That had been a few weeks ago. We hadn’t spoken again till yesterday, when I called her to let her know that Ted, her son-in-law, had been killed in an attempted burglary. I told her I was coming up for a couple of nights, that I didn’t want to stay in Boston.
“Of course you don’t, Faith.” My mother still called me Faith, my middle name and the name I’d gone by from the age of six to the end of college. I’d insisted on changing it when there was another girl with the name of Miranda in my first grade class. When I told my mother I was switching back to Miranda, she’d refused. “I’ve only just gotten used to it, Faithy, and I’m not turning back.”
I could tell that Detective Kimball wasn’t too pleased when I told him I was driving to Maine to be with my mother. “We could get you a hotel room here in town,” he’d said. “Your mother could come down here.”
“Is it important that I stay in Boston?”
“It would be helpful to have you here to answer any questions we might have.” Detective Henry Kimball talked in a low voice, and seemed far too nervous to have reached any kind of rank in the police department. He had brown hair that was a little too long, and brown eyes. He wore a tweedy coat over a pair of jeans. I thought he looked like one of the lost souls who used to work at the literary magazine at college. I wondered how quickly I could make him fall in love with me. Pretty fucking quickly, I thought.
“I’m only going to Maine. You have my cell phone number. I can’t stay . . . I can’t stay in my house, right now. You understand . . .”
“Of course, I understand, Mrs. Severson. Completely. Well, then, we’ll be in touch. I’ll call you immediately if something comes up in the investigation.”
We’d had this conversation after I’d identified Ted’s body. I took a cab from the police station back to our house, and packed a bag. Brad had thought that driving to Maine so soon would look suspicious, but I thought it would look completely natural.
After losing my husband it would make sense that I would want to spend time with my mother. That is, if you didn’t happen to know my mother. But driving up to Maine gave me a chance to stop over in Kennewick and check on Brad and find out how much I needed to worry about his nerves. And, as it turned out, I definitely needed to worry.
Up past Portland I started losing decent radio stations and slid in one of the mix CDs that Ted had made for me. It began with a song that he claimed was playing at the party where we met. “Mansard Roof” by Vampire Weekend. I couldn’t remember the song from that party, but I liked it, and sang along. When I married Ted I hadn’t planned on killing him. I didn’t love him, but I liked him enough. And he was generous. He let me spend his money without complaining. Not that he really had anything to complain about; as far as I could tell, the money would never run out. Then one morning I woke up in Boston, sun coming through our bedroom window. I looked over at Ted, still deep in sleep, his face pillow-creased. I studied a little patch of dark stubble under his chin that he must have missed while shaving the previous day. He was snoring, lightly, but each ragged breath began with a little nasal hiccup, like his breath had caught on the edge of something. It was infuriating to listen to, and I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life waking up and looking over at the same face, growing older, and older, and snoring more and more. That part was bad enough, but I also knew that, as soon as Ted woke up, he was going to look over at me, and his face was going to look so pleased, and he would say something like, “Hey there, beautiful.” That was the worst. I’d have to smile when all I wanted to do was smash that stupid grin off his face. Ted stirred a little, and I knew he was going to wake up. As quietly as I could, I pulled the duvet off of me and slid my legs over the lip of the bed. I wasn’t fast enough, though. Ted woke and ran a finger along my back, and said, in a sleepy, dopey voice, “Where you going, sexy?” And right then, I knew I couldn’t do it. I wanted the money but couldn’t spend a lifetime with Ted. Not even close. We’d just begun breaking ground on the house in Kennewick. I thought of Brad Daggett, our contractor, and wondered if he might be good for something besides house construction.
By the time I reached the outskirts of Bangor, the CD had played through twice, but I kept listening to it. I got off of I-95, drove past the Thomas Hill Standpipe and got onto Kenduskeag Avenue, which took me all the way into town. It was grim, the leaves on the trees having already turned and fallen. Most had been bagged or mulched, and the city had settled back into its familiar color palette of shingle and brick, low dwellings underneath a low gray sky.
I got onto State Street, skirting the Penobscot River, heading north toward Orono. A quarter mile from my mother’s condo my phone trilled. I turned down the radio and answered it.
“Mrs. Severson, this is Detective Kimball.”