Chapter Six
The device arrived in a plain, padded envelope addressed to my work, and it cost eleven dollars.
I’d found it while researching something else entirely, which was what I told myself, though the search history would show I’d spent forty minutes reading reviews.
It was a black, plastic square smaller than a matchbook, and its entire purpose was to produce a short, electronic chirp at random intervals.
Sometimes twice in ten minutes. Sometimes silence for half a day.
The listing marketed it as a prank device, and the reviews were glorious.
“Hid it in my brother-in-law’s truck, he’s had it at two mechanics.”
“My roommate thinks our apartment is haunted. Battery lasts months. God help us all.”
Pamela had said, “Keep it legal, keep it small, and don’t tell me about it.”
This was legal. It was very small. I wasn’t going to tell her.
Nick’s office was the one room in our house I’d never had any influence over. Dark shelves, heavy furniture, and framed deal announcements – his sanctuary. I’d respected that arrangement for twenty years without ever asking why the respect only ran in one direction.
On a morning when he’d left for work early and Julie was still asleep, I went in with a stepladder and a flashlight and studied the room the way I’d study an installation space.
The bookshelves were too obvious; a searching man cleared bookshelves first. The desk was his territory, too likely to be turned out.
But against the far wall stood a low, wooden cabinet where he kept old files.
It was heavy, flush to the wall, with a gap of a few inches behind it, and no man who’d ever thrown his back out moved a full cabinet on a hunch.
I taped the device to the wall behind the cabinet, low, where even a flashlight beam would have to work to find it. Then I put the stepladder away, made coffee, and got on with my day.
Nothing happened for two days, because the thing was random. I half started to wonder if eleven dollars had bought me a defective square of plastic. Then, at dinner, on the third night, Nick came to the table with the particular frown he used for problems that were beneath him.
“Did you hear that beeping earlier?”
“Beeping?” I asked innocently.
“Like a chirp. Twice this afternoon, then nothing.” He served himself salad. “It’s the smoke detector, has to be. The batteries are going.”
“They’re hardwired,” Julie said, not looking up from her plate.
“They have battery backups. Everything has battery backups, that’s why everything in this house chirps when it dies.” He pointed his fork at the ceiling in general indictment. “I’ll deal with it this weekend.”
He dealt with it that weekend. Dealing with it meant a trip to the hardware store, a nine-volt multipack, and two hours of Nick on the stepladder replacing the backup battery in every smoke detector in the house, narrating as he went, while I brought him iced tea, held the ladder, and thanked him for being so thorough.
He came down from the last one flushed with accomplishment and threw the old batteries in the trash with the air of a man who’d defended his home.
His office chirped again on Tuesday.
“That’s not possible,” he said at dinner. “I replaced every battery in this house.”
“Maybe you got a bad one from the pack,” Julie said. “That happens. There are whole threads about it.”
“Threads?”
“Forums, Dad. Battery forums.”
“There are no battery forums,” Nick said, with less certainty than the sentence deserved.
After dinner, I heard him in his office, dragging his desk chair around, standing on it under the smoke detector with his phone flashlight, waiting for a sound that declined to come.
The device, doing its one job perfectly, stayed silent all evening.
It chirped once at 6:40 the next morning, when he was in the shower and I was the only one who heard it.
I stood in the hallway with my coffee and let myself smile at the closed door of his office.
By the following week, it had become his project.
The carbon monoxide detector was replaced entirely, eighty dollars, though it had never made a sound.
His surge protector was swapped out. He unplugged the printer, decided the printer had been fine, plugged the printer back in.
He crawled under his desk with the flashlight and emerged with dust on his shoulders and an old phone charger held aloft as the culprit; the office chirped again two days after the charger went in the trash. He summoned me twice.
“There. Did you hear that?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Just now. A chirp. Clear as anything.”
“Nick, I was standing right here.” I looked around the office with mild concern, at the desk he’d repositioned, at the drawers hanging open. “Maybe it’s coming from outside? The Hendersons redid their whole security system.”
“It’s not the Hendersons,” he said with contempt, but I watched him file the idea away
Two days later, I saw him standing at the end of our driveway, staring at the Hendersons’ house with his hands on his hips.
He called the alarm company, and this I got to hear from the kitchen.
