I kicked off the slippers to walk silently across the living room, toward the hall that led to the bathroom where I’d last seen Misty working.
I passed our bedroom, the future guest room, and the cozy study we planned to use as the nursery. The last door on the right at the end of the hall opened into the bathroom. It was equipped with a pedestal sink; a pink claw-foot bathtub; the circa 1980 pre-fab glass shower I used every morning; cranky plumbing, circa God-knows-when; and the small linen closet that Misty had been stuffing with my life’s toiletries. It was not, however, equipped with Misty.
The narrow hall dead-ended in front of a small oval stained-glass window of a purple tulip. A sharp left led to the sunroom. I stood at the threshold of the bathroom door. The light was off and everything in place except for the dripping piece of yellowing rose-and-vine wallpaper over the commode that I’d peeled back this morning to reveal a print of little girls in blue bonnets.
I inched reluctantly toward the passage that led to the sunroom. Where was the light switch for this part of the hall? A spiderweb tickled my forehead, and I swung frantically at it, imagining its architect crawling on my head. Wasn’t the security system supposed to take care of him? But it wasn’t a spiderweb. It was a pull chain, which I’d forgotten about, attached to a naked bulb in the ceiling. I tugged on it and was unrewarded with about 40 watts of light.
I moved toward the sunroom, its French door shut tight, old newspaper superglued over each pane of glass. The previous owner, the elderly Elsa, had done a painstaking job. Her mind was eventually eaten with too much paranoia to live alone. But maybe she knew something everybody else didn’t.
I’d left the door open, I was sure, because we’d experienced unseasonably cool Texas weather the last couple of days. I liked to think the warm sun crept its way down the halls, keeping our gas bill low and Mrs. Drury’s ghosts from lingering.
Maybe Misty had gone home? But without saying goodbye? I heard a slight sound behind the sunroom door, like a cat’s paws hitting the floor. But I’d found Belmont in a box of clothes before my nap, and he’d indicated that I should not remove him, ever.
My mind called up an image of Misty, sprawled on the floor behind that door, a man holding her Swiss Army knife at her throat. I marched the last few steps, twisting the glass knob with a sweaty palm. Pale yellow light poured into the hall.
Misty knelt over a box, her back to me.
She quickly snapped around, only losing composure for a second, but it was one of those critical seconds that causes you to rethink everything.
A fusion of hormones and fear and loneliness must have thrown off my instincts about people.
I didn’t speak. The late afternoon sun struggled through grimy windows that overlooked the backyard, a bramble of bushes and trees cooked to a crisp for the past four months.
I had a mindless thought that the windows needed scraping and new hardware before the baby was born. Most of them were painted shut. Mike’s and my child would breathe fresh air.
“I thought I’d get a start in here while you napped,” Misty said, brushing off her knees. “I see you’ve already begun on those baby boxes over there.” She gestured across to the other side of the room and an assortment of half-unpacked shower gifts.
Was the awkwardness real or imagined? I was focused on the box at her knees. The one she’d been bent over. It wasn’t open.
“I didn’t want to wake you.” She gestured to the room. “I was just getting a sense of how much is left to do.”
The excuse she’d thought up, maybe, just in case, before digging the tip of her knife into a box.
She took a few steps toward me. “It’s getting late. You look tired.”
We moved wordlessly out of the sunroom, down the hall, into the living room, past the lukewarm tea on the tray.
“Maybe we can talk tomorrow,” she suggested.
“Maybe,” I replied stiffly.
As I slid open the deadbolt, I wasn’t thinking about her snooping in the sunroom or her jumpiness and I certainly wasn’t thinking about how she deserved a grateful thank-you at the door for bringing order to my house and, surely, to some extent, my marriage.
I was thinking about her eyes.
Maybe it was nothing.
A whim.
A fashion conceit.
But the first time I met her, Misty’s eyes were a deep brown like a golden retriever collie mutt I once loved.
In the light of the sunroom, they were blue.
22
Misty Rich’s master bathroom was probably a chrome and granite affair with perfectly folded, impersonal white towels, nothing like the motley collection she unpacked for me, worn thin and soft, accrued over many years, combined in marriage and now ready to clash with Pepto Bismol-colored tile.
Were her bathroom drawers stuffed with every hue of contact lens, five different shades of brown and blue and green, including that Caribbean aqua so mesmerizing and so utterly wrong on the face of a human being?
Who was she?
Did she feel like I did? That she hosted infinite people inside her body, who slipped in and out seamlessly, with no one ever noticing, transforming her into what she thought people wanted?
Twilight was casting its gray pall in the sunroom, but I could still make out the words scrawled on the box that Misty had been kneeling over.
OLD DISHES/STORAGE.
Misty could have been telling the truth.
I began to dig through the boxes, tossing them aside, dumping them on the floor, a small well of panic rising. Where was it? There. The box underneath a round container that held my wisp of a wedding veil.
EMILY/PERSONAL.
The mover’s tape securely in place.
I scraped my nail under the edge of the tape and ripped it open.
Since I was a kid, I’d stuck any piece of paper that meant anything to me in one place.
An old lover’s poem, my parents’ obituaries, a handcrafted birthday card from a friend, a New York Times review of the best books in the last decade, a napkin with the scribbled names of my foodie friend Delia’s favorite San Francisco restaurants. All of it, stacked neatly into folders and envelopes for future reference, most of it unlikely to ever be touched again.
I pawed my way to the bottom until I uncovered the corner of something red. An ordinary, college-ruled notebook-notes from a Shakespeare class that confounded my nineteen-year-old mind with imagery and metaphors and obscure, clever references to the politics of another time. Why doesn’t anyone admit that Shakespeare is so damn hard to understand?
It wasn’t until much later, as an adult, that I had my epiphany. Shakespeare’s words were not meant to be read and highlighted at a tiny desk in the hushed stacks of a university library. Shakespeare was meant to be roared out loud, and breathed in like a brisk wind.
I barely pulled out a B in the course, but I tried, at least until after the rape.
After that, before each class, I had swallowed two Vicodin prescribed for a toothache six months earlier, enjoyed a nice buzz, and doodled in the margin of this notebook.
I looked up from the box, frustrated by the waning light. Beyond the smeared glass of the sunroom, twisting, bare tree branches drew a sharp black outline against orange sky. A wicked Elizabethan set design for someone out there, watching.
I regretted not bringing the flashlight from the hall closet. This room had never been wired for a fixture. Mrs. Drury apparently didn’t enter it after dark. I wondered whether the cop was still out front.
Shivering, I flipped toward the back of the notebook, to my carefully rendered cartoon of a man with horns.
He lay on his back, a knife in his gut.
Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!
Angry words scratched across the page.