Paul Tremblay
After dinner, there was enough sunlight left to pretend we had more time to our Sunday. I suggested to my wife Linda that we walk the mile or so to the local dairy farm for ice cream. We had yet to go that spring, or, we had yet to walk to the farm to get our own ice cream. It’s possible – scratch that – probable that some foggy number of weeks prior we had sent one of our two kids to fill our sugar fix. I suppose in the eyes of state and federal law Cal and Elly were technically adults, but they were young enough to remain financially umbilicalled to us. Cal would graduate from his college on the opposite coast in less than a month and Elly, a high school senior, was out with friends.
I almost pitched the walk to Linda as a preview of our fast-encroaching empty nesters’ destiny, but she was already in the throes of the tomorrow-is-Monday blues, so I didn’t pile on. Linda agreed to the walk, but without much, or any, enthusiasm. Was it the company or was she considering what the sugary dose of dairy might digestively wreak later in the evening’s soft gloam? She rolled her eyes at the ‘soft gloam’ quip. Deservedly so.
We left our small dog, Molly, at home. Molly wasn’t a fan of crowds, other dogs, or walks. She had never liked walks, but now, with her golden years descending as quickly as an autumn sun at dusk, she downright loathed them. No one in the family, myself included, was willing to verbalise the mundane yet depthless horror at how old and creaky Molly was getting.
So, it was just me and Linda. We walked, heading uphill and north – north if our house was the centre of a compass – through a suburban neighbourhood we knew well. That is to say, we knew it physically well. I could draw a map of the streets, but we didn’t know any of the actual human neighbours. We weren’t aloof or snooty – definitely not snooty, anyway. Our lack of conviviality with our neighbours to the north was more a quirk of happenstance and direction. Our kids made friends by coasting their bikes downhill instead of pedalling up. I don’t intend that as a metaphor for their work ethic or future prospects. Not everything means something else, right? But, writing this now, I’m afraid the opposite is true. Maybe we need a new, better word to describe the slippery things we claim as true.
With no kids, no dog, no neighbours to chat up as we ambled past house after house, Linda detailed the latest shit pile the gaggle of old, out-of-touch white men, who comprised the board of directors for their chain of local seafood restaurants, had dumped on her all-women marketing department. It was a slight variation of a common theme at her workplace. Once her indignation and moral stance was clearly stated for the continuing record, she told me about another streaming true crime show, one of many that she referred to as her ‘murder shows.’ I didn’t have much to add to the one-sided conversation. I was a listener, or the listener. That was my role in our relationship, and, frankly, it was my role in my handful of other close adult relationships. I used to think the people who were talkers, or tellers, could somehow sense I was a listener by just looking at me, as though reading the fine print on a nametag.
About a half-block away from the always-busy Bay Road, I saw the house first. We were across the street, the only side of the street that had a sidewalk, and I pointed out the house like I’d spotted a tiger and we had to be careful, make no sudden movements.
We stopped and stared at a modestly sized, boxy, white Colonial, not that different in terms of design than the other houses on the sleepy side street. Two storeys tall, the second floor had three windows; stacked below those were two more windows and the painted black front door. The only remarkable thing about the place was that its wild, overgrown grass and weeds were knee-high on me, and thigh-high on Linda. The abutting properties had well-manicured lawns kept as tight and neat as a fascist’s haircut, which made the house with the rain-forest lawn stick out even more.
I asked, “Did the owner die? Foreclosure?” I just about wished death on whomever lived there, or once lived there, but not out of malice. At least death fit into the natural order of things, which was a weird way to put it. Everyone died eventually, right? But foreclosure? Talk about a fucking nightmare. In our insanely cruel economy, in which debtors were scythed like wheat stalks, all it took to lose your home was a little bad luck plus a wrong decision or two, the kind of wrong decision that had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. What do you do and where do you go when your home was taken away? I didn’t even want to consider those what ifs.
We crossed the street, slowly, not wanting to stir up the tiger in the tall grass. We swapped hushed I-don’t-knows and does-anyone-still-live-theres. This house had been on our kids’ trick-or-treat route in ye olde days, but I couldn’t remember who had opened the door, or if the door had opened at all. Maybe it was one of those houses who left the lights off, not wanting to be bothered. Maybe it was one of those houses my kids told scary stories about.
Linda said, “Ooh, there’s a note taped to the front door.” She’d perked up. This new mystery was way more exciting than our walk through the ’burbs for pricey-but-worth-it ice cream.
