Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
The app knows where I was last night.
David mentions it the next evening, while he's fitting the new pane into the terrace door. He's not looking at me. He's kneeling on newspaper with glazing putty and the little tools he keeps for jobs he won't let a tradesman do.
"That app of Henry's is hopeless, by the way.
It had you at Westburn's home for a couple of hours last night, then put you back home.
" He presses the putty flat along the bead.
"I nearly said something to you. Then I thought, it's the app. It’s glitchy.
The cameras are fine. It's just the tracking that's junk.
It can't seem to hold a location with the power dipping every ten minutes.
" He looks at the door, satisfied. "I'll have Henry look at it.
" He rises, pleased with himself. "There. Good as it was."
I'm standing at the counter with a glass of water. I say nothing at all.
I was at Westburn's last night. In his back room, with the folding table and the dead strangers between us, exactly where the app said I was, for exactly as long as it said.
I thought about the app on the way up the road. I decided it didn't matter, because I wasn't doing anything wrong.
It didn't glitch. It didn't lie.
But David didn't believe it, because the truth was less likely to him than a glitch.
I’m reminded in that moment of three things. The app can see where I am. It keeps a record of it. And I’ve just been saved, not by anything I did, but by my husband's certainty that the location app is faulty.
Which is not something I can expect him to believe again.
There's something else I don't look at too closely. David didn't ask whether it was true. He simply decided the app was broken, as if he preferred that answer.
"I'll keep an eye on it," I say, which is true in a way he doesn't hear.
I open the app after he goes upstairs.
It's clean and simple. Four camera feeds cover the perimeter of the house from different angles. The location map shows two dots, one blue and one green. That’s David and me, sitting on top of each other in a little rectangle called home.
There’s a history I can scroll. There I am, home most of yesterday, and then a clean two-hour block up the road at Westburn's, exactly as David said.
I can also see when David was at work, then at home.
I could turn off location tracking. There's a toggle. I sit with my thumb over it for a long time and don't press it. I tell myself it's because David wants it. Because it makes him feel he can find me. Because after the other night, it's the least I can give him. All of that is true.
It just isn't the whole truth.
I don't turn it off because I want to see where he is.
His phone rings a little after seven.
We're on the sofa, me stretched out with my feet in his lap, both of us pretending to watch something. His phone lights up on the arm of the sofa, and I see the name before he does.
LENA HOLLOWAY.
It means nothing to me. A woman's name, two soft words, a stranger. But I watch David see it, and I watch something happen in his body that I've only seen once before, a stillness. He picks the phone up and turns it face-down against his leg, letting it ring once, twice, while he decides.
Then he stands and takes it into the hall.
"This is David." His voice is low. "No. No, that's, hang on."
He must have sensed I was listening. He goes farther into the kitchen, out of my good ear's reach. I get the sound of him and none of the words. It goes on longer than a wrong number and shorter than a fight.
When he comes back he's already patting his pockets.
"Who was that?" I ask.
"Just work." He doesn't say anything else about it. "I'm going to run out and grab some things for the party."
"About that." I sit up. "I've been wondering whether we should still do it."
“Are you having second thoughts?"
I sigh. "It just seems in bad taste. So soon after what happened."
"Life goes on, Mal." He says it gently. "It's a terrible thing but it had nothing to do with you. You only turn thirty-nine once. The country club's already booked." He finds the keys. "And Peggy would have wanted it. You know what she was like about birthdays."
"Yeah. I suppose."
He kisses the top of my head in passing.
"Remember your pills. Lock up behind me."
"I always do."
I hear the door close, the car start, the gravel crunch as he pulls away. Then the house goes quiet, and I'm alone in it.
I don't decide to open the app. My thumb decides for me. The way my hands sorted the clippings into columns before I'd even thought about it. The way my mouth told Cassandra I might have something, which was as good as yes.
The green dot pulls out of our driveway and onto Hunts Point Road. I watch it go, a small bright bead, off the point. I feel like a woman I don't want to be, sitting alone tracking her husband across a map. But I keep watching.
It doesn't stop in Bellevue. It doesn't stop anywhere a person buys anything or runs an errand. It heads onto the bridge toward Seattle.
I frown. “Huh.”
I sit up.
It crosses the water. It comes off at Montlake, slows, and settles on the hospital campus where my husband works.
He didn't mention work. That's the thing I keep coming back to. He stood in front of me with his keys in his hand and told me he was getting things for the party. The one true thing about where he was going, he left out.
I decide to call him. Just to ask about the party things, I tell myself. The reason is ready in my mouth.
It rings out to voicemail, his brisk recorded voice, then the beep.
I lower the phone to my lap, my mind turning over.
I watch the green dot stay exactly where it is, and then I do the only thing I know how to do with a thing that won't add up.
I make it add up. He's a surgeon and that's his hospital, and there is nothing on earth more ordinary than the two of them in the same place at night.
Something came up. The ward called, a patient turned, a resident panicked, and my husband went in and did what he does, and it never occurred to him to narrate it to me because it happens multiple times a month.
It's all possible. I lay each explanation down like a plank over a hole and then walk across them.
I almost get to the other side.
What stops me isn't a theory. It's smaller than that. It's that he gave me a false evening on his way out the door. He told me he was running errands. I can't work out why the small lie was necessary when the truth would have done just as well.
There you go again, building a case out of nothing.
But there's another thought underneath it. I sit on the sofa and hold it down with both hands. I'm proud of that for a little while.
I’m not sure when I stopped watching. At some point I put the phone down, and the room went dark around me, and I didn't get up to turn a lamp on.
When I pick up the phone again, the dot is moving. It's half past ten. He's coming back across the water. I put the phone face-down before it reaches the bridge, so that when he comes in I can be a woman who was already in bed. Not a woman who watched.