The Other Mrs (ARC) Read online

  only a handful of blocks. It takes less than five minutes from the

  time I drop Otto off until I pull up to the humble, low-slung

  blue building that was once a house.

  From the front, it still resembles a house, though the back

  opens up far wider than any home ever would, attaching to a

  low-cost, independent living center for senior citizens with easy

  access to our medical services. Long ago someone donated their

  home for the clinic. Years later, the independent living center

  was an addition.

  The state of Maine is home to some four thousand islands. I

  didn’t know this before we arrived. There’s a dearth of doctors

  on the more rural of them, such as this one. Many of the older

  physicians are in the process of retiring, leaving vacancies that

  prove difficult to fill.

  The isolation of island living isn’t for everyone, present com-

  pany included. There’s something unsettling in knowing that

  when the last ferry leaves for the night, we’re quite literally

  trapped. Even in daylight, the island is rocky around its edges,

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  overcome with tall pines that make it suffocating and small.

  When winter comes, as it soon will, the harsh weather will shut

  much of the island down, and the bay around us may freeze,

  trapping us here.

  Will and I got our house for free. We got a tax credit for me

  to work at the clinic. I said no to the idea, but Will said yes,

  though it wasn’t the money we needed. My background is in

  emergency medicine. I’m not board-certified in general prac-

  tice, though I have a temporary license while I go through the

  process of becoming fully licensed in Maine.

  Inside, the blue building no longer resembles a house. Walls

  have been put up and knocked down to create a reception desk,

  exam rooms, a lobby. There’s a smell to the building, something

  heavy and damp. It clings to me even after I leave. Will smells

  it too. It doesn’t help that Emma, the receptionist, is a smoker,

  consuming about a pack a day of cigarettes. Though she smokes

  outside, she hangs her coat on the same rack as mine. The smell

  roves from coat to coat.

  Will looks curiously at me some nights after I’ve come home.

  He asks, Have you been smoking? which I might as well be for the smell of nicotine and tobacco that follows me home.

  Of course not, I’ve told him. You know I don’t smoke, and then I tell him about Emma.

  Leave your coat out. I’ll wash it, Will has told me countless times.

  I do and he washes it, but it makes no difference because the

  next day it happens all over again.

  Today I step into the clinic to find Joyce, the head nurse, and

  Emma waiting for me.

  “You’re late,” Joyce says, but if I am, I’m only a minute late.

  Joyce must be sixty-five years old, close to retirement, and a

  bit of a shrew. She’s been here far longer than either Emma or

  me, which makes her top dog at the clinic, in her mind at least.

  “Didn’t they teach you punctuality where you came from?”

  she asks.

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  MARY KUBICA

  I’ve found that the minds of the people are as small as the

  island itself.

  I step past her and start my day.

  Hours later, I’m with a patient when I see Will’s face sur-

  face on my cell phone, five feet away. It’s silenced. I can’t hear

  the phone’s ring, though Will’s name appears above the picture

  of him: the attractive, chiseled face, the bright hazel eyes. He’s

  handsome, in a take-your-breath-away way, and I think that it’s

  the eyes. Or maybe the fact that at forty, he could still pass for

  twenty-five. Will wears his dark hair long, swept back into a

  low bun that’s growing in popularity these days, giving off an

  intellectual, hipster vibe that his students seem to like.

  I ignore the image of Will on my phone and attend to my

  patient, a forty-three-year-old woman presenting with a fever,

  chest pain, a cough. Undoubtedly bronchitis. But still, I press

  my stethoscope to her lungs for a listen.

  I practiced emergency medicine for years before coming here.

  There, at a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in the heart of Chi-

  cago, I went into each shift without any idea of what I might

  see, every patient coming in in distress. The victims of multi-

  ple-vehicle collisions, women hemorrhaging excessively follow-

  ing a home birth, three-hundred-pound men in the midst of a

  psychotic break. It was tense and dramatic. There, in a constant

  state of high alert, I felt alive.

  Here, it is different. Here, every day I know what I will see,

  the same rotation of bronchitis, diarrhea and warts.

  When I finally get the chance to call Will back, there’s a hitch

  to his voice. “Sadie,” he says, and, from the way that he says it,

  I know that something is wrong. He stops there, my mind en-

  gineering scenarios to make up for that which he doesn’t say. It

  settles on Otto and the way I left him at the ferry terminal this

  morning. I got him there just in time, a minute or two before

  the ferry would leave. I said goodbye, my car idling a hundred

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  feet from the waiting boat, watching as Otto moped off for an-

  other day of school.

  It was then that my eyes caught sight of Imogen, standing at

  the edge of the pier with her friends. Imogen is a beautiful girl.

