“Nina!” she calls again.
Footsteps descend the stairs.
I head into the kitchen. I cross the kitchen for the garage door. I set my hand down on the garage door lever and, as deliberately as I can, I pull the door open. I step into the garage and guide the door closed behind me, holding down on the lever, releasing it by degrees so that it doesn’t snap back into place.
What I want to do is slam the door and run.
I have no choice but to open the overhead door. It will make noise, but that’s inevitable because there is no other way out of the garage other than through that door. I have zero options.
I press the button. The door lifts. It’s as loud as a leaf-or a snowblower on a Sunday morning. There is the very real possibility that I’ve fucked this all up. That I’m fucked. That the police are already on their way and I won’t get to my car before they arrive.
As I walk to my car, I risk a glance back and see it.
From one of the front windows, a face is pressed to the glass, looking back at me.
I speed home in such a state of shock that I forget all about the bag of Lily’s bloody clothes sitting in the back seat of my car.
“It was her mother,” Lily tells me later, when we’re both back home. I was home before she got here. She came in to find me pacing, practically running the house from end to end, just waiting for the axe to fall, for the police to show up at the door with a warrant for my arrest. “Her mother is losing her vision, Christian. It’s fine. She doesn’t see very well. How close were you to her?”
“Maybe ten or twenty feet. The thing is, Lily, even if she couldn’t see me, she heard me. She knew someone was there. She spoke to me.”
“What did she say?”
“She called me Nina.”
“See,” Lily says, “there you go. It’s fine. She thought you were Nina.”
“Except Nina would have spoken to her. Nina wouldn’t have run. And it gets worse.”
“Why?”
“Because as I was leaving, she got a clear view of my face.”
“Not clear, Christian. She doesn’t see very well,” she says again. “She wouldn’t have known it was you. She doesn’t even know you. She couldn’t identify you. I’m sure it’s fine.”
The more times Lily says that it’s fine, the less I believe it’s true.
As the day goes on and the police don’t come, I find my anxiety tapering. If they knew it was me, they would have come already. Wouldn’t they?
And then, later in the day, just as I finally start to feel safe, the doorbell rings.
NINA
I know that something is different the second I come home.
The garage door is open.
In the kitchen, there is a smell in the air, a woodsy scent like cologne.
I set my bag on the kitchen island and step out of my shoes. I take a sweeping glance of the room, calling for my mother. When she doesn’t answer, I take long strides toward the foyer to go check on her.
Just into the foyer, I see that Jake’s office door is open. It stops me dead. I draw in a breath. The door is not just slightly open, but entirely open, the frosted glass door flush against the wall. That door hasn’t been open in days. I’ve been keeping it intentionally closed because I kept finding myself looking in this week, expecting him to be there. He never was, but all it took was a lampshade in my peripheral vision, for example, to make me think that he was. My heart couldn’t take any more false alarms.
But now the door is open. Someone has opened it and my first thought is that Jake is home, that he’s finally come back home to me. I edge toward it. From the foyer, I don’t have a clear view of the inside yet, but there is a part of me expecting Jake to be sitting behind his desk, as if nothing is wrong, as if he hasn’t been gone all this time.
I take a breath and step into the room, but it’s completely empty. Jake isn’t here. I sag against the doorframe to catch my breath, feeling let down by the empty desk chair.
After a minute, I turn away from the office. There is something on the floor by the front door. I go to see what it is and find that it’s the extra key card to my Tesla, sitting by the floor register. It must have fallen from the mail sorter, which is where Jake and I keep it. I pick it up and put it back in the pocket of the mail sorter, wondering how it got on the floor and if my mother was looking for something while I was gone.
I reach for the banister. I pull myself toward the stairs. I climb the steps for the guest room, where my mother has been staying. The guest room doesn’t get much use because Jake’s family and mine live relatively close. When they come to visit, they come for the day, not for the night. Still, I went out of my way to decorate the space. It was wishful thinking, hoping that a beautiful room would bring guests, and it has brought some, old college friends mostly, but not as many as I imagined. For now I’m grateful I have a place for my mother to stay. The room is modern chic, but simple, with dark walls and white bedding and drapes.
I find her sitting in the armchair in the corner of the room with our cat curled up at the end of her bed. She’s looking out the window at the street. Her back is to me and she’s listening to an audiobook in her earbuds, which is why she didn’t hear me calling for her. She’s lost in the audiobook. She’s consumed with audiobooks these days because it’s practically all she can do now that she’s losing her vision. She can’t read a physical book, she can’t watch TV and she can’t drive. Because of what’s going on with her eyes, she’s no longer able to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it. She has to rely on me for everything. It’s so hard on her, who’s used to being independent.
“Mom,” I say and I go to her and set a hand on her shoulder. She turns, taking the earbuds out of her ears. My mother is only sixty-two. She’s relatively young, and it shows. Physically, she’s fit. She’s thin. She used to be a hiker and a backpacker when she was in her twenties. She met my father backpacking through Europe, long before they got married and had me. I forget sometimes that she had an entire life before I was born, when she was once young, adventurous and completely self-sufficient. She’s no longer self-sufficient but, even now, she could walk for miles and easily keep up with me. Her age is just starting to show in her face and neck, but her skin is mostly still free of lines, just some around the mouth and between the eyes. I’m envious. I hope that I look half as good as she does when I’m her age.
“Hi,” I say, smiling down.
“How was breakfast?” she asks.
“Good,” I say. “Did you get along okay while I was gone?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Did you nap?”
“A little.”
“What else did you do?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I took a shower,” she says.
“That’s all?” I wasn’t gone long, less than two hours. “Did you eat anything? Did you go downstairs?”
“Yes,” she says. “I made myself some oatmeal for breakfast.”
“Good,” I say, glad that she wasn’t shy about helping herself to breakfast. But that’s not really what I want to know. “Did you go for a walk?” I ask. “The garage door was open.”