Julian
Julian checked hisphone again. No one had texted him all evening. Not to check in, not to play Sudoku. He didn’t want to read too much into it, but he worried something had gone wrong. Mostly, he worried about Betty. From a distant corner in his apartment, Felix meowed. Julian had given up on finding him tonight.
He slunk to his bathroom, and a pain, a sharp bubble, rose up in his chest. He froze, worrying it would escalate and maybe he would drop dead right there on the tiles with graying grout, but he took five deep breaths and slowly, the pain ebbed out of him. Probably gas. He shook his head, reached for the Tums in his medicine cabinet. He needed to call his doctors. He should tell them that he was having recurring symptoms, that it had been four years since the heart attack and maybe it was time to fine-tune his valves again. He made a mental note to take care of this in the morning. He wouldn’t do it, he knew, but he was very good at pretending.
Julian peed, washed his hands and examined his face in themirror. He didn’t think he looked too bad for sixty, for a man whose job had caused enough stress to induce his first heart attack, for a widower who hadn’t relieved himself from his grief for a decade.
He made his way to his office, sat in the chair that had the back that squeaked and had done so since he bought it. There was a lot you could learn to live with. He opened his filing cabinet, pulled out his old cases. Maybe there was nothing to solve here, he told himself. Maybe he needed to just let it go. Run a candy store. Look after his heart. Build a relationship with his daughter.
He massaged his temples, eased back.Squeak squeak.
But also, maybe all of that was wrong. If he’d missed something, maybe there was something left to be done.
17
Night Six
Sybil
November 8th
In the end,maybe a knife through her toe was exactly what her marriage needed. Or exactly what she needed, even though they had to suture her toe back together and Sybil was already concocting a story to tell the twins about the situation when they came home for Thanksgiving break in two weeks.
Back home in her too-big, empty-nesting house, Sybil yanked the sheets off her king-sized bed, wobbling a little uncertainly in her foot bootie. She refused crutches and said absolutelynotto a cane or a walker, so the boot, an eyesore, it was. But the knife had cut straight down to the bone, and even in her stubbornness to carry on as normal, she wasn’t dumb enough to tempt risking a toe. Toes, she thought, as she gave the top sheet another yank, were undervalued. Lose the big one, and it’s way more than just a horrendous look in sandals in Turks and Caicos. Your entire balance would be destabilized, your entire gait obliterated. Goodbye to what babies learn as second nature: how to walk, how to stay upright. She suspected she was now talking to herself in analogy. Something about losingMark. But honestly, she thought her toe was more critical to her future than her husband. So that was a pretty strong indicator.
Sybil dumped the fitted and top sheets on the floor. She hadn’t been home for the past few nights, having camped out at the pied-à-terre since the accident, and while she didn’t detect the scent of the anesthesiologist’s perfume, she didn’t trust that Mark wouldn’t have invited her for a sleepover, despite blowing up her texts telling her that she had misunderstood at the ER. She wondered if it would be too extreme to haul the bed to the front lawn and burn it. She liked the imagery of that, the metaphor there, but then, well, someone would surely post about it on Nextdoor, and she didn’t really see how she could keep a bonfire in her front yard a secret from the twins. She did have a fire pit in the back, so maybe if she chopped the mattress up into itty-bitty pieces, she could incinerate it there. But, she thought, as she gave the pillowcases a hard tug, that wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying.
“Sybil?” A voice from downstairs, then footsteps ascending, and Natalie burst through the bedroom door. She was breathing heavily and looked like she’d just come into contact with the surface of the sun. She was too young for a hot flash, Sybil thought.
“Are you okay? Your cheeks are maroon,” Sybil said and threw a pillow,hard, against the headboard.
“Why did Zeke Rodriguez just let me into your house?” Natalie hissed, quiet enough not to be overheard a story below but loud enough to be extremely dramatic.
“Oh.”
“Is this why you asked me about your boobs a few weeks ago?”
“No—”
“Oh my god, are you sleeping with Zeke Rodriguez?!” This time, Natalie couldn’t help herself, and her voice rose to a quiteaudible level. There was a clattering downstairs, and Sybil’s eyes went wide, then Natalie’s eyes went wide, then Betty’s voice called out, “Sorry! I was just giving a treat to Pluto, and he knocked over a plant.”
“Who are these people downstairs, and why are you sleeping with Zeke Rodriguez and haven’t told me?” Natalie whispered.
“I’m not sleeping with him. And that’s the girl I mentioned a while back, the aspiring actress. She’s a waitress. I told you?” Sybil couldn’t remember if she had actually told Natalie anything. She thought she’d sent Natalie her picture, but that could also just be something she imagined. She was so tired that nothing stayed in her brain for long anymore.
Natalie ignored the second part of Sybil’s statement and gestured to the bed, raising an eyebrow. “Changing the sheets?”
“I kicked Mark out.”
Natalie’s palm flew to her chest as her jaw loosened. “You didn’t lead with that? You didn’t call me immediately?”
Sybil shook her head. “Sorry, I’m ahead of myself. I haven’tkickedhim out. I told him that Iwantedto kick him out.”
Natalie planted her hands on her hips.
“When?”
“Last week.”
