The Art of War
Hope was in middle school, Drew in elementary, and Jada in preschool when I put our home, the home we had shared with Adam, up for sale. I’d had a final divorce decree for several years by then and a restraining order for just as many, but Adam had never recognized either piece of paper. It was starting to look like nothing would keep him away.
“Some lady was looking at the house about an hour ago,” eleven-year-old Drew said when I pushed through the front door after a too-long day of writing computer code.
“You didn’t let her inside though, right?” I asked, scalp tingling, heart galloping.
“She knocked, but I ignored it. She was out by the sign mostly. Looked like she was doing something to it.”
“Maybe it was the realtor?”
He laughed. “No. It was definitely not the realtor. She was wearing this big yellow beach hat, and maybe a bathing-suit top. Really weird. It’s not even hot out. And it’s cloudy.”
I had a long commute in those days. Even though Hope was only twelve, she was in charge of Drew and seven-year-old Jada for almost two hours before I came home. Roman wasn’t around yet. Most days my mom arranged her work schedule to be there when I wasn’t, but she wasn’t there that day. “It’s good you didn’t answer the door. You guys have to stay inside until I get home. Don’t forget.”
The strange lady in the yellow hat didn’t set off alarm bells, but I walked down and checked out the for-sale sign by the mailbox. It was bright and cheerful, with red and blue bubble letters, but the idea of selling the house still made me sad. My kids had learned to crawl and walk there; we had celebrated a dozen Christmas, Easter, and Halloween parties there. And I wasn’t leaving willingly for greener pastures. I was running away.
I opened the mailbox and flipped through the top few pieces of mail. A loose credit card slipped out and landed in the flower circle around the mailbox. Part of me wanted to leave it there in the petunias. I knew it was bad news.
A sale ad from the local grocery had a black line through “Current Resident,” and a frightening name written above with a fine-tipped Sharpie. Adam Petrovic. The ink bled in little veins on the cheap newsprint as if a spider had written it with tiny webs. It didn’t matter anymore that Adam didn’t mean to be scary or dangerous. It didn’t matter that madness had robbed him of his mind by no fault of his own. The only thing that mattered was the threat he represented to the kids and me. He was a very dangerous man.
My heart squeezed so tight it hurt. I understood how a person could really die of fright, their heart contracting tight enough to lock right up into a stone.
The next envelope, a Capital One application, had been cut open with something as sharp as a razor blade. The dark Sharpie letters of Adam’s neat, all-caps handwriting were visible through the envelope.
“Car coming,” Hope called from the front door.
A rush of blood flooded my face, and I blinked rapidly as I stepped away from the mailbox. I leaned down and grabbed the credit card that had perched in the branches as naturally as if money did grow on trees. All at once I was furious instead of terrified. If he had done anything to the house, anything the kids would see, I would call the police, let them enforce the damn restraining order—aka the most useless five-thousand-dollar piece of paper on the planet.
I wanted to ask Drew more about the yellow-hat lady, but I didn’t want him to know it probably hadn’t been a woman at all. It had been a disguise, something the voices had instructed him to wear. The credit card was shiny and new, and the name stamped on it was a combination of mine and his, Mrs. Adam Brookins. He had signed it in cursive with the same stitched-together Frankenstein of a name.
Adam was living with his sister about fifteen miles from my house. The only contact I had with the family was when he fooled them and quit taking his medication long enough for the voices to shout louder than his logic. The cycle repeated every couple of months, with him coming around the house and doing crazy things until I called his sister or the police and he was carted off to the state hospital until he was released over a promise to take his meds. Rinse. Repeat.
He wanted to believe he still owned me, and for all intents and purposes, he did. He owned us all, and his insanity was as alive in our minds as it was the first day we learned he was descending into paranoid schizophrenia.
I carried the mail to my room. “I’ll change and then start supper,” I sang over my shoulder, imagining they wouldn’t notice the way fear had turned my voice high and trilling. I never realized how often I still watched for him until I found evidence that he had been nearby. Later I would inspect every inch of the mail. There would be clues there, hidden messages and underlined words, things he needed to tell me without letting Them know. Of course I’d never decipher the secrets. I was a terrible code breaker—he’d told me so for years. But it wouldn’t stop me from trying, from hoping there would be a clue to what he might try next. Maybe, against all odds, a hint of how to stop it all for good.
He had been in the house again, and that was why we were moving. My clothes had been rearranged in the closet, color-coordinated from cools to warms. Taking a few seconds to mix things up made me feel better before I changed into shorts and a sweatshirt, my fall go-to casual wear. I checked my panty drawer, then laughed, not even sure what I expected to find there. Everything looked in order.
But in my bathroom, a long line of products had been arranged across the double vanity. If I combined the second or third letters of the shampoo, lotion, shaving cream, panty liners, and shower gel in just the right way, they would spell something, reveal something true only to Adam. I quickly rearranged them so I wouldn’t be tempted to try.
All at once a knife blade of pain stabbed above my right eye. A pain like that would turn into a migraine if I didn’t get control of it. Ten minutes. If I could just lie down for ten minutes.
When I lifted the sheets on my bed, two long columns of books slept peacefully. It was less terrifying than the knives he’d lined up there in the past while I slept, but only because I hadn’t yet figured out what the books meant. The titles or the subjects would all add up to something in Adam’s mind, and it could be sharper than knives. Could be a promise, a memory, an apology, or a threat. I would never be sure which.
I took a photo of the books—an even dozen. They weren’t arranged alphabetically, and the first letters of the titles didn’t spell anything. Eleven authors in a mixture of fiction and non-, with no obvious connection between the topics or genre. I had the idea that The Art of War was significant, and not only because copies of it occupied both the top-left and top-right corners. Blank yellow Post-it notes had been pushed between the pages at points in the text.