Wednesday mid-morning brought another call from Frances. Because she needed something, she had conveniently forgotten that during their last conversation she’d ordered Sarah to leave her family alone.
“Sarah?” said Frances, who was calling from work. “Any chance you could help me out here?”
Charlotte had forgotten her inhaler. Could Sarah go over there and get it and deliver it to the school as soon as she could? Sarah knew not to mention that Frances had basically forbidden her from trespassing on their property. She knew too not to suggest that she might have anything better to do with her time, because nobody was busier than Frances. As ever, she wondered if this might be her chance to finally get on her sister-in-law’s good side and stay there. Chris would want her to say yes; Frances was the only family (except her) that he had in the world.
So, “Of course,” said Sarah, because what was she here for if not to perform last-minute favours for Frances. Sarah’s schedule, in her eyes, she knew, was ever flexible, almost negligible.
The inhaler was on the kitchen counter. Frances couldn’t get hold of Evan on the phone. “He’s been so busy,” said Frances. “All that rehearsing.” Sarah could hear in Frances’s voice that she wanted to believe this was perfectly reasonable. “But she needs it, you know she does.” Sarah could hear too that Frances was worried for Charlotte.
“I’ll do it,” said Sarah. “I’ll go over right now.”
“Thank you,” said Frances, who never sounded like herself when she expressed a thing like gratitude. “It means.” She stopped. “It means a lot. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”
“It’s no problem,” said Sarah. “No problem at all.”
So once again, Sarah wound a path through the fence, the back-and-forth journey she’d been taking all week. Her senses were heightened—for days she’d been anticipating bad news and surprises around every corner, usually these very corners she was taking now. The messages from Jane Q seemed connected to this route, to Frances and Evan, the sight of their house from her office window. She couldn’t shake the idea that somehow all the pieces fit.
She stopped when she got to the bottom of the stairs beside the garage. She couldn’t hear anything, no music, but she wasn’t going to take the chance of going up to check. It wasn’t part of her mission, and she’d only get called out again for interrupting Evan’s focus. So she kept walking, down the driveway and around to the front of the house. She’d brought the spare key to their bright red front door.
Sarah climbed the steps to the porch, the big wide veranda with the hanging swing upon whose super-plush floral cushion seat no one ever sat. While just a block away geographically, the house Frances had bought in their neighbourhood was from a different world, one whose great mansions loomed over the narrow terraces and worker’s cottages on recently gentrified streets like Sarah’s. The mansions had fallen into decline, long ago divided up into rooming houses, as they’d remained for decades, but in recent years they were being bought up and fixed up by single families as downtown life once again became desirable. Frances and Evan got their place for a steal, and they’d spent just as much restoring it, removing the dropped ceiling panels and linoleum floors, mouldy carpets and fire doors. The woodwork in the vestibule was gleaming, polished, dusted, and rich with grain. You would have thought the wood was one of the house’s original fixtures, if you didn’t know the whole story. Sarah, however, was aware of every single detail. The precise cost of the leaded glass doors that led her into the hallway, for example—a ridiculous fortune.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs, considering the echoing silence of the place. It was hard to fill a house like this; it was more like a museum than a home. Perhaps if Frances and Evan had had another child? But that was another story, and they would have had to have at least fifteen of them, considering the house’s size. Particularly if the children had been anything like Charlotte, who was pale and small and scarcely there, overwhelmed by the frill and flounce of the fussy dresses her mother made her wear. Only in her asthma did she ever make a stir, imperilled and gasping for air—a legacy from her mother, who curiously didn’t seem to suffer the affliction any longer. Charlotte’s attacks were the only thing Sarah had ever known to derail Frances’s fervent planning, or to for once snap Evan’s easy eyelids wide, making him appear to be completely awake.
The kitchen was perfectly tidy, not a dirty dish in sight, and even the clean pots and dish rack were stored away. The dishwasher itself was hidden, like the fridge was, behind what appeared to be a cupboard door, so you had to look for appliances in a place like this, opening random cupboard doors, never sure of what you might find.
An artful ceramic bowl was the only item on the countertop, and the inhaler was resting inside it, along with a tube of medicated lip balm and two nickels. Just where Frances had said it would be, for she was not the type to lose track of things. The nickels must have been some kind of rare lapse. And no doubt, they were someone else’s error, just as it was that the inhaler was not now at school with Charlotte as it should have been. Being Frances must be exasperating, actually, Sarah thought, because all her problems were other people’s screw-ups. All of mine, at least, she thought, are my own.
Charlotte Katherine Bennett-Grayson, written on the prescription. The middle name for Chris and Frances’s mother, the woman whose ability to produce such disparate offspring Sarah so often wondered about.
