“We had a complaint from the school.”
“A complaint?” About to go on, he sees the look on her face. “Sorry, I know what it looks like, but I . . . my girlfriend went to this school, a long time ago. She died, and I was just remembering . . .”
Unmoved, the cop shrugs and tells him to move along. He can feel her watching him all the way to the end of the block.
He buys coffee from a cart near Jackson Square Park and settles on a bench inside the wrought-iron fence. The dog walkers, stroller-pushing nannies, and dozing vagrants pay no attention to him.
He stares at the cast-iron fountain, no closer to figuring out the mystery surrounding Anna’s reappearance or how he could have forgotten that she hadn’t died after all. Unless time travel is possible, or ghosts or zombies are real . . .
His phone nudges with a text.
Emina. She’s sent a photo of their two sons posing on the sidewalk in front of the building. They’re holding backpacks and dressed in new shirts, heading off to second grade and fourth—no, wait, it’s third and fifth this year.
Pulsing dots appear beneath the photo. She’s typing.
A moment later, her message comes in: They did good in case u were wondering.
He hadn’t been wondering. He’d forgotten all about his sons’ first day of school. He hadn’t given them, or his wife, a second thought when he got up in the dark this morning and left the house.
They’d likely assumed he’d gone to work early. He does that sometimes. He’s an independent electrical contractor, and the hours vary.
He stands, tosses his empty cup into the garbage, and heads back toward the subway, thinking about Anna’s miraculous return.
Nora
Jules stands on the doorstep bearing a large glass bowl and covered tray. She’s wearing a sunflower-colored headwrap and a purple tank dress that bares her arms and legs, her dark skin shimmering with sweat and wafting patchouli oil.
“You look like you’re having a fun day!” She grins, gesturing at Nora’s grimy self, then leans in to pluck a small twig from her hair.
“Oh . . . sorry. I was . . . I . . . I’ll get cleaned up.”
Jules is already heading toward the kitchen as though she’s been here many times before. “No worries. Take your time. I know my way around.”
Nora closes herself into the half bath under the stairs, exhales through ballooned cheeks, and leans toward the mirror. Her fingernails are embedded with soil and her face is smudged with grime. Her sweat-matted blond hair hasn’t seen a brush since yesterday. She uses her fingers as a comb and washes up the best she can, thinking about the metal box she’d hastily concealed beneath a stack of yard cleanup bags in the shed.
As soon as her guest is out of here, she’ll get back out there and open it.
Jules has set out plates and cutlery on the breakfast nook table and is unspooling paper towels to use as napkins. “Do you have salad tongs? I didn’t want to go snooping around for them.”
“Yes—have a seat, and I’ll finish setting the table. Can I get you some ice water, or coffee, or . . . I think we have wine.”
“Water’s fine. With lime, if you have it?”
“We do.”
Nora opens the fridge and takes two green glass mineral water bottles and a lime. She slices it quickly, keeping a watchful eye on the shed through the window.
“I hope you like fennel. I’m trying to imitate a salad they make at our favorite Italian restaurant . . . Nora?”
She turns away from the window. “Sorry. Just thinking of all the things I have left to do out there.”
One thing. One really important, nerve-racking thing.
She does her best to put it out of her mind as they settle in over lunch. Jules tells her about a crazy morning in her own household, with Heather searching high and low for her MetroCard, Courtney hogging the shower, and Lennon repeatedly hitting the snooze button and late for school.
“On top of all that, one of the dogs had an accident that everyone stepped over and ignored so that I’d be the one to clean it up after they all left the house. I was going to leave it there, but it stunk to high heaven, so . . . sorry, wrong lunch conversation topic,” she adds, as Nora pokes at her salad, still contemplating the box. “You don’t like fennel, do you?”
“I . . . hate fennel,” she admits, and Jules laughs.
“You’re a breath of fresh air, girlfriend. Honesty’s a lost art.”
“But the best policy, right?”
“Unless I’m performing and I ask you how I did. Then you lie your ass off.”
“Other than the fennel, this is delicious. And I’m not lying my ass off, I promise.”
“Good. Heather and I had something like it at this amazing little place we love on Mulberry Street. I’ve been trying to re-create it. The owner won’t give me the recipe. Old family secret, he says.”
Mulberry Street . . .
All around the mulberry bush . . .
Nora had finally gotten the song out of her head, but it’s back, tinkling and taunting her, redolent and elusive, attached to a memory she can’t seem to retrieve—maybe because it’s one she’d deliberately buried.
Jules is asking her how her morning went.
“Pretty well, I think. By the time I got downstairs, the girls were ready to leave.”
“And they didn’t bother you? How’d you pull that off?”
“They’re pretty self-sufficient, and I normally get up early, but . . . jet lag. I’m still not used to the time difference.”
In reality, she’d lain awake again last night, thinking of the murders in the master bedroom, and down the hall. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw blood-spattered walls and floors. Yes, the stains have long since been scrubbed away, sanded over, painted over. Yet she’s certain they remain, lurking beneath the surface, indelibly soaked into wood and plaster and her mind’s eye.
“This is so not fair, Nora.”
“What isn’t fair?”
“You get to sleep in, your kids are self-sufficient, and your husband is great—even your dog. He’s not under the table driving us crazy begging for scraps.” Jules jerks a thumb at Kato, out cold on the doormat. “I bet he never craps on the floor or eats MetroCards. And you, Nora . . .”
“I don’t do that, either.”
The quip is met with a hearty laugh. “Yeah, no, what I mean is you’re perfect, too.”
“Stop trying so hard, Nora,” Teddy’s voice echoes in her head. “Perfection doesn’t exist.”
“Sure it does. I have everything I ever wanted: a husband and children, a beautiful home, good health, financial security . . .”
“Any of those things can disappear in an instant. Be careful, my love . . .”
“I’m always careful.”
But is she? Living here? Sitting across the table from a virtual stranger? One who managed to work her way into this house uninvited, and says she knew the victims?