But later that night, when her father wasn’t looking, Fake Mom got down into Mouse’s face and told her if she ever made her look stupid again in front of her father, there would behell to pay. Fake Mom’s face got all red. She bared her teeth like a dog does when it’s mad. A vein stuck out of her forehead. It throbbed. Fake Mom spit when she spoke, like she was so mad she couldn’t stop herself from spitting. Like she was spitting mad. She spit on Mouse’s face but Mouse didn’t dare raise a hand to wipe it away.
Mouse tried to take a step back, away from Fake Mom. But Fake Mom was holding on too tightly to Mouse’s wrist. Mouse couldn’t get away because Fake Mom wouldn’t let go.
They heard Mouse’s father coming down the hallway. Fake Mom let go of Mouse’s wrist quickly. She stood straight up, fluffed her hair, ran her hands over her shirt to smooth it down. Her face went back to its normal shade, and on her lips came a smile. And not just any smile, but one that was radiant. She went to Mouse’s father, leaned in close and kissed him.
How are my favorite ladies doing?he asked, as he kissed her back. Fake Mom said they were fine. Mouse mumbled something along the same lines, though no one heard because they were too busy kissing.
Mouse told her real mom about Fake Mom. She sat down across from her on the edge of the red rag rug and poured them both cups of pretend tea. There, as they drank their tea and nibbled cookies, she told her how she didn’t like Fake Mom much. How sometimes Fake Mom made Mouse feel like a stranger in her own home. How being in the same room with Fake Mom gave Mouse a tummy ache. Mouse’s real mom told her not to worry. She told her that Mouse was a good girl and that only good things happened to good girls.I’ll never let anything bad happen to you,her real mom said.
Mouse knew how much her father liked Fake Mom. She could see it in the way he looked at her how happy she made him. It made Mouse feel sick to her stomach because Fake Mom brought out a kind of happy that Mouse never could, even though they were happy before Fake Mom came.
If her father liked having Fake Mom around, she might stay forever. Mouse didn’t want that to happen. Because Fake Mom made her uncomfortable sometimes, and other times scared.
Now when Mouse wrote stories in her head, she started making up stories about bad things happening to an imaginary woman named Fake Mom. Sometimes she fell down those squeaky steps and hit her head. Sometimes she got buried in one of the rabbit holes beneath the clumps of fur and hair and couldn’t get out.
And sometimes she was just gone, and Mouse didn’t care how or why.
SADIE
That evening, there’s a bite to the air. The temperatures are plunging quickly. I pull my car from the parking lot and head home, remembering that Will and Tate are off playing with Legos tonight. The idea of it concerns me, of Will not being around to act as a buffer between Imogen and me.
I try not to let it get the best of me as I drive home. I am a big girl; I can take care of this myself. And besides, Will and I are Imogen’s guardians. It’s our legal obligation to take care of her until she turns eighteen. If I want to search through her things, it’s very much in my right to do so. That said, there are questions I have that I’d like answers to. Namely, who is the man in the photograph that had his face scratched off at Imogen’s hand? Is he the same man who wrote the note to Imogen, the one I found in the pocket of her sweatshirt? A Dear John note, I took it to be. His reference to adouble lifeleads me to believe that Imogen was the other woman. That he was married, maybe, and broke her heart. But who is he?
I pull into the drive and put the car in Park. I look around before I step from the safety of the locked car, to be sure that I’m alone. But it’s dark out, nearly black. Can I really be sure?
I move quickly from the car. I scurry into the safety of my home, where I close and lock the door behind myself. I tug on it twice, to be sure it’s closed tight.
I move into the kitchen. A casserole awaits me on the stovetop when I step inside, a piece of foil folded over the top of it to keep it warm. A Post-it note on top.Xo, it reads. Signed,Will.
The dogs are the only ones waiting in the kitchen for me, staring at me with their matching snaggleteeth, begging to be let outside. I open the back door for them. They make a beeline to the corner of the yard to dig.
I climb the creaky steps to find Imogen’s bedroom door closed, the lock on it undoubtedly turned so that I couldn’t get in if I wanted to. Except that when I look, there’s a new lock on the door, a whole system—complete with padlock—that slips over the door handle. The door now locks from the outside in. Imogen must have installed this herself, to keep me out.
Rock bands the likes of Korn and Drowning Pool lash out over the Bluetooth speaker, volume turned all the way up so that there’s no misinterpreting the songs’ lyrics, dead bodies a recurring theme. The profanity is atrocious, hate spewing through the speakers and into our home. But Tate isn’t around to hear it, and so this time, I let it be.
I go to Otto’s door, rap lightly and call out, over the sound of Imogen’s noise, “I’m home.”
He opens the door for me. I look at Otto, seeing the way that he looks more and more like Will each day. Now that he’s older, the angles of his face are sharp. There is no more baby fat to soften the edges. He’s getting taller all the time, finally enjoying that growth spurt that has for so long bypassed him, keeping him small while the other boys in school grew tall. If not now, then soon he’ll rival their height. Otto is handsome like Will. In no time at all, he’ll be making girls swoon. He just doesn’t know it yet.
“How was your day?” I ask him, and he shrugs and says, “Fine. I guess.”
It’s an indecisive reply. I take it as an opportunity. “You guess?” I ask, wanting more: to know how his day really went, if he’s getting along with the other kids at school, if he likes his teachers, if he’s making friends. When he says nothing, I prod. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?” It’s silly, one of those things doctors say when they’re trying to gauge a patient’s pain. Otto shrugs again and tells me his day was a six, which ranks as moderate, decent, an okay day.
“Homework?” I ask.
“Some.”
“Need any help?”
He shakes his head. He can do it himself.
As I make my way to Will’s and my bedroom to change, I catch sight of a light drifting from beneath the doorway that leads to the third-floor attic. The light in the attic is on, which it never is, because it’s where Alice killed herself. I asked the boys never to go up there. I didn’t think it was a place any of us needed to be.
The boys know that Alice gave us the house. They don’t know how she died. They don’t know that one day, Alice slipped a noose around her neck, securing the other end of it to the ceiling’s support beam, stepping from the stool. What I know as a physician is that, after the noose tightened around her neck and she was suspended, supported only by her jaw and her neck, she would have struggled for air against the weight of her own body. It would have taken minutes for her to lose consciousness. It would have been extremely painful. And even when she finally did lose consciousness, her body would have continued to thrash about, taking much longer for her to die, up to twenty minutes, if not more. Not a pleasant way to go.
It’s hard for Will to talk about Alice. This I can understand. After my father passed, it was hard for me to talk about him. My memory isn’t the best. But what sticks with me most is when I was around eleven years old, when my father and I lived just outside of Chicago and he worked for a department store in the city. Dad rode the train downtown every day back then. I was old enough to keep watch over myself by then, a latchkey kid. I went to school and I came home. No one had to tell me to do my homework. I was responsible enough for that. I made and ate my own dinner. I did my dishes. I went to bed at a reasonable time. Most nights, Dad would have a beer or two on the train ride home, stopping at the bar after he’d departed the train, not getting home until after I was asleep. I’d hear him, stumbling around the house, knocking things over, and the next morning there’d be a mess for me to clean.
I put myself through college. I lived alone, in a single dorm followed by a small apartment. I tried living with a roommate once. It didn’t work for me. The roommate I had was careless and irresponsible, among other things. She was also manipulative, a complete kleptomaniac.
