The cab driver has long gray hair in a plait and silver sleeper rings in both ears, a classic Willy Street sixties survivor, or casualty, take your pick. He’s already asked for extra directions, as if Madison is some sprawling metropolis and not a city of under a quarter million people, and he’s made his ritual little dig about the upscale West Side, as if it’s all Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive over here and not the American Mid-West 101. Although Claire doesn’t exactly live in the 101 tract, but on a sparsely inhabited tree-lined road in the heart of the UW Arboretum. The car pulls up outside the black iron gates of the old house. Claire doesn’t have her remote with her, so she gets out of the cab to open them by hand. The driver gets out too.
‘There’s a chain around it,’ he says.
The approach light clicks on. She’s never seen the heavy link chain before. A haunted house game the girls were playing, maybe. There’s no padlock, and it’s easily removed. She can see the lights of the house up the drive. The night air is crisp and refreshing after a day of hotels and flights and taxis, and the walk will do her good. She pays the driver and he gets her bag out of the trunk, then looks up and down the narrow, deserted road, the inky darkness almost glossy, like paint, a fragment of moon glowing dull, as if behind a veil.
‘You sure about this?’ he says.
‘Sure about what? You think I don’t know where I live?’ Claire points up the drive. ‘Look, the house lights are on.’
‘I didn’t know there were houses out here.’
‘Just little old us.’
The driver shrugs and smiles.
‘Well, you know where you’re going. No need to worry.’
‘That’s right,’ Claire says, smiling herself, suddenly glad to be safe home. And as she walks up the drive towards the welcoming lights of her hundred-year-old Queen Anne house, her fairytale house with its turrets and towers, she shakes her head a couple of times and actually says ‘No!’ out loud, followed by ‘Nothing!’ and ‘No problem!’ and ‘Fine, thank you!’ – not at the prospect before her but to banish what has just been, whatever it was, whatever Paul put in that damn card. It’s like she slipped and fell in the street and found her feet immediately and is marching on undaunted, daring anyone to question or commiserate, trying hard not to stumble again. Whatever happened in Chicago, stays in Chicago. That’s the official version now. Happiness? Jesus. She’s not a teenager any more. So she feels guilty. That’s her problem; don’t make it Danny’s, let alone the girls’. She’s nothing to feel guilty about anyway, not really. Not really. No problem, no problem!
The first glimmer she has is Mr Smith doesn’t bark when she turns her key. Normally, he brings the house down at the merest hint of a visitor, not angrily but with excitement. He should have started when he heard her footfall on the porch, or when she started talking to herself. But there isn’t a sound, not a scratch of his paws.
‘Hey, honey, I’m home!’ she says, with sitcom brightness, as she pushes the door open. If she had known that nothing would ever be the same again from this moment on, maybe she would have chosen her words with less irony. But change so often comes without warning, like the secret policeman’s dawn knock, and we rarely have our faces fixed or our stories straight to greet it.
The extent of what has happened is not so apparent in the hall, apart from the marks on the wallpaper where all the paintings have been removed, and the fact that the long red Ikea table that ran along one wall is gone. It’s when she leaves her bag down and moves into the living room – she remembers later feeling as if she was on castors, so involuntarily, so inexorably was she drawn in search of what’s no longer there. No battered old brown leather three-piece suite that they know is past its best but can’t bear to get rid of for sentimental reasons. No TV, no books, no bookshelves, no rugs on the floor, no art on the walls. Through to the dining room, and it’s as bare: the heavy-legged mahogany Chippendale table and matching chairs Danny insisted on keeping from his grandfather’s time are gone, as is everything else. Up the stairs, and yes, there it is, whatever it is, gone: the beds, the closets emptied, the girls’ toys and books and games, the rugs, the linen, gone, all gone, the lampshades.
She’s standing on the landing, empty rooms on either side of her, exposed gables above, the arched entrance to the tower ahead. She’s never seen the house like this. When they moved in, Danny’s sister Donna had been living here; before that, it was the family home, back through Danny’s grandfather. Sure, they – she – redecorated, stripped walls and polished floorboards and flung out dumpster loads of trash, but one room at a time. How hard she had fought to make their mark on it all, replacing heavy drapes with blinds, bulky old Victorian furniture with contemporary pieces, little by little working to open it up and modernize, to lay the ancestral ghosts and make it theirs, make it hers. Now it’s bare throughout, as if she has never lived here at all, as if no one has. In Chicago a day, mere hours ago, she found herself daring to wonder what it might be like to break free of what held her. Now it feels as if she made a wish, and it’s come true, and all she wants is what she has lost.
