Chapter 53
Kate doesn’t need to feel for a pulse. There’s no point in that. She’s far too late. He is right here, right in front of her, but he is so clearly gone.
She screams. At first, the sound scares her, but she doesn’t stop. She screams her throat raw.
The police. Her phone. Where is her phone?
But then there are footsteps. A man running toward her, his own phone in his hand, its flashlight function engaged. His face is drawn tight in terror, obscuring its kind familiarity.
“What is it?” he asks, urgent and panicked, with a hint of I don’t want to know lurking. “What’s wrong?”
He’s her neighbor. Dan or Dave or Dale. He lives next door with a wife and two teenage girls. His girls probably heard Kate scream, and his wife probably made him come. He has a pleasantly boring life.
This is a night he will never forget.
The neighbor’s name is Dave. Kate finds that out later.
“Jesus,” he says when he notices Ben’s body. “Oh my God.”
He steps closer to her husband.
“Don’t touch him,” hisses Kate. Her ferocity scares her.
Dave doesn’t. He lifts his phone and calls 9-1-1.
While they wait for the police, Kate sits on the ground near Ben’s body. He’s still a little warm. She can’t look at him.
Her knees are bent, the stones of the patio digging harshly into her tailbone.
She wraps her arms around her legs, folding thighs and calves tight, and tucks her head down.
She rocks, crying, keening, a child waiting for someone to scoop her up and fix it.
To assure her that everything will be okay, even though she knows it won’t.
Dave lingers nearby somewhere. Kate can’t see him, but she senses his presence, shifting and uncertain. He has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing, and neither does she.
When the police cars and ambulances arrive, uniformed people streaming into Kate’s backyard, an EMT helps her stand and leads her to an ambulance, lights still flashing.
They take her vitals, drape a heavy charcoal blanket across her shoulders.
They treat her with sympathy, with care, and quickly decide that she’s in shock but doesn’t need to be taken to the hospital.
Instead, the police help her into the back of a marked sedan, and Kate feels affronted that, on top of everything, they are making her feel like a criminal.
She watches the EMTs wheel a stretcher out of the ambulance.
There’s a black body bag on top, waiting for her husband.
When she gets to the station, they’re gentler with her.
They bring her tea in a Styrofoam cup and water in a waxy paper one.
Detectives Nia Scott and Frank Perkins sit down across from her, a wooden table and Kate’s drinks between them.
They tell her they’re sorry for her loss, but it’s very important that she speak with them, that she tell them everything she knows, everything she can remember.
She should know that crime scene technicians are at her house, processing the scene.
They will interview neighbors. They will not rest until they find out who killed her husband.
They study her face as they say this, searching for fear, and that’s the first time Kate realizes they think that person, the one they are looking for, might be her.
All she wants to do is curl into herself, make herself silent and invisible and nothing, but they press on with their questions. How was her relationship with Ben? Marriage can be difficult. Were they fighting?
“No,” she says coldly. She thinks of earlier that day—yesterday, by this point—sitting on the sofa with her husband. She remembers lowering her novel, stretching her legs out, asking him what he wanted to do about dinner.
Ben shrugged. “Whatever you want,” he said. He crossed his legs, shifting slightly away so that her toes could no longer feel his warmth.
She flipped her book closed and pushed herself up, folding her legs onto the sofa, looking at her husband.
That morning, she had decided to take a break from trying to write, reminding herself of the tempting bit of advice that breaks were part of the process.
It was too early to take a pregnancy test, her period not expected for another week, so there was a sense of futility surrounding the day.
If Kate could have fast-forwarded, passed through it hurriedly, she would have.
She kept her notebook and laptop closed and gave herself time to read something else, thought that perhaps she’d go out to lunch or dinner with her husband, a quiet meal at a favorite local place. Later, she would review her notes and the rest of her words.
But Ben had been distant all day, offering no suggestions of a nice meal together, of a bowl of chips and fresh salsa to share, of frosty drinks or vibrant music.
They had leftovers for lunch. Ben stared at his phone while they ate, occasionally raising his gaze to inspect her as though he had no idea who she was.
“What is with you?” she finally asked; he was there beside her on the sofa, yet he seemed blurred and obscure.
