Chapter 35
The next day, long after Tom has left—reluctantly—for work, long after I’ve run through small household chores and prepared a vegetable stew that’s now simmering on the stove, I stare at our pineapple wallpaper and will it to stand in for fresh air and sunlight on my face.
Back when Tom Junior was young, I never noticed my relative confinement.
I would go about our housebound mornings feeling productive, fulfilled—unless I’ve forgotten how those days really were.
Were they truly so simple, so engaging? I only used my camera as a perfunctory accessory back then, like every other busy mother; now my needed appendage hangs limply from a peg on the darkroom wall, and I slump at the kitchen table one floor above it, staring around, sensing the thinness of the wall between the present and my grandmother’s house in those terrible days.
They locked me up then, too, because the man was somewhere outside—even though he’d walked inside to harm me and could, I knew, return at any time.
Don’t go out alone whether it’s day or night. Stay home, Denby said. It’s close to what the police officers from my past said, and just as meaningless. The man can reach me anywhere. Everywhere. Inside and outside don’t matter. Both equally unsafe.
Still, I’ve promised Tom.
I glimpse autumn’s high blue sky through the kitchen window.
Branches twitching in a stiff breeze. Red and yellow leaves spinning to the ground.
I long to put on my coat and walk briskly through them, my Nikon in hand, so instead I shift to the living room to flip through the latest National Geographic for the second or third time, hoping the color-saturated images will sate me.
They did the first time, for a while. Now I stare hungrily at things I’ve never even thought of shooting before: castle ruins, dense jungles, isolated tribes.
I stare at the photographers’ bylines, too, reading what they’ve written to introduce their portfolios, and feel a flicker of want.
Have I been wrong to cling so tightly to privacy?
What has privacy won me, anyway? The man still found me, ferreted me out, invaded my life—and here I sit, locked at home.
An idea flickers in my mind—of giving Paul what he wants. Would it be so bad? Would Tom care so very much?
He would. I know he would.
I hear the barking of a dog outside, far off but recognizable.
When it barks a second time, I’m certain: It’s Rosie.
Even though she’s dead and gone. I know she’s dead and gone, I took pictures of her, lifeless on the living room carpet, and watched Tom bury her, but: there it is again.
Rosie. I know her bark like the sound of Tom Junior’s voice: immediately, instinctively, like something carved from my own cells.
I rise, put on my coat—just as I imagined, though without this thrumming anxiety—and step outside.
I stand still and listen on the front porch.
Nothing, no sound. I remember my knife then and step back inside, rummage through my purse, and slide the folded blade into my coat pocket.
That’s when I hear it again—Rosie’s distant bark.
I take deep breaths of the fresh, cold air as I walk the quiet streets, telling myself it’s good that I’m out, telling myself I’m just strolling through the neighborhood, what could be the harm?
But the sound of leaves rustling roughly in the wind and the sight of my neighbors’ dark, hooded windows combine to rattle me.
I look back over my shoulder again and again—seeing nothing—but I keep hurtling forward toward the sound.
Even as I wrap my hand around the knife in my pocket, it comes again.
Closer now. I move faster, passing identical, tidy homes and heedlessly following Rosie’s bark until I reach an abandoned-looking house several blocks away.
It’s like my own house and every other but with peeling paint, an overgrown lawn, and a rusting car parked in the driveway.
I don’t remember ever seeing it, even on my longer walks with Rosie, but maybe we never turned down this street before.
But didn’t we turn down every street in the neighborhood? There are only so many.
“Rosie?” I call, embarrassed at first, then letting my voice ring out. “Rosie?”
She barks in response; she’s inside. I step closer, crossing the weedy lawn to the nearest window until my face is just inches from the glass.
Shading my eyes to peer inside, I find a room that looks like a ruin of my own living room: with a long couch and two armchairs, blue carpeting, oval coffee table, antique lamps.
Everything layered in dust and unbearably shabby, as if the owners died or abandoned the place years ago.
But Rosie is in there somehow; I hear her again. A moment later, she trots into the terrible room.
Her ears are perked and her small pink tongue hangs out. She spots me at the window and yaps repeatedly. Urgently. I’m pawing at the window frame now, trying to lift it, when a wrinkled, wrecked face with milky blind eyes rears up before me.
“Get out! Get off my property!”
“Rosie!” I call. “Rosie!”
I’m banging on the window, adding to the noise, and Rosie is jumping now as she barks, then turning in panicked circles.
I never saw her behave like that—but was she ever so distressed, when she was mine?
I beat harder on the window; in an instant, the glass shatters.
All over the wrinkled face and my Rosie.
I start to scramble over the windowsill, knocking out more glass as the person tries to push me back. The awful face bleeding now.
“Rosie!” I shout, expecting her to come.
But when I look at her again, with half of me in the window, hanging over the sill, I freeze.
It isn’t her. It’s a little dog that resembles her, yes—but this dog’s ears are less upright, its coat a darker color.
It’s growling now, and yipping. Ugly. Nothing like my cheerful Rosie—gone, dead, buried in the backyard at home.
Of course. It can’t be her. I knew it couldn’t be her.
I drop back to the ground, muttering apologies, and stumble away with the old woman’s curses ringing in my ears and the dog still yipping, yipping.
It’s only when I reach my lawn that I notice my hands—slick with blood. I’ve dripped blood on my lovely winter coat. My palms burn badly as I pick out the slivers of glass, then wipe my hands on the soft grass to clean them.
“Judith?” I hear behind me. A woman’s voice—Patty’s. The last person I would hope to see, the person who ogled us from her porch as Tom was carried out. The person who will spread the news from house to house: I saw Judith Stanley disheveled and running, then wiping her bloody hands on the lawn.
“Patty, hello,” I say, hiding my hands behind me.
“Everything all right?” she calls from her porch. Her hair is up in a rag and she’s wearing an apron over her housecoat.
“I’m fine! Just getting some fresh air. You cleaning the house?
” She nods but I can see her scanning me, looking for signs of disarray, noting that my hands are out of sight.
Can she see the bloodstains on my coat from there?
I turn and start walking toward my house, moving my hands to the front as I go.
“It’s a good day for cleaning. Hope you have a nice day,” I call out. My voice wobbles, but I make it inside the house and lock the door behind me before crumbling apart.