Sarah went to the window and looked outside at her own house through the trees, though their own small backyard was only one of four that backed onto Frances and Evan’s grand one. Her little house over there was just like all the others. There were buds on some of the trees now, the world on the cusp of spring, but for the moment, everything was still.
The back staircase creaked as she climbed to the second floor—she might as well take advantage of the situation, Sarah thought, and do a little reconnaissance. She ran her hand along the oak wainscotting down the corridor. Not a spot of dust there either, though that was down to Charlotte’s breathing troubles as much as to her mother’s meticulousness—Frances had paid a fortune to have an air filtration system installed for her daughter’s benefit.
Sarah passed Charlotte’s room, with no toys and clothes on the floor, her bed neatly made. She had a playroom next door, and Evan’s study was next door to that, a room that annoyed Sarah whenever she considered it, but because he was a man and not a mother, nobody ever wondered why he might require a room of his own. And had there ever been a house more inappropriate for just three people to live in? They had so many rooms, they had to dream up uses for them. If Hitler had lived here, he would have been provided a room for transcendental meditation.
“Hellooooo,” called Sarah, just to hear her voice come back. “Coo-eee.” Evan’s study was untidy, books and papers scattered throughout, which was to be expected, except that it meant that he actually went in there—surprising. Just what did Evan study in his study? Frances used to claim that he was writing a musical, but that was years ago, back when Evan played guitar in a second-tier Grateful Dead cover band and Frances was trying to make him into something more than that.
She went inside and tried to scope things out without disturbing the chaos. The desk was heaped with economics tomes, and philosophy textbooks that Sarah suspected had been Frances’s in university—a quick flip to the inside cover confirmed this. There were also comic books, graphic novels, and several raw-food cookbooks. Yellow notepaper was scattered through the mess, covered in illegible scrawl. Notation paper too, and sheet music. There was a couch in the corner, with a pillow and a blanket, where Evan spent more time sleeping, Sarah suspected, than in the room he shared with his wife.
What was his project? Sarah wondered. Perhaps Evan was full of surprises. But not entirely. Sarah tripped over a coffee table book of lesbian erotica, and kicked it across the floor.
And then she heard something downstairs, somebody coming in the side door. Two people talking. The floor creaked under her footsteps, and she cringed in response, tiptoeing out of Evan’s study into the hall toward the front stairs. It was two men, their voices raised in argument. She made her way down—she’d say she’d been looking for the inhaler up there, she decided. Maybe Evan could even deliver it to the school, and then she could get home and back to work.
They were talking in the music room. A grand piano that no one ever played, and an upright bass in the corner. No music now, though. Evan was shouting at somebody, whose responses were muted, an antagonist seemingly much less prone to passion.
Sarah crept down the hall, the tricky floor blessedly silent for once.
“If she knew I’d done it, she would kill me,” the quiet voice was saying. It was Chris.
“She’s going to kill me anyway,” Evan was saying.
“So then what was the point?” It really was Chris. Chris in the middle of the day, when he should have been high up in the sky doing something with apps and banking systems. The only time she’d ever managed to get him out of work, she’d had to come down with appendicitis. And even then, he went back that afternoon.
“It’s the principle. That kind of shit cannot be tolerated. I thought you of all people would understand.”
“I don’t know about the principle that makes it okay to break a guy’s face.”
“What happened to chivalry?”
“You can explain that to your wife, then.”
Evan said, “I thought you were on my side.”
Chris said, “I don’t even know,” and then the side door opened, somebody coming in.
Evan called out, “Hello?”
And Sarah was stuck—whoever was at the door would find her eavesdropping, or else Chris and Evan would catch her creeping past the music room, skulking along the corridor like the meddling snoop they’d accused her of being.
“It’s me,” called out a woman’s voice, not Frances.
Sarah had a split second in which to make her decision, partly inspired by the novel she’d been reading with her children. Behind her was the dumbwaiter, the sole original feature in that whole gleaming house that had been so ravaged by the twentieth century. The dumbwaiter no longer worked, left over from the days in which servants had prepared meals in the basement, but was a charming anachronism, not to mention only slightly too small to accommodate a grown woman.
As footsteps bounded up the short flight of steps from the side door, Sarah hauled herself up into the nook in the wall and pulled the door shut. It groaned slightly, the noise masked by the sound of that orange-haired girl, the backup singer, who was calling out, “Where are you?” as she came around the corner. Sarah watched the scene through a small round window that was discoloured and made everything appear sepia toned. She breathed in; the air was already close.
“In here,” Evan called out.
