The Other Mrs.(3)
My heart thumps inside my chest. I stand in the hallway, breathless. I clear my voice, try to recover from the shock of it. I step closer, rap my knuckles on the wood and say, “I’m leaving for the ferry in a few minutes. If you want a ride,” knowing she won’t accept my offer. My voice is tumultuous in a way that I despise. Imogen doesn’t answer.
I turn and follow the scent of breakfast downstairs. Will is by the stove when I come down. He stands, flipping pancakes in an apron, while singing one of those songs from the jaunty CDs Tate likes to listen to, something far too merry for seven fifteen in the morning.
He stops when he sees me. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, voice strained.
The dogs circle Will’s feet, hoping he’ll drop something. They’re big dogs and the kitchen is small. There isn’t enough room for four of us in here, let alone six. I call to the dogs and, when they come, send them into the backyard to play.
Will smiles at me when I return and offers me a plate. I opt only for coffee, telling Otto to hurry up and finish. He sits at the kitchen table, hunched over his pancakes, shoulders slumped forward to make himself appear small. His lack of confidence worries me, though I tell myself that this is normal for fourteen. Every child goes through this, but I wonder if they do.
Imogen stomps through the kitchen. There are tears up the thighs and in the knees of her black jeans. Her boots are black leather combat boots, with nearly a two-inch heel. Even without the boots, she’s taller than me. Raven skulls dangle from her ears. Her shirt reads, Normal people suck. Tate, at the table, tries to sound it out, as he does all of Imogen’s graphic T-shirts. He’s a good reader, but she doesn’t stand still long enough for him to get a look at it. Imogen reaches for a cabinet pull. She yanks open the door, scanning the inside of the cabinet before slamming it shut.
“What are you looking for?” Will asks, always eager to please, but Imogen finds it then in the form of a Kit Kat bar, which she tears open and bites into.
“I made breakfast,” Will says, but Imogen, blue eyes drifting past Otto and Tate at the kitchen table, seeing the third, vacant place setting set for her, says only, “Good for you.”
She turns and leaves the room. We hear her boots stomp across the wooden floors. We hear the front door open and close, and only then, when she’s gone, can I breathe.
I help myself to coffee, filling a travel mug before making an effort to stretch past Will for my things: the keys and a bag that sit on the countertop just out of reach. He leans in to kiss me before I go. I don’t mean to, and yet it’s instinctive when I hesitate, when I draw back from his kiss.
“You okay?” Will asks again, looking at me curiously, and I blame a bout of nausea for my hesitation. It’s not entirely untrue. It’s been months now since the affair, and yet his hands are still like sandpaper when he touches me and, as he does, I can’t help but wonder where those hands have been before they were on me.
A fresh start, he’d said, one of the many reasons we find ourselves transported to this home in Maine, which belonged to Will’s only sister, Alice, before she died. Alice had suffered for years from fibromyalgia before the symptoms got the best of her and she decided to end her life. The pain of fibromyalgia is deep. It’s diffused throughout the body and often accompanied by incapacitating exhaustion and fatigue. From what I’ve heard and seen, the pain is intense—a sometimes stabbing, sometimes throbbing pain—worse in the morning than later in the day, but never going completely away. It’s a silent disease because no one can see pain. And yet it’s debilitating.
There was only one thing Alice could do to counter the pain and fatigue, and that was to head into the home’s attic with a rope and step stool. But not before first meeting with a lawyer and preparing a will, leaving her house and everything inside of it to Will. Leaving her child to Will.
Sixteen-year-old Imogen spends her days doing only God knows what. School, presumably, for part of it at least, because we only get truancy calls on occasion. But how she spends the rest of the day I don’t know. When Will or I ask, she either ignores us or she has something smart to say: that she’s off fighting crime, promoting world peace, saving the fucking whales. Fuck is one of her favorite words. She uses it often.
Suicide can leave survivors like Imogen feeling angry and resentful, rejected, abandoned, full of rage. I’ve tried to be understanding. It’s getting hard to do.
Growing up, Will and Alice were close, but they grew apart over the years. He was rattled by her death, but he didn’t exactly grieve. In truth, I think he felt more guilty than anything: that he did a negligent job of keeping in touch, that he wasn’t involved in Imogen’s life and that he never grasped the gravity of Alice’s disease. He feels he let them down.
At first, when we’d learned of our inheritance, I suggested to Will that we sell the home, bring Imogen to Chicago to live with us, but after what happened in Chicago—not just the affair alone, but all of it, everything—it was our chance to make a new beginning, a fresh start. Or so Will said.
We’ve been here less than two months, so that we’re still getting the lay of the land, though we found jobs quickly, Will and me, he working as an adjunct professor teaching human ecology two days a week, over on the mainland.
As one of only two physicians on the island, they practically paid me to come.