I make sure the kids are asleep. I slip down the stairs, ease my feet into a pair of Nick’s old work shoes and my arms into his coat, find a flashlight and step outside into the storm.
I have to know.
Harriet follows reluctantly, and for this reason I don’t feel quite so scared or alone. I close the front door and lock it, sliding the keys into the pocket of my coat. I stand by the door and listen for the faint sounds of a baby’s cry, but there are none. I pull the coat’s hood over my head, and immediately the wind rips it right back off again, the air whizzing past my head. As I step from the covered front porch, the rain pelts me from all directions. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two until I am soaking wet and cold.
I use the flashlight as a guide. Harriet follows closely behind, and I don’t know who’s more nervous, her or me.
With every step, I plunge deeply into the mud, the mire getting stuck to the soles of my shoes, making it hard to move. I sink as if it’s quicksand, my eyes sweeping the property for any signs of a man with a hat and gloves. Is he here?Washe here?
I don’t know what I’m looking for. I tremble inside and out, cold and wet and scared, praying I find nothing, that at the end of this expedition I can chalk the man in a hat and gloves up to Maisie’s imagination and not let it obsess me.No one is here, I try hard to convince myself, wishing I had stayed in bed, that I was tucked beside Maisie and Felix, that I was safely inside and dry. But instead I’m outside as the thunder grumbles through the sky and an explosion of lightning lights up the night, and I cry out in fright, certain an evergreen arborvitae ishim, the bad man, taking a minute to realize that it is only a tree, tall and thin like a man, motionless, watching me.
It’s not him, I tell myself.
No one is there.
The rain taps on rooftops, a marching band’s drum line. The water comes pouring out the gutter’s downspout, creating a flood in the flower beds, into which I sink, getting soaked halfway up my calf.
My heart throbs quickly as a noise from behind sends me spinning in a complete three-sixty, flashlight and eyes scanning my sight line, finding nothing.
“Is someone there?” I call anxiously over the sound of the wind and the rain, and then immediately after, “Who’s there?” finding myself scared stiff. Beside me, Harriet whines. She’s drenched like me, wondering why she followed me outside. The fur of her legs and the pads of her feet get coated in mud. She wonders what we’re doing. Even I don’t know for sure what we’re doing, but I have to know if someone has been here watching Maisie, Felix and me. For the children’s sake, I have to know.
For my safety and for the sake of my sanity, I have to know.
“Who’s there?” I call again, but no one replies. From across town, I hear the sound of the train’s wheels bustling down the tracks, oblivious to the wind and the rain that all but brings me to a standstill.
I walk the periphery of the house, staying close. I use the flashlight’s dull glow to examine the yard, Maisie’s play set, the trembling trees. I round the second corner of the home and, opening the fence, let myself into the backyard where the rain turns to penny-sized hail and I can hardly see, thanks to the precipitation in my eyes, my unrestrained hair, which thrashes around my head like a leather whip.
I’m starting to feel certain that I’ll find nothing, and this will all be for naught. It comes with great relief, knowing with certainty that there is no one here, that therewasno one here, that Maisie was wrong. Maisie was being silly, I reason. She was confused. She saw something on TV, and her imagination is to blame for this, for bringing the man with the hat and gloves to life. My heartbeat decelerates. I stop shaking. I smile.
There is no man with a hat and gloves. No one has been here watching us.
And that’s when I catch sight of the mud.
I freeze in place, my legs going numb.
There sit three glops of mud, trampled across the back patio, three large footprints of mud imprinted on the brick pavers beneath the pergola where the slats of wood have deflected the rain. Not in the yard as they should be, but pressed up closely to our home, coming to a dead stop beside the kitchen’s bay window, where only hours ago I stood with Maisie, listening to the rain. The footprints are squashy around the edges, losing shape. By morning they will be gone, trace evidence of our visitor washed away by the storm. I could call Detective Kaufman and have him come in the morning, first thing to see, but what are the odds that by the time he arrives the footprints would still be here? He wouldn’t believe me. Detective Kaufman would stare at me with those somber eyes of his and tell me again that I am wrong.There is no case, he would say.You know what I think happened? I think your husband was driving too fast and took the turn too quickly.And then he would apologize for my loss.
I shine the flashlight on the footprints and force myself to step closer to examine them closely. It’s a lug sole, like you might find on a hiking boot or a heavy-duty work shoe. The three steps are spread wide, farther than my own legs can span. I set my foot beside the print, measuring the length, easily reasoning that they belong to a man, for the size bears a striking resemblance to Nick’s shoes on my own feet.
In my hand, the flashlight battery dies, and my world turns to black. I peer around, utterly blind. “Is someone there?” I call out, but no one replies. But someone was here. That I know for sure as I call for Harriet, and the two of us hurry back to the front door and inside.
Someone was here. But who?
NICK
BEFORE
I make the difficult decision, the one I’ve been trying to avoid. I’ve put it off as long as I possibly can. I can’t keep paying Connor for work that I can do, and so around noon, when the office is empty, I ask him if I can buy him lunch, and there in a crowded Mexican restaurant over a plate of nachos supreme, I tell him I have to let him go. His eyes grow wide at first, and then he laughs, thinking that this is some kind of joke, that I’m screwing with him maybe.
“Funny, Boss,” he says, chuckling as the waitress brings glasses of ice water and then leaves. We’ve known each other for years, and that’s the kind of thing we used to do. Pull pranks on one another. But this time it isn’t a prank. The look on my face is serious, and I tell him no, it’s not a joke.
“I’m sorry, Connor. I have to let you go,” I say again, telling him how it will be easier for him if I lay him off rather than having him resign, as if I’m doing him some sort of favor, which in all actuality, I am. He just doesn’t realize it yet. I tell him this is for the best. Being laid off is indicative of the shortcomings of our practice, not him; resigning is a reflection of his work ethic and stamina, his staying power. But already I see his hands clench up into fists on the table slab, his face become red. He flexes and then clenches the hands, again and again, gearing up for a fight. He reaches for a napkin and wads it into a ball, tossing it back and forth between his hands.
“You can’t be serious, Nick,” he says to me, eyes steely but also stung. “After everything I’ve done for you,” he bleats, and it’s conjecture only when my mind goes immediately to Clara, to my life with Clara. That if it weren’t for Connor, Clara and I would never be.
Though he doesn’t say it, that’s exactly what he means.
Clara was working at a kiosk in the mall when I met her, trying hard to sell some sort of high-end perfume to passersby. It helped put her through college, the commission she made off of sales, which wasn’t a lot, but as she told me later that day in the food court over limp slices of pizza,It was better than nothing. Connor claims he saw her first, but if so, it was seconds before I spied her long, lean legs that stretched out from beneath a miniskirt whose hemline landed high above her knees.You can have her, is what Connor said before we’d even exchanged a word with Clara, as we stood, backs pressed to a railing that overlooked an open space and four floors of stores. He saw exactly what I was looking at, and though his comment didn’t bother me at the time, in the coming years it did, this constant reprise that Clara was mine because Connor had let me have her, as if she was his to give. As if, if he hadn’t been so charitable that day at the mall, she might otherwise be his. He always said it with a smile, too, so that the line between sarcasm and truth blurred. Did he mean it, or was he only joking? I could never tell.
