What the Dead Can Do, page 19
“Are the kids at the park?” she asked.
Matthew ignored her in favor of peering out the peephole. When had he removed the putty? Could have been months ago, could have been five minutes ago.
“Kids, Mommy’s home,” she tried.
“They’re with Tag’s mother,” Matthew said. He hadn’t bothered to turn around.
Nicole sat at the kitchen table. It was best to let him explain why her children were at Lucinda’s on a weekday when he was good and ready. She didn’t need to see his face to understand that he was not. His energy was off, and his concern was creeping into her own.
When they’d first met, Nicole fell in love with Matthew for a half-dozen reasons. His calm demeanor was chief among them. He had answers for problems, and his nonchalance about life’s obstacles had been intoxicating. He’d been her antithesis; opposites attract and all that. Even now, when her husband didn’t know what to do, he carried indecision and uncertainty quietly until he had solutions. Not every fix was the right one, but little blew up in his face, and he didn’t lose his shit when it did. No, he went back to the drawing board and did so whistling.
He finally spun away from the door to join her in the kitchen, but even with the curtain pulled, it was still too dark to read his face. His expression rarely contorted itself beyond a configuration one might read as minorly bummed, but as he sat across from her at the kitchen table, she saw he was capable of communicating genuine panic after all.
She thought she might be in trouble. A great deal of time in sobriety had been spent feeling that way, an emotional relic of her life prior, maybe. Her sponsor had suggested that many spouses—even supportive ones—at times force those in recovery into that space of guilt and self-loathing inadvertently, especially those who didn’t attend Al-Anon. She also said it was more likely Nicole hadn’t forgiven herself completely and was projecting. Matthew still hadn’t said shit, though, and her mind raced too fast to give a fuck if she’d done something wrong.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.
He wiped away the concern by rubbing his hand from forehead to chin.
“I’m sure it’s nothing, but …” There was a quiver in the deep breath he took as he gathered his thoughts. “Gracey phoned before Em and Ethan made it home. She said a man tried to pick up Ethan from school this afternoon.”
Her entire respiratory system felt paralyzed. Other than a nauseating intuition that some in the rooms of AA referred to as newly developed spidey senses, there was no reason to think it was the same man from the bodega. She managed to ask, “What man?” and felt she’d only asked it in an attempt to convince herself that the two men being the same man was a stretch.
“He told Natalie his last name was Schaeffer. Called himself a family friend.”
“A reporter, maybe?” she asked. “Or some influencer who thinks they’re a reporter?”
Matthew squinted and made the hmm sound he always made when he thought she was talking out of her ass. She didn’t think her questions had been dumb, but, of course, she didn’t believe it was either of those. Even her voice had sounded doubtful. It was true that most people had moved on from Flight 2332 and the Miracle Boy, but not everyone. People obsessed over a lot of insane bullshit these days. Last she’d checked, conspiracy theory videos about why Ethan had been spared had view counts in the tens of millions. It was entirely possible that the two men were the same man and that he was some loon who believed he’d been chosen to play a part in some prophecy outlined by slick hucksters looking to make a quick buck via clickbait videos.
“Where were you this afternoon?” he asked.
Oh, fuck. He hadn’t thought her suggestion sounded ignorant after all—he was suspicious. For a moment, her rage overpowered her anxiety and growing worry about the man and the situation at hand. It was difficult to keep the muscles in her face from trembling.
“What in the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know that it does, but where were you?” he asked again.
She’d been at her meeting. Her whole life now was AA meetings, errands, and mothering. How dare he ask her where she was. She’d lost the battle with her nerves, and her head and arms shook as she swallowed what she really wanted to say to him—and had wanted to say to him for months: You have no fucking idea what’s going on with me, and you don’t care.
“You know where I was. My meeting,” she said instead.
His shoulders dropped. “I’m sorry, of course you were. I don’t know why I asked.”
His contrition seemed genuine, which surprised her. Though this was an absolutely inopportune time, she wanted to stay angry at him. She wanted that anger to lead somewhere productive … or maybe destructive. As it was, she added nothing more to his insinuation, and neither did he. They sat in silence until her concern for Ethan and Em came back in full.
“Why did you have Lucinda take the kids?”
“I didn’t want them around while we discussed this.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s fucking serious. And scary. And they’re kids—even Em.” He was right. This time, her question had been stupid. She was about to apologize when he added, “Things were just starting to feel normal around here, you know?”
Whether it’d been a dig at her or not, it threatened to reignite her desire to argue and to come clean about how she’d been feeling. If she was going to come clean about anything, it needed to be about the incident at the bodega, though. All she’d left unsaid that week about the stranger and his interaction with Ethan flooded her thinking. Her hand started to tremble on top of the table again, and she put her other one over it to try and still it. This time, Matthew noticed.
“Are you alright? You’re shaking.”
“Did Gracey say what the guy looked like?”
“She didn’t see him. The whole thing happened after another kid threw up and—”
“What about Emily?”
