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In the guest room, she laid out a huge piece of paper on her drafting table. Beside it she neatly set a compass, pencils, erasers, templates, a ruler, and a T-square. Although she did most of her drafting on the computer, she liked to begin every project in pencil.
When she sat down, she felt the open door behind her like a cold breath. She realized that as she’d checked the safe, wrapped her husband’s ring, she’d unconsciously stood with her back to a wall.
So no one could sneak up behind you.
The drafting table was surprisingly easy to move. She shoved it such that she could sit facing the door to the room. This time when she sat, the hairs on the back of her neck stilled and she was able to focus.
She drew a grid. A color-coded list of concrete steps (hire a lawyer), and uncertain ones (prove you’re telling the truth). Her capability, the confidence of the lines she drew, the clear architectural lettering, all spoke to her in a way that said,You are not crazy. It was all real. You can get them back. You will getbetter. You can protect them.
Things already scheduled she put a dotted line through. The alarm installers, the locksmith, would arrive in the morning. The new problem of the immobile cars had yet to be dealt with.
She forced down a microwave meal of indeterminate age. Then she gathered pillows and a blanket from the guest bedroom and locked herself in her bathroom, the only room in the house with a door that bolted from the inside.
Her hand lingered for a moment on that bolt with the memory of installing it, desperate for some barrier between her and her family, for some tiny moment alone. It seemed like a desire sprung fromanother life, such a contrast to her current all-consuming longing for them.
She wound a nest of bedding in the cast-iron bathtub.
Another hard thing softened.
She downed her medication. Put in her earplugs. Surrounded by the walls of the tub, she didn’t so much fall asleep as fall completely unconscious.
The first dribble of light through the bathroom window woke her. Her muscles were horribly twisted. The small of her back ached as though she had spent the night lying on a fist. Even her finger with her husband’s ring on it tingled, unused to the band.
That’s what happens when you sleep with metal things.
She checked her phone. An hour until the locksmith and the alarm installers were scheduled to arrive. Standing as still as she could, she listened to the sounds of the house. Pressed an ear to the bathroom door. No creak of stair treads. Nothing but the sound of the wind outside. Even so, there was something about the depth of her sleep that made her nervous about leaving the bathroom. She was still too close to dreams for courage. She showered, brushed her teeth, and then, sitting on the edge of the tub, made call after call, leaving the same voicemail.
“Hello, I’ve just been notified that family services will be looking into my situation, and I see online you have experience with assisting parents. I’m in need of immediate representation….”
In between each call she thought,The hospital could have made a mistake about your blood alcohol. You know the tin box is missing. The teddy bear. Her clothes. You did feel watched. He could have copied the key. Put a nail in the tire. And maybe he did hide, somehow. Snuck out somehow.
She had left sixteen messages by the time she heard a knock downstairs. She slid open the bathroom bolt, peeked out at the still and empty hall, and listened carefully, pressing the Band-Aids circling herhusband’s wedding ring to reassure herself no Corner stood in the shadows, waiting to strike. She left the bathroom, dressed in a loose shirt and one of her husband’s sweaters, pulled soft sweatpants over her tender legs, and fumbled as she made sure the drawstring was tied tightly. She hoped the baggy clothes hid the state of her body with its bruises, its swelling, its hard, unnatural lumps. Downstairs she apologized to the locksmith for making him wait. He was followed quickly by the team of alarm system installers.
“All the locks,” she said. “Every camera, every window, every door. Yes, run whatever electricity you need. Sure, wires there are fine.”
The noise and motion of other people in the house allowed her to wander with a sense of safety, a sureness that the Corner wouldn’t spring out at her, that he couldn’t do anything to her, surrounded as she was by workers seeking her out, asking their questions. “Where do you want the new panel? Should we hook into the generator, too?”
Carefully but efficiently she put her hands on everything in the house, looking for any signs the Corner had left of his existence. Anything to fill that void on her chart that saidevidence. The other that saidproof.
He existed. All living things leave traces.
In the basement she smelled cigarette smoke again. Asked one of the alarm company men working there if he smelled it, too.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I quit a year ago, and it’s like I got a sixth sense for it now.”
This acknowledgment, this verification of her own senses, made grateful tears spring to her eyes at the same time she felt a ripple of resentment.
You know what you smell. You shouldn’t need someone else to tell you it’s real.
If there were any other signs the Corner existed, she didn’t find them. He was an absence. A smell with no source, vanished objects, memories. He was displacement—her phone on the wrong table, the toilet seat open, the baby monitor switched off. If he’d left footprints in the attic, the basement, they had been obliterated by the police during their search of the house, dust scuffed by different treads of many sizes.
The cops were messy. Sloppy.
Discouraged at finding no evidence, she changed gears. By early afternoon she had stacked several heavy-duty garbage bags’ worth of trash and a box full of old clothes in the garage, bringing her home a step closer to being combed and tidied after months of grief-induced neglect.
She imagined a caseworker coming into the house, seeing it lived-in but clean and shining. “Oh yes,” the pretend woman said. “This is a lovely place for children.”
But no evidence. Only things missing. Things set askew. A smell.