  There’s no rebutting that. Her skin is naturally fair; she doesn’t

  need to cover it in talcum powder, as her friends must do, to

  make herself look white. The piercing through her nose has

  taken some getting used to. Her eyes, in contrast to the skin,

  are an icy blue, her former brunette showing through the un-

  kempt eyebrows. Imogen eschews the dark, bold lipstick the

  other girls like her wear, but instead wears a tasteful rosy beige.

  It’s actually quite lovely.

  Otto has never lived in such close proximity to a girl before.

  His curiosity has gotten the better of him. The two of them

  don’t talk much, no more than Imogen and I speak. She won’t

  ride with us to the ferry dock; she doesn’t speak to him at school.

  As far as I know, she doesn’t acknowledge him on the commute

  there. Their interactions are brief. Otto at the kitchen table

  working on math homework last night, for example, and Imo-

  gen passing through, seeing his binder, noting the teacher’s name

  on the front of it, commenting: Mr. Jansen is a fucking douche.

  Otto had just stared back wide-eyed in reply. The word fuck is not yet in his repertoire. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.

  This morning, Imogen and her friends were standing at the

  edge of the pier, smoking cigarettes. The smoke encircled their

  heads, loitering, white in the frosty air. I watched as Imogen<
br />
  brought a cigarette to her mouth, inhaled deeply with the ex-

  pertise of someone who’d done this before, who knew what she

  was doing. She held it in and then exhaled slowly and, as she

  did, I was certain her eyes came to me.

  Did she see me sitting there in my car, watching her?

  Or was she just staring vacantly into space?

  I’d been so busy watching Imogen that, now that I think back

  on it, I never saw Otto board the ferry. I only assumed he would.

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  MARY KUBICA

  “It’s Otto,” I say aloud now, at the same time that Will says,

  “It wasn’t the Nilssons,” and at first I don’t know what he means

  by that. What does Otto have to do with the elderly couple who

  lives down the street?

  “What about the Nilssons?” I ask but my mind has trouble

  going there, because—at the sudden realization that I didn’t see

  Otto board the ferry—all I can think about is Otto in the sin-

  gle seat across from the principal’s office with handcuffs on his

  wrists, a police officer standing three feet away, watching him.

  On the corner of the principal’s desk, an evidence bag, though

  what was inside, I couldn’t yet see.

  Mr. and Mrs. Foust, the principal had said to us that day and, for the first time in my life, I attempted some clout. Doctor, I said to him, face deadpan as Will and I stood behind Otto, Will

  dropping a hand to Otto’s shoulder to let him know that what-

  ever he’d done, we were there for him.

  I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I was quite certain

  I saw the police officer smirk.

  “The siren last night,” Will explains now over the phone,

  bringing me back to the present. That was before, I remind my-

  self, and this is now. What happened to Otto in Chicago is in

  the past. Over and done with. “It wasn’t the Nilssons after all.

  The Nilssons are perfectly fine. It was Morgan.”

  “Morgan Baines?” I ask, though I’m not sure why. There isn’t

  another Morgan on our block as far as I know. Morgan Baines is

  a neighbor, one I’ve never spoken to but Will has. She and her

  family live just up the street from us in a foursquare farmhouse

  not unlike our own, Morgan, her husband, and their little girl.

  Living at the top of the hill, Will and I often speculated that

  their views of the sea were splendid, three hundred sixty degrees

  of our little island and the ocean that walls us in.

  And then one day Will slipped and told me they were. The

  views. Splendid.

  I tried not to feel insecure. I told myself that Will wouldn’t

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  have admitted to being inside her home if there was something

  going on between them. But Will has a past with women; he

  has a history. A year ago I would have said Will would never

  cheat on me. But I couldn’t put anything past him now.

  “Yes, Sadie,” Will says. “Morgan Baines,” and only then do

  I make out her face, though I’ve not seen her up close before.

  Only from a distance. Long hair, the color of milk chocolate, and

  bangs, the type that hang too long, that spend their time wedged

  behind an ear.

  “What happened?” I ask as I find a place to sit, and, “Is ev-

  erything alright?” I wonder if Morgan is diabetic, if she’s asth-

  matic, if she has an autoimmune condition that would trigger

  a middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room. There are

  only two physicians here, myself and my colleague, Dr. Sand-

  ers. Last night she was on call, not me.

  There are no EMTs on the island, only police officers who

  know how to drive an ambulance and are minimally trained

  in lifesaving measures. There are no hospitals as well, and so

  a rescue boat would have been called in from the mainland to

  meet the ambulance down by the dock to cart Morgan away

  for treatment, while another waited on shore for the third leg

  of her commute.

