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Later she checked the baby monitor’s transceiver. It was switched off. She turned it back on. Told her daughter, “Love, please don’t turn the monitor off. Otherwise I won’t wake up if you’re sleepwalking.”
“I didn’t turn it off, Mommy.”
“I know you’re a big girl. I know you’re responsible. But it’s dangerous if it’s off.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t do it.”
Maybe you did it, and forgot? Maybe your husband did it, before. Maybe he thought it wasn’t necessary because it had been so long since she last sleepwalked. Maybe he’s trying to tell you something.
Like her daughter, each bit of strangeness triggered the thought,It’s him! He’s come back to us.It was her husband, still not quite solid enough to use it, who’d moved the hide-a-key. It was her husband, trying to reach them, who’d vanished from behind his favorite tree, who’d left the path looking tamped down, traveled.
Stop it. You’re imagining things because you’re exhausted. Even when you sleep you don’t rest. Because you miss him. It’s so impossible that he’s gone, it’s easier to think he’s here. And because of the article.
She knew, objectively, that the uncannies began at the same time the feature in the city paper was published. That was the logical explanation for why she and the children felt her husband had been wrenched back into reality. Daily, she ignored emails, texts, calls, and voicemails from seemingly everyone they’d ever met. Most messages leaked the sender’s glee at his or her proximity to fame, seeped superficial pity about her proximity to death. Only a few shared her fury, shared their sympathy, asked how she was, given the way the article made her look.
It was the gallery’s fault. Or hers for hiring them. She was tired of calls from interior designers, pained by their palpable desperation for artwork instantly made more valuable by death, their condolences impatient. So when a gallery tracked her down, gave her a convincing pitch for representing her husband’s work, she signed on the dotted line. Recalling the hundreds of prints stored in her husband’s office, she told them that of course she had signed photos, lots. She had a rare night of restfulness, thinking how the money would allow her time to find more clients, or even a job at a firm. Even so she woke sickened at the world for recognizing her husband, caring about him like this, only after he was dead. Her one consolation was that she had absolutely no signed prints. All those vultures would unknowingly be paying for her hand writing his signature.
During lockdown her husband had leaned out of his tiny planeto photograph miles of empty highways. Had taken shots of Boston, New York, Providence, Hartford, abandoned, postapocalyptic.
These had not sold at all.
“I’ll take them off the website for now,” her husband had said. “But just you wait. Once people can look back on it, say, ‘Remember when we survived that?’ they’ll be interested. Until then, it’s just too fresh.”
Or maybe people just don’t want their beach house decorated with a four-foot-tall photo of a plague city.
What she’d said aloud, though, was also true.
“I think it’s your best work.”
The gallery had agreed, the representative almost salivating over the scans she sent of these pieces. The article had been the gallery’s idea. It featured quote after quote from the representative about this “new period of deeper work, historic and insightful,” along with much speculation regarding her husband’s derring-do in the airplane to achieve such shots and weepy hand-wringing about what a loss it was to the artistic world.
No one had contacted her for comment. But they’d found her father-in-law. She recalled the old man spitting, “Photography’s for girls. And men who don’t like girls.” But there he was, misty over how he’d nurtured his son’s artistic skills, so obvious even when he was a child, at least to an attentive father. How he was inspired by good old dad’s love of airplanes. How masculine he made art by involving said airplane. A quote, pulled from the article large and bold, felt the same as that awful slap across her face.
“I think the investigation will show his death was no accident,” her father-in-law said.
“You couldn’t ask for better publicity,” the gallery representative gloated. “A little mystery? A little hint of foul play? Your father-in-law may have just doubled your net worth. Oh, don’t say that, honey,no! I’m sure no one would ever think he meant you had anything to do with it. Honestly, I assumed it was something about the airplane. Oh, sweetie, you know how it is, we told them not to bother the widow for a puff piece.”
That’s what she was.A widow, widow, widow.
So no wonder, she told herself,No wonder, signing his name, seeing his name, hearing it again and again—of course it feels like he’s near, with all that.
A shriek from her son and she ran out of the house, terrified he was hurt. There was her little boy, laughing and muddy on the cold November ground beneath the swing set, and she could breathe again. A chain hung loose, the other side dangling with the swing still attached.
“Are you okay?”
“It broke, Mama, look how messy I am!”
She examined the swing, the chain. How was it possible? The screw-type carabiner that had attached it was delicately undone, its metal clasp securely locked open, not a thing that could have happened unless done deliberately.
“Did you do this? Unscrew this?”
The children shook their heads.
“I mean it. Did you? This is dangerous.”
“No, Mama.”
“Well, someone did. And it wasn’t me, which means it was one of you.”