“I wasn’t finished. When Em got there, he was already gone, or maybe he’d snaked off amongst the chaos when she arrived, but Natalie saw him.”
“Well, what did Natalie say then?”
“Tall, dark hair, large but not unfit, ordinary face, but … off.”
The man from the store was all those things, but the description also fit a thousand different someones walking around Brooklyn on any given day. Off could mean drunk, high, slow—it never meant a body that didn’t seem to belong to them, not like the one she’d seen.
“Off how? Like not altogether there?” she asked. “Like struggling physically?”
“All she said was off. She told Gracey the man felt dangerous … also said Ethan recognized him and that for a minute, Natalie thought he might even know him. He had a lollipop for Ethan, too. I mean, candy from strangers—I thought that shit was an urban—”
Nicole jumped from her seat and managed to make it to the sink. It was him. How fucking dumb had she been to not tell Matthew about the man? She tried to hold onto the sick barreling from her stomach through her throat, but her nausea was overpowering. A colorful mix of what had been a salad, a coffee, and natural bile coated the basin. The smell alone was enough for round two.
“I’m sorry,” she managed before spitting up a second time, mostly stomach juices. “Did you call the police? We need to call the police. Now.” She hadn’t meant to sound panicked, but it was utterly impossible to control it. “And the kids. We need to get the kids.”
Matthew was at her side now. “Hon, you need to calm down,” he said as he handed her the towel he’d grabbed from the oven handle. “I already called the police. They’re going to assign an officer to the school for the next couple of days. They said it’s all they can do at this point. Just breathe. Jesus.”
He put his hand on her shoulder and peered into the sink with her. “What is that? Carrots?”
His attempt at levity sounded particularly strained. Her vomiting was probably unexpected, confusing, and, to him, suspicious for all the wrong reasons. His bullshit calm, her omissions—the kids not being home—only angered her more, and her thoughts conspired to ensure every last molecule from her stomach was ejected. Matthew pulled the curtains over the sink all the way open and stared out the window while she finished.
When she was done, she practically fell back into her seat at the table.
“Are you having an affair?” he asked, still looking out the window but filling a glass of water she assumed he intended to give her. “You can tell me, you know.” He was all calm again. Practical. Understanding. Everything she’d once admired about him was ugly now. Inauthentic.
She decided no answer was the only appropriate one. How he’d managed to make this about him or them when Ethan or maybe even both the kids were in danger was just so very expected. When he turned to join her back at the table, though, there was something in his eyes that made her feel like he was legitimately hoping to hear that she was having an affair.
“You’d feel better if I was having an affair?”
He sat, slid the glass of water over to her, and laid out his own bit of insanity. “If you were having an affair—met someone in the rooms, maybe—and the dipshit you slept with thought it’d be nice or clever or a good shot at home-wrecking to pop by Ethan’s school to pick him up … I don’t know, Nicole. I realize a jilted-lover prank sounds absolutely nuts, but the alternative is far worse. You and I would have to accept that some brazen motherfucker tried to abduct Ethan in broad daylight. So, I just think—”
“I met this man the other night,” she said. It came out easy. Painless. She was still learning that the truth almost always did.
“Met him where?” he asked. His face was surprisingly wrecked.
She shook her head. “Not in a romantic way. Met isn’t the right word.” She was on a roll now and could not be bothered with hoping to hear he believed her. “He was at the grocery store, just standing in the aisle, staring at the lights in the ceiling and swaying a bit. I thought he might be high or having a stroke, so I offered to help him.”
“What makes you think it’s the same guy?”
“His interest in Ethan was off-putting.”
“I thought you said he was having a stroke?”
“At first … but at some point, he … I don’t know … clicked. Like went from not being there to being there. And started to talk to Ethan. He or maybe even she—”
“Wait, you’re not even sure it was a man?”
“It was a man,” she said, frustrated. “But when he spoke to Ethan, his voice switched. It was him, but not him.”
Matthew pressed his lips into a fine line, ran a finger up and down along the back of his neck, then finally said, “I honestly don’t know what the hell you are talking about, Nicole.”
“Half the reason I didn’t say anything is because I’m still not sure how to describe it.” She started to stand, but the nausea was still potent, and she sat back down quickly. “I just want to go get the kids,” she said, resting her head against the palm of her hand.
“Not until you tell me what you saw. I won’t say another word.”
That was unlikely. He didn’t know how to stay quiet. A character defect if there ever was one. His ultimatum was shitty, too, but her earlier rage had found all the old nooks and crannies it had always relied on to hide. She was tired. Unsure. Scared. And maybe worst of all, sober.
“He went from gruff and disinterested to sweet and adoring—not only his words but his face. It changed. I thought he was just being overly kind, cartoonishly so, but he knew things about Ethan. He knew what his favorite lollipop flavor was—from when he was two.”
“Ethan couldn’t know what his favorite flavor was from when he was two.” Matthew was wrong about that, but Nicole let that slide. “Jesus Christ, Nicole. I can’t believe you’re just now telling me this.”