In the bathroom, the empty bathroom, she sits at the edge of the tub, breathing deeply, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, over and over again. Claire is a lapsed Catholic, which means she isn’t really religious, or hasn’t been for some time, but Jesus Christ Almighty, what the fuck is going on? She leans a hand on the mirrored door of a cabinet mounted above the bath, and it snaps open, and Claire almost cries with relief to see it full of stuff, their stuff, tins and tubs of talcum powder and Vaseline and calamine lotion and athlete’s foot spray – proof, precious proof, that she hasn’t been sucked into some parallel universe. And then, when she sees the Sponge Bob Band-Aids and the Colgate Smiles toothpaste and the Sure Girl deodorant Barbara suddenly, urgently needed about six months ago when her body started to change, Claire does cry. Where is Danny? Where has he taken her girls? Why is the house cleaned out?
Minutes pass; she doesn’t know how many. She wipes her eyes, mascara and eyeshadow mackerel staining the backs of her hands. She’s shivering. She needs to call someone: Danny, her friend Dee, the cops. She goes back into her bedroom. No phone. No phone downstairs in the hall either. They took the phones. Who would take the phones? They took the phones. That’s a line from something. Don’t think like that, not everything is a line from something. Back upstairs, she opens the study at the base of the tower. Her cell-phone charger should be in the desk drawer. Should be, and would be, if there was still a desk there, Jesus. She casts around the bare room, the floorboards dusted with dead bugs and plaster crumbs where cables were ripped from the wall, the walls seamed with bookcase shadows, the spiral staircase ascending to the upper level.
Finally her eye lands on something, on the mantelpiece and above it, two actual objects, watch closely now. The first thing is a picture, a photograph, of her and Danny in thirties evening clothes in The Way of the World. They played the leads, Mirabell and Millamant, and the photo was taken during their love scene, when, having agreed to marry, they make promises to and demands of each other for the future. The second thing is a porcelain statuette of two lovers in old-fashioned costume in some kind of pastoral setting, maybe a shepherd and shepherdess, they’ve never been sure, Danny got it made to resemble the one in The Palm Beach Story, one of their favorite movies. How it worked in the film was Claudette Colbert, who is looking to snare a rich husband, tells Joel McCrea, the husband whom she still loves but who can’t seem to make enough money to keep her, that as long as the ornament stands intact on the mantlepiece, he’ll have nothing to reproach her with. She won’t have strayed. Everything will be as it was.
Claire slides down the wall and comes to rest on the dusty boards by a phone socket. They took the phones. Glengarry, Glen Ross, that’s what it’s from – shut up Claire. Can’t she for once feel a thing directly, without reference to anything else, especially not a quotation from a play? ‘Shakespeare is full of quotations.’ Shut up shut up shut up. She needs to think, needs to do something … but she just sits there on the floor in the tower and stares at the porcelain lovers, and slowly, steadily, starts to feel calmer. Whatever has happened – and evidently it involves a removals firm packing up the entire contents of their home and taking them away, and her husband and daughters disappearing – Danny is letting her know it’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about. He’s always been able to make her feel like this. She knows that’s part of why she married him: because a life based on chance and uncertainty had spooked her, she craved security, and she felt safe in Danny’s arms. Danny is letting her know it’s all right. But why in such a cryptic way? There must be something else, some kind of message. Her laptop. She remembers him saying, ‘Take your laptop, restaurant reservations, flights, the weather,’ but she didn’t want to. ‘I can do it all on my phone,’ she said. And then deliberately left her charger behind. She wanted to be out of reach. She wanted – didn’t she – to be in situations where her husband simply couldn’t get in touch. Now her phone is dead and her laptop is gone and she can’t get in touch with her husband.
She lets her eyes follow the wood and steel spiral staircase up to where it disappears through the trapdoor. Up above is her nook, her refuge, her sanctuary, fast at the top of the tower. A room of her own. It’s where she keeps all her treasures: old photos, letters from boyfriends past, theater programmes. She doesn’t feel ready to climb up now and find them all gone.
