“I don’t know if I can do it anymore. I’m starting to feel … I don’t know. The girls. Some days, I look at them, and I—”
“Yes you can,” he says. “You can do this. The girls are fine.”
Margaret brought it up again at dinner tonight: those footprints on my carpet, muddy and fading like my memory, my mind. I can still hear the clank of my mother’s fork as she dropped it; my father, staring at us, probably imagining me wandering into the marsh at night. My white nightgown sticking to my ankles, my calves, my thighs. The water moving higher and higher until it poured down my throat.
“Maybe if we could just get some help,” my mother says now, her voice perking up. “If I could get some help—”
“No.”
The room grows quiet, but it’s the kind of quiet that’s heavy, dangling over them like a piano suspended by a string, threatening to come crashing down in an instant and bury them in the debris. And that’s when I hear my mother sigh—a sigh of resignation, maybe. Frustration. Of knowing that no matter what she says, no matter how hard she pleads, come Monday morning, he’ll be gone again, and she’ll be left to deal with us alone.
“Elizabeth, this was the deal,” my father says. “My job is in Washington, yours is here. I thought this is what you wanted?”
“It was,” she whispers. “It is.”
“You can stay home,” he says. “You can paint. We can keep growing our family.”
Another bout of quiet, but this time, different. Intimate and fragile. I think I can hear the groan of a chair, the sound of rustling clothes. The almost inaudible suction of two lips pressed together, moving in unison. I take a step backward, trying to make my way back upstairs, when the board groans beneath my feet—and suddenly, I can tell that the movement has stopped. I can feel their eyes on the other side of the door, watching me freeze in fear, like a deer on the wrong side of two headlights barreling fast.
I hold my breath, stand perfectly still, until I hear the screech of a chair being pushed back, my father’s lumbering footsteps growing loud.
My heart plummets as the door swings open.
“Isabelle.”
I stare up at my father towering above me and feel impossibly small. He looks at me for a moment, quiet, before opening the door wider. Inside, I see my mother sitting on the arm of his office chair, nightgown hanging off one shoulder so I can see the pop of her clavicle. She stares at me in the doorframe, her eyes waxy and red. She’s been crying, I can tell, and I feel guilty. Guilty for making her feel like this.
I think of her words to my father, a hushed whisper. A desperate pleading.
“You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t understand.”
“I couldn’t fall asleep,” I blurt out, realizing they might be thinking it right now: that I’m doing it again. That I’m walking the halls of the house in my sleep, standing here with my eyes open and an emptiness on the other side.
My mother stands up and glides across the room, joining my father in the doorway. She continues to stare, examining me. It’s the same way she looks at me sometimes when I wake up in the dark, standing in the bathroom with the faucet running or holding a spatula in the kitchen. The same way she tilts her head to the side, like she’s studying me. Like she’s trying to determine if I’m real.
Like she’s afraid.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NOW
That man from last night, sitting on his porch. Something about him has been irking me, bothering me, sticking to my side like a burr digging in its spikes.
I walk into the dining room, streaks of orange light illuminating the house and a mug of coffee pushed hot in my hands. Then I stare at the wall, that giant canvas covered in pictures and maps and article clippings; Post-it notes with late-night ruminations that have never amounted to much. He didn’t look familiar to me in any way; he didn’t seem like anybody I know—and that’s when it hits me.
He should look familiar. He should be somebody I know.
I know everyone in this neighborhood. They’re all right here, right in front of me. I’ve researched them all, walked house-to-house and pounded on doors. I’ve listened to their alibis and apologies and forced myself to smile, nod, thank them for their time. And through it all, I’ve never come across that man. I’ve never seen him. If he lives here—so close to my home, his house practically parallel to mine—I should know who he is. I should know everything about him.
But I don’t.