Chapter 52
Kate expels a breath harshly as she snaps her laptop closed on Klara and Troy. As though to punish. As though it’s the computer’s fault that the words have ceased to flow.
Three months. She’s been stuck here for three months, rereading her own words over and over, walking endlessly, to nowhere, on their basement treadmill.
When that didn’t work, she started walking outside, white baseball cap shielding her face from the sun, moving slowly through the neighborhood streets, refraining from listening to music or audiobooks.
She’s forced silence on herself while doing meaningless chores around the house, freeing her mind to wander.
She’s tried gardening, too, but she’d let her flowers die, and she realized that she despises pulling weeds, that she’s incapable of remembering to water.
She has been so diligently cultivating quiet, the blank canvas of her mind, hoping, waiting, for something to jiggle loose in her head so that the words will flow again.
Klara comes to understand Troy’s grip, the controlling actions he’s taken.
She loses the baby, a fairly late miscarriage.
She understands that she is alone, she is trapped.
Enraged, calculated, she kills him in revenge, to regain her freedom.
Kate had added that later—the plan, the murder—and it felt like a breakthrough at the time.
She wasn’t quite sure where she was going, but that had felt like the piece she’d been missing sliding into place.
Except her final chapter isn’t even a thousand words, and nothing more has come to her. She still has no idea what’s next.
It feels like an ending, but if it is, she doesn’t really have a book. It’s not nearly long enough. It’s only a short story, really—maybe a novella. And she’s not sure she likes that ending for Klara. Is murder really the answer?
Her premise for the book was the arc of a couple’s complicated relationship, one that was, unbeknownst to them both, abusive.
For a while, Kate thought the wife would find happiness on her own, but as Kate wrote, Troy developed into too much of a villain to ever let Klara go, and Klara is intelligent enough to see that.
With each week that’s passed, with each progress-less week, Kate has become less sure that happiness is in the cards for either of her characters.
So she turned to murder. And such a finality is murder.
It’s no wonder that she has nowhere left to go.
She sighs again, rubs her eyes. It’s Saturday, and it’s far too late to be sitting at one’s desk.
Ben has surely finished his workout by now.
He must be out of the shower. He’s probably poured himself a drink and settled onto the family room sofa with the remote, flicking through their various streaming services.
Ben probably retrieved a glass for her, too, and it’s sitting on the counter, both olive branch and silent invitation for her to pour the drink of her choosing.
Because unlike her protagonist, Kate has never been pregnant.
She only managed to give up alcohol for the first four months of them trying to conceive.
Once she realized how difficult it was going to be, or that it might never happen at all, she resumed the occasional drink. She figures that everyone must do it.
And they’ve been trying for nearly fourteen months.
It started long before they moved into this house.
Long before she quit her high-pressure job to lower her stress, to improve her fertility, to focus on that novel that had been simmering in her brain, which is, apparently, not really a novel at all.
Kate leaves her office, trails downstairs, finds that she’s both right and wrong. There is a glass on the island in the kitchen, empty and waiting for her. But there’s no Ben. The television hanging on the wall in the family room is dark.
It’s so late. She sat with her words, her open laptop, for much longer than she’d intended. She mixes herself a quick cocktail—always her preference over wine, especially red—then goes to look for her husband.
He’s not in the living room, the sunroom, or the basement, always so chilly and dim. Her glass is cold between her fingertips, condensation dripping.
Kate peers through the windows of the door at the back of the house, and she can see his form, dark against the insensible pale-blue cushions of their outdoor sofa.
They’re still new, the cushions, but Kate and Ben haven’t been vigilant enough about covering them, so it’s only a matter of time before they’re sun bleached and stained and worn.
Kate tugs the door open and steps outside onto the patio.
She’s greeted by more darkness—her husband didn’t turn on all the outdoor lights, only the fairy lights that stretch above, from the side of the house to the edge of the deck—and by music.
It’s too loud, possibly disturbing to the neighbors at this hour.
“Ben,” she says, tone scolding but playful. She’s still feeling benevolent and affectionate toward him, the way she always feels after they’ve argued, then resolved things.
And they’d resolved things quite comprehensively—apologies and sex that was somehow both urgent and tender. When it was over, he’d tucked his face into the crevice between her shoulder and cheek. She could feel his breath against her collarbone as he whispered how much he loved her.
Now Ben doesn’t stir.
“There you are,” she adds belatedly, unnecessarily, because decidedly, he is there. Physically, he is there—there he is. Her husband.
But he still doesn’t move, doesn’t react to her voice, which is odd. So she moves closer.
“Ben,” she says, and she’s laughing now, wondering if he actually managed to fall asleep while he was waiting for her, until she realizes that his head is tipped forward at a strange angle, that something isn’t right.
And as she moves around the sectional to stand in front of him, she can see his chest, and it all makes sense, just as it makes no sense at all.
Ben didn’t move because he couldn’t. He can’t. He didn’t hear her. He will never hear her again.
There are holes in his chest—wounds. They are oozing and deep and black in the darkness. The pale-blue cushions of the sofa are irrevocably stained.
The music swells, the chorus of the song, and the fairy lights twinkle, and Ben is dead.