Twenty minutes of Nick pacing his office with the door open, explaining to some blameless technician named Denny that his system was clearly defective, that a sensor was clearly failing, that he was clearly not imagining an intermittent electronic chirp, and no, he could not make it happen on command, that was the entire point of the word intermittent, and yes, he’d hold, though Denny should know his firm handled the accounts of two of the alarm company’s board members.
The company sent a man out on Thursday. The man tested every sensor, pronounced the system flawless, and stood in the driveway for a while listening to nothing before charging us a service visit.
“He looked at me,” Nick said that evening, wounded, “like I was making it up.”
“Nobody thinks you’re making it up,” I said.
Julie made a sound into her water glass and left the table.
“What’s with her?”
“She’s leaving home in two weeks, Nick. Everything makes her emotional.”
“Right.” He pushed his food around. “It’s not quiet, you know. It’s a distinct, electronic chirp. Twice yesterday. I marked the times.”
He took out his phone and showed me a note titled CHIRP LOG, with timestamps. I looked at it for a respectful interval and told him the truth, which was that I’d been at the gallery during the first one, and in the garden for the second, and I hadn’t heard a thing.
Julie had figured it out by then. I never told her; she caught me.
The office chirped one afternoon while she and I were both in the kitchen, twice, faint through the wall.
Nick’s chair scraped upstairs immediately, and Julie looked at the ceiling, then at me.
I kept my face perfectly still, and that was my mistake.
Because perfectly still was my tell, and my daughter had known it her whole life.
Her mouth fell open. She pointed at me across the counter with an expression of pure, scandalized delight and mouthed, “IT’S YOU”, and I mouthed back, “I have no idea what you mean”.
She had to walk out the back door and stand by the pool for five full minutes, shoulders shaking, pretending to look at her phone.
After that, it became unbearable for her to be in the room when he complained. Nick would start in over dinner.
“I’m telling you, it did it again during the Meyer call, twice. TWICE!”
And Julie would press her lips together, gaze with enormous concentration at the saltshaker, then stand, announce she’d forgotten something upstairs, and flee.
He thought she found his problem boring. She spent that whole stretch of the month cry-laughing into her packing boxes, texting me things like: “status report on the office cricket” and “dad just called it the entity”.
The Meyer call was the masterpiece, and I only got the secondhand version, delivered by Nick in a low, grave voice, with pauses. An important client, a video call, Nick mid-sentence on portfolio strategy, and from somewhere in the room, twice, bright and clear: chirp. Chirp.
The client had stopped and said, “Do you need to get that?” and Nick had been forced to explain that it was nothing, a sensor issue, being handled.
The client had said, “Sounds like a smoke detector, you should really deal with that,” and then, for the rest of the call, Nick had sat rigid in front of his own bookshelves, praying, unable to hear a word about the portfolio because his entire body was clenched around the possibility of a third chirp.
It did not chirp a third time. It waited until he’d ended the call, and then, according to Julie, who heard the aftermath from her bedroom, it chirped once, softly, and something in the office hit a wall.
That night he tore the room apart. I came home from a site visit to find the rugs rolled back, the cabinet drawers stacked in the hallway, every book off the shelves in leaning towers, and Nick in the middle of it, sweating, hair disordered, holding his phone flashlight in one hand and a letter opener in the other for reasons I chose not to explore.
The cabinet itself stood exactly where it had always stood, flush against the wall, unmoved and unsuspected.
“I’ll find it,” he told me. “Whatever it is. It’s in this room, and I’ll find it.”
“Do you want help? I could take the shelves on the left.”
“No. No! I have a system.” He gestured at the towers of books with the letter opener. “Alphabetical as they come down, so I can reload them in order. If you move things, I lose the system.”
“Of course. The system,” I said.
I asked if he wanted dinner, went downstairs, and stood in my kitchen listening to my husband hunt through his office for something small and hidden that had been there all along, right under everything, making its little sound.
Julie found me there a few minutes later.
She didn’t say anything. She just leaned against the counter next to me, bumped my shoulder with hers, and handed me her phone, where she’d typed into her notes app: “he’s been up there 3 hrs.
this is the best month of my life, and my parents are getting divorced. ”
I laughed, properly, for the first time since the party, bent over the counter, with my hand pressed to my mouth so the sound wouldn’t carry upstairs, wiping my eyes while my daughter grinned at me.
Somewhere above our heads, a grown man in a four-million-dollar house interrogated his bookshelves one by one.