home where I close and lock the door behind myself. I tug on
it twice, to be sure it’s closed tight.
I move into the kitchen. A casserole awaits me on the stovetop
when I step inside, a piece of foil folded over the top of it to
keep it warm. A Post-it note on top. Xo, it reads. Signed, Will.
The dogs are the only ones waiting in the kitchen for me,
staring at me with their matching snaggleteeth, begging to be
let outside. I open the back door for them. They make a beeline
to the corner of the yard to dig.
I climb the creaky steps to find Imogen’s bedroom door
closed, the lock on it undoubtedly turned so that I couldn’t get
in if I wanted to. Except that when I look, there’s a new lock on
the door, a whole system—complete with padlock—that slips
over the door handle. The door now locks from the outside in.
Imogen must have installed this herself, to keep me out.
Rock bands the likes of Korn and Drowning Pool lash out
over the Bluetooth speaker, volume turned all the way up so that
there’s no misinterpreting the songs’ lyrics, dead bodies a recur-
ring theme. The profanity is atrocious, hate spewing through
the speakers and into our home. But Tate isn’t around to hear
it, and so this time, I let it be.
I go to Otto’s door, rap lightly and call out, over the sound
of Imogen’s noise, “I’m home.”
He opens the door for me. I look at Otto, seeing the way
that he looks more and more like Will each day. Now that he’s
older, the angles of his face are sharp. There is no more baby
fat to soften the edges. He’s getting taller all the time, finally
enjoying that growth spurt that has for so long bypassed him,
keeping him small while the other boys in school grew tall. If
not now, then soon he’ll rival their height. Otto is handsome
like Will. In no time at all, he’ll be making girls swoon. He just
doesn’t know it yet.
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“How was your day?” I ask him, and he shrugs and says,
“Fine. I guess.”
It’s an indecisive reply. I take it as an opportunity. “You
guess?” I ask, wanting more: to know how his day really went,
if he’s getting along with the other kids at school, if he likes his teachers, if he’s making friends. When he says nothing, I prod.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?” It’s silly, one
of those things doctors say when they’re trying to gauge a pa-
tient’s pain. Otto shrugs again and tells me his day was a six,
which ranks as moderate, decent, an okay day.
“Homework?” I ask.
“Some.”
“Need any help?”
He shakes his head. He can do it himself.
As I make my way to Will’s and my bedroom to change, I
catch sight of a light drifting from beneath the doorway that
leads to the third-floor attic. The light in the attic is on, which it never is, because it’s where Alice killed herself. I asked the
boys never to go up there. I didn’t think it was a place any of
us needed to be.
The boys know that Alice gave us the house. They don’t know
how she died. They don’t know that one day, Alice slipped a
noose around her neck, securing the other end of it to the ceil-
ing’s support beam, stepping from the stool. What I know as a
physician is that, after the noose tightened around her neck and
she was suspended, supported only by her jaw and her neck,
she would have struggled for air against the weight of her own
body. It would have taken minutes for her to lose consciousness.
It would have been extremely painful. And even when she fi-
nally did lose consciousness, her body would have continued to
thrash about, taking much longer for her to die, up to twenty
minutes if not more. Not a pleasant way to go.
It’s hard for Will to talk about Alice. This I can understand.
After my father passed, it was hard for me to talk about him. My
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memory isn’t the best. But what sticks with me most is when
I was around eleven years old, when my father and I lived just
outside of Chicago and he worked for a department store in the
city. Dad rode the train downtown every day back then. I was
old enough to keep watch over myself by then, a latchkey kid.
I went to school and I came home. No one had to tell me to do
my homework. I was responsible enough for that. I made and ate
my own dinner. I did my dishes. I went to bed at a reasonable
time. Most nights, Dad would have a beer or two on the train
ride home, stopping at the bar after he’d departed the train, not
getting home until after I was asleep. I’d hear him, stumbling
around the house, knocking things over, and the next morning
there’d be a mess for me to clean.
I put myself through college. I lived alone, in a single dorm
followed by a small apartment. I tried living with a roommate
once. It didn’t work for me. The roommate I had was careless
and irresponsible, among other things. She was also manipula-
tive, a complete kleptomaniac.
She took phone messages for me that I never received. She
made a mess of our apartment. She ate my food. She stole money
from my wallet, checks from my checkbook. She used my credit
card to buy herself things. She denied doing it, of course, but
I’d look at my bank statements later and find checks made out
to places like hair salons, department stores, cash. When I asked the bank to produce the processed checks for me, I could clearly
see that the handwriting on them was not mine.