“It’s just—” He shrugged listlessly. “Bored.”
“You’re bored,” she echoed.
“Yeah.” He unlocked his phone, scrolled through his screens of apps, locked it again.
“Well, do you want to go to dinner? Go for a walk? Watch something?” She suddenly felt quite motherly, supercilious, rattling off a practiced list of activities.
“Ethan texted me today,” Ben said softly. “He said a bunch of them were going out to dinner. A new Indian place opened along the wharf.”
“Okay,” said Kate, the syllables sticky and slow.
“So—do you want to go? You want to drive down to DC?” She could hear the incredulity in her tone.
She was already calculating. Saturday-afternoon traffic.
It would probably take them an hour and a half to get down there.
Assuming Ben wanted to match their friends’ drinking, she’d have to drive home.
It had been so long, but she was pretty sure it was her turn.
“We never go anymore, Kate.” His words were clipped, slicing into her thoughts. “We never see our friends.”
“Well, we live up here now. And we’ve been trying for a baby.”
“For fourteen months,” said Ben, dropping his phone into his lap.
“In a few days, I can take a test,” she said tentatively, which felt relevant, although she couldn’t quite pinpoint why.
Ben didn’t agree. “What does that have to do with anything, Kate? That’s all you care about anymore. The days we can try. The days you can test. What about all the other days? These are our lives. And all of it feels so fucking futile.”
Kate pulled her knees into her chest. Thoughts she’d had so many times before, but that he’d voiced them so casually gutted her.
“I feel like I barely know you anymore. You have this singular focus. You’ve changed so much.”
“That isn’t true.” Chin resting on her knee, she watched him from the corner of her eye.
“It’s all you care about. The baby that might never exist.”
“You used to feel the same way,” she urged. “Maybe I am a little obsessed, but that’s normal. Who wouldn’t be after we’ve been trying for so long? It’s like the longer we try and can’t get pregnant, the more I want it. That’s normal.”
“So I’m not normal? Me wanting to take a step back and try to enjoy all the other things in our lives, to do things with our friends like we used to, to consider that having a baby isn’t everything, that it’s not the only thing that matters, is unhealthy? Because that seems pretty healthy to me.”
“I didn’t say that.” She didn’t tell him, no. That it didn’t seem normal. Not to her. “I’ve sacrificed a lot for this already, Ben. I left my job.”
“I didn’t make you do that.”
She swallowed a gasp. Of course he hadn’t.
But it had been his idea—that she leave her high-pressure job to lower her stress, to see if that would help them conceive.
She was hesitant. She’d worked so hard to be promoted to senior analyst, was one of only two women in the entire firm who had that title.
A few more years of pushing, and she could be a member with equity and six weeks’ vacation.
The thought of giving that up, even temporarily, for the mere potentiality of something, something that still might never happen, something that might be painful and wrought and unnatural for her, felt insane.
Yet she did it. She took that plunge. Because what if it was the stress that was preventing her from conceiving?
She clung to a distant, broader view of the future, to that potentiality, to Ben, and to the wisps of the novel that had been rattling around in her brain and that had turned out to not be enough for a novel at all.
“I didn’t say you forced me, Ben. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been hard. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sacrifice. So for you to tell me that I’ve changed since I left my job in finance and my sixty-hour workweeks—of-fucking-course. What did you expect?”
Her husband opened his mouth, closed it again.
She thought her harshness had deflated him, that she’d shocked him into reality so that he could process the accusations he’d just made against his wife, but his eyes hardened, brows drawing low.
“You are always home. You have so much less stress now, so much less work. But you’re still constantly on your laptop.
You’re looking at your screen all the time. ”
“Oh, like you aren’t constantly staring at your phone? Is that what we’re fighting about now? Which one of us is more addicted to screen time?”
Ben pressed on, ignoring her. “I thought you must be almost finished by now, you have so much time to work on it.”
Kate stared at him, at the creases in his forehead, wondering when they’d become so deep.
“You only have thirty-five thousand words. I looked up how many words a book should have. That’s less than a half.”
“You read my book,” Kate said. She leaned away from him like he was burning hotly.
“It’s not a book.”