The spring peepers and their bright kettle whistle in the wetlands; a car on the mountain road—a drunk, maybe, taking the back way, the night way. Kay gazed out through the window above the kitchen sink as the dark moved in, soft as moss. Only the black silhouette of the hills retained relief against the star-lit sky; all else compressed into blackness. She took the hammer and butted the tap to turn it on.
Alice had carefully placed the hammer there; she had shown Kay and Michael the force necessary to turn the old iron tap on and then off. “My Al’ll be up to fix it any day,” she’d promised. Did it mean something, this broken tap, in a house of scrupulous repair? This house of coded secrets.
The water surged out warm on Kay’s hands, into the sink. A miracle fluid, miraculously made warm. She added the soap, frothed the bubbles. Other women had stood here, as she did now, a long line of women, a matriarchy, connecting back through this ritual of washing dishes, this solitary task.
She imagined those other housewives—the many wives of this house—their feet right where hers were planted, their hands as hers, dipping and sponging, caressing the plates and cutlery. They were not all resentful. Some liked the peace, and others had only the expectation of such work, they were born to it. Maria? What about Maria? Poised here in front of the mixing bowls she’d used to make Candice’s fudge. Maria treating herself to a lick of the sweet batter. Maria, who said, “Frank, honey, you need to fix this sink.” He kept everything else fixed.
The hammer lay there by the tap. Kay touched it. The hammer, the hammer. She turned it in her hand and put it down again. Marriage was like a hammer: you could build things with it or bludgeon each other to death. Marriage was like a hundred different things, but similes ultimately failed, because marriage was the air around the hammer, the air which held all words and deeds and feelings, breathed, thought, intended, everything unseen, everything existing and no longer existing, history, pre-history, dinosaurs, pond scum, star dust, the boundless, shifting, unavoidable, choking air of every single, merciless day. She had believed in the iron and steel of marriage, the substance, dense and defined, the bitterness, sourness of her sweat and words across the dinner table, the sunless steppe of their bed.
But marriage did not exist as a weight and a shape, it was a wish thrown into a well.
*
She knelt before the cupboard but didn’t open it. She had a suspicion the writing wasn’t there, she’d imagined it, projected it.
Slowly, then, she ran the nail file along the seams and popped the latch. The latch worked so fluidly, mounted by a careful, precise craftsman, the kind who kept tools in perfect order. The words were there, each expressing its own discrete menace.
DIRTY SQUEAL SQUEAL
DIRTY PIG SLIT YOU OPEN
“Hello, Frank,” she whispered as she edged herself in, on her hands and knees, now pressing her eye to the hole in the wallboard. There was nothing to see, darkness thick as felt.
“Mum?”
She startled. Why hadn’t she heard him? The floor was a minefield of creaks, and somehow Tom had traversed it without a sound.
“Mum, what are you doing?”
Trying to block the writing with her body, she began to slither out.
“Just thought there was a leak.”
“Oh,” Tom said, believing her, because he believed grown-ups, he was five. “Can I see?”
“It’s not very interesting, love. Just some pipes.”
“But can I see?”
Crawling out completely, she shut the door, replaced the laundry basket. “What are you doing up?”
“I had to pee.”
He shuffled forward, pulled down his pajama bottoms. She wondered at what point she wouldn’t stand in the room with him when he peed. And at what point she’d never see him naked again—that body she’d grown, birthed, bathed, wiped, caressed. She’d taught him how to urinate, how to clean his foreskin because Michael had been away. And yet it would be Michael who’d share his nakedness in years to come, man-to-man, peeing in the woods. Nothing prepares you for the retraction of intimacy, she thought. Just as nothing prepares you for the way it slams into you like a cast-iron skillet.
“Mum,” he spoke over the steady tinkle. He was very serious. “Do octopuses pee?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they do, won’t it just float up and get in their eyes?”
“They live in quite a lot of water, so maybe the pee would just disperse.”
“What does disperse mean?”
“Float away. Like if you pee in the pool, there’s such a little amount of pee and such a lot of water.”
“Hamish says they put special stuff in the pool so if you pee the water turns blue and everyone can see.”
“Grown-ups say that so kids won’t pee in the pool. But there’s no dye.”
Tom turned, looked up at her. “Really?”
“Grown-ups said the same thing to me when I was your age.”
“When’s Dad coming back?”
Because he was always there, even now, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a discussion about pee.
“I don’t know, love. Maybe not until London.”
“Can’t we stay here? I don’t want to go back.”
She knelt. “It’s not always summer here and the winters are very long. It gets very, very cold.
“We could have a fire.”
She kissed him. “Off to bed. You need your sleep for camp.”
His lean brown back, she watched, the shoulder blades protruding slightly, the dimples where the top of his buttocks tucked against the sacrum. He was miraculous.
Now she heard his footsteps on the wooden floor, the creak of the old bed as he got back in. She felt a sudden rush of fear, as she used to when they were babies, asleep, and she’d convinced herself they weren’t breathing. For how soft a baby’s breath, how vulnerable the child in sleep. For other children had slept in those beds, those sheets. Where were they?
Where, Frank? Kay thought, returning to that faint tremor in Nadine’s voice. The simple solution was to go to the police, express her concerns, and wipe her hands of it. But she wouldn’t—for the same reason she wouldn’t tell Michael: it was a story, she was possessive of it. She wanted to open the black garbage bag all by herself and see what was inside, right down inside.
It was difficult to type holding her phone above her head and Kay wondered how Michael had managed for all those hours, tapping and whispering. What dedication. To whom? Barb? Barbara as Michael called her, exotic accent on the final syllable.