“I wanted to tell you the other night, but …”
“But what?”
“I thought you’d think I was making things up.”
“Why would I think that?”
“I don’t know … maybe insinuating I’m having affairs has something to do with my reluctance to tell you anything that doesn’t fit your perfect little family fantasy.”
The twitch under his eye would’ve been imperceptible to most, but she saw it. Her barb had stung, she’d wounded him, and the buzz of nausea gave way to another swift kick of that untamable adrenaline she’d felt before. Just enough to fire one last shot at him.
“Someone tries to kidnap Ethan, and the first place your mind goes is, ‘Nicole must be fucking some loon she met at one of her meetings.’ It’s unfair but not surprising.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a shitty thing to think. Let’s start over.”
Matthew only ever used the word “sorry” when he’d backed himself into a corner. She took another deep breath, already on the third of the ten it took to calm herself. An obvious practice now that she knew it. Breathing correctly—with intention—would have saved her from so many other violent blow-ups over the years. Where would she be now if she’d been taught to breathe correctly two decades ago? It was an odd thought to have, but it came nonetheless.
“Fine,” she said between the fifth exhale and the next inhale. “Start over.”
“So, you have a stalker.”
He’d said it calmly and had tried hard to soften his face to project plausible belief, but it wouldn’t take. She pressed on. “I don’t think this guy is into me. He was all eyes on Ethan.”
“Stalkers do crazy shit, Nicole.” He looked down at the table as if embarrassed by her ignorance of worldly things. But when his eyes found hers again, they had changed. His pupils had dilated under raised brows, and there was a slight quiver in his voice when he quietly asked her, “Wait, are you saying he’s a pedophile?”
That thought had occurred to Nicole, but on nothing more than a mother’s intuition, she’d already decided that wasn’t the case with the man. “No,” she said firmly, but because she didn’t want to give her husband more reason to think her naïve, she added, “I mean, how would I know if he was? But it wasn’t like that.”
“For fuck’s sake. Quit holding back. I’m ready to believe whatever.” His capitulation had sounded legitimate.
Nicole and Amanda hadn’t really been friends, more like patient acquaintances, entirely different stars, one bright and one dimming, that orbited near each other once in a while within the galaxy of their husbands’ best-buddies friendship. She hadn’t hated Amanda, but she hadn’t quite liked her either. Amanda was pitch-perfect Park Slope material. Everything Nicole wasn’t. Being a wasted wreck almost anytime Tag and his family were over never helped her over the hump of shame for being anything but right for mothering in that neighborhood. What they talked about, when they talked to each other at all, must have been held in the brain cells that Nicole shed from using, but she hadn’t forgotten one very pertinent thing: the nickname Amanda had used for Ethan with an almost sickening regularity. She knew that Matthew knew it just as well.
“The man called Ethan ‘silly boy.’ ”
18
AIDAN
Aidan sat alone in the waiting room. The smell of elderly ointments and soiled diapers came and went over a baseline hint of bleach. A fine reminder that illness, like death, lands upon people at any age. He himself had sent souls between eighteen and fifty-two to heaven or hell, but reminiscing about those kills did little to distract him from the offending odors. He was no stranger to foul scents—but at home, he used a 3M reusable respirator and vapor cartridges to clean up and dispose of the messes his victims had made. He’d been in such a rush to be on time for his appointment that bringing even a handkerchief slipped his mind. The smell of sickness here was at least less pungent than it’d have been at the Urgent Care in Norwalk, where the average resident was sure to be considerably older, it had to be. This office was less public, too.
The physician he was there to see was a coworker’s recommendation, but so far, the promise of reliable appointment times was as flimsy as it had sounded. He picked at his nails, then at the thin spot of denim above one knee. He folded his arms and stuck his hands under his pits to try and keep himself still and presentable. Nerves weren’t something he remembered having, but he was definitely rocking a bit, back and forth, in the chair. His swaying wasn’t aggressive like that of a mental patient in a movie, but it wasn’t subtle, either. It would not do.
He reached for a magazine he’d flipped through already, started on the first page again, and then revisited every page after. A second read-through failed to take his mind off his reason for being there. Then again, Popular Science can only do so much for a man fretting about being seen by a doctor, or in Aidan’s case, being seen at all. Doctors asked questions. Doctors wanted a list of symptoms. Doctors wanted answers before they would hand out their solutions.
He wasn’t sure how he’d respond when the physician asked, “What seems to be the problem?” There was a high probability the doctor would start there. He’d already given it a great deal of thought but could not find an approachable word to describe what he had.
I can’t be the only one to ever say, “Hey, Doc, I think I might be possessed.”
He chuckled at the thought, but the levity was fleeting.
What started out as something mildly entertaining had turned frustrating. Possession wasn’t scary. Possession was damn inconvenient. At least for him. He wasn’t actually at the doctor to claim he was possessed. That morning, Aidan had landed on an alternative theory for his two long-distance sleepwalking trips from Stamford to Brooklyn: a brain tumor.