“You motherfucker,” the girl started screeching, and Sarah envisioned her leaping onto Evan’s back, scratching at his eyes.
“Hey, hey, cool it,” came the other voice, Chris’s voice. Sarah could not fathom how he’d found his way into what appeared to be a scene from Cops.
“Listen, I’ve got to get out here,” said Chris.
“No way, man,” said Evan. “You’re a part of this.”
And now Chris was talking, but too quietly for Sarah to hear. It was hard to hear much, actually, except for screeching, because she was curled up so tight, her ear plastered against her shoulder, and also because the enclosed space amplified her breathing, the sound of her heart. Sarah pushed against the side of the dumbwaiter to create a millimetre or two of extra space to move in. She clearly hadn’t thought this through, she realized, as her spine began to ache, her knees. Charlotte’s inhaler in her pants pocket was stabbing against her thigh. This place would prove a very poor sanctuary in a minute or two.
The girl was talking. The backup singer. And then some, Sarah supposed, and Chris being here was more incongruous than all the rest of it. He would be there for Frances, no matter what, but now he and Evan were colluding about something, and had Chris known about the backup singer all along?
She hadn’t been in a situation this ridiculous for years. It was such a Mitzi Bytes scenario, stuffed inside a dumbwaiter for the sake of a story to tell, except that she couldn’t follow the story.
Sarah pulled the doors open a crack to let some air in. Dumbwaiters clearly hadn’t been constructed with human occupancy in mind. And with the crack, she could hear better, Evan saying, “Take it easy, Jen,” and the girl, Jen, explaining, “He’ll drop the charges, but only if I go back home to him.”
“But you can’t do that,” said Chris. And Sarah wondered how he could be so sure.
“So you’re just going to throw me under the bus,” said Evan.
“What about the principle?” said Chris. He was being sarcastic. He said, “I posted the bail. Surely that’s enough. Now you’re on your own. The buck stops here.” What was he talking about? Who was feeding him these lines?
“I could tell her everything,” said Evan.
“But you won’t,” said Chris. “Not now. The whole thing looks so much worse on you. So the threats aren’t going to work anymore. It’s all over.”
Jen was saying, “You’ve really fucked up this time.”
“I was trying to help,” said Evan.
“You were drunk out of your mind,” said Jen. “Not helpful.”
“There is such a thing as good intentions,” said Evan.
“Tell me about it,” said Chris. “It’s what got me into this mess in the first place.”
“Oh, take off your self-righteous hero sweater,” said Evan. “Get over yourself. You had your own motivations. I know you did.”
“I wanted to help.”
“See? Then we’re not so far apart, you and me. Which is how I know how it really was. You didn’t want to help. You wanted to be a saviour.”
“There’s no saving you.”
“Well, now you know,” said Evan. “So you can’t even lord it over me.”
“You’re both idiots,” said Jen. “And I’ve got to get my stuff.”
“I really have to get back,” said Chris.
“You didn’t seem to think I was an idiot when you were taking my money,” said Evan.
“My money,” said Chris.
“Which is the fucking problem with you,” said Evan. “How it all comes down to this every time.”
“You’re both missing the point,” said Jen. “Which is that I’m done. I’m leaving.”
“Not without me, you’re not,” said Evan.
“But I am,” she said. “You’re the reason.”
The three of them came into the hall, walked right past the dumbwaiter, oblivious to Sarah’s presence, and down the steps to the side door. Chris in yellow, in this context, was like somebody she’d never seen before, though Evan was as slippery as ever. Sarah couldn’t get a good look at the girl, who had been and gone before she’d even registered.
Every bit of Sarah’s body was pressed against the sides of this unfathomably tiny space. Her head was tucked into her chest, and her neck was strained in a way that didn’t seem anatomically possible. If she’d had to hide there any longer, she may have expired, or else opened the door and sheepishly tumbled from its height to the floor.
“Hey, guys,” she would have said, the threesome staring down at her incredulously. Or not so incredulously, come to think about it. She was glad to feel the unit shake as the outside door slammed, the house now empty so she was free to go.
She fumbled to get a grip and slide the door open all the way, for one terrible moment fearing it was stuck. But then it budged, and she poked her head out to take a real breath, and to check for silence—nothing. She set about unfolding, unfurling, climbing out of the dumbwaiter without plummeting to the hardwood. There was nothing graceful about it, but she made it, shaking out her jammed-up joints as she made for the front door.
Sarah looked outside in time to see Chris’s car pulling away from the sidewalk, hearing the sound of Evan and the girl’s feet pounding up the garage stairs once again. She was home free, just barely, and she was also covered with dust. The one place in the house that Frances had forgotten to touch with her frightening perfection, and in spite of everything, Sarah was the smallest bit gratified for having found it.
