The Wrong Family(36)
It was raining when she stood under the awning of the building just a few yards from where her car was parked. Winnie stood huddled there, her eyes looking at the bruised color of the sky and not really seeing it. Where would she go if she got in and drove right now? She didn’t know, so instead of walking to her car she flipped the hood up on her jacket and began walking along the sidewalk, dodging a couple of guys who had their eyes on their phones. The rain was more of a mist, and it swept into her face with an affection only Seattle rain offered.
If they fought it would get ugly, because that’s how people with secrets stepped into the ring. If she told Nigel she knew he’d searched for Lisa Sharpe online he would get accusatory, make her feel awful for snooping and then thinking the worst of him. And maybe he’d be right, or maybe he’d be gaslighting her; she was fairly certain she did her fair share of gaslighting herself. But Nigel wasn’t like Winnie; he wasn’t trying to punish himself for his role in her mistake. No, if he was searching for information it was to benefit himself. You couldn’t live with someone for years on end without knowing their patterns; good or bad you learned them.
Winnie licked the water off her lips. She wasn’t aware of where she was walking, or how fast; she was only vaguely aware of the people she passed and how they stared at her. It must be my makeup, she thought. The rain that was kissing her face was probably making her mascara run. A voice in the back of her mind was telling her that she was deciding how people were seeing her instead of facing the truth about how she actually looked; the voice sounded suspiciously like the therapist she’d seen for three years, the man’s voice more distinct in her mind than her dead father’s. He’d ended up losing his license, after which Winnie quit therapy indefinitely to become a full-time control freak mom.
It was when Nigel brought up renting out the apartment downstairs to help with bills that she’d started looking for a job. The thought of some stranger in her house, watching her, terrified Winnie. She just couldn’t do it, even though she’d agreed to put in the separate entrance. She stopped on the corner of a street she wasn’t familiar with and looked around for the first time. Calm down, she told herself, but she was calm. Almost too calm. Why was that? Because he couldn’t leave her, and that was her ultimate fear. She laughed, a raucous burst that made several people who were waiting for the light to change step away from her, the woman in the Burberry coat with the smudged mascara. But it was funny, wasn’t it? She was afraid of the thing that couldn’t happen. The smile wilted from her lips. It wasn’t that he couldn’t leave, it was that he wanted to and couldn’t. Perhaps it was too much to ask after what she’d done, but she just wanted her husband to love her...to want to be with her.
She’d somehow walked home, wound herself through streets she rarely drove down until she’d reached the opposite end of Greenlake Park and was now standing in front of her own house—a mess of wet clothes and running face paint. Her car was still in the parking lot at work. She’d walked four miles and hardly noticed. The last thing Winnie wanted to do was schlep all the way back to the office just as people were coming back from lunch. If people from work saw her show up, drenched, to pick up her car, they’d assume the worst. They were always looking for something scandalous to chew on; it made the days go by faster. And the worst they could imagine would not be as bad as what Winnie had actually done. She’d have to take an Uber to work tomorrow, concoct some story to go with it. She decided that she’d tell Nigel she’d left work to find her car battery dead. That would be enough. She was back to her old ways: sweeping pieces of her crazy under the rug.
She stilled for a moment, standing at the edge of the park; her house was across the street and for a moment she saw it as the park-goers saw it. “One of the neater homes,” she’d once heard an older man say to his older lady friend as they walked past it. “Mmm-hmm,” she’d agreed as she scooped her arm through his. Winnie agreed with the old dude; she saw the red brick and traditional angles as charming, but some of her girlfriends made snide comments, saying it could have been the setting for a Wes Craven movie. It was barely noon, yet the sky already had a six o’ clock shadow. Her house was framed by agitated clouds that seemed especially dark right above her roof like they were specifically congregating there. That was ridiculous. It was like she was having a mental breakdown or something; this whole day was just—and then her eyes moved downwind toward the bedroom windows and the thought slid from her head. What she saw made her stomach clench and her thighs squeeze together. Someone was standing in her bedroom window looking out at the park—looking out at her. Her mouth dropped open at the same time a man walking his dogs crossed in front of her, blocking her vision for two seconds at most. After he passed, the window—her bedroom window—was empty. She darted across the street, yards from the nearest crosswalk, and a Mazda honked at her. Winnie held up an apologetic hand as she ran across the three lanes of traffic, her eyes firmly glued to the window of the bedroom she shared with her husband. She was pulling her keys out of her bag as she ran up the pathway to the house, now searching the other windows for signs of the intruder. She could see Mr. Nevins’s Tahoe parked along the curb. He was home; she could call out to him if she needed help. The rear of his house faced the rear of her house, separated by a narrow alley. Winnie ran past his truck and the yellow bumper sticker she hated with a passion, to the back alley. Mr. Nevins was nowhere to be seen, the windows of his Cape Cod dark. The gate to her own house was undisturbed; she opened it quietly, pulling her phone from her purse as she kept her eyes on the back door. If someone were to run out it would probably be from here. But then Winnie straightened up, remembering one important detail: the house alarm. She blinked at the back door, fingering her keys. She’d peek in, see if the alarm was still on. She ran across the grass in the backyard, the flowers overly bright in the strange light that was filtering through the clouds. As soon as she was within five feet of the door, she could see the red light on the keypad in the kitchen. It was armed. Winnie felt a chill run down her back and pool indecisively in her toes. She wanted to call the police, but Nigel would have a fit. He’d be embarrassed, and more than that, he’d think Winnie was “losing it”. He’d give her that look again, like she was a dangerous thing that could snap at any moment. She chewed on her lower lip, trembling slightly. She couldn’t call the police, and she couldn’t call Nigel. She’d have to go explore this herself.