“You startled me!”
I step back, surprised myself. She looks so out of place in my bedroom, less than a foot from my unmade bed.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “I was using your bathroom. Cole was in the other one.”
“No, not at all.” Suddenly, I think of the Overton T-shirt that found its way into my laundry.
I watch as Susan steps past me into the hall and then into Cole’s room. There’s nothing threatening or even remarkable about her. She’s nondescript, with her mannish haircut and medium-wash jeans. But what do I really know about her? I never even checked her references. Just knowing that she had watched the Zoni triplets had been enough for me.
Maybe that was a mistake, I think, as I continue through the bedroom to the entrance of our bathroom. There, in the silence, an uneasy feeling settles on me. Our bathroom was renovated sometime in the eighties, when pink tile was in vogue. Whoever owned the house did a cheap job. They installed an oversize Jacuzzi tub that’s impossible to clean and a toilet that grumbles for a full five minutes after you flush it. It’s on our list of things to fix.
But now the toilet is quiet.
Susan couldn’t have been using it, not recently.
Stop it, I tell myself. Maybe she was washing her hands. Or her face.
When I turn, I notice a slice of light under my closet door. I pull the door open and stare inside. My clothes hang as they always do. Nothing looks out of place. Did I forget to turn off the light this morning when I left? Maybe Cole was playing in here.
“I’m taking off,” Susan calls from the hallway. “There’s a pot roast in the oven.”
I rush to the hall. “Thank you, Susan. You didn’t have to do that.”
She stops halfway down the landing and gives me a little smile. “Oh, it’s my pleasure. I know how busy you are, and it’s not easy with Mark working late.”
I nod as if I already knew this. “Right.”
“He called about an hour ago. Said he couldn’t reach you.”
Now I remember. The call I sent to voice mail while I was meeting with Detective Khoury. I forgot to listen to his message. Still, for some reason I can’t quite pinpoint, I am irritated that he passed the message on through Susan.
“You or Cole weren’t in my closet for any reason, were you?” I ask, hoping to sound casual and not accusatory. “Maybe playing hide-and-seek or something?”
She blinks twice. “No.”
“It’s just that the light was on. I’m sure I shut it off this morning.”
Susan frowns. “Is everything all right, Allie? You look exhausted, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
I feel my eyes widen. What has she heard? It’s naive to think some gossip has not reached her ears. “Everything’s fine. Good night, Susan.”
I let Cole watch television with dinner, something I am normally loath to do, while I surf the internet. To distract myself, I try to read an article that Leah sent me on the four styles of parenting and how only one of them does not damage your children. It’s the usual clickbait nonsense, but I can’t focus enough to be outraged. Bits and pieces of the day swarm my mind like a sick collage. Mike firing me. Detective Khoury dismissing my concerns. Being accused of murder. My confrontation with Heather. I need to talk to Mark, but he won’t be home until late, so to calm my nerves, I pour myself a tall glass of cold sauvignon blanc, not even trying to hide it from Cole.
After Cole is in bed, I come back down and pour myself another glass as fortification while I do the dishes.
I once read a story about a happy couple that lived in a cute, little blue house for years until one morning, they came down to discover the kitchen had fallen into a sinkhole. By the late afternoon, the entire house had been swallowed, their lives vanished before their eyes.
That’s how this feels.
And the worst part is that I am unsure of what to do next. Especially without Mark here to guide me. He’s like my compass. I don’t know if I’ve always been this way, or if self-doubt is part of the legacy Paul left me.
I don’t trust my own instincts.
For years, I questioned whether I deserved to be in art school, whether I was really any good like he had said. Maybe that had been a lie, too, a part of the bigger lie: That I was special. That I was lovable.
Stop it.
I turn off the water. I need to distract myself. Watch something silly on TV. I slosh a bit more wine into my glass, promising myself that three’s the limit, and move through the house, switching on all the lights as I go. I feel safer this way, electricity bill be damned.
This is the first house I have lived in, except the one my family lived in before my father died. I don’t remember it, but I have a photo of the narrow blue wooden house. It stood in a neighborhood packed with them, all different colors, each one close enough to the others that you could lean out your kitchen window and pass a saltshaker to the person next door.
After my father died, everything changed. We moved to Connecticut and began a pattern of moving from apartment to apartment every few years. Sometimes we came home from school to see all our belongings packed and a lost look on Sharon’s face, like she had wandered in from some other life and didn’t know what she was doing. Other times, we moved in the middle of the night, all our clothes stuffed into giant black trash bags like we were sneaking out on our lives.
I blamed my mother at the time. Losing jobs, unable to make rent. But she was overwhelmed trying
