But she was gone. Sean had seen the autopsy report. The DNA results. If that wasn’t her body in the lake, whose was it? Even in a Michigan town, they didn’t make mistakes like that.
I read cookbooks and learned to make dishes—eggplant parmesan, Korean tofu stews—that Sean and the boys resisted at first but came to like. Or maybe they ate them to humor me. They ate them, just the same. I didn’t want us to eat meat every night. I started feeling good about being in Emily’s kitchen. I was feeding the people she loved. Food was sustenance. Food was life. Emily had put together a kitchen and married a husband and found a best friend who could take care of her little boy after she was gone.
Everyone was making compromises. Nicky stopped acting out and was as nice to me—or almost—as he’d been before his mother vanished when the four of us did fun things on Fridays after school. I turned the guest room—the one with the vanity table—into a kind of office, and decided that soon I would go back to blogging. Enough time had passed for my readers to accept that Sean and I were a couple.
I would have a lot to say about the challenges and rewards of raising two boys instead of one. Easier in some ways, harder in others. So far they have still never fought. I was grateful, but I wondered if it would last.
Sex with Sean was as amazing as it had been at the start. Or almost as amazing. The heat dies down when you can have the person whenever you want. That’s only natural. Unless you do it every night, which you do at first and then not so much. Some nights you lie there side by side like sister and brother. And you notice, though you try not to.
Maybe that was why the heat never died down between me and Chris. Because we couldn’t have each other when we wanted. Not by a long shot.
The boys never again mentioned seeing Emily near school or anywhere else. I decided to pretend that it never happened. I remembered reading about cases of mass hysteria, where a group of people all have the same hallucination at once. It is especially common with school children. It had happened with Nicky and Miles, but they showed no signs of lasting damage.
We’d come through it, I thought.
We had a quiet Thanksgiving, just the four of us. The boys helped me cook the turkey. It was perfectly done, crispy skinned and moist, the stuffing was delicious. Sean sweetly pretended not to know what the holiday was about so the boys could tell him what they’d learned at school. How the pilgrims had come here and how the Native Americans had showed them how to plant corn and grow their first crops so they could survive the cold New England winters.
That night, after the boys were asleep, Sean and I sat on the couch, finishing up the wine. He put his arms around me and said that maybe we should all go away together somewhere for Christmas vacation, the four of us. Someplace warm. An island. Someplace that was only ours. He didn’t have to say: somewhere he’d never been with Emily. Mexico maybe, or the Caribbean. A guy at work had gone to Vieques and loved it.
Rum drinks. Hammocks on the beach.
I said that sounded wonderful. And it did.
We stayed up and made love. I thought, Maybe this will work.
The next morning, I dropped the boys off at school and took Sean to the station. Then I came home. I had begun to think of it as home. No longer Emily’s house, or Sean’s house. But home.
I made myself a cup of coffee. I sat at the sunny kitchen table. Then I took my coffee into the living room and settled into the couch. For a second, I thought, Emily’s couch, then I made myself stop thinking that way. My couch now.
I thought about my life so far and about the chance that things had settled and come to rest. With luck, we could go on this way. That would be fine with me.
The phone rang. The landline which no one ever used.
I scooted over to answer it.
The caller ID said out of area. I picked up and was sorry. I heard the silence you hear just before the robocall recording comes on.
I was about to hang up when a voice said, “Stephanie. It’s me.”
It was Emily. I would have known her voice anywhere.
“Where are you?” I said. “You’ve got to tell me!”
“Outside. Watching you.”
I rushed from window to window. There was no one out there.
“Go around to the kitchen,” Emily said. “Hold up your hand. I’ll tell you how many fingers you’re holding up.”
I held up my hand. I raised two fingers.
“Two,” said Emily. “Try again.”
This time I held up both hands. Seven fingers.
“Lucky number,” said Emily. “You always were a clever girl. Okay, got to run. For now. Talk soon.” That had been Emily’s sign-off: talk soon.
“Wait!” I cried. There was so much I wanted to ask. But how would we begin that conversation, with me in her house, living with her husband?
“No. You wait.” Was I imagining that it sounded like a threat? She hung up.
I looked around at Emily’s things. Emily’s furniture. Her house.
There was no way that could have happened. Within a few hours, I managed to convince myself that I’d imagined Emily’s phone call.
I’d been lying on the couch. Maybe I’d fallen asleep and dreamed it. I’d been having vivid dreams ever since Emily died. Some of them had her in it. Maybe this was one of them.
I wasn’t convinced. Part of me knew it had happened.
The next morning, after I came home from taking the boys to school, I dropped off the groceries in the house and took a couple of deep breaths and walked out into the woods.
I calculated where Emily must have stood to see me in the window.
I stood there and looked at the house.
Nothing moved. It was spooky.
I heard branches crack deep in the woods. I could hardly breathe.
Then I saw myself in the window. In the house. And that was the scariest thing.
It was me. And it wasn’t me.
I was someone else. I was all alone. I was out in the woods.
Spying on myself.
Part Two
25
Emily
Peeping. Something about the word makes me almost physically sick, and at the same time I adore it. Peeping. The word gives me a feeling that’s like the tingly nausea jitters you get just before the roller coaster drops. Some people will do anything for that feeling. And, as the song goes, God, I know I’m one.
I’ve been peeping at Stephanie, Sean, and the boys. Just thinking the word is almost as nauseating and exciting as creeping up to my kitchen window and watching Stephanie pretend to be me. Sleeping with my husband, raising my child, overcooking disgusting hunks of dead cow in my kitchen. To be honest—I’m borrowing Stephanie’s phrase here; she’s always saying to be honest, maybe because she so rarely is—I’m more fascinated than furious.
Spying on Stephanie in my house is like playing with some weird 3-D live-action dollhouse. As if the people inside were all animated figurines that I can move around. I can make them do things. I can control them with my magic weapon: a burner phone.
Dial the magic number—and the Stephanie doll runs to the window.
Stephanie can have the house, but I want a few things back. She can have the husband, his hopeless stupidity proved forever by the fact that he’s fucking her.
I just want Nicky. I want my son back.