Chapter 59
Henry is gone. Every door and window is locked—Kate checked after she heard the front door click closed behind him.
The things he’d brought her—the box of gourmet treats, the flower—were lying on the ground, near the base of the stairs.
The flower looked like it had been hastily cut from someone’s garden.
Not Kate’s own—she hadn’t managed to keep hers alive.
Kate left them there, on the floor. Now her hands tremble as she opens her laptop.
She can’t shake the image of him there, in the doorway of her closet. I didn’t do anything. Words that could have so many different meanings. But in the context of him inside her home, uninvited, of Ben’s killing, they take on an alarmingly suspicious glow.
But she’ll worry about that later—very soon. Now she’s more focused on what Henry said next: It was the murderer, who lives in the house next to mine.
When the screen blinks to life, she ignores her manuscript, the seemingly benign file saved on her desktop. Instead, she opens her browser.
She types murder and Hawthorne Heights and adds Maryland, in case there are other neighborhoods in the world that share the same name and propensity for murder as hers.
Results flood the screen. Kate clicks on the first. She’s still wearing Ben’s shirt, and she shouldn’t be—it’s making her feel weaker, more disastrous.
She should be taking a shower, washing her hair, calling her mom and her friends, checking her phone—where is her phone?
—forcing herself to eat something. But first, this. For now, all she can do is read.
In the sleepy neighborhood of Hawthorne Heights, Edward Irvin, age forty-five, died from injuries related to multiple stab wounds on Thursday night.
Edward’s wife, Mary Irvin, confessed to the murder but her confession was proven to be falsely made.
Kate’s eyes volley across the screen, her fingertips scroll. She backs out of that article, opens another. She reads furiously, the way she used to swiftly skim pages of financial data, before taking a breath, looking more closely, digging deeper.
It was not Mary Irvin who, Kate calculates, is now sixty-one years old, who killed her husband Edward.
It was Edward and Mary’s son. His name was shielded in the earlier articles.
He was simply referred to as “the son of the deceased, age 15.” In later articles, after, Kate gathers, it was decided that the boy would be charged and tried as an adult, his name was revealed.
Owen Irvin, who pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty years in prison with the possibility of parole.
After fifteen years, he was paroled. She read that part in the briefest of follow-up articles.
Owen was believed to be released into the custody of his mother, who attended his parole hearings and expressed a willingness to take him in.
Kate’s vision blurs. She snaps her laptop closed.
The bedroom Kate uses as an office overlooks the front yard, the street, the other houses beyond.
She looks to Henry’s house, then to the one to the left.
She has seen the woman who lives there. She has seen her in plain colored T-shirts and long khaki shorts, carrying boxes and dragging trash cans to the curb, extra weight around her middle, graying blond hair brushing her shoulders.
She has waved to her. The mother of a murderer.
Kate has wondered in passing whether she lives in that big house all alone. Soon, people will think the same of Kate.
And next to the mother and the murderer, Henry.
There is decidedly something off about him. At the same time, there’s this obliviousness, a harmlessness—he makes her think of a washed-up magician who performs at kids’ birthday parties and refers to the children as “fuckers” and “dickheads” as soon as he’s in his car, heading back home.
She assumes Henry was lying to her. Her front door was not open.
Unlocked—that, she could believe. She might have failed to lock it after the detectives left on Sunday.
Even in the face of Ben’s murder, old habits, distraction making her careless, and perhaps there’s a part of her that would leave it unlocked on purpose.
Come in, finish the job. There’s a part of her that doesn’t care what happens to her now.
But that the door was not even closed? That doesn’t make sense.
Unless someone had opened it. Someone had been inside, looking for her.
Her suspicion of Henry suddenly shifting.
Owen Irvin.
Kate has never seen him. She tries to recall a man, about her age, outside the house across the street. But she can’t.
Her phone. Kate needs to find her phone.
She moves gingerly through the house, still stiff from her night on the floor. Ben’s dress shirt grazes her bare knees.
Her phone is resting on an end table in the living room, and she has dozens of missed calls, texts.
She scrolls through them, messages from the police, from before their visit; from her friends; from Ben’s best friend, Ethan, and his wife, Rosie.
One from Chris, Ben’s brother, which surprises Kate.
She doesn’t open any of them. There’s nothing from her mother, so at least she hasn’t heard the news.
Kate will have to tell her soon. She will have to arrange a service—who else would do it?
She will have to notify people and prepare a eulogy.
If we just could have had a baby, she will say, this wouldn’t have happened.
She feels this in her chest, within the depths of her bones.
If they’d had a baby, Ben wouldn’t have been sitting out on that patio by himself.
They would have been in their bedroom, asleep, the baby in its bassinet.
Or perhaps they would have gone to dinner downtown like Ben had wanted, a rare night out, the nanny staying over to give them a break.
There’s one text from a number Kate doesn’t recognize.
