Usually, he would call just before eight, before she cycled with Benjamin to his day care. Today, she would try to leave a few minutes early. She wanted to speak to him, but she mustn’t let him stress her out. If he did, things would go wrong.
The boy was already in her arms when the treacherous mobile began to rumble and spin on the table. Her little porthole to the outside world, always within reach.
“Hi, darling!” she said, trying to keep herself in check, her pulse pounding in her ears.
“I called you. Why didn’t you call back?”
“I was just about to,” she blurted. She knew it was a mistake as soon as the words left her mouth.
“You’re on your way out with Benjamin, how could you be about to call? I know you.”
She held her breath and put the boy down carefully on the floor. “He’s a bit off color today. You know when they’ve got a runny nose the day care says to keep them at home. I think he’s got a temperature.” Cautiously, she allowed herself to breathe. Her whole body was screaming for air.
“I see.”
The pause that followed worried her. Was he expecting her to say something? Was there something she had forgotten? She tried to focus. Stared out through the double glazing at the garden gate opposite. The bare branches. People on their way to work.
“I called more than once yesterday. Do you hear what I’m saying?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m sorry, darling. The phone just went dead on me. I think maybe it needs a new battery.”
“I only charged it on Tuesday.”
“Yes, I know you did. That’s what I mean. Only two days and it was flat. Strange, don’t you think?”
“So you charged it yourself, then? Could you work out how?”
“Yes.” She forced herself to giggle in as carefree a manner as possible. “It was easy, I’ve watched you do it loads of times.”
“I didn’t think you knew where the charger was.”
“Of course I do.” Now her hands were shaking. He knew something wasn’t right. Any second now he would ask where she had found that damned charger, and she had absolutely no idea where he kept it.
Think! Think fast! Her mind raced.
“Listen, I…” She raised her voice a notch. “Oh, Benjamin! Don’t do that!” She gave the boy a little shove with her foot, provoking him to make a sound. Then she glared at him harshly and nudged him again.
When the question came-”Where did you find it, then?”-the child finally began to cry.
“We’ll have to talk later,” she said, sounding concerned. “Benjamin’s hurt himself.”
She snapped the mobile shut, crouched down, and pulled off the boy’s romper, showering him with kisses and comforting noises. “There, there, Benjamin. Mummy’s so sorry, so sorry. She didn’t mean it. Would you like a piece of cake?”
The child sobbed and forgave her with a heavy nod, his big, sad eyes blinking. She thrust a picture book into his hands as the full extent of the catastrophe slowly manifested itself in her mind. The house they lived in was enormous, three hundred square meters, and the mobile charger could be in any place the size of a fist.
An hour later, not a single drawer, cupboard, or shelf on the ground floor was left unsearched.
And then it struck her: What if they only had the one charger? And what if he had taken it with him? Was his phone the same kind as hers? She didn’t even know.
She fed the little boy, her brow furrowed with concern, and became convinced that that was indeed what had happened. He had taken the charger with him.
She shook her head and scraped the boy’s lips clean with the spoon. But no, when you bought a mobile there was always a charger to go with it. Of course there was. Which meant there was a good chance that somewhere in the house there was a box that had come with the phone, containing a manual and most likely an unused charger. It just wasn’t on the ground floor, that’s all.
She glanced at the stairs leading to the first floor.
There were places in this house she almost never went. Not because he forbade her, but because that’s how it was. Correspondingly, he hardly ever entered her sewing room. They had their own interests, their own oases, and their own time to spend alone, albeit his freedom was the greater.
She sat the child on her hip and went up the stairs, pausing at the door of his office. If she found the box with the charger in one of his drawers or cupboards, how would she then explain her presence in his domain?
She pushed open the door.
In contrast to her own room across the landing, his was devoid of all energy, lacking the zest of color and creative thought so characteristic of her own space. This was a place of gray and off-white surfaces, and very little else.
She opened the built-in cupboards one by one, staring in at what amounted to nothing. Had the cupboards been hers, she would have been overwhelmed by tearstained diaries and accumulated mementoes, collected and saved to remind her of happy days in the company of friends.
But on the shelves here were only a few books piled up in small stacks. Books to do with work. Books on firearms and policing, that sort of thing. And then a pile on religious sects. On the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Children of God, the Mormons, and others she had never heard of. Odd, she thought briefly, before standing on tiptoe to see whatever might be on the top shelves.
There was hardly a thing.
She opened the desk drawers one by one. Apart from a gray sharpening stone of the kind her father always used to hone his fishing knife, nothing caught her attention. The drawers contained paper, rubber stamps, and a couple of unopened boxes of floppy disks for the computer, the kind no one used anymore.
She closed the door behind her, all her emotions frozen. At this moment she knew neither her husband nor herself. It was frightening and unreal at the same time. Like nothing she had experienced before.
She felt the child’s head loll on her shoulder, his breath steady against her neck.
“Oh, Mummy’s little boy. Did you fall asleep?” she whispered as she laid him down in his cot. She had to be careful not to lose control now. Everything had to proceed as normal.
She picked up the phone and called the day care. “Benjamin has a cold; it wouldn’t be fair to the others if I brought him in today. Sorry for leaving it so late,” she said mechanically, forgetting to say thanks when the day-care assistant wished him a speedy recovery.
That done, she turned toward the landing and stared at the narrow door between her husband’s office and their bedroom. She had helped him lug box upon box of stuff up the stairs into that little room. The main difference between the two of them had been one of ballast. She had come from her student accommodation with an absolute minimum of lightweight furniture from IKEA, whereas he came with everything he had amassed during the twenty years that made up the age gap between them. That was why their home was a jumble of furniture styles from different periods, and the room behind the door was filled with packing cases whose contents remained a mystery to her.
She almost lost heart as soon as she opened the door and peered inside. Though the room was less than a meter and a half in width, the space was still sufficient to contain packing cases stacked three wide and four high. She managed to peer over the top and could see the Velux skylight at the other end. In total, there were at least fifty boxes.
“Mainly stuff belonging to my parents and grandparents,” he had said. A lot of it could be chucked out once they got sorted. He was an only child, so no one else would kick up a fuss.
She stood staring at the wall of boxes, feeling overwhelmed. It wouldn’t make sense to keep a charger in there. This was a room for the past.
But then again…Her eyes settled on the overcoats that had been thrown into a heap on top of the rearmost boxes. Were they covering something? Might what she was looking for be hidden underneath?