“It’s a no-mow manifesto,” I said.
Linda twisted up her face in a what-are-you-an-asshole? expression. But I initially thought it meant what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about? They were similar and common looks, in my defence. I started rambling through a wholly unnecessary explanation of the no mow movement – gas mower and chemical fertiliser fuelled lawn maintenance being bad for the environment.
Linda interrupted. “I know what no mow means.” She stepped ahead of me, almost onto an entrance for the driveway that carved a half-circle through the overgrown front yard. “Let’s see what the note says.”
“What if someone is home?” Yeah, I didn’t want to trespass onto the homeowner’s potential misery, but it was more I didn’t want to trespass onto the property. I was a hopeless rule follower.
“No cars in the driveway.” Linda was not a hopeless rule follower. At last year’s college reunion, she had broken into her old dorm to see her freshman year room. I had waited and paced outside the dorm. She had later emerged victorious and disappointed with me.
The note was taped to the inside of a glass storm door that shielded the wooden one. The note was yellowed at its edges. I assumed it had been there for a while. I asked, “How long has the house been like this?” which I knew neither of us could answer. Even from that distance, I saw there was line after line of handwriting filling the note.
Linda said, “I know it makes me a bad person, but I want to read it.” The way she said it, she was already reading the note in her head.
“How about on the way home? The ice cream line is getting longer by the second.” I cowered back across the street and I was surprised that Linda followed me without running to the stoop and reading the note first.
On the final leg of our trek, we risked middle-aged life and limb traversing Bay Road. The posted speed limit was 40 mph, so add another five to ten mph for the vast majority of drivers. There were no sidewalks, only thin road shoulders and thinner patches of dirt and grass along the outside of fenced properties until we hit the farm. Linda marched forward, heedlessly on the shoulder, pressing her luck, and I couldn’t help but imagine a driver futzing with their cellphone and then swerving – and it wouldn’t take much of a swerve – onto the shoulder, scooping Linda up and away. I walked as far off-road as I could, even when it meant losing my head in low hanging tree branches. That we used to navigate this stretch of road with our kids when they were little, clutching their impossibly small hands that didn’t always clutch back because they wanted to be on their own and were in a rush to walk balanced across the top of a stone fence right before the farm, seemed beyond reckless in retrospect.
* * *
Crescent Ridge Dairy Farm, where a kiddie cup was a small, a small was a large, and large was lactose intolerance. Cars jammed the parking lot and the lines behind the serving windows blobbed into a formless crowd. We played the losers’ roulette of which window line to wait in. The reality of the wait-length dampened our ice cream enthusiasm, such as it was. I was glad we weren’t any of the younger parents with impatient kids in tow, so clearly and loudly done with waiting. I couldn’t blame the kids. I was done with waiting too, and since my own kids weren’t with me, I didn’t have to worry about modelling patient behaviour. I could say shit like, “We always pick the wrong line,” and, “The kid working our window is taking his sweet ass time,” and, “Selfish fuckers are getting frappés. Rome was built in less time than it takes to make a frappé.” I counted the families ahead of us and I monitored the progress of the other lines as though I was an actuary, and I sighed, loudly.
Linda, as always, was more stoic in the face of the endurance test. She enjoyed my acting like a brat because she would appear more adult by any comparison. She asked if I wanted to switch lines when I grumbled that the one to our right was moving faster. I pouted, and I memorised the faces and clothing of people in the other lines, all to be forgotten later.
The sun completed its trip west and it got dark quickly. Finally, after forty minutes, we made it to the window counter. My order of chocolate chip with rainbow sprinkles didn’t sound ridiculous at all. Since we’d be eating and walking, I asked for a cup with my cone. Which really wasn’t necessary as I’d eat most of the ice cream before we left the parking lot. Linda always marvelled, and was slightly annoyed, at how quickly I ate my ice cream.
I’d forgotten about the house and the note as we flowed in the evening’s current, until we drifted to a stop at the outer arc of the half-circle driveway. Our plastic cups were the only tangible evidence that we hadn’t stayed rooted to that spot and stared at the house. The overgrown grass wavered in a breeze. The note was a rectangular shadow taped to the storm door. All but one of the house’s windows were dark. On the second floor, there was one lamp on, the weak yellow light blurred by a lace curtain.
I said, “Light’s on. Maybe someone is home.”
“Sitting alone in the drawing room upstairs?” Linda asked.
“So Gothic. What’s a drawing room?”