I could have pressed charges. For whatever reason, I chose
not to.
She wore my clothes without asking. She brought them back
wrinkled and dirty, sometimes stained, reeking of cigarette
smoke. I’d find them hanging in my closet like that. When I
asked her about it, she’d gaze at my filthy clothing and say, You think I actual y wore that ugly shirt of yours?
Because on top of everything else, she was mean.
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I put a lock on my bedroom door. That didn’t stop her.
Somehow, she still found a way in. I’d come home from a
night out to find my door open, my things rifled through.
I didn’t want to live like that.
I offered to move out, to let her keep our place. She was angry
to the point of being combative. Something about her scared
me. She couldn’t afford the unit all on her own, she told me,
seething. She got in my face, told me I was crazy, that I was a
psychopath.
I held my ground. I didn’t flinch.
I said calmly, I could say the same about you.
In the end, she was the one to leave. That was best, seeing as
I’d recently met Will, and needed a place where we could hang
out. Even afte
r, I had my suspicions that she was still letting herself in, going through my things. She’d given me her key back,
but that didn’t mean she hadn’t taken it to the hardware store first and made a copy of it to keep. In time I had the locks changed.
That, I told myself, would have to stop her. If I thought she was
still coming in, it was only my paranoia speaking.
Still, that wasn’t the end of her. Because I saw her some six
months ago or so, when I passed her on the street, not far from
Will’s and my home. She looked the same to me, strutting her
stuff down Harrison, just as arrogant as she’d always been. I
ducked away when I saw her, slipped down another street.
It was just after graduation when Will and I met, at the en-
gagement party of a friend. Will and I have different versions
of the time we met. What I know is that he came up to me at
the party, handsome and gregarious as ever, thrust out a hand,
and said, Hey there. I think I’ve seen you before.
What I remember is feeling awkward and insecure that night,
the awkwardness abating ever so slightly with the cheesy pickup
line. He hadn’t, of course, seen me before. It was a come-on,
and it worked. We spent the rest of the night intertwined on the
dance floor, my insecurities lessening the more I had to drink.
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MARY KUBICA
We’d been dating only a couple months when Will suggested
he move into my apartment with me. Why he was single, I didn’t
know. Why he chose me over all the other beautiful women in
the city of Chicago, I also didn’t know. But for whatever reason,
he insisted he couldn’t stand to be away from me. He wanted
to be with me all the time. It was a romantic notion—no one
had ever made me feel as desired as Will did back then—but it
made sense financially too. I was finishing up my residency and
Will his PhD. Only one of us was earning an income, albeit a
small one, most of which went to repay med school debt. But
still, I didn’t mind covering the rent. I liked having Will with
me all the time. I could do that for him.
Not long after, Will and I got married. Shortly after that,
Dad died, taken from this world of his own volition. Cirrho-
sis of the liver.
We had Otto. And then, years later, Tate. And now I find
myself living in Maine.
To say I wasn’t completely bowled over when word arrived
that Will’s sister had left us a home and child would be a lie. Will always knew about the fibromyalgia, but we learned about the
suicide from the executor of the estate. I didn’t think any good
could come from our moving to Maine, but Will disagreed.
The months before had been merciless and unsparing. First,
Otto’s expulsion, followed immediately by the discovery of
Will’s affair. It wasn’t days after that that a patient of mine died on the table. I’d had patients die before, but this one nearly
wrecked me. He’d had a pericardiocentesis done, a relatively safe
and routine procedure where fluid is aspired from the sac that
surrounds a person’s heart. When I looked back at my medical
notes, the procedure was well warranted. The patient was suf-
fering from a condition known as cardiac tamponade, where
the accumulation of fluid puts excessive pressure on the heart,
stopping it from functioning properly. Cardiac tamponade can
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be lethal unless some of the fluid is drained. I’d done the pro-
cedure before, many times. There’d never been a problem.
But this time, I didn’t do the procedure. Because, according
to my colleagues, I walked out of the room just as the patient
went into cardiac arrest, forcing a resident to perform the peri-
cardiocentesis without me. The patient on the table was dying,
and without the procedure he would have died.
But the procedure was done incorrectly. The needle punc-
tured the patient’s heart so that he died anyhow.
