The Other Mrs.(43)

He opens the door for me. I look at Otto, seeing the way that he looks more and more like Will each day. Now that he’s older, the angles of his face are sharp. There is no more baby fat to soften the edges. He’s getting taller all the time, finally enjoying that growth spurt that has for so long bypassed him, keeping him small while the other boys in school grew tall. If not now, then soon he’ll rival their height. Otto is handsome like Will. In no time at all, he’ll be making girls swoon. He just doesn’t know it yet.

“How was your day?” I ask him, and he shrugs and says, “Fine. I guess.”

It’s an indecisive reply. I take it as an opportunity. “You guess?” I ask, wanting more: to know how his day really went, if he’s getting along with the other kids at school, if he likes his teachers, if he’s making friends. When he says nothing, I prod. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?” It’s silly, one of those things doctors say when they’re trying to gauge a patient’s pain. Otto shrugs again and tells me his day was a six, which ranks as moderate, decent, an okay day.

“Homework?” I ask.

“Some.”

“Need any help?”

He shakes his head. He can do it himself.

As I make my way to Will’s and my bedroom to change, I catch sight of a light drifting from beneath the doorway that leads to the third-floor attic. The light in the attic is on, which it never is, because it’s where Alice killed herself. I asked the boys never to go up there. I didn’t think it was a place any of us needed to be.

The boys know that Alice gave us the house. They don’t know how she died. They don’t know that one day, Alice slipped a noose around her neck, securing the other end of it to the ceiling’s support beam, stepping from the stool. What I know as a physician is that, after the noose tightened around her neck and she was suspended, supported only by her jaw and her neck, she would have struggled for air against the weight of her own body. It would have taken minutes for her to lose consciousness. It would have been extremely painful. And even when she finally did lose consciousness, her body would have continued to thrash about, taking much longer for her to die, up to twenty minutes, if not more. Not a pleasant way to go.

It’s hard for Will to talk about Alice. This I can understand. After my father passed, it was hard for me to talk about him. My memory isn’t the best. But what sticks with me most is when I was around eleven years old, when my father and I lived just outside of Chicago and he worked for a department store in the city. Dad rode the train downtown every day back then. I was old enough to keep watch over myself by then, a latchkey kid. I went to school and I came home. No one had to tell me to do my homework. I was responsible enough for that. I made and ate my own dinner. I did my dishes. I went to bed at a reasonable time. Most nights, Dad would have a beer or two on the train ride home, stopping at the bar after he’d departed the train, not getting home until after I was asleep. I’d hear him, stumbling around the house, knocking things over, and the next morning there’d be a mess for me to clean.

I put myself through college. I lived alone, in a single dorm followed by a small apartment. I tried living with a roommate once. It didn’t work for me. The roommate I had was careless and irresponsible, among other things. She was also manipulative, a complete kleptomaniac.

She took phone messages for me that I never received. She made a mess of our apartment. She ate my food. She stole money from my wallet, checks from my checkbook. She used my credit card to buy herself things. She denied doing it, of course, but I’d look at my bank statements later and find checks made out to places like hair salons, department stores, cash. When I asked the bank to produce the processed checks for me, I could clearly see that the handwriting on them was not mine.

I could have pressed charges. For whatever reason, I chose not to.

She wore my clothes without asking. She brought them back wrinkled and dirty, sometimes stained, reeking of cigarette smoke. I’d find them hanging in my closet like that. When I asked her about it, she’d gaze at my filthy clothing and say, You think I actually wore that ugly shirt of yours?

Because on top of everything else, she was mean.

I put a lock on my bedroom door. That didn’t stop her.

Somehow, she still found a way in. I’d come home from a night out to find my door open, my things rifled through.

I didn’t want to live like that.

I offered to move out, to let her keep our place. She was angry to the point of being combative. Something about her scared me. She couldn’t afford the unit all on her own, she told me, seething. She got in my face, told me I was crazy, that I was a psychopath.

I held my ground. I didn’t flinch.

I said calmly, I could say the same about you.

In the end, she was the one to leave. That was best, seeing as I’d recently met Will, and needed a place where we could hang out. Even after, I had my suspicions that she was still letting herself in, going through my things. She’d given me her key back, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t taken it to the hardware store first and made a copy of it to keep. In time I had the locks changed. That, I told myself, would have to stop her. If I thought she was still coming in, it was only my paranoia speaking.

Still, that wasn’t the end of her. Because I saw her some six months ago or so, when I passed her on the street, not far from Will’s and my home. She looked the same to me, strutting her stuff down Harrison, just as arrogant as she’d always been. I ducked away when I saw her, slipped down another street.