The Other Mrs (ARC) Page 8
me that he’s on his way, though it’s a twenty-some hour trip
from Tokyo with layovers at LAX and JFK. He won’t be home
until tonight.
“Have you found her cell phone? That might give you some-
thing to go on?” I ask.
He shakes his head. They’ve been looking, he says, but so far
they can’t find her phone. “There are ways to track a missing
cell phone, but if the phone is off or the battery is dead, those
won’t work. Obtaining a warrant for records from a telecom-
munications company is tedious. It takes time. But we’re work-
ing on it,” he tells me.
Officer Berg shifts in the seat. He turns his body toward
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MARY KUBICA
mine, knees now pointed in my direction. They bump awk-
wardly into the gear shift. There are raindrops on his coat and
his hair. There’s icing on his upper lip.
“You told me yesterday that you and Mrs. Baines never met,”
he says, and I have trouble snatching my eyes from the icing as
I reply, “That’s right. We never met.”
There was a photograph online of the woman. According to
the paper, she was twenty-eight years old, eleven years younger
than me. In the photo, she stood surrounded by her family, her
happy husband on one side, stepdaughter the other, all of them
dolled up in coordinating clothes, and wreathed in smiles. She
had a beautiful smile, a tad bit gummy if anything, but other-
wise lovely.
Officer Berg unzips his rain jacket and reaches inside. He re-
moves his tablet from an interior pocket, where there it stays dry.
He taps on the screen, trawling for something. When he finds
the spot, he clears his throat and reads my words back to me.
“Yesterday you said, I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself. Do you remember saying that?” he asks, and I tell him I do, though it sounds so flippant now, my words coming
back to me this way. A bit merciless, if I’m being honest, seeing
as the woman is now dead. I should have tacked on an empa-
thetic addendum, such as, But I wish I had. Just a little something so that my words didn’t sound so callous.
“The thing is, Dr. Foust,” he begins, “you said you didn’t
know Mrs. Baines, and yet it seems you did,” and though his
tone is well disposed, the intent of his words is not.
He’s just accused me of lying.
“I beg your pardon?” I ask, taken completely aback.
“It seems you did know Morgan Baines,” he says.
The rain is coming down in torrents now, pounding on the
roof of the car like mallets on tin cans. I think of Otto all alone on the upper deck of the ferry, getting pelted with rain. A knot
forms in my throat because of it. I swallow it away.
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I force my window up to keep the rain at bay.
I make sure to meet the officer’s eye as I assert, “Unless a
one-time wave out the window of a moving vehicle counts as a
relationship, Officer Berg, I didn’t know Morgan Baines. What
makes you think that I did?” I ask, and he explains again, at great length this time, how he canvassed the entire street, spoke to all
the neighbors, asked them the same questions he asked Will and
me. When he came to the home of George and Poppy Nilsson,
they invited him into their kitchen for tea and ginger cookies.
He tells me that he asked the Nilssons what they were doing
the night Morgan died, same as he did Will and me. I wait to
hear their reply, thinking Officer Berg is about to tell me how
the older couple sat in their living room that night, watching
out the window as a killer slipped from the cover of darkness
and into the Baines’s home.
But instead he says, “As you can expect, at eighty-some years
old, George and Poppy were asleep,” and I release my withheld
breath. The Nilssons didn’t see a thing.
“I don’t understand, Officer,” I say, glancing at the time on
the car’s dash, knowing I’ll need to leave soon. “If the Nilssons
were asleep, then… what