She locked the front door behind her, and took the long way back around the block toward home.
From the Archives: Mitzi Bytes Snoop’s Monkey Trial
When my first husband was cheating on me, there were many clues, bread crumb trails leading deep into the woods. He began keeping strange hours, deleting messages from his phone, and once I found a condom in his coat pocket, which was weird because I was on the pill. But I never confronted him. There would be suitable explanations for everything, I told myself, and besides, I thought this was what trust was: obliviousness in the face of the blatantly obvious. What else can I say, except that I was very young. And I think he was actually desperate for me to find out, just so he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of telling me. But I refused to see what was in front of my face, preferring my own delusions.
So how does a person learn to trust again after that? There is a short line between having that experience and becoming the kind of person who no longer believes in anything, which is really not such a different kind of delusion—seeing what’s in front of one’s face but refusing to acknowledge what’s there.
It’s been a persistent struggle ever since The Programmer and I really got together for me to believe that what he’s saying is true. Which is not his fault, but it has meant he’s had to get better at saying things, at clarity and avoiding awkwardness, and I’ve had to work on my end in believing. But this weekend I suffered a lapse.
He’s still moving in with me, slowly, slowly. Too slowly, I often protest, but then he’ll come over with a lamp or a toaster oven and I’ll start freaking out at the sight of his stuff in my space—what if I’m just setting myself up for the same thing all over again? To which he’ll respond that this is why we’re moving slow, taking things at their natural pace. He’ll turn on the lamp and show me the softness of the light that it casts in my den, or else we’ll melt cheese on bread in the toaster—delicious. Once he brought up a bedside table, but I decided that was a step way too far, and he said he understood, taking it back home again.
We’re really happy. Does it sound that way? I don’t intend for it to sound any other way. But it’s a real negotiation, made more complicated by everything I went through before. All this is new to him, but it’s a bit déjà vu to me—unsettlingly so.
On Saturday I found a note in his pants. He was in the shower, and his pants were on the floor where he’d left them the night before, and I saw the piece of paper poking out of the pocket. I was curious about what it was, so that is what I mean when I say “I found a note in his pants.” I mean that I was snooping, but I wasn’t considering the connotations or the possible ramifications as I plucked out the paper, folded multiple times. I unfolded it, the folds making squares that were a perfect grid, and it was an email he’d printed, one sent to his work account. It was from the girl he’d been seeing before me, the dumpy one with the tapered jeans. And now I’m being malicious—she’s the only girl he’d been seeing before me, at least the only girl for a long time. The message was something about an electric toothbrush that she wanted back. It seemed overly familiar. The girl had signed it “xo.” I was unaware that he ever heard from her at all.
I was still holding that paper when he came out of the bathroom, my peach bath towel wrapped around his waist. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to decode all the possible meanings in the message, and he saw me there. He said, “What are you doing?”
I waved the paper at him. “What’s this?”
It took a few seconds for him to realize, and I watched his face. It’s true there was no panic in his eyes, but that in itself could be a bad sign. For some people, lying comes too easily. He said, “It’s what it looks like.”
“You still hear from her?”
“Almost never,” he said.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“It wasn’t important.”
“It was important enough for you to print it all out,” and he explained that he’d done so in order that he’d remember. He had her electric toothbrush in his bathroom cabinet, and he needed to get it to her. She was moving to Turkey.
“They don’t even have the same voltages in Turkey,” I protested. The holes in his story were miles wide.
But he just shrugged and said he didn’t know. She wanted it. They were going to meet up for coffee one day so he could give it to her, but maybe I’d prefer it if he put it in the post.
“It didn’t cross your mind to mention this?” I asked him.
He said it honestly hadn’t. There was nothing to mention. And I started spouting off about secret emails, which pissed him off.
“It’s not a secret,” he said. “I printed it. Who prints out a secret email?”
I said, “Someone who wants to be found out?”
At which a lesser man would have put up his hands and said, “I give up,” and gone away for good, but not this man. Instead, he sat down beside me, pulled me around to face him, and took my hands in his. He said, “I love you.” He said, “And the only way I can prove that is just to love you and love you and love you, and I do, and you’re going to have to decide if that’s enough. Because, honestly, it’s all I can give.”
He said, “I promise you, I’m not the kind of person you have to squint to read. You know that, right? I’ll always be where I say I am.” He had his eyes locked on mine—it was almost unnerving. “Always. Always.”
And what else can a person do with that kind of assurance but calm down and keep going forward? He makes it almost easy.