’s cloudy and opaque, and it’s hard to see much of anything. The door is closed and locked. For the time being, we’ll sleep like that. We never used to sleep with the door closed. But it makes Lily feel safer now, though there isn’t a reason for her to feel unsafe.

We didn’t have a conversation about closing the door, but the other night, before we lay down in bed, Lily watched me close and lock it, and then she just barely nodded as if agreeing it was the prudent thing to do. It’s not exactly a robust lock; any little screwdriver can pop the lock. But what I like about it, and what Lily likes about it, is that there is this barrier between us and the unknown when we’re out cold. Popping the lock or rattling the door handle would make a sound and wake us.

The noise comes back. I hear it this time, and in some very primal way, I know that it’s the same noise that, not two minutes ago, woke me. The sound is a beeping sound, like an alarm. There’s a steady beat to it, an unfaltering cadence. It’s subdued, making it hard to tell exactly where it’s coming from, like when a smoke detector chirps in the middle of the night and you don’t know which it is. It’s like that. Evasive. Hard to pin down.

I push the weight of the covers away from me. I get out of bed. I let the noise lead me. I follow it around the end of the bed and into the adjoining master bath. With every step, the sound gets louder. Lily sleeps through it. She sleeps much more deeply than me. She always has and we joke how, when the baby is born, I’ll get the nighttime feedings because she won’t hear the baby cry in the middle of the night.

The porcelain tiles are cold against my feet. Stepping inside the bathroom, my hand instinctively goes to the light switch. I catch myself before turning it on. I don’t want to wake Lily, and I also don’t want to be visible to the outside.

The sound, whatever it is, is magnified in here. I’m getting close.

There is a window in the bathroom. It sits just behind the large soaker tub. The window has faux wood blinds on it, which are angled upward and lowered all the way to the sill. Still, I see the gentle flap of the last few slats where the breeze hits them. The window is open a crack, the crisp night air wafting in. It’s cold in the bathroom, the night outside thirty degrees colder than it is in the house.