“Then what is it?”
I think of James’s overdrawn account, of the slow suspicion that grew when I saw the ATM withdrawals from our joint checking, small sums—twenty or forty dollars—amounts that he would normally have taken out of his private funds, until he couldn’t. Of how I ignored it for a while until the frequency increased and I asked if he’d gotten his ATM cards confused and how James had broken down and told me what had happened, of how he had started visiting the OTB on his lunch hour, laying down cash on races, forming what felt like friendships with the other guys urging their workday along with a shot of adrenaline at noon, ordering hot wings and beer as an alibi. I think of the cave James is convinced he visited, of all he’s dismantled, and I remember that I have no answer for where the bruises come from or for where I disappeared to when the house swallowed me up, and we have no explanation for the noises—the intonation or the deep breathing in the night or the voices looting our dreams—and no reasons for the drawings or the children in the woods, things we see together, even if we’re apart. My instinct is to pin the trouble on James, but I ask myself if it might be easier to believe it’s neither of us, so that we might trust each other and try to solve this mystery together.
Connie sits on the toilet, and I think about whether she noticed how much the bathwater rose when I sat down in it. It’s something I’d worried about since I was a teenager, the serenity of a bath marred by my anxiety about my own volume. She is so thin, so elegantly formed. I feel certain she knows the water she’d displace wouldn’t be more than an inch or two.
“You don’t have to talk to me. I know we might not be as close as I feel like we are. We haven’t kept in touch. We’ve only just reconnected. But I hope you’re talking to someone.” Connie stares straight ahead, trying not to look at my body.
I don’t scrub at myself. I dunk my head under once, filling myself up with that submerged rumble, holding my breath, but not for as long as I know I can. I don’t want to unnerve Connie. I don’t want to make her think I’m trying anything dangerous. When I sit up, the water rushes off me and I hunch over, my head resting on my bent knees, and only when Connie stops speaking do I realize she was talking at all.
I wish for something clear to say, for a cock to crow, for an alarm to sound: anything.
39
I LOOK AROUND for the journal, but don’t find it on Julie’s nightstand. I get down on the floor to see if it fell beneath the bed. I see a square outlined in light, like what might peek around a trapdoor. I scoot under the bed and my fingers hunt the edges, trying to find a place to pry up the boards to see what’s below. I knock, and the space beneath me echoes. I can’t find a way to budge the seam of light, though.
“James?” I hear in the room around me. I don’t answer. I hear a creak. I think about Connie setting my naked wife on the bed. She must be rifling through our drawers for clean clothes. Maybe she combs Julie’s hair. I hear a bird’s ritual call from beyond the room, too. The fowl are getting more insistent.
When I was a child, I feared the day I would identify what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to stay free. The worst nightmare appeared to be recognizing how you wanted the world to change.
40
CONNIE CALLS for James. I am used to his disappearing. She walks out to the hall and shouts his name, but he doesn’t answer, and I sit on the bed and wait, clear, damp, and heavy, and then something grabs my ankle and I scream and stomp.
It’s James’s voice I hear call out from beneath the bed, and he emerges, one hand kneading the other, trying to make it feel something other than pain.
“You frightened me,” I say, by way of apology.
“Seems like.” He wriggles himself free.
I don’t ask why he was under the bed, but Connie does. “James, where the hell were you?”
James doesn’t answer, and Connie asks where the dirty clothes should go and I point.
“James, you know that Julie has something she’s afraid to talk about. She won’t tell me, but something has her unglued.”
A siren sounds in my mind, and I spring into motion and shove Connie out of the room and down the hall. She’s so surprised that she doesn’t resist. She keeps moving down the stairs without my prodding.
“Julie! Stop! What the fuck?”
I follow her, clutching the towel around me, slipping down the last stair, bashing my tailbone, but struggling to stand right away, my body still dripping.
She turns at the crash, finds me on the ground. “Whoa, are you okay?” She pauses.
Even in this moment, she is worried about me, but I reject that worry. I push past her and open the front door and wait for her to go, but she won’t cross the threshold so I step outside, nearly naked, so she’ll follow me and she does.
“Connie,” I shout-whisper, “I didn’t ask for that. I need to figure some things out before I start naming this situation, but this is not your responsibility. You think my husband doesn’t know that something’s off?”
Connie throws up her hands. “Get yourself back to the office. Or maybe don’t? I don’t know that you’re the best face to put in front of the board.” She stomps down the porch stairs.
“Tell them I’m home for the day,” I call.
“Tell them yourself.” She slams her car door and takes off.
I walk back inside and lock the door. I gather the strength to deal with James and tug myself upstairs, feeling the ache in my tailbone now. When I pass the guest bedroom, I see a dark shadow and freeze, keeping my eyes on it. “James?”
“Do you have something you want to talk to me about?” James asks from the other room. “It seems like you do. I didn’t need Connie to tell me that. I was trying to be—”
“James.” I stop him. “Could you come here?” The shadow shifts.
“What?” Then he is next to me and I hear him gasp, and I know he is seeing what I see. “What the…,” he whispers, afraid, as I am, of something, unsure if we fear scaring the dark spot away or inviting it to stay.
“Hello?” I call into the room but nothing responds. “That’s a person’s shadow, right?”
“But from where?” he asks.
My heart is rattling and I want to step into the room, but can’t bring myself to do it. James steps forward before I get the courage, and as soon as he moves, the shadow disappears, and I look behind him to see if his body is now blocking some light, but the angles don’t work that way, and James goes into the room to look for the cause, waving his hand around, trying to figure out what window’s light strikes that wall, and he peers outside to see what could have conned our sight. He shakes his head, and when his eyes meet mine, I begin to weep, and he rushes to me and takes me to the bedroom, where we lie down, me still in that damp towel, and I finally breathe normally and hug him until I can’t even feel him around me.