The Other Mrs.(89)

I choke on my own saliva. Officer Berg pats my back, asks if I’m okay. I nod because I can’t speak.

“It’s not easy to look at, is it?” Officer Berg asks, thinking it’s the dead woman’s body that has me rattled like this.

I see it now, what I couldn’t see before. Because the woman in the photograph—the mother perched on the chair—is older now. Her brown hair is now gray, and she’s lost a significant amount of weight. Too much weight, in fact, so that she’s gaunt.

It’s utterly impossible. It’s too hard to digest. This can’t be.

The woman in this photograph is Morgan’s mother. The woman I met at the memorial service. The woman who lost another child years ago and has never been the same since, according to her friends Karen and Susan.

But I don’t understand it. If this is true, it means that Morgan was Erin’s sister. That Morgan is the little girl in the photograph, the one who’s about ten years old.

Why didn’t Will tell me about this?

I think I know why. Because of my own insecurities. What would I have done if I’d learned Erin’s sister was living in such close proximity to us? I realize Will and Morgan’s friendship, their chumminess, it was real. It existed. Because of their shared affinity for the one woman Will loved more than me. Erin.

The room drifts in and out of focus. I blink hard, trying to get it to stop. Officer Berg teeters on the chair beside me. He doesn’t move; it’s my perception of him that makes him move. It’s all in my head. The edges of his face begin to soften. The room suddenly expands in size, walls widen, moving out. When the officer speaks, his words are nearly extinguished by whatever is going on in my head. I see his lips move. His words are harder to make out.

The first time he says it, it’s unintelligible.

“Pardon me?” I ask, speaking loudly.

“Will told us that you have a tendency toward being jealous and insecure.”

“He did, did he?”

“Yes, Dr. Foust, he did. He said he never expected you to act on those feelings. But he also said that you’ve been having a hard time lately. That you’re not quite yourself. He mentioned a panic attack, a forced resignation. You’re not the violent type, not according to Will. But,” he says, repeating his own words, “he says you haven’t been yourself lately.”

He asks, “Do you have anything to say to that?”

I say nothing. A headache begins just then, inching up the nape of my neck, stabbing me between the eyes. I clench my eyes shut tight, pressing my fingertips to my temples to dull the pain. I must experience a drop in blood pressure because all at once, it’s hard to hear. Officer Berg is talking, asking if I’m okay. But the words are more muffled than they were before. I’m underwater.

A door opens and then closes. Officer Berg is speaking to someone else. They found nothing. But they’re conducting a search of my home because Will has given them permission to do so.

“Dr. Foust? Dr. Foust?”

A hand shakes my shoulder.

When my eyes open up, some old guy’s looking at me. He’s practically drooling. I glance at the clock. I look down at my shirt. A blue button-down pajama shirt buttoned all the way up, making me gag. I can barely breathe. She can be such a prig sometimes. I unbutton the top three buttons, let in a little air. “It’s fucking hot in here,” I say, fanning myself, seeing the way he looks at my clavicle.

“Everything all right?” he asks. He’s got one of those looks on his face, like he’s confused about what he sees. His eyebrows are all scrunched up. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, makes sure he isn’t seeing things. He asks again if I’m all right. I think I should ask if he’s all right—he seems to be in far more distress than me—but I don’t so much care if he is. So I don’t ask.

Instead I ask, “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”

“You seem, I don’t know, disoriented somehow. You’re feeling okay? I can fetch you some water, if you don’t want your coffee.”

I look at the cup before me. It’s not mine.

He just looks at me, saying nothing, staring. I say, “Sure,” about the water. I twirl a strand of hair around my finger, taking in the room around me. Cold, bland, a table, four walls. There’s not much to it, nothing to look at, nothing to tell me where I am. Nothing except for this guy before me, fully decked out in a uniform. Clearly a cop.

And then I see the pictures on the table beside me.

“Go on,” I tell him. “Fetch me some water.”

He goes and comes back again. He gives me the water, sets it on the table in front of me. “So tell me,” he says. “Tell me what happened when you took the dogs for a walk.”

“What dogs?” I ask. I’ve always liked dogs. People I hate, but I’m quite fond of dogs.

“Your dogs, Dr. Foust.”

I get a great big belly laugh out of that. It’s preposterous, ludicrous, him mistaking me for Sadie. It’s insulting more than anything. We look nothing alike. Different-color hair, eyes, a heck of an age gap. Sadie is old. I’m not. Is he so blind he can’t see that?

“Please,” I say, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear. “Don’t insult me.”

He does a double take, asks, “Pardon me?”