“No one’s home,” Linda said. “That light’s on a timer to scare off would-be burglars.”
“Or would-be note readers. Does anyone say ‘burglar’ anymore? Do they use that word in your murder shows?”
Linda handed me her half-eaten, soupy cup of ice cream, a wordless statement of intent to read the note.
I said, “You can’t. What if they’re home?”
She was already walking away from me, or, that is, toward the house’s front stoop. Playing coy, she said, “What if who’s home?”
“You know, they. The house people.”
Linda didn’t respond. I risked a glance at the lit-up window. And it was only a glance. I was convinced the longer I stared, the more likely someone would appear in the window and the expression on that person’s face would most certainly be a horror.
I wanted to walk away, leave her there by herself, but I knew that would be unforgivable. I looked up and down the street to see if any other house people inside other houses were watching. In the full dark, the street was deserted, incongruously so, given the proximity of Bay Road and the crowded farm.
I wanted to suggest that we come back tomorrow, after work, because then we’d be too tired and defeated to do that on a Monday, so we’d put off the walk to the note house for another day, week, year, however long enough for whomever the note was meant to finally show up, read it, take it away, and then clean up the yard so it looked like everyone else’s and I wouldn’t have to think about this house and the note ever again.
Linda opened the storm door, gently, but there was a conspiratorial creak of rusty hinges. She looked once at the black wooden front door, maybe imagining it bursting open to reveal a Leatherface-adjacent nightmare. That’s what I was imagining, anyway. With the storm door propped open against her hip, she peeled the corners of the note free from the glass. She couldn’t read it in the dark so she took her phone from her back pocket and aimed the flashlight at the text. Judging by the time she spent spotlighted on the stoop with the note, she read it carefully.
I paced a rut into the pavement and had a conversation with myself about why I was a buzzkill, but also about why I was right to be upset and why Linda was wrong; nothing I’d ever dare say out loud. Those conversations with myself never ended in hurt feelings.
She finished reading and re-fastened the note to the storm door. Linda walked back down the drive and I watched the lamp-lit window for a face, knowing that people got caught doing inexplicable things in the new, irreparable moments after.
Linda walked past me and I had to jog to catch up. I thought she was angry or annoyed or disappointed, but now, I’m not sure what she was thinking or feeling.
I said, “Your ice cream is melting,” and held her cup out to her. She took it. I turned and gave the note house one last look as it receded into the local horizon. I expected more lights to come on, and maybe the sound of an opening door. Neither of those things happened. Once we turned the corner, I presumed we were safe and I dared ask, “So what did the note say?”
“If you really want to know, you should go read it,” she said.
I scanned for sarcasm or humour but I couldn’t find either. She sounded distant, or detached. Detached is the best fit here. The words she’d said and who she was and what she was thinking, were separate, had been separated.
I said, “Wait. You’re not going to tell me?”
“Nope.”
Aiming for a levity that hid my exasperation I said, “That’s the last time I take you for ice cream.”
No response.
“You’re really not going to tell me?”
She shook her head.
“I was your faithful lookout,” I said. “I had your back and you’re not going to tell me what was in the note? That’s cold.”
She shrugged and swirled the remnants of her ice cream with a plastic spoon.
“That’s not fair,” I said.
Linda laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh, or it wasn’t her laugh, exactly. Though my memory is tainted by what has since come to pass.
She said, “Life isn’t fair.”
We didn’t full-on argue very often in our going on thirty-year relationship, and I don’t say that in a braggy, we-were-so-perfect way. Sometimes arguments were avoided with one or both parties choosing to swallow our resentments or perceived slights instead of talking it out. When we did full-on argue, it was almost always over what we had said to our kids and how it had been said. When I say ‘we,’ I mean me. I’m trying to avoid the phrase disciplining your kids because it’s such an awful phrase. Our last big row was years in our rearview mirror. The funny part is that I don’t remember what our daughter Elly’s request had been, one I had deemed unreasonable. I do remember saying, “No,” and Elly then repeatedly asking, “Why?” and saying, “It’s not fair.” Instead of explaining the rationale behind my parental edict I pronounced, “Life isn’t fair,” with all the dismissive weight I could muster. Linda rushed into the room and admonished me for not explaining the why to Elly and for my tone, while Linda used the same tone on me. Everything rolled downhill from there.
