The sound of my name doesn’t pause my march to Jake’s door. It has a window encased in the wood, his full name etched into the glass. Through it, I see him seated in his office chair. A uniformed officer sits on the lip of his desk, leaning toward him.
I throw open the door with such force that it bangs against the outside wall. I feel nothing as I enter. Instead of communicating my feelings about the presence of my husband’s lover, my mind dispassionately imparts logistics. Officer Colleen is six feet away from me. Her gun is on her holster. The carriage is to my left.
“Beth!” Jake bolts upright and rounds the desk. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
The officer turns toward me, unpainted lips in a pursed smile. Her face is tinged with color, as though she’s blushing.
“Officer, this is my wife.” Jake stands between us, angled to the side, leaving open my route to shoving her onto the thin carpet and breaking the bumped bridge of her nose. She’s smaller than me but undoubtedly more athletic. Stronger. Still, I’ll have surprise. Her guard is down. She’s trying to seem friendly. She doesn’t know that I know.
“Honey, this is Colleen.” The term of endearment confuses me. I glance at Jake. The same red hue that colored his girlfriend’s skin tone transfers to him, darkening his tight smile.
The woman extends her hand. I blink at it in awe. She’s sleeping with my spouse and still has the gall to shake?
I face Jake. “I need to talk to you.”
His face scrunches with concern. “Is something wrong?”
I stare at Colleen. Her hand falls from the air onto her hips, inches away from her holster. “I was heading out anyway.” She walks behind my husband, shoulder nearly to the wall. It’s as wide a berth as she can give me.
“You’ll e-mail with that arrest report?” Jake shouts after her. She pauses, one foot already in the hall. Her expression is first puzzled and then furious. He is pretending that their meeting was professional, for my benefit. A man poised to dump his wife for his mistress wouldn’t play such games. She grunts something affirmative and strides out the open door. It slams with a bang that rivals my own moments before and the noise wakes Vicky. She starts crying, sounding that little baby alert, part yell, part meow.
“Heavy door.” Jake scoops her from the bassinet, cupping her head to his chest and supporting her back with his open palm. His weight shifts from side to side. Immediately, she starts to settle down, safe now from the noise that startled her to consciousness.
The reddish hue fades from my vision. My husband is a decent father. Doesn’t my baby deserve her dad?
“We need to talk.” The urgency has left my tone.
“Everything all right?”
“I’m going to leave Vicky with my mom in Jersey for the night.”
“Are you feeling like you can’t take care of her?”
The anger returns like a reversed tide. This must be how he’s excusing the affair. My wife became depressed after the baby. I needed attention. I look at his handsome face and regret that the picture frame missed his nose. “We need to talk.”
He stops swaying and lowers Vicky from his chest into a cradle position before placing her in the stroller. A proud smile sneaks on his face. The sight of it threatens to weaken me. Anger is a lifeline to courage. I grasp for it by picturing Colleen’s face.
“I’ll get back by seven,” I say. “You’ll be home. We can talk then.”
“Sure. Well . . .” He looks up at me, smile no longer genuine. “Uh, I have some work that I was thinking might keep me.”
I bet. “This is important. You’re not on trial. I need you home at seven.”
“You don’t want to give me a clue as to what this is about?”
“Seven, Jake.” I say it in a seething whisper. “I need you home at seven.” I lean into the stroller and tuck a blanket around Vicky’s legs. As I do, Jake dips his head in and kisses the side of my face.
“I love you two,” he whispers. “You know that?”
My fight vanishes. The only choice now is to flee. I wrest my head away from his warm lips and grasp the stroller handle. “Seven. Okay? I’ll see you at seven.”
LIZA
I wake with blood in my mouth. At first, I think the metallic flavor is a phantom taste left from my nightmare. In my sleep, I’d been floating above a mortally wounded Colleen, an omniscient narrator ready to read my character her last rights. She’d writhed below me, hands cupping a hole in her gut. The liquid pooling around her had appeared black in the darkness, motor oil from a busted gasket.
My hand reveals that the cut is not in my imagination. A wet mark shines on the finger that I dragged across my lower lip. There are dark splotches that must be dried blood. I peel the sheets from my sweat-drenched body and roll from the bed, making my way from memory into the pitch-black hallway and toward the bathroom. Once inside, I close the door behind me and flick on the buzzing overhead light. The woman in the vanity has crazy hair and a raised welt from where a front tooth pierced flesh. I must rub my eyes to recognize myself.
I grab a washcloth from beside the sink, wet it, and press it to my mouth. Reality still feels ephemeral. Am I nursing a real wound or still asleep, facedown on a drool-drenched pillow?
By the time my bottom lip stops oozing, I’m wide awake. I return to my room and remove my charging laptop from the nightstand. I may not be ready to kill Colleen, but I can picture Beth’s next move: dropping the kid off with her mother. I cannot have her confront Jake again with a stage whisper.
*
I finish the chapter as day breaks through the shutters. The light casts an alternating pattern of sun and shadow on the knotted pine floor, like a still shot of the view outside a moving subway. My mind feels slow. I’d like nothing more than to pull the covers over my head and get a few more hours of shut-eye. Doing so, however, would negate my early morning progress. I’ll need a few all-nighters to make my deadline as it is.
Still, my brain requires carbohydrates, and my body could use a shower. A musky odor, like the smell of a dog’s neck, fills the room. There’s only one place it could be coming from.
I return to the bathroom and step into the shower. When I was a child, sliding glass doors above the tub had walled off the area, turning it into a mini-steam room. My mother swapped them for opaque plastic curtains before I turned ten, presumably so I could brush my teeth in the sole upstairs bathroom without watching her shave. Seeing your parents naked is only appropriate when you don’t have a sense of why “private parts” should be private.
Water sputters from the shower head. Though I have the dial turned to the hottest setting, the temperature is lukewarm at best, a consequence of the forty-year-old plumbing system. It’s amazing that people pay as much as they do to rent this place.
As I scrub my body, I think of my mother, of the way her energy still permeates the house during the day, buttressing the rafters no matter how rotted the wood may be. If only I’d inherited some of her strength. Her fight. She would have no problem making this month’s deadline while on fertility treatments. A woman who can work in an office all day and then do all the cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing at night while her husband goes out drinking and womanizing would not be so easily overwhelmed by synthetic hormones. She certainly wouldn’t be near tears all the time.