She goes downstairs and out through the kitchen and crosses the yard to the garage, not even sure what she is looking for any more but in a hurry to find it. But the garage, at least, is untouched: tools still on the wall, screws and bolts in their airtight plastic containers, hose pipe and electrical cable in coils. More to the point, both cars, her bashed-up Chrysler Pacifica and Danny’s old Karmann Ghia, are there. She has the keys to both, and pops each trunk just in case, nightmare images flashing through her mind, but no one has been stowed there. Nothing but spare wheels and Mr Smith’s smelly old rugs. Did Mr Smith go with? Who else would take him? How did Danny travel anyway? On the plus side, there’s a phone charger in the glove box of the Chrysler. That’s at least one of the things she’s looking for. She turns the engine on and sits in and plugs the lead in the cigarette lighter socket and waits for her phone to fire up sufficiently for her to use it to call her husband and ever so politely ask him what the fuck is going on.
Maybe he followed me to Chicago, Claire thinks, flushing in fast-acting hangover panic, heat sparking on her scalp, a sharp ache of anxiety creasing her belly. If he went through her computer … had she said anything in an email to Dee? No, she wouldn’t be that stupid, or indiscreet. Besides, she hadn’t had any plans in that direction, or at least none that she had admitted, even to herself, let alone to other people. On the other hand … Dee. God, Dee and her dirty mind. Dee checks out every guy they see when they’re out together, flirts compulsively with the waiter, the bartender, the cab driver for God’s sake. Had Dee speculated on what Claire might get up to in Chicago? Had she put it in an email? She could well have; it’s got so Claire screens out most of what Dee says; it’s all talk anyway. At least, she thinks it is. Still. Maybe Danny was uneasy after being out of touch, or simply decided he wanted to surprise her, do something romantic and spontaneous, just like she complains he never does any more, and parked the girls for a sleepover with his sister, Donna, and arrived at the Allegro and … no, no, no. He had left the signs deliberately, the photo and the statuette of the lovers, to reassure her. Hadn’t he?
Her phone should have enough juice now. She pops the switch and waits and up flashes the screensaver photo of the girls among the apple trees, taken two years back but still her favorite. When they’re grown and have kids of their own, this is still the image she’ll keep in her mind’s eye. These are her girls. Stop, stop, the tears are welling again. Keep moving, Claire, that’s the trick, don’t sit still. She grabs the phone and steps out and slams the car door and locks the garage and heads down through the backyard towards the trees. The sensor light doesn’t come on. Maybe it’s broken. There’s a faint spill from the half moon now, the veil blown aside. She’s wearing flat white rhinestone studded sandals, the grass damp between her toes. The wet grass, beneath the apple trees.
Her phone chimes out its message alert. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. Three voice mails, two from drama students who can’t make it to class this week and one from Dee checking to see if she’s home yet and demanding chapter and verse on what she got up to. Seven text messages, four from students, two from teachers at the school, one from Dee. Nothing from Danny. Nothing from the girls, even – they sometimes leave messages when she’s away for longer than they expected. What has Danny done? She thinks of those newspaper reports where some guy is going bankrupt, or finds his wife is cheating, and kills the entire family. That’s crazy talk – Danny would never raise a hand against her, or the girls. But isn’t that the profile those guys have too? The quiet, ordered family man who suddenly explodes? She calls his cell, but it goes straight to message.
‘Danny, I’m home. Where are you?’
She swallows, more a gulp than a swallow. Finding she can’t continue to speak, she ends the call. Where are you?
She feels a mounting panic now, her breath coming in short gasps. Her feet are wetter than they should be, as if she’s stepped in muddy ground, or apples that have started to rot. She moves her feet, and one of her sandals comes loose, and her bare foot plunges into something marshy, sticky even, not apples, not grass. Twigs there, maybe, twigs and straw, and something thicker, like resin, like sap. She looks down, using the face of her phone for light. First she sees red, on her foot, on the ground, not flashes behind her eyes, red stains, and not on the ground; she’s standing on fur, on flesh; she’s standing on the torn-apart carcass of a dog, a springer spaniel, her springer spaniel, her beautiful Mr Smith. His body has been gutted, eviscerated, spatchcocked, his poor head half severed but still attached, still intact. Make it not be, make it not be, make it not be, she prays, the prayer that is never answered. Claire falls to her knees and holds the dog’s heavy head in her hands, his wide snout, his beautiful, beseeching eyes staring into nothing. She opens her mouth to howl, to scream, but nothing comes except a high-pitched keening sound, and then the tears, a child’s brimming, boiling tears, tears overflowing until she can barely breathe, wracking sobs that convulse her until she can cry no more, and then a whimpering sound not unlike the sound Mr Smith used to make when he wanted a treat, or a walk, or to nestle in her arms. She brings her wet face down to Mr Smith’s head, still warm, her fingers chucking his chin, her lips, her nose, deep in his hair, just as she had every single day of his life, and breathes in his precious musky scent for as long as she can bear.