I pull myself into a formation. One arm aims the flashlight through a hole above my head. My eye is situated at another opening. I flip the switch in my hand.
The space I find is not the furnace room. It’s a skinny path between walls. Maybe even a slim hallway. It’s big enough that a person could walk through it by shuffling sideways.
A bed, narrow as an army cot. Pillows and dolls, covered in filth, litter the floor. Unframed photographs leaf the walls. My eyesight goes in and out. I see a class picture of Julie’s. I find a photo of my family on the beach when I was a teenager. A snapshot of a young girl I don’t know, blinking against the sun. I feel certain that the picture of a man fishing on a familiar-looking dock is Rolf.
73
I’M HIDING OUT in the floor’s shared ladies’ room when Connie finds me. She recognizes my shoes under the door and knocks. I panic and try not to answer. My head is unspun. I feel parched from crying. Too disoriented to understand why the walls are thumping at me, and too paralyzed to slide back the lock. She makes the sacrifice of allowing her knees to touch the tile so that she can peer under the stall’s door to find me sitting on the closed toilet seat, my face streaked with tears. “Can you unlock the door, Julie?” When I don’t move, she slithers under, saying, “I must really care.” She struggles to stand, unlocks the door, but doesn’t try to maneuver out yet. “You can’t hide in here all day, Julie. What happened? You were holding it together.”
“More. More since you found the new bruise.”
“What more?”
I’m feeling protective of myself again and look down instead of answering.
“It’s okay. You’ve got to pull it together, though. People are looking for you.” She leads me out of the stall and makes me splash water on my face. She hands me a paper towel to dry it.
In the mirror, I catch sight of my face, looking as if my plates have shifted, as if half my face were on a different level from the rest.
“Ready?”
I follow Connie out of the bathroom.
While we’re walking the concrete hall back to the office, I see the two detectives flash a badge at the front door and the office manager points at me, though I would bet Connie wonders if she’s pointing at her, too, and they stride toward us. “Ms. Abbatacola, I hope you’re well this morning. Mrs. Khoury, it’s you we’re hoping to talk to. Is there somewhere we could speak privately?”
I lead them to the big conference room next to the entrance.
“We’re sorry to disturb your workday, Mrs. Khoury. We have a few questions. First, do you recognize these photos?”
The taller detective, O’Neill, shows me pictures of the drawings on the wall of our bedroom and I wonder what else they know. All of it? The way the search engine has bounced my entire life back to me as if I were being surveilled? I convince myself it’s nothing so complicated. They must have stopped at the house and James was home to let them in. I pause and know there is only one way to answer their question. “I do.”
“And can you tell us who made these drawings?” The detective cocks his head to the side.
“I thought it was my husband, but he denies it.”
“And you saw the drawings that showed up on the wall of Ms. Abbatacola’s house, right?”
I see where he’s headed and believe I’ll gain credibility if I get there first. “I did, and, yes, they look like the ones in our bedroom.”
“But you didn’t inform us of the drawings that appeared on the wall of your bedroom?”
I wonder if the shorter one, Poremski, ever talks. He doesn’t look like the muscle between them, and I look him up and down trying to figure out what part he plays, before turning back to the one asking the questions. “Like I said, I thought that my husband was playing a trick on me, so no.”
“But not even after you saw the vandalism in the home of your friend?”
There’s a knock at the door and my coworker, Tim, peeks his head in. “Whoa, I’m sorry! I’ll book another room!” He ducks out.
“I’m not sure I have a good answer for you.” All of my other worries show up again, and I change tacks: “Have you found our neighbor yet?”
“We haven’t. I’ll take that to mean you also haven’t seen him?”
I rub my forehead. “No.”
“Okay, Mrs. Khoury. That’s all for now. Please let us know if you think of anything else that might be helpful.”
“Did you talk to my husband?” I have the urge to know that our stories match up.
“We did.”
“And?”
“I’m sure he’ll fill you in,” one of the detectives says, and they excuse themselves.
74
I WANT TO assume Julie is the one to blame because it feels easy and possible. All of the signs indicate I’m the one doing the drawings. Even alone in the basement, looking at myself, I come in and out of focus as the culprit. I wonder if I’m losing my grip. I refuse to believe it. I let myself accuse Julie instead. I don’t hold back. I flood with all the pent-up anger that she moved us to this tiny town. I blame her for stopping me from gambling. I blame her for thinking it was a problem. If I’d had a little more time, my luck would have turned around. I think of the bruises on her body. There’s no reason for them. I imagine her running herself into walls. She makes the marks appear. She was never trapped in a secret room as she says. Maybe there is a grave in the backyard. Maybe it’s filled with the body of Rolf. I’m furious that, through all of this, she’s dismissed my fears and demanded sympathy and comfort for her own. I have visions of the police arriving and taking me away for our neighbor’s murder. I imagine Julie looking at me as if I’ve disappointed her. That feeling is so familiar I do the only thing I can think of to avoid it.
That afternoon I pretend to be Julie. I write letters confessing to causing all of this. I explain how she did it. I write that she drugged me. She clawed holes in the walls. She hid Rolf’s body. She made every drawing. Every sentence paints a motive. She did it for proof of life. She did it to scare me off. She did it as revenge for my misdeeds. She wanted to test her limits. She wanted to teach me. She wanted to teach herself.
I try to mimic her handwriting. I get pretty close. I throw away the ones that look least accurate. I leave the good drafts on the table. I go back to the basement.