He first noticed the van approximately two weeks prior to Kathy’s death. At the time, he didn’t think much of it. It was parked right there across the street from their house, a white-paneled van with no windows and PVC pipes tied to the roof rack. There were no logos on the side, and it had nondescript Maryland plates. Someone had placed a sunshade on the dash, so it was impossible to see through the windows into the cab.
David had just picked up Ellie from Mrs. Blanche’s house, having spent the afternoon at the Greenbelt facility with Kathy. He turned onto Columbus Court, the daylight already draining from the sky. The trees beyond the houses had started to shed their leaves. As he always did, he glanced at the remains of Deke Carmody’s house. When he looked up, he found that the otherwise inconspicuous white van was crowding the left-hand side of the street. David steered around the van, not thinking much of it . . . yet it was his first conscious sighting of it, and it would come to nestle itself into the recesses of his brain in the days to come, as things with Kathy took a quick turn for the worse.
That evening, before tucking Ellie into bed, they called Kathy on her cell phone. She answered, and despite sounding cheery for Ellie’s sake, David knew she was wiped. Kathy gave the obligatory responses to all of Ellie’s questions. Yes, she was fine. Yes, she would be home with them soon. Yes, this was something very special that she was doing. Yes, of course she missed her very much, but she had been too tired lately for visitors.
After they hung up, David ushered Ellie into bed. He turned off her light and kissed her good night. In the half light, he watched her roll onto her side and hug her pillow.
Before he got up from her bed, she reached out and laced her hand inside one of his. He smiled at her . . . then closed his eyes. It felt good to hold her, to touch her, just as it had when she was an infant and he’d walk the floorboards with her all night while she gazed up at him with those wide, impossible eyes. He felt calm, serene. Strangely at peace.
Once she had fallen asleep, he kissed the side of her face and got up off the bed. He closed her bedroom door, then wandered aimlessly about the house—a house that now seemed impossibly large and mazelike, a turreted castle with countless dark corners and unending corridors. He could feel his anxiety creeping slowly back into him. Since Kathy’s stay at the Greenbelt facility had become permanent, David had stopped sleeping in their bedroom, opting instead for the living room couch. In fact, he found himself limiting his time spent in the master bedroom altogether, as the scent of Kathy’s perfume lingered in the pillowcases, the sheets, the curtains over the windows, the clothes in their shared closet. The hairbrush she’d left on the bathroom sink made him melancholy. The unfinished Wally Lamb novel on the nightstand, propped open with its spine in the air as if it were doing push-ups, made him restless and caused his mind to wander in the direction of dark things.
Despite his nightly reassurances to his daughter, he had a bad feeling about the direction of things. He had mentioned to Kathy a few times lately that he wanted her to come home with him. But she said she was okay, that she could stick it out. She’d insisted.
Earlier that day, he’d commented to Dr. Kapoor about the pallor of Kathy’s skin. She’d become jaundiced, with bruise-colored hollows under each eye. She had lost so much weight in such a brief amount of time—there was no question about that—and the result was eerie, causing the flesh of her face to stretch taut around her skull, which gave her cheekbones an unnatural emphasis. Her fingers had slimmed, and as David sat beside her bed that afternoon eating lunch, they’d both heard the clinking of her wedding band as it fell from her finger and tink-tink-tinked across the floor. He’d picked it up and tried to slide it back on her finger, but she pulled her hand away, almost embarrassed, and shook her head. No. No. For a moment, there was a strange telescopic look in her eyes, much like the lens of a camera as it adjusts to focus on something at some great distance.
“You keep it for me,” she’d said.
He had it in his pocket now. He dug it out and pushed it onto his pinkie. It fit.
“Something’s wrong with her,” David had expressed to Dr. Kapoor before leaving the facility that evening. They stood talking in the hallway outside Dr. Kapoor’s office, their voices low although there was no one around to eavesdrop. “She doesn’t look well.”
“We’ve been taking a lot of blood,” Dr. Kapoor said. “As long as we keep her on the IV, though, everything will be fine. The weight loss comes from her lack of appetite. She gives us trouble about eating.”
“You’ve taken her off her psych meds, the antidepressants. She’s distraught.”
“It’s necessary for the blood work, the cultures. I assure you, Mr. Arlen, that she is getting all the proper nutrients through the IV.”
He took Dr. Kapoor at his word, though he didn’t feel good about doing it.