In the backyard, the river runs along the far edge of the property, bound by a public hiking and biking trail. We were worried about a lack of privacy when we first moved in, because of the trail. The trail brought pedestrians to us. Strangers. People just passing by. For most of the year, it’s not a problem. The leaves on the trees provide plenty of privacy. It’s only when they fall that we’re more exposed, but the views of the river are worth it for that small sacrifice.
“Done,” I tell her about the locks, and she asks then if I set the alarm. We’ve lived here years and hardly ever set the alarm. I’m taken aback that she would ask.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
Lily says, “Yes, fine.” She says that we have an alarm. We pay for it. We might as well use it. She isn’t wrong—it’s just that she’s never wanted to before.
I set the alarm. I make my way around the first floor, turning off lights. It takes a minute. When I’m done, I climb the stairs for the bedroom. Lily has the lights off in the room now. She stands at the window in the dark, with her back to the door. She’s splitting the blinds apart with her fingers and is looking out into the dark night.
I come quietly into the room. I sidle up behind Lily, setting my hand on the small of her back and asking, “What are you looking at?” as I lean forward to set my chin on her shoulder, to see what she sees.
Suddenly Lily reels back, away from the window. She drops the blinds. They clamor shut. I’ve scared her. Instinctively, her hands rise up in self-defense, as if to strike me.
I pull back, ducking before I get hit. “Whoa there, Rocky,” I say, reaching for her arms.
Lily’s hands and arms remain motionless, suspended in air.
“Shit, sorry,” she says, knowing how close she came to impact. The realization startles us both.
“What was that?” I ask as I gently lower Lily’s arms. Lily isn’t usually so jumpy. I’ve never seen that kind of reaction from her.
She says, “I didn’t know it was you.”
“Who did you think it was?” I ask, as a joke. She and I are the only ones here.
Lily doesn’t answer directly. Instead she says, “I didn’t hear you come up the stairs. I thought you were still downstairs.”
That doesn’t explain it.
“What are you looking at?” I ask again, gazing past her for the window.
“I thought I heard something outside,” she says.
“Like what?”
She says that she doesn’t know. Just something. We stand, quiet, listening. It’s silent at first, but then I hear the voices of kids rising up from somewhere outside. They’re laughing, and I know there are teenagers clowning around on the trail again. It wouldn’t be the first time. They never do anything too bad, though we’ve found cigarette butts and empty bottles of booze. I don’t get mad about it. I was a stupid teenager once. I did worse.
I go to the bed. I pull the blankets back. “It’s just dumb kids, Lily. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Come to bed,” I say, but, even as she turns away from the window and slips under the sheets with me, I sense Lily’s hesitation. She’s not so sure.
NINA
I must have fallen asleep with the TV on. Whatever I was watching has given way to the ten o’clock news, which glows garishly in the darkness of the house, the volume obnoxiously loud. Lying on my side on the sofa, my eyes half-open, I watch it. Today, a midrise apartment building in the city caught fire and collapsed. There was a shooting on the south side. It’s all bad news. The news puts this on because it’s what people want to see. It’s a sickness. It’s not that the world is innately bad or that bad things happen more often than good things. It’s that we’re drawn to bad things. Death sells. I turn the news off. I hate watching it.
I push myself upright on the sofa, into a sitting position, rubbing at a kink in my neck. I must have been lying on it funny. Despite the nap, I don’t feel any more rested. If anything I feel more tired. I just need to carry myself up to bed, but Jake isn’t home yet and I don’t want to go to bed before he is. I want to talk to him. I want to talk things out. Things got heated last night and I feel bad for it now. Looking back on it, it was mostly my fault, but, in the moment, I was being stubborn. I didn’t see it that way. I said things I shouldn’t have said and it’s been eating at me all day. I thought over and over again about calling him at work to apologize, but I didn’t want to interrupt him because he’s so busy when he’s at work, doing things that matter, like saving lives. He never likes it when I call him at work.
The papers I was grading are fanned out on the coffee table; I only got through a few of them before nodding off. They’re for my honors English classes. We’ve just finished reading 1984 and the kids were asked to write about ways in which our modern society is Orwellian. I love reading their responses. I didn’t mean to sleep for as long as I did. I told myself I was just going to close my eyes for a bit, and then get back to grading, but I must have slept for hours. I feel guilty now because I promised the kids I would have them graded by tomorrow. They put so much work into them and are anxious to know what they got. The honors kids are hard on themselves. But now it’s dark outside and I’m tired, worried about what happened with Jake and needing him to come home so that we can talk.
I stand from the sofa and go to the kitchen for coffee. It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled an all-nighter but a good night’s sleep is not in the cards for me. I fill the Keurig’s water reservoir, replace it on the unit and let it warm, checking my phone to see if I missed a call or a text from Jake. It’s ten thirty-five at night. I don’t know why he isn’t home.
Jake saw patients in his office today. These days tend to be his shorter days because there’s a predictability about them. Patients come in for consults or pre-op appointments. They have set appointment times, which may run over a few minutes if a patient is late or Jake gets behind, but never by more than a few minutes. The rest of the time, Jake spends these days catching up on paperwork. If anything, he’s said, nonsurgery days are boring. Jake prefers being in surgery because that’s when he’s at his best.
Despite that, the days he performs surgeries are astonishingly long. He wakes up at four thirty in the morning when the alarm goes off on his watch. The workday starts just after dawn with rounds, prechecks and discussing patients on his list with the rest of the surgical team. They end sometimes as late as nine or ten o’clock. Surgery days are the most unpredictable too. While surgeries are sometimes planned, like removing a tumor, sometimes, like last week, a patient comes in with a gunshot wound to the head and Jake has to spend unanticipated hours trying to save a life. That gunshot victim died. She was practically dead to begin with. That’s how Jake phrased it. There is a detachment in the way he speaks of his patients because there has to be. He can’t get all emotional about it, otherwise he wouldn’t be a good surgeon. There is a whole psychology about how doctors like him get through the day. It started in med school for Jake, where he referred to cadavers as things, not people, so he could cut into them more easily. For most people, seeing a dead body is a defining moment in their life; for Jake, it’s frequent.