Without relitigating the past, which I have no interest in doing as there’s enough regret within these pages already, Linda’s use of “Life isn’t fair” during our walk home on that strange night, felt like a purposeful call back to that argument. I refused to take the bait, and instead pouted and simmered and seethed like the child I still imagined myself as sometimes, until those feckless emotions turned into something heavier and akin to sadness that could sink inside of me and stay at the bottom.
When we got home, Linda went to the living room, sat with our dog Molly on the couch, and watched murder shows. I retreated to my laptop, pretended to work on my novel and instead checked emails and social media feeds that didn’t need to be checked, all the while thinking about the stupid note and how it had put us both in strange, pissy moods. Later, I wandered upstairs to our bedroom with a book, resolving to convince Linda to tell me what was written in the note the next morning. I read maybe about ten pages before the book flagged in my hands as I was nodding off. I rolled over to Linda’s empty side of the bed, turned on her night lamp, then rolled back to my side and turned mine off and quickly fell asleep. I woke up a few hours later to pee. When I returned to bed, Linda was in her spot, lying on her side, facing away from me. I half-patted, half-rubbed Linda’s shoulder twice, and I went back to sleep.
At some point in the early, night-stained morning hours, when I was still mostly dead to the world, the mattress creaked as Linda’s weight lifted away. This and what follows might not be a real memory, but something I’ve imagined and willed into being. I can admit that, yet these sleep-hazed memories are real to me, as real as any other memory. I was lying on my back, eyes shut, and Linda leaned close to my head and whispered, “I have to go to the office.”
I woke later with my phone’s alarm. Molly was snoring and burrowed behind my bent knees. Molly didn’t start off in bed with us, but Elly would drop her into our bed before she went to school. I got up, threw on joggers and a sweatshirt, plucked Molly from the bed and carried her downstairs. Because of lower back issues she wasn’t supposed to walk down the stairs on her own anymore. I set about the morning routine, which included letting Molly outside and making both of us breakfast. It hit me as I sat at the kitchen counter, hunched over my bowl of cereal, that sometime during the morning routine I’d noticed something was off without knowing what it was. I looked around the kitchen and adjoining dining room and Linda’s work laptop was open on the dining room table. The table was her workspace. Linda had been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, but she did occasionally get called into the office, like today. But why did she leave her laptop at home?
I abandoned my cereal and wandered over to her space. Folders and notebooks and her calendar were spread out on the table. She hadn’t packed any of it up. Her shoulder bag full of more work stuff was still there, too. I thought I could maybe score some points by offering to bring her the laptop and bag. I took out my cellphone and texted her, “Did you forget something this morning?” In the abject quiet of the house, I heard the unmistakeable buzz of a phone upstairs. Was it Elly’s phone? No, Elly would sooner forget a limb than her phone. I stood still, and listened, and the house’s emptiness expanded inside of me. I typed another message to Linda: “Did you forget your phone too? Wrong answers only.” I paused, then hit send. Somewhere upstairs, a phone buzzed. I ran up to our bedroom and found Linda’s phone on her nightstand. I picked it up, touched the screen, and my two texts bubbled up before the locked screen went black again. I ran downstairs to the first floor, and didn’t stop. I ran further down, into and then through the basement and out a side door and her car was gone. Yeah, sure, it was technically possible that she went into the office forgetting to take all her work stuff and her phone, but the instant I saw that empty spot in our driveway, that was when my memory of what she’d said to me earlier that morning, if she had said anything to me at all, changed from “I have to go to work,” to “I have to go.”
* * *
I’ll spare you the details of my texts and panicked calls to Linda’s office (there were no in-person meetings scheduled for her department that day) and friends and family and local hospitals and eventually the police. I’ll spare myself a full accounting of the thirty-six hours over which it took me to convince the police that they needed to look for her, that something must’ve happened to Linda, that she wouldn’t just up and leave us. I’ll spare myself a full accounting of the thirty-six hours after the initial thirty-six hours, over which I was suspected of foul play, which, objectively speaking was fair enough given the appalling frequency with which men, husbands in particular, murder and disappear women. Those thirty-six hours were long enough to cause an online stir given my status as a minor writer. I ceased being a suspect when a gas station about a mile and a half down the road had surveillance footage of Linda pulling her car next to a fuel pump and minutes later driving away alone at 6:14 a.m. There was no question it was Linda in the video, with the clearest images of her being when she first got out of the car. There was a rectangular white patch with some sort of writing above the breast of her green jacket. I knew the coat but didn’t remember that it had a patch. There wasn’t a focused, clear shot of the patch despite Linda standing in unobstructed view of the camera as she pumped gas. The video quality degraded, went fuzzy the longer it played. No one explained to me why or how the footage became so grainy. By the end, the Linda climbing back into her car was blurred beyond recognition. It was as though she was disappearing on camera as we watched. After the gas station and one ATM stop at which she withdrew one-thousand dollars, Linda never used that bank card again.