They found me later, upstairs on the hospital’s rooftop,
perched on the edge of the fourteen story building, legs dan-
gling over the edge, where some claimed I was about to jump.
But I wasn’t suicidal. Things were bad, but they weren’t that
bad. I blamed Otto’s expulsion and the affair for it, for wreaking
havoc on my emotions and mind. A nervous breakdown, claimed the rumors circulating throughout the hospital. The buzz was
that I had had a nervous breakdown in the ER, marched myself
up to the fourteenth floor, prepared to jump. I’d blacked out is
what happened. When all was said and done, I didn’t remem-
ber any of it. It’s a period of my life that’s gone. What I remem-
ber is examining my patient, and then coming to in a different
room—except by then I was the one spread out on a table, hid-
den beneath a sheet. When I later heard that my patient died at
the hands of a less experienced doctor, I cried. I’m not one to
cry. But that time, I couldn’t keep it inside.
The triggers of a nervous breakdown were there: a period of
stress that hadn’t been dealt with, feeling disoriented, worth-
less, unable to sleep.
The next day, the head of the department put me on forced
medical leave. He subtly suggested a psych eval. I said thanks,
but no thanks. Instead, I chose to resign. I couldn’t go back
there ever again.
When we arrived in Maine, Will and I found the foursquare
farmhouse in quite a state. The stepstool was still in the attic
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MARY KUBICA
along with three feet of rope, snipped at the end while the rest
remained bound to some sort of exposed support beam that
cut across the ceiling. Anything within reach of Alice’s thrash-
ing body had been knocked over, implying death hadn’t been
a breeze.
I make my way to the attic door and pull it open. From up
above, a light glows. I climb the steps two at a time as beneath
my feet, they creak. The attic is an unfinished space, complete
with wooden beams, a plank cork flooring, wads of fluffy pink
insulation scattered here and there like clouds. The light comes
from a single exposed bulb on the ceiling, which someone, who-
ever was here, has forgotten to turn off. A string dangles beneath.
A chimney, wrapped in exposed brick, runs through the center
of the room, venting outside. There’s a window that faces onto
the street. It’s so dark outside tonight, there’s nothing to see.
Sheets of paper catch my eye. They’re on the floor with a pen-
cil, one I recognize right away as one of Otto’s graphite draw-
ing pencils. The ones Will and I got for him, the ones he never
lets Tate use. They’re expensive and also Otto’s prized posses-
sion, though I haven’t seen him use them in months. Since all
that happened in Chicago with him, he hasn’t been drawing.
I’m stricken with two things: disappointment, for one, that
Otto would disobey me and come into the attic when I said
not to. But also relief that Otto is drawing again, the first step, perhaps, in a return to normalcy.
Maybe Will is right. Maybe if we give it time, we can find
happiness here.
I make my way to the sheets of paper. They’re on the floor.
The window is open an inch, crisp December air coming in,
making the paper move. I bend at the knees to retrieve it, ex-
pecting to see the big anime eyes of Asa and Ken staring back
at me. The characters from Otto’s graphic novel, his work-in-
progress. The barbed lines of hair, the sad, disproportionate eyes.
The pencil, sitting inches from the paper, is cracked in half.
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The end of it is worn down and blunt, which isn’t like Otto.
He’s always taken such great care of these pencils. I reach for
that too and stand upright, before looking at the image before
me. When I do, I gasp, a hand going involuntarily to my mouth.
It’s not Asa and Ken I see.
Instead angry, incomplete lines that stop and go. Something
dismembered on the page, a body I assume. A round object at
the end of the sheet which I take for a head; the long, limb-like
shapes for arms and legs. At the top of the drawing are stars,
a crescent shaped moon. Night. There’s another figure on the
page, a woman by the looks of it, from the long scraggly hair,
the lines that jut out of her circular head. In her hand, she holds something with a keen edge that drips with something else,
blood I can only assume, though the drawing is in black and
white. No telling red. The eyes of this figure are mad, while
the decapitated head nearby cries, big shaded blobs of tears that
tear a hole in the page.
I suck in my breath and hold it there. A pain settles in my
chest. My arms and legs go momentarily numb.
The same image is replicated on all three sheets of paper.
There’s nothing different about them, nothing that I can see.
The drawings are Otto’s, I tell myself at first because Otto is
the artist in the family. The only one of us who draws.
But this is far too primitive, far too rudimentary to be Otto’s.
Otto can draw much better than this.
But Tate is a happy boy. An obedient boy. He wouldn’t have