  I think of the amount of time that would have taken in sum.

  What I’ve heard is that the system works like a well-oiled ma-

  chine and yet it’s nearly three miles to the mainland. Those

  rescue boats can only go so fast and are dependent on the co-

  operation of the sea.

  But this is catastrophic thinking only, my mind ruminating

  on worst-case scenarios.

  “Is she alright, Will?” I ask again because in all this time,

  Will has said nothing.

  “No, Sadie,” he says, as if I should somehow know that ev-

  erything is not alright. There’s a pointedness about his reply. A

  brevity, and then he says no more.

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  MARY KUBICA

  “Well, what happened?” I urge, and he takes a deep breath

  and tells me.

  “She’s dead,” he says.

  And if my response is apathetic it’s only because death and

  dying are a part of my everyday routine. I’ve seen every un-

  speakable thing there is to see, and I didn’t know Morgan Ba-

  ines at all. We’d had no interaction aside from a one-time wave

  out my window as I drove slowly by her home and she stood

  there, thrusting the bangs behind an ear before returning the

  gesture. I’d thought about it long after, overanalyzing as I have

  a tendency to do. I wondered about that look on her face. If it

  was meant for me or if she was scowling at something else.

  “Dead?” I ask now. “Dead how?” and as Will begins to cry on

  the other end of the line, he says, “She was murdered, they say.”

  “They? Who’s they?” I ask.

  “The people, Sadie,” he says. “Everyone. It’s all anyone’s talk-

  ing about in town,” and as I open the door to the exam room

  and step into the hall, I find that it’s true. That patients in the waiting room are in the thick of a conversation about the murder, and they look at me with tears in their eyes and ask if I

  heard the news.

  “A murder! On our island!” someone gasps. A hush falls over

  the room and, as the door opens and a man steps in, an older

  woman screams. It’s a patient only, and yet with news like this,

  it’s hard not to think the worst of everyone. It’s hard not to give in to fear.

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  Camille

  I’m not going to tell you everything. Just the things I think you

  should know.

  I met him on the street. The corner of some city street, where

  it crosses beneath the ‘L’ tracks. It was gritty, grungy there. The buildings, the tracks didn’t let the light in. Parked cars, steel

  girders, orange construction cones filled the road. The people,

  they were ordinary Chicago people. Just your everyday eclectic

  mix of hipsters and steampunk, hobos, trixies, the social elite.

  I was walking. I didn’t know where I was going. All around,

  the city buzzed. Air-conditioning units dripped from up above, a
>
  bum begged for cash. A street preacher stood on the curb, foam-

  ing at the mouth, telling us we’re all hell-bound.

  I passed a guy on the street. I was going the other way as him.

  I didn’t know who he was, but I knew his type. The kind of rich

  former prep school kid who never fraternized with the trashy

  public school kids like me. Now he was all grown up, working

  in the Financial District, shopping at Whole Foods. He’s what

  you’d call a chad, though his name was probably something else like Luke, Miles, Brad. Something smug, uptight, overused.

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  MARY KUBICA

  Mundane. He gave me a nod and a smile, one that said women

  easily fell for his charms. But not me.

  I turned away, kept walking, didn’t give him the satisfaction

  of smiling back.

  I felt his eyes follow me from behind.

  I spied my reflection in a storefront window. My hair, long,

  straight, with bangs. Rust-colored, stretching halfway down

  my back, over the shoulders of an arctic-blue tee that matched

  my eyes.

  I saw what that chad was looking at.

  I ran a hand through my hair. I didn’t look half bad.

  Overhead, the ‘L’ thundered past. It was loud. But not loud

  enough to tune out the street preacher. Adulterers, whores, blas-

  phemers, gluttons. We were all doomed.

  The day was hot. Not just summer but the dog days of it.

  Eighty or ninety degrees out. Everything smelled rancid, like

  sewage. The smell of garbage gagged me as I passed an alley.

  The hot air trapped the smell so there was no escaping it, just

  as there was no escaping the heat.

  I was looking up, watching the ‘L’, getting my bearings. I

  wondered what time it was. I knew every clock in the city. The

  Peacock clock, Father Time, Marshall Fields. Four clocks on the

  Wrigley Building, so that it didn’t matter which way you came

  at it from, you could still see a clock. But there were no clocks

  there, on the corner where I was at.

  I didn’t see the stoplight before me go red. I didn’t see the

  cab come hustling past, racing another cab to snatch up a fare

  down the street. I stepped right into the street with both feet.

  I felt him first. I felt the grip of his hand tighten on my wrist

  like a pipe wrench so that I couldn’t move.

  In an instant, I fell in love with that hand—warm, capable,