Other than the gas station video and online conspiracy and rumour, there was no trace of her. Her car didn’t turn up. Her cellphone records and email and socials showed zero evidence of Linda having carefully pre-planned leaving the house that Monday morning. Elly, Cal, and I wavered between imagining the worst had happened to her and hoping that she would return home. Given there was no reason that we could discern for her to go to the office that morning, and given the symbolism of leaving behind her work stuff and her phone, it became more plausible that she’d purposefully left us behind too. With each excruciating minute that passed without her contacting someone, anyone, was a condemnation of who we were, a judgement on something we had done or not done, which sent us circling the drain of the where did she go? and who did she run to? questions. Elly and Cal blamed themselves for her running away and they blamed me. I blamed me too, obviously. But mostly, I blamed the note she’d read. I had to.
* * *
Those first days and weeks after her disappearance, time was immeasurable and meaningless. It was as though Linda had fallen into the plot of one of her true crime shows, and I was a feckless character from one of the stories that I had written.
One night, I fell asleep on the couch with the television on. When I twitched awake, I reflexively checked my phone for a message from Linda that wasn’t there. Instead of retreating upstairs to our bedroom, I walked out the front door. Everything outside the house was ambered in dark. The new spring leaves on the trees were as still as the stars dotting the night sky, forming their ineffable pattern. My footfalls and shallow breathing were intrusions upon the entropic reality of things. I was supposed to remain inside my house and sleeping, or trying to sleep. Instead, I was a glitch in the system, a blank spot in the universal mind. I was afraid that my transgression would be corrected somehow, but it was a thrilling kind of afraid that I clutched to, because at least I was feeling something other than grief, helplessness, and sorrow. I wondered if Linda felt what I was feeling and it was what had spurred her forward, or outward. Despite our thirty years together, I didn’t really know what she was thinking or feeling.
I walked past the note house before realising I had. It no longer had a note taped to its front door and its yard had been mowed and landscaped. The note house looked like any other slumbering house on the street. There was one light on. That same lamp shining weakly through a second-floor window.
I stared at the window, an attempt at defiance, but an aimless one. I wasn’t afraid of a face popping into view to look down at me, and if this was a story I’d written, my face would be peering down at me. I was afraid the window would remain empty forever. I stared, stuck in my own kind of amber, until tears turned everything blurry. Then I walked back home.
* * *
The following happened in the years before I saw Linda again.
Cal stayed in Los Angeles after graduation, moving into a small apartment with two friends. Linda and I had some money saved up, and I sent a large chunk of it to Cal to pay off his student loans. When I got back from my ten days in Los Angeles, I decided that I would not return to teaching in the fall, despite our household losing Linda’s income. After the years of pandemic teaching and my imagining a cacophony of whispers about Linda from students and faculty, I couldn’t face the classroom. Also, my stubbornly deciding to write full-time at an inopportune moment in my life was my way to fake that I had some control and to say fuck you to the universal mind. Moreover, I wanted to be home for Elly if she decided to stay home and take a gap year before going to college. I reasoned I could get another teaching job in the future, if needed.
That first summer passed without any clue to Linda’s whereabouts or fate. Elly ended up going to her upstate New York liberal arts college in September. And I was glad she did. But the college didn’t help us out as much as I’d hoped, given I was a single parent with a writer’s twitchy, unreliable income. The college offered Elly more loans instead of cutting us a serious tuition break. I insisted that Elly turn down the loans. Like her brother, I didn’t want her saddled with crushing debt. I told her not to worry, I’d figure out a way to pay it.
The rest of the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency money Linda and I had saved up went to Elly’s first-year tuition. After that I took out a sizeable equity loan on the house, which doubled my mortgage payment. Elly’s tuition became even more expensive because we were no longer on Linda’s or my old school’s shitty health insurance. The HMO I bought through the Writer’s Guild featured a daily double of expensive premiums and high deductibles, plus it didn’t fully cover Elly because she was attending school out of state. The college insisted I purchase a supplemental plan for $2,500 per year or she wouldn’t be able to enrol.
