“You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Sadie,” Will tenderly reprimands.
Will reaches into the pantry and finds a cookie for me to eat. He hands it to me, saying, “Just don’t tell the boys about this. No cookies before dinner. It’ll ruin your appetite.” He smiles as he says it and, even after everything we’ve been through, I can’t help but smile back, because he’s still there: the Will I fell in love with.
I stare at him awhile. My husband is handsome. His long hair is pulled back and all I can see is that chiseled jawline, the sharp angles of his cheeks, and those beguiling eyes.
But then I remember suddenly what Officer Berg said about Will having eyes for Morgan and I wonder if it’s true. My own smile slips from my face and I feel regret begin to brew inside.
I can be cold, I know. Glacial even. I’ve been told this before. I often think that I was the one to push Will into the arms of another woman. If only I had been more affectionate, more sensitive, more vulnerable. More happy. But in my life, all I’ve known is an inherent sadness.
When I was twelve, my father complained about how moody I could be. High as a kite one day, sad the next. He blamed the imminence of my teenage years. I experimented with my clothing as kids that age tend to do. I was desperate to figure out who I was. He said there were days I screamed at him to stop calling me Sadie because I hated the name Sadie. I wanted to change my name, be someone else, anyone other than me. There were times I was snarky, times I was kind. Times I was outgoing, times I was shy. I could be the bully just as easily as be bullied.
Perhaps it was only teenage rebellion. The need for self-discovery. The surge of hormones. But my then-therapist didn’t think so. She diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. I was on mood stabilizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics. None of it helped. The tipping point came later, after I’d met and married Will, after I’d started my family and my career.
Tate calls out from another room, “Come find me, Daddy!” and Will excuses himself, kissing me slowly before he leaves. I don’t pull away. I let him this time. He cradles my face in his hands. As his soft lips brush over mine, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time. I want Will to keep kissing me.
But Tate calls for him again and Will leaves.
I head upstairs to change. Alone in the bedroom, I wonder if it’s possible to dream about a place you’ve never been. I take my question to the internet. The answer isn’t so easy to find about places. But it is about faces. The internet claims that all the faces we ever see in our dreams are faces we’ve seen in real life.
It’s been over an hour, but Officer Berg still hasn’t called me back.
I change into a pair of pajamas. I drop my clothes into the laundry basket. The basket itself overflows, and I think that after everything Will does for us, the least I can do is a single load of laundry. I’m too tired to do it now, but first thing tomorrow, before work, I’ll throw in a load.
We eat dinner together. As expected, Imogen is a no-show. I pick at my food, hardly able to eat. “Penny for your thoughts,” Will says toward the end of dinner, and only then do I realize I spent the entirety of our meal staring off into space.
I apologize to him and blame fatigue.
Will does the dishes. Tate disappears to watch TV. Otto plods out of the room and up the stairs. I hear his bedroom door close from this distance, and only then, when I’m certain they’re both out of earshot, do I tell Will what Imogen said to me in the cemetery. I don’t hesitate because, if I do, I might just lose the nerve. I’m not sure how Will is going to respond.
“I saw Imogen today,” I begin. I fill him in on the details: how the school called, how I found her alone at the cemetery. How there were pills with her. I don’t dance around the words.
“She was angry but unreserved. We got to talking. She told me, Will, that she yanked that stool out from Alice’s feet the day she died,” I tell him. “If it wasn’t for Imogen, Alice might still be alive.”
I feel like a snitch as I say it, but it’s my duty, my responsibility to tell Will. Imogen is a disturbed child. She needs help. Will needs to know what she has done so that we can get her the help she deserves.
Will goes stiff at first. He’s at the sink with his back toward me. But his posture turns suddenly vertical. A dish slips from his wet hands, falls to the sink. It doesn’t break, but the sound of a dinner plate hitting the sink is loud. I jump because of it. Will curses.
In the moments of silence that follow, I offer, “I’m sorry, Will. I’m so sorry,” as I reach out to touch his shoulder.
He turns off the water and comes to face me, drying his hands on a towel. His eyebrows are lowered, his face flat. “She’s messing with you,” he says incontrovertibly. The denial is clear as day.
“How do you know?” I ask, though I know that what Imogen told me is true. I was there. I heard her.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he says, meaning that Imogen wouldn’t help her mother die. But the truth of the matter, I think, is that Will doesn’t want to believe she would.
“How can you be sure?” I ask, reminding him that we barely know this girl. That she’s been a part of our life for only a few long weeks now. We have no idea who Imogen is.
“There’s this animosity between you and her,” he says, as if this is something petty, something trivial, and not a matter of life and death. “Can’t you see she’s doing it intentionally because it gets a rise out of you?” he asks, and it’s true that Imogen doesn’t behave this way toward Will and the boys. But that doesn’t change things. There’s another side to Imogen that Will can’t see.
My mind goes back to our conversation this morning about the photograph on Imogen’s phone. “Were you able to recover the photos?” I ask, thinking that if he found the photo, there will be proof. He’ll be able to see it the way that I do.
He shakes his head, tells me no. “If there was a photograph, it’s gone,” he says.
His carefully chosen words come as a punch to the gut.Ifthere was a photograph. Unlike me, Will isn’t sure there ever was.
“You don’t believe me?” I ask, feeling bruised.
He doesn’t answer right away. He thinks before he speaks.