After several awkward and unsuccessful configurations, she sat on the toilet’s tank, wedging the phone against the window. She glanced through her emails; there weren’t many aside from “Pearl Street” from Michael, possibly because she’d posted an automatic reply: We’re on vacation in a remote location with no phone or internet. It may take me a few days to respond.
Scrolling on to Skype, she trawled through her contacts, Julian, Marco, Teddy, Gina, a dozen or so people she didn’t remember or didn’t remember friending or who’d been part of her past life. Teddy was recently married, a glamorous German countess, so he was off the list. Marco? It had been too long; she didn’t know if he was still single or even where he was. She’d heard vague rumors that he’d gone off the rails and was teaching history at an elementary school in the Hebrides. Gina. Was in Afghanistan for Reuters. But Sam, for instance, Sam, of course, available. She hit video dial, it rang twice, and there he was, un-ironed, un-shaven. They peered at each other.
“Sam!”
“Kay, darlin’.”
“How are you, Sam?”
“Better than not at all. And you?”
“Good, yeah, well, we’re all well.”
He squinted at her through the camera. “Where the hell are you?”
“Vermont.”
“Vermont?” he looked perplexed. “Don’t they make a lot of cheese there?”
“Ha. We rented a house for the summer.”
“I can only see white tile. Are you sure you’re not in an asylum of some kind?”
“The bathroom. I’m in the bathroom. It’s the only place I can get reception.”
“You look great.”
“It’s the high pixilation. I’ve only got one bar of reception.”
He pushed his forelock back, appraised himself in his own image. “I look like shit.”
“Shit from a goat’s ass.”
“With diarrhea.”
“And a weeping STD.”
They laughed, it was so easy.
“Tell me about Vermont.”
“The kids love it. I’m writing.”
“Good. That’s good, isn’t it?”
She might imagine she was there with him, sitting in a coffee shop in London or Addis, their coats slung over the back of their chairs, half-eaten pastries on the table. How it had been for years. They were always half-flung from the broken world into the civilized one, the dust still on their shoes. She peered in at him.
“Where are you?” she said, instead of answering his question.
“Ali’s.”
“Christ, Ali’s! I can’t believe it’s still there. How is Ali?”
“Bitter, cantankerous.”
“And what’s the story?”
“South Sudan.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, indeed,” said Sam. “Aahhhhh. As in, ‘Open wide, this won’t hurt.’”
“At least it’s still considered a story.”
“They put Kanye West on the cover and me on page 36.” Sam shifted in the light of Ali’s Carpets and Internet and Kay could suddenly see his age. They’d been babies when they’d met, mid-20s, young, thrusting journalists, they strode across the continent. Sam’s face was lined, now, bags beneath his eyes.
“I heard about the Magnum award. Congratulations.”
“Sure,” he shrugged. “Only I’m not going to take that picture anymore.”
“But you will.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Nope.”
“Because you care, Sam, you care.”
“I’m going to become a professional ping pong player.”
Kay laughed. Then realized Sam was waiting for her to finish. “Oh, my God, you’re serious.”
“I got into playing at a refugee camp near Kigoma. Turned out I have natural talent. I’ve been getting into shape.”
“What kind of shape?”
“Shape. Toned muscle. Svelte. I’m svelte.” He smiled. “The resurrection of svelte self.”
They looked at each other, but she could only see this fuzzy version of him; his eyes were out of focus like the rest of him, and it wasn’t a metaphor, it was just poor bandwidth.
“Hey, Sam, I need to run something by you.”
“Sure.”
“I think something’s happened in this house, to the owners.”
Sam’s image froze for a moment. “What did you say? The link dropped.”
“In this house. The people who own it. I think they might be missing.”
“What do you mean, ‘missing’?”
She outlined the story—Ammon and Frank’s cupboard, Alice, the surgical bootie. Sam leaned back, arms crossed, “You know what I think?”
Kay waited.
Skype made a little whoop and Sam vanished, a black screen, then a message popped up. Please wait while we get your call back.
He came back, he was saying something about camping.
“What? You’re breaking up.”
Sam flickered, the video went out. Instead, Sam typed a message:
They’re camping in Alaska.
She dialed again, several times, but the connection kept dropping out. And then Sam was off-line. The generator had broken down or run out of fuel or Ali hadn’t paid the phone bill and Egypt Telecom had cut him off. Sam was pushing back his chair, finishing his dark, sweet Arabica coffee, he was stepping out into the street, into Cairo, into the blare of horns and nightlife, tea-sellers and pick-pockets, the air so thick with diesel fumes he could feel it brush against his face like an animal pelt.
For 15 years, she’d been stepping out of that door, into that street, writing, documenting, reporting. All those words, all those miles. She wrote about one war, and when it stopped or the editors lost interest, she waited for another. She’d felt so necessary, the work so imperative. Now the dirty, hot roaring world carried on without her and the Wilsons were camping in Alaska. Or they’d gone to a beach house in Maine. Or even simpler: to their cabin in Granby so they could rent out this house for money.
She slid down off the toilet’s tank, sitting on the lid, pressing the phone to her forehead. She could not account for what she felt: an unhinging. She was not so certain of the seam between fact and narrative. Words were malleable. This house may be secluded or isolated, it may be haunted or merely empty. It was a matter of the adjective. The interpretation was hers; the words were spells. The Wilsons were in Alaska, they were keeping themselves to themselves. Or they had disappeared—they had dispersed, floated away.
And here she was, keeping herself to herself. If she and the children disappeared, how long would it be until Michael noticed? A month? Six weeks? He was on his way to a remote mining camp in Côte d’Ivoire, there’d be no internet. He might call on the sat phone from time to time, leaving message after message. He’d believe she wasn’t replying out of pique. No one was expecting to hear from her. Parents, friends, anyone who emailed her. We’re on vacation in a remote location with no phone or internet. It may take me a few days to reply.