My writing didn’t go well despite my being home full time. Much to my publisher’s displeasure, I stopped using social media to interact with readers and promote my writing. That was another fuck you to the universal mind, or another type of hive mind. Sales and marketing couldn’t parse that I deleted accounts with a decent number of followers because the messages and tags and posts and DMs from trolls and randos wasn’t good for my already-cratered mental health. Thirteen months after Linda disappeared, my next novel was published. According to my publisher, the novel had a soft opening as a direct result of my online hiatus. I was contractually obligated to write one more book for them.
For about a year post-disappearance, friends and family regularly called or stopped by our house or invited me out to dinner. I welcomed their emotional support and attention. But I could tell I was wearing on them. Being around me was a chore. I didn’t have any news to share about Linda and my grief was a millstone they had to help me carry. I didn’t have a sunny, positive outlook to make them feel better by proxy. One night, after having a few too many beers while at dinner with Larry and Jody, a couple Linda and I had met when Cal joined Little League, I told them about the note. I matter-of-factly told them I blamed whatever was written on the note for Linda’s disappearance. I said it all in a rush and punctuated with a nervous laugh that turned into uncontrollable tears. The way Larry and Jody looked at me, or couldn’t look at me, stopped me from telling other people about the note. But I thought about the note all the time, especially when I was supposed to be working on my next book. The note, the note, the note. Cutting my grief and confusion with obsession over the note was how I would continue surviving my one and only life.
After that night out with Larry and Jody, I made excuses to everyone and anyone as to why I couldn’t talk on the phone or have them over or go to dinner. Everyone did take my no for an answer. I don’t blame them. No one liked to be around someone who was receding, pulling away. I did it for them as much as I did it for myself. I didn’t want to take any of them with me.
Our dog Molly died somewhere in the middle of Elly’s college years, and I can’t write another word about that. Those college years went quick, and so did the money from the equity loan and my old school’s retirement IRA from which I’d also borrowed. Elly moved to Portland, Maine, with two friends after graduation. I stubbornly stayed home. I couldn’t sell our house, even if I wanted to, as I owed more than what I could sell it for.
Eventually, I squeezed out enough pages for my last contractually obligated book, a book I turned in two years late. It was titled Lost and Found; plotless, metafictional, ambiguous, recursive, hopeless, with morose, irredeemable characters, according to my editor. Instead of dickering over edits and changes that would be required to make the thing remotely palatable to a general readership, my publisher dropped it into the world with zero marketing behind it. There wasn’t any need to explain its soft sales opening this time.
* * *
About a month ago (or a month from the writing of this note), a well-meaning friend insisted that I take part in a library panel discussion in central Connecticut. I’d been saying no to event invites for years, but I said yes to this one. The long drive appealed to me, and I fantasised driving past the library’s highway exit and into the next state and the state after that. Of course, reality struck back, and I got stuck on I-95 traffic, the kind that killed wanderlust and spirit-of-the-road vibes.
I exited the highway, and with the aid of GPS, wormed my way through cookie-cutter suburb after suburb toward the library. This was not how I’d imagined disappearing onto the wide, open road. I might as well have been driving loops around the neighbourhoods in my own shitty town. It was downright depressing.
I didn’t make it to the library because I had to pee like a racehorse. I pulled into a random shopping plaza’s parking lot. I walked/jogged into the chain supermarket, and me and my middle-aged, balky prostate made a beeline to the restroom. With a piss-my-pants crisis narrowly averted, I headed for the exit and was about to step through the automatic doors when I saw Linda pushing a grocery cart around the end of an aisle.
I’d seen wishful-thinking flashes of Linda elsewhere, ones that had proved false as soon as I’d paused for a double-take. But this wasn’t one of those flashes, wasn’t my mind manipulating an image into what I wanted to see. I saw Linda. It was her.
I sped-walked through the front registers and dodged sales displays and other shoppers. I found her more than halfway down a canned goods aisle. Her back was to me as she pushed her cart past a man stocking the shelves. She wore jeans and the same green coat she had worn when she left, but I couldn’t see if it had a patch on the front. Her brown hair was streaked with grey. She swivelled her head, eyeing the shelves, showing each side of her profile, a profile I knew better than my own.
My heart stopped and filled at the same time. I jogged toward her on unsteady legs as though mired in the molasses of a dream. I was scared without being able to explain why I was scared. I had fantasised about this moment and had imagined crying tears of relief, regret, joy, and recrimination, but I had not imagined fear. My lizard brain clamoured at me to turn around, return to my car, drive to the library, and pretend I had seen a stranger who looked like Linda. But I kept moving toward her and I was about to call out her name when a white man, the one who was stocking the shelves, stepped between us. He was my height and build, and as I mumbled, “Sorry,” and “Excuse me,” his movements mirrored mine so I could not pass him.
