The Nix(147)

This was what it was like for him, every time. The more of these encounters Officer Brown had with Alice, the more afraid and paranoid he became about losing her. He knew this about himself. He could feel it happening, but he could not stop it. After each new encounter, the thought of no longer encountering her became more devastating and impossible to bear.

This is what he called them, privately, to himself, in his head: encounters.

Because the word sounded passive and almost accidental. You “encounter” a stranger in an alley. You “encounter” a bear in the woods. It sounded like it happened by chance and certainly not in the elaborately premeditated way the encounters actually occurred. The word encounter was a word that did not sound like he was aggressively on-purpose cheating on his wife, which of course he was doing. Willingly. And often.

When he thought about his wife discovering his secret, he was ashamed. When he imagined what it would be like admitting to his wife what he’d been doing and how he’d been doing it in such a well-thought-out, behind-your-back way, he felt full of shame and disgust, yes, but also a kind of recrimination and justifiable anger and a sense that he was beyond reproach and driven into Alice’s arms by a wife who, since the birth of their daughter, had changed.

Changed drastically and fundamentally. It began when his wife started calling him “Daddy,” and so he called her “Mommy,” and he thought it was a joke, a game between them, trying to get used to these new roles, like the way she called him “Husband” all through their honeymoon. It seemed so suddenly formal and exotic and strange. “Would you join me for dinner, my dearest husband?” she would ask each night for a week after they were married, and they would fall giggling onto the bed feeling much too young and immature for names like Husband and Wife. And so he figured in the hospital in the days after his daughter was born and they called each other Mommy and Daddy that it was similarly comic and temporary.

Only that was five years ago and she was still calling him Daddy. And he was still calling her Mommy. She never explicitly asked to go by that name, but rather slowly stopped responding to other names. It was weird. He’d call to her from the other room: “Honey?” Nothing. “Sweetie?” Nothing. “Mommy?” And she’d appear, as if that was the only word she could still hear. He found it creepy she’d refer to him as Daddy, but this remained, for the most part, unsaid, except for furtive suggestions here and there: “You don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to,” he’d say, to which she’d respond, “But I want to.”

Plus there was also the matter of sex, which was not happening, at all, sex between them, a fact he chalked up to the family’s now regular sleeping arrangement, which involved their daughter sleeping with them, between them, in their bed. He did not remember agreeing to this. It simply happened. And he suspected it wasn’t even for his daughter’s benefit, this arrangement, but for Mommy’s. That Mommy liked sleeping this way because in the morning their daughter would climb on Mommy and kiss her all over and tell her she was pretty. He got the feeling that Mommy did not want to live without this daily ceremony.

She had in fact trained their daughter to do this.

Not on purpose, not at first. But Mommy had definitely actively ritualized this behavior, which began innocently enough, their daughter waking up one morning and saying all puffy-eyed and bleary, “You’re pretty, Mommy.” It was cute. Mommy hugged her and said thank you. Innocent. But then a few mornings later Mommy asked “Do you still think I’m pretty?,” and the daughter responded enthusiastically “Yes!” That wasn’t weird enough to say anything about—just enough to note, quietly, in his head. Then again a few mornings after that, when Mommy asked the daughter “What do we say to Mommy in the morning?,” and the daughter said, reasonably, “Good morning?” And Mommy said no and this quizzing went on until the poor kid got it right: “You’re so pretty!”

That was kind of weird.

Weirder still the next week when Mommy actively punished the daughter for not saying she was pretty, withholding the pancakes and cartoons that were their Saturday-morning tradition and instead directing the daughter to clean her room. And when the daughter asked through her disappointed tears why this was happening and Mommy said “You didn’t tell me I was pretty this morning,” he thought it was very weird indeed.

(It goes without saying that when he told his wife she was pretty, she rolled her eyes and pointed out some new part of her that had lately become wrinkled or fat.) He began working the night shift. To avoid the cascade of kisses and hollow compliments that had now become the normal and habituated way each day began. He slept during the day, the whole bed to himself. At night, he was on patrol, which is how he encountered Alice.

She was exactly like the rest, at first, memorable only because of the sunglasses she wore in the middle of the night. He found her out walking and asked her to produce identification. Predictably, she could not. So he cuffed her and pressed her against his car and searched her for drugs, which about one in three of these types usually carried, stupidly, right in their pockets.

But she carried nothing—no drugs, no money, no makeup, no keys. Homeless, he guessed. He took her to the lockup, dropped her off, and promptly forgot about her.

She was at the exact same spot the next night.

At exactly the same time. Dressed exactly the same: green military jacket, sunglasses worn most of the way down her nose. She wasn’t walking this time, just standing there on the sidewalk like she was waiting for him.