The Other Mrs.(55)

Before he can argue, I say, “Imogen would come with us, of course.”

What I don’t say is that on our turf, we’d have the upper hand. I’d feel a sense of control over Imogen that I don’t feel now.

“Leave and go where?” Will asks, but it seems so obvious to me, the way that our fresh start isn’t so fresh after all. Our stay in Maine has been stormy, to say the least. If anything, our lives have gotten worse since being here.

“Home,” I tell him, but he only asks, “Where is home anymore, Sadie?” and at those words, my heart aches.

Our Chicago condo, the one where Will and I spent our entire married lives until now, is gone, sold to a couple of millennials. My job at the hospital is gone, too, no doubt replaced with some young recent med school grad. Otto can never return to his public school, nor Tate to his, not because of anything he did, but because he’s guilty by association. They’d both need to go to some private school, and on Will’s salary alone—assuming he could even get his old job back—that would never work.

When I say nothing, Will says, “Let’s talk about this when I get home,” and I say okay. I end the call and make my way into the kitchen to start the teakettle. As I cross into the kitchen, I see our knives and am stricken with a morbid curiosity to see for myself what a boning knife is, what one looks like, to hold it in my hand. Will has a set of knives he keeps in a wooden block on the counter, just out of reach of Tate’s inquisitive hands.

I go to the block. I don’t know what a boning knife is, but an internet search tells me I’m looking for an arched blade with a very sharp point, five to nine inches long. I yank on the handles of the knives, pulling them out in turn to examine their blades. It doesn’t take long to see that there’s no knife matching the description in the block. Furthermore, I see that one space on the wooden block is empty. This set of twenty-one knives only contains twenty. One knife is gone.

My imagination gets the best of me. I try to stay calm, sensible, remembering again about Occam’s razor. Maybe some other knife belongs here. Maybe Will doesn’t own a boning knife. Maybe the missing knife is in the sink, though I look and it’s not. Maybe Will lost that knife long ago, or it got placed in the cutlery drawer by mistake. I pull open the drawer, rifle through Alice’s modest collection of knives—steak and dinner knives mostly, a paring knife, one with a serrated edge—but it’s not there.

I think of Imogen in our bedroom at night. You hear stories about children murdering their parents in the middle of the night. It happens; it’s not that far-fetched. And Imogen is a hostile girl, a damaged girl. I don’t know that I’d put it past her to take that knife to threaten me with, or worse.

I turn and step from the kitchen. I climb the steps to the second floor, my slick hand gripping the banister. I go to her room, planning to search it as I did the other night, but my plan is quickly derailed when I come to her door and realize there’s no getting in without the padlock key.

I curse, shaking on the door handle. I try another call to Will to tell him about the missing knife, but he’s on his way home now, likely on the ferry, where reception is spotty. My call doesn’t go through. I put my phone away, relieved to know that he’ll be home soon.

I find something to keep myself busy. I dust the house. I strip the sheets from the beds. I start to gather them in a pile to lug down to the laundry room.

In our bedroom, I tug on the fitted sheet. As I do, something black comes skidding out from my side of the bed, something that had been wedged between the mattress and the bed frame for some time. As the object slews halfway across the bedroom floor, my first instinct is to think it’s the remote control for the bedroom TV we rarely use. I go to pick it up. As I do, I realize that it’s not a remote, but rather a phone, one which is neither Will’s nor mine. I turn it over in my hands. There’s nothing discernible about it. It’s simply a phone, an older generation iPhone. Perhaps Alice’s, I think, noting that the phone is not-surprisingly dead. Alice herself has been dead for quite some time. Of course the phone would be dead, too.

Back downstairs in a drawer full of gadgets, I find a charger that fits. I plug it into an outlet in the living room wall, stretching the phone to the fireplace mantel.

I go back to straightening the house until Will arrives soon after with Tate in tow. I greet them in the foyer, and Will sees it in my eyes straightaway: something is wrong.

Both he and Tate are wet with snow. It’s on their coats, on their hair, melting quickly. Tate stomps it from his feet, creating a puddle on the wood. He’s trying to tell me a story about something that happened at school today, something he learned. He starts to sing a song but I’m not listening, and neither is Will.

“Take your shoes off,” Will tells him, before helping Tate out of his coat. He hangs it from the hook in the darkened foyer, and it occurs to me that I should turn on a light, but I don’t.

“Do you like it, Mommy?” Tate asks about the song. “Days of the week, days of the week, days of the week,” he sings in tune to The Addams Family theme song, clapping twice between each line. Though I hear him, I don’t reply. “Do you like it?” he asks, louder this time, nearly screaming.

I nod my head, but I’m just barely listening. I hear his song, but my mind can’t process it because all I’m thinking about is the missing knife.