His smile was neither friendly nor helpful, and his teeth were as grey as newspaper. His hairline was at low tide, and when I quit attempting to move around him, he rubbed the top of his male-pattern baldness head. The close-cropped black hairs encircling the islands of his ears looked as though he’d spraypainted them on. “Can I help you?” he asked.
I said, “No, thank you, just trying to catch up to—”
“I don’t believe,” he said, and paused to arch both eyebrows, which looked as painted on as his hair. I had the urge to press a finger into the ink as he continued, “that you are familiar with this place.” He sounded like his throat was full of something other than words, like he was holding down his gorge. He swallowed heavily after speaking.
“Yeah, well, I don’t need help,” I said. He continued mirroring my movements so I couldn’t navigate past him without ploughing through him. Dumb, animal anger bubbled up and I shouted, “Get out of my way, please!” Please said with all the inchoate fuck you I could muster; a poor camouflage for my growing unease.
His eyebrows collapsed over eyes that were so deeply brown as to be almost purple. “Are you sure?” he asked and swallowed again.
“Yes,” I said.
He wore tan khaki pants, a white shirt with a blank white apron. There was no name or logo of the supermarket etched on the apron. A nametag over his breast read Welcome, my name is and below that an array of black bars, slashes and dots, the sum of which, when viewed as a whole, turned into static in my head. It was as though I’d read sheet music and could hear the dreadful song.
He spread his arms and said, “We’ve rearranged some items.” He didn’t quite roll the double r’s in rearranged, but he lingered over and across the expanse of the word, as though speaking it was an unfathomable pleasure. Then he said, continuing to enunciate carefully, whatever it was he really meant hiding in the low grass of the syllables, “While we acknowledge previous items of preference will be difficult to find, we ask for your continued patience, and we ask that you be mindful of our work.” The man tapped his skull by the temple with two fingers, turned, spinning on his heels, and returned to stocking the shelves.
My dizzy, slouching shuffle away became an awkward, staggering jog by the aisle’s end. Succumbing to an impulse similar to the urge to smear what I assumed were his painted-on eyebrows, I flashed out a hand and knocked cans of beans off the shelves.
Linda was not in the next aisle, nor was she in the one after that, and I wanted to scream. She wasn’t in the freezer section or perusing the baked goods or at the deli. She wasn’t back in the fresh fruit and vegetables area and she wasn’t waiting in check-out. I paused at the registers. The workers all wore red aprons, not white, emblazoned with the supermarket logo and advertisements from local businesses. They wore nametags with their handwritten first names.
I went outside and wandered the parking lot. Linda wasn’t there either.
I went back into the store and walked the aisles in order. When I made it to the aisle in which I saw her, Linda wasn’t there. The man with the blank white apron wasn’t there. The cans I’d knocked to the linoleum had been returned to the shelves. One of the cans that had fallen was dented.
I continued searching the aisles until the supermarket manager and security guard asked me to leave. I asked to see their surveillance footage to look for my missing wife, and I have to assume that because my manic request was a harried and wild-eyed demand, they refused and asked me to leave. I wanted to sit in my car and survey the parking lot but the guard was now joined by a cop, and they were both watching me so I left. I didn’t drive to the library event and instead drove to another small town’s supermarket and wandered the aisles until I was asked to leave again.
Later, much later, I returned home, and pulling into the driveway, even in the dark, I noticed that my grass was getting tall, well over my ankles in height, and needed to be cut. I joked to the Linda in my head that maybe I would write a no-mow manifesto and post it on my door. The Linda in my head didn’t think the call-back joke was funny. Then, the Linda in my head was replaced by the man in the white apron and indecipherable nametag, and he grinned at me. I wandered my empty house in the dark until one of the lamps in the living room went on. That timer had been set by Linda and I’d never changed it. With the automated flash of light came an idea. Maybe the slashes, bars and dots on the man’s nametag was what was on the note that Linda had read, and maybe also written on the white patch that was on her green coat when she was at the gas station. Maybe those symbols created some type of code, the knowledge of which was as dangerous and irreparable as the fevered sets of equations that allowed for the weaponised splitting of the atom.
