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“I don’t remember any footprints. But I wouldn’t have noticed. People come all the time, you know? To deliver packages, or just ’cause they’re looking for another house and get turned around.”
“So you didn’t see anything?”
“No, but…like I said, I might not have noticed.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Could he…have hidden in the house? After? Waited for you all to leave?”
This earned her a stern look from the sergeant. “Any more secret rooms in there?”
“No.”
“Then there was no intruder in your house when we got there. We searched the whole place. Thoroughly.”
“Right. Of course.”
She tried to make a connection, find an explanation, and failedto. Her thoughts sparked and faded out, sparked and faded out, live wires briefly touching and then pulled apart as she tried to understand how it could be possible.
No footprints. No tire tracks. No sign at all but the smell of cigarette smoke. The toilet seat up. Your daughter’s missing things. A lowered curtain. A flat tire. Maybe.
“Okay,” the sergeant said. “How about we go back inside? There’s a few more questions we’re hoping you can help with. No need to do that out here in the cold.”
She looked around her as she slowly walked through the snow back to the house. It was all so impossible, the flat plane of that snow. Its sparkling evenness was a betrayal, somehow, another thing unexplained and unexplainable. Like the clean beauty of the path. The baby monitor, shut off, useless. Her phone returned to her bedside.
The sheen of the world had an incongruity to it that made her go soft with fear that her mind was irretrievablydamaged.
30
She tried to massage the pain out of her hairline, but it only made the fissure in her head groan, bone rubbing against bone like a biological fault line.
The sergeant sat a distance away from her on the couch, the boyish policeman in a nearby chair by the fireplace.
“Is there anyone other than the guy from the café you think might have targeted you? Anyone who you hadn’t paid, say, or who you turned down for a date? Anyone who would’ve thought you owed them money?”
“No,” she said over and over. “Nothing like that.”
She answered more questions, endless questions, mournfully looking outside to see it was already dark.
At this rate the children will be asleep by the time you get to your father-in-law’s apartment.
With a shudder she realized she couldn’t get the children at all, not with a flat tire.
Why didn’t you think of that before? Right away? What’s wrong with you?
She interrupted the sergeant midsentence, blurting, “Can you put a spare tire on? I want to be able to drive, to get the kids, do you think you could help? I don’t know if I can do it by myself.”
The sergeant grunted, said, “Ma’am, how about we focus, all right? Then when we’re done here, we can discuss all that.”
She felt the sting of his dismissal, the sergeant again seeming to see her children as a distraction, an insignificant detail, her heart plummeting, shrinking, at the realization that she wouldn’t see them tonight. Even if the spare were on, she couldn’t drive all the way to her father-in-law’s house on it, given the distance and the age of the spare.
“I’m sorry to ask, but maybe you had a bad breakup, an affair? Or your husband might have had an affair? Sometimes people feel they’re owed something, after that,” the sergeant said.
At this idea her dismay over not seeing the children was whipped away by outrage and she sputtered, “No! No affair. No.”
“All those long days he was away flying? Nothing suspicious?” the boyish officer chimed in.
They made an affair sound inevitable, obvious.
