The Other Mrs.(47)

I reroute the conversation. “What’s this you’ve got?” I ask. In his hands Tate proudly totes a mini figure he assembled himself at the library event. He shows it to me, before climbing onto the bed to kiss me good-night at Will’s request. Will ushers him to his own bedroom, where he reads Tate a story and tucks him into bed snug as a bug in a rug. On the way back to our bedroom, Will stops by Otto’s and Imogen’s bedrooms to say good-night.

“You didn’t eat the casserole,” Will says seconds later after he returns to our bedroom. He’s concerned, and I tell him I wasn’t hungry. “You feeling okay?” he asks, running a warm hand the length of my hair, and I shake my head and tell him no. I think what it would feel like to lean into him. To let his strong arms envelop me. To be vulnerable for once, to fall to pieces before him and let him pick them up.

“How safe is Tate’s elementary school?” I ask instead.

He assures me it’s safe. “It was probably just some mother dropping off a forgotten lunch,” he says. “It’s not like Tate is the most observant kid, Sadie. I’m the only dad at school pickup, and still, every day he has trouble finding me in the crowd.”

“You’re sure?” I ask, trying not to let my imagination get the best of me. Besides, there’s something less disconcerting about it because she was a woman. If she had been a man, watching kids play on a playground, I would already be perusing the internet by now, trying to determine how many registered sex offenders live on the island with us.

He tells me, “I’m sure.”

I slide the drawings I found in the attic to him. He takes a look at them and believes right away that they’re Otto’s. Unlike me, Will seems sure. “Why not Imogen?” I ask, wishing they could belong to Imogen.

“Because Otto,” he tells me unquestioningly, “is our artist. Remember Occam’s razor,” he says, reminding me of the belief that states the easiest explanation is most often right.

“But why?” I ask, meaning why would Otto draw like this.

At first he denies the gravity of the situation, saying, “It’s a form of self-expression, Sadie. This is natural for a child in pain.”

But that alone is disconcerting. Because it’s not natural for a child to be in pain.

“You think he’s being bullied?” I ask, but Will only shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t know. But he’ll call the school in the morning. He’ll find out.

“We need to talk to Otto about this,” I tell him, but Will says, “Let me do some investigating first. The more we know, the better prepared we’ll be.”

I say okay. I trust his instinct.

I tell him, “I think it would be good for Imogen to speak with someone.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, taken aback, though I’m not sure why. Will isn’t averse to therapy, though she’s his niece by blood, not mine. This is for him to decide. “Like a psychiatrist?” he asks.

I tell him yes. “She’s getting worse. She must be harboring so much inside of her. Anger. Grief. I think it would be good for her to speak with someone,” I say, telling him about our conversation this evening, though I don’t tell him what I saw on Imogen’s phone. He doesn’t need to know I saw a picture of his dead sister. I say only that Imogen described for me in detail what Alice looked like when she found her.

“Sounds to me like she’s opening up to you, Sadie,” he says. But I have a hard time believing it. I tell him therapy would be better, with someone trained to deal with suicide survivors. Not me.

“Will?” I ask, my mind going elsewhere, to a thought I had earlier tonight as I stared out the window toward the home next door.

“What?” he asks.

“The vacant house next door. Do you think the police searched it when they were canvassing the neighborhood?”

The look he gives me is confused. “I don’t know,” he says. “Why do you ask?”

“Just seems an empty home would be an easy place for a killer to hide.”

“Sadie,” he says in a way that’s both patronizing and reassuring at the same time. “I’m sure there isn’t a killer living next door to us.”

“How can you be so sure?” I ask.

“We’d know, wouldn’t we? Something would look off. Lights on, windows broken. We’d hear something. But that house hasn’t changed in all the time we’ve been here.”

I let myself believe him because it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to sleep tonight.



CAMILLE


There were nights I went to Will’s condo that I stood alone in the street, watching from outside. But Will and Sadie lived up too high. It was hard to see inside from the street.

And so one night I helped myself to the fire escape.

I dressed in all black, scrambled up six flights like a cat burglar in the night.

On the sixth floor, I sat on the steel platform, just outside his kitchen window. I looked in, but it was dark inside their home, the dead of night, hard to see much of anything. And so I sat awhile, wishing Will would wake up, that he would come to me.

I lit up a smoke while I waited. I flicked the lighter awhile, watched the flame burst from the end of the wick. I dragged my finger through the flame, wanting it to hurt, but it didn’t hurt. I just wanted to feel something, anything, pain. All I felt was empty inside. I let the flame burn for a while. I let the lighter get all heated up. I pressed it to my palm and held it there before drawing it away, smiling at my handiwork.