She opens it and discovers that it’s from Ben’s boss, expressing his condolences and letting her know that someone will come by to pick up Ben’s laptop so that she doesn’t have to worry about that.
There’s a startling coldness to the message, beneath the concern.
Ben’s work laptop hasn’t been anywhere near her list of worries since her husband was murdered.
She doesn’t want someone from Ben’s work, someone she met at the last holiday party but whose name she’s forgotten, to come to her house, to hug her, to bring her flowers that will smell like death. She’ll ask the police if they will take the laptop.
Ben’s backpack is still resting on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. He dropped it there on Friday evening and hadn’t moved it since. Occasionally, he would work for a few hours on Saturdays, but he didn’t on the day he died.
She unzips it, confirming that the laptop is still inside.
She will leave it in the coat closet by the front door, out of sight, ready to be retrieved by whoever is willing to take it.
But first, she flips through its contents, just to be certain there’s nothing personal she might need.
There’s a notebook, a folder, pens littering the bottom of the bag, a case with a pair of earbuds.
Kate leaves everything in there. She doesn’t want it.
She pauses, then, on a page that lacks the plain black print, the severity, of Ben’s work-related things.
It’s glossy and vibrant and wedged behind the notebook, and she slides it out, the photo she’d found on her phone and printed last month.
Her and Ben, the way he was looking at her, and it winds her, just as it had when she first saw it.
The morning she printed this picture, Ben had bent over the bed to kiss her hair before he left for work, and when he was gone, she felt hollow.
Her empty day stretching ahead of her—its peacefulness, its possibility, so auspicious.
Yet it felt too quiet, too vacant, too different from the way her days used to be, too similar to all the preceding unproductive days.
It was neither a testing day nor a trying day.
She didn’t know what to write. She didn’t know what to do.
She heard the garage door creak closed, and she couldn’t go back to sleep.
Her aging cell phone was plugged into its charger on the nightstand beside her.
She flipped through her screens of apps aimlessly, then opened her photo library and scrolled backward.
She scrolled back nearly ten years, to when she and Ben first started dating.
He wasn’t in many of her pictures, and neither was she.
Apparently, she was quite fond of taking photos of her meals and take-out coffee back then, foam hearts atop lattes.
But there were a few of Ben, of Kate, of the two of them together.
His hair was a little fuller, and hers was longer.
Their eyes were brighter, faces thinner.
This was before they were so worn, so broken down by the long hours they’d put into building their careers.
One picture stopped her. It was a candid shot of Kate and Ben at a bar.
It must have been taken by a friend of Kate’s, who’d sent it to her.
Her hair was gathered into a low ponytail—she often wore it that way in her early twenties—and her shoulders were exposed, a black top tied at the base of her neck, skin golden.
Her hands were up, slightly blurred. She was animated, speaking, gesturing.
Beside her was Ben. He was smiling faintly, watching her and only her.
The look on his face—the very image of love, of worship.
It made Kate ache. She touched her fingers to the screen, pinching, zooming in on her face, then on Ben’s, and she believed that if she’d only had a quick glance at this image, a flash, then it was gone, she might not have recognized that it was of them.
She emailed the picture to herself, then slunk from the bed and into her office.
She opened her laptop, then the photo, and she printed it, so large that it took up the entire eight-by-eleven paper.
The page was damp and heavy with ink, and she carried it downstairs.
She placed it on the kitchen table, in front of the chair where Ben always sat.
By the time Ben finally got home, it was after seven. Kate’s laptop was shut, resting on the kitchen island, and dinner had been ready for a while. She’d been trying to keep it warm.
“Hey,” he said as he stepped into the kitchen. He dropped his backpack onto a chair, heavily, but his expression brightened at the sight of her. “How was your day?”
“Look,” she said, sliding the picture from the table, the paper fluttering as she stepped toward him. “Look at us,” she said. “Look what I found.”
He removed the still-flapping page from her fingers and looked at it, smile spreading until it had devoured his face.
“Weren’t we so young and beautiful?” she asked as they stared at their own faces together.
Ben put the picture down, still grinning as he gathered her into his arms. “We still are, Kate,” he said, his lips against her neck. “We still are.”
Then they’d eaten dinner and talked about their days—his so busy, hers so not—and she’d forgotten about the picture, had lost track of it. Apparently, Ben hadn’t. He’d put it in his work bag, something to look at while he was sliding his laptop out.
Now Kate smooths the picture flat, pressing her finger into Ben’s cheek.
She’s always hated decorating the house, unfurling area rugs, hanging photos and curtains, but in the living room, she’d carefully displayed a string of their wedding photos along the mantel.
They married in Hawaii, just the two of them, feet in white sand, her in an eyelet sundress and Ben in a pale-blue polo and khaki shorts.
She knows it will hurt; she wants to see them anyway.
She wants more evidence of what they’d been.
But when she steps into the room and her eyes fall to the blocky white frames, she sees that the photos are gone. The frames are empty. Every last one.