Just the Nicest Couple(52)

“Jake,” I whisper, practically breathless, out into the darkness, imagining him keeping hidden in his marigold chair, waiting for me to come home. The perfume is mine. I have many bottles of perfume, but this is one I wear all the time. It’s Chanel. I’d recognize the scent anywhere. Jake gave the bottle to me. “Are you here? Jake?”

My words are met with silence. It means nothing. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t here.

I practically have to force myself into the room.

As I cross the room for the lamp, my feet step on something wet and sticky that makes me think of blood.

With the next step, I come down on something sharp. It pierces my feet and I cry out, clamping my hands against my mouth to quiet the sound. I move through total darkness, walking on the edges of my feet where it hurts less, anticipating what it would feel like for someone’s hands to come down on me, to touch me, to grab me by the feet.

I come to the lamp. I fumble for the switch. I turn on the light. Light floods the room. I spin around, looking in all the dark corners of the bedroom and bath.

Jake’s chair is empty. There is no one in the bedroom but me.

On the floor beside the dresser is a bottle of broken perfume. Perfume runs along the wooden floors, getting absorbed by a wool rug when the flow of perfume reaches it.

I reach down to collect the glass in my hand.

I see movement peripherally. My head spins in the direction of it.

Shaking, I drop to my knees and look under the bed. The cat is there now, hiding under the bed with its back arched and its tail tucked between its legs, looking scared.

“Did you do that?” I ask, of the broken bottle and the spilled perfume. The cat doesn’t answer back. Maybe it did. And maybe it didn’t.

I get back up on my feet. Still shaking, I hobble down the stairs with the largest shards of glass in my hand, what I was able to collect. “What happened, Nina? What is it?” my mother asks, cleaning up the picture frame glass in the foyer.

“Nothing. Just the cat.”

Cautiously, I search the rest of the house while my mother looks on. I turn on all the lights. I find nothing and no one.

Later, as I sit on the edge of the bathtub, my mother helping me to pick glass out of the soles of my feet, I think how the cat might have knocked the perfume off the dresser either intentionally or by mistake. She does that. She has a tendency to knock things over to get attention or food, or to get a rise out of me.

But the cat didn’t leave that dirty shoe print by the door.



CHRISTIAN


Lily likes to feed the birds outside our house. She has two feeders in the backyard, which she hangs from hooks close to the trees and fills with seeds. She loves to stand at the back window and watch them. Even in the dead of winter, when the birds should have flown somewhere south, where it’s warm, I wake up to the sound of birdsong. The birds come in droves, and because of it, despite Lily’s best efforts, she can’t always keep up with feeding them. Eventually the feeders go dry and the birds disappear, and then the backyard becomes quiet and still. Days pass without seeing a bird so that you’d think they were long gone.

Lily goes to the store. She gets more seed. She trudges outside, sometimes in the cold, sometimes through a foot of snow, to fill the feeders.

No sooner does she come back inside than the birds reappear, emerging from the deepest parts of the trees.

We couldn’t see them. We were sure they were gone, that they’d moved on to someone else’s feeder. But no. All the while they were there, lurking just out of sight, watching Lily, waiting on their next meal.

It makes me think of Jake. It makes me wonder if there is any possibility no matter how remote that he’s there, hidden in the background somewhere, camouflaged like the birds in the trees.

If that’s the case, the question is why. Why would he do that? Why would he only pretend to be dead?

Late Monday afternoon, I leave work early. The first thing I do is go back to the Hayeses house to return the key. It’s around four o’clock when I get there. I park in the same place I parked the other day and retrace my steps, entering the house through the garage. According to Lily, Nina has taken her mother to an appointment and won’t be home. The house, she said, should be empty and she’s right. It is. I put the key back in its place. I hurry out through the garage door and to my car, and then I make the snap decision to revisit Langley Woods. Once there, I leave my car in the same lot where Lily and I parked, and make my way back to where she and I found blood. It’s not easy to find. The ground is soft and wet from the rain this weekend, though, despite the mud, the weather is much nicer today. The sun is finally out and it’s warm. Presumably everyone who was cooped up inside this weekend is here, because the place is more crowded than I’ve ever seen it.

Even having been here before, having found the spot once already where Jake and Lily fought, I don’t find it on the first try. It takes three. Three wrong turns onto the wrong unmarked paths until eventually I come to the right clearing in the trees. I’ve brought a small screwdriver with me, which I found in my car, in a car tool kit. I use it to engrave lines on the trees, to blaze a trail so that I’ll be able to find my way out when it’s time to leave. I don’t want to get lost. Lily doesn’t know where I am. No one does. I walk further into the trees, remembering how Jake isn’t the only person to ever disappear here. Years ago, a woman named Amanda Holmes also vanished in Langley Woods. She went missing from the area. I remember that she was twenty-two at the time, a senior in college. Her case was strange, the kind that captured national attention. It was all over the news. I followed her story at the time because it was interesting. I didn’t think it would ever matter to me on a more personal level.