The door to Jonah and Rebecca’s bedroom was shut.
“Is it normally shut?” Maurice asked. “We need to establish a baseline of your normal pattern.”
“We don’t have a pattern,” Jonah said. “It’s a door.”
Maurice took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to ease open the bedroom door.
The bed slowly materialized from the dimness, a ghostly Polaroid image.
Jonah choked on his breath.
On Rebecca’s side of the bed—which Maurice must have deduced from the creams and lotions on the bedside table—the comforter and sheets were tousled in a heap. On Jonah’s side—evidenced by the poetry chapbooks, lit mags, the hardbound Poe’s Collected Works, and an empty bottle of beer on the table—the comforter and sheets were undisturbed.
It was obvious only one person had slept in the bed the previous night; plainer still who that person was.
And wasn’t.
Maurice silently observed the room as if he were a museum visitor absorbing a tableau of ancient man. The silence seemed to jab a bony finger at Jonah: Where were you last night?
Maurice, using the handkerchief, flipped the switch on the wall to the left.
The room remained dark.
Jonah sensed an odd aura to the room, something wrong in the room. With the room. He could not pin it down.
“The ceiling light burned out,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to fix it.”
He’d had plenty of time. The bulbs were in the hallway closet five steps behind him. It would take thirty seconds to replace the bulb. Yet for weeks the light had remained dark. It was one of his many daily failings at upkeep that nagged him and exasperated Rebecca. Every time she came into the room at night, she’d hit the switch and—darkness. She’d stay mum, but in the milky hallway light Jonah would spot the infinitesimal flare of her nostrils as she stepped around the bed to click on her bedside lamp. Jonah intended to change the bulb. He just . . . he got immersed in his dissertation after dinner, working maniacally, and forgot. Which was more important: a damned lightbulb or his PhD needed for tenure?
Maurice stepped deeper into the room. “Where’d you sleep last night?” he said as he clicked on Rebecca’s lamp, using the handkerchief.
The harshness of the 150-watt bulb Rebecca preferred brutalized Jonah’s eyes. He winced; protozoan spots danced in his vision as Maurice worked a thumb along the inside waistband of his trousers.
Jonah had slept the night on Sally’s floor, awakened beside her in the morning. After the argument and several more beers he’d checked on Sally, lain on the floor beside her bed to rub her back. He’d fallen asleep, as he had scores of times. As had Rebecca. That he’d slept through the night on the floor was a consequence of his exhaustion from slaving over his dissertation, and the argument.
Come morning he’d woken and crept out of the dark room, never actually seeing Sally, just a lump of blankets, under which he’d assumed his daughter had slept. Where she had to have slept, because otherwise—
He shut down the corrupted thought.
“I slept on top of the covers,” Jonah said, the lie coming to him in an instant of self-preservation, not wanting his sleeping on Sally’s floor to be anything more than the . . . pattern it was. For himself and for Rebecca. “I got done working late and didn’t want to wake Rebecca. The comforter makes me roast anyway. So I slept on top.”
Maurice stared at him.
Jonah wondered if the unkind words he’d said to Rebecca had caused her to leave on her own with Sally. Not leave forever. Just for the evening. To cool down. Find perspective. It was more palatable a narrative than others, and his mind snatched the seed of it, let it germinate into plausibility, flourish into certainty. Fact.
One place he had not called to track down Rebecca: the Savoy Cinema. Sally and Rebecca adored movies; perhaps that’s where they were. Perhaps Rebecca had taken Sally to a movie to cool down. If so, they weren’t in peril. They were safe. That was all that mattered. He thought about telling Maurice, yes, we argued. And, now that he thought about it, that was why his wife and daughter were gone: Rebecca is taking time out with Sally to recalibrate. They’ve gone to the movies. They’ll be through the door any second. You can go. Call off the search. Leave me to welcome my wife and child back with gratitude and humility, and in the privacy we all deserve. No need to humiliate me more than I already am.
Jonah opened his mouth to speak, and would have, except Maurice, who stood at the opened closet door, looked back over his shoulder at Maurice, face fraught, and said, “What the hell is this?”