As fearful as I was about stumbling onto such a mind and reality warping code, I spent two days and nights attempting to replicate the slashes and dots from the man’s nametag. I think I got close once because staring at what I’d written reproduced a static noise of a dead radio station in my head. Granted, the noise was at a much lower level than what I’d experienced in the supermarket, like groundwater low. I could only hear it if the house was totally silent. I tried changing and tweaking the symbols and scratches and the static went away. I was unable to make it louder.
I gave up trying to perfectly replicate the markings, and instead wrote the one that worked, or worked a little, onto an index card and safety-pinned the card over the front pocket of my jacket. I then spent the better part of two weeks wandering through supermarkets and malls and libraries and town and city parks and parking garages. The hope was my version of the note would be like, I don’t know, me placing a phone call to Linda, or even the awful man in the white apron, and they’d answer. But no one answered. I never saw either of them again.
However, I discovered that with the card fastened to my jacket I could haunt public spaces for hours and hours and I’d be left alone. No one asked if I needed help and no one asked me to leave. No one even looked at me. It was as though I wasn’t there.
* * *
I could make a pithy observation about these pages – and all writing in general, secret code or not – breaking the rules of time and space (i.e. you reading these pages in your present, which is my future and also, at the same time, my past), but I’m not feeling up to pithy.
I will leave these pages, this rather long note, in an envelope (the one you opened) taped to my former house’s front door. So as not to infect the family and friends I have left, I will leave this house and fully recede and lean into being forgotten. I cannot tell you, now, what a balm the idea of being forgotten has become.
You, the one holding this note, I don’t know what might or will happen to you. As ominous as that reads, maybe you can take comfort in the idea that none of us know what might or will happen to you, whether or not you’ve read this note. Life would be an unremitting horror, otherwise.
Yes, my house is in foreclosure. I assume you knew that already. You might’ve looked up the house online. Maybe you’re the nosy neighbour from a few doors down, who complains that the neglected yard is a terrible look for the neighbourhood and you believe you’re entitled to read what’s in the envelope taped to the door. Or you were walking through the neighbourhood, on the way to get ice cream, and judging by the yard’s neglect and the manilla envelope taped to the front door you put two and two together. I could come up with hundreds of scenarios attempting to explain why you are here. I’m a writer, after all. Maybe I’d hit on the correct one. Maybe I wouldn’t.
I’ve already shared some theories about what any of this means, and I have more, but they are only theories. They are not answers. I haven’t been able to figure out the exact connections, if any, between Linda and the note and the man with the weird, buzzy nametag and my own low-grade homemade version. I still don’t know what comprised the note Linda had read. I don’t know how the note works. At first, I suspected the note was some Monkey’s-Paw-like form of sharing misery, of attempting to shed it to others as evidenced by my economic downfall and my house now appearing just like the neglected house Linda and I had walked by. But I didn’t read that note so how did that misery get shared to me? I suppose the misery was shared to our family, but that’s not narratively satisfying. But this isn’t a narrative. Is it?
I am afraid that my insipid writer’s brain – one too often given to flights of worst-case-scenarios spun within the prism of postmodernism and metafiction – took a concatenation of real-life events that didn’t make any sense and puzzled the jagged pieces together into a narrative that I could better explicate, if not understand. I am afraid my own actions followed the rules of narrative. I am afraid I made the string of poor fiscal decisions so my economic crash could act as a narrative call back to the foreclosed note-house Linda and I had found. Assuming the note-house had been foreclosed, of course. I did not create nor fabricate the man stocking shelves at the grocery story, but I am afraid that, as he appears in these pages, he is an exaggeration, or an extrapolation. I’ve written other stories with characters experiencing static filling their heads due to exterior and possibly supernatural or extradimensional forces. I am afraid the reoccurring static-filled motif in my fiction has wormed its way into my real life because I wanted or needed it to.
Now, I do not believe or think the above paragraph is the truth, or even a partial truth. I mention it here to honestly acknowledge its slight possibility.
That the unending end of this note is nigh, and that, as a traditional narrative this ending being, perhaps, unsatisfyingly open, is a shred of hope you and I should cling and clutch to. Because what I am most afraid of – and I can’t state this strongly enough – what I am deathly, pants-shittingly afraid of, is that the events of my life (and yours) and the people I love have been rearranged, have been moulded into narrative not by me but by the universal mind. Or worse, someone or a collection of someones – solipsistic, obdurate fools incapable of seeing the world beyond their fingertips – have hacked their way into the collective mind, have roughly and coarsely split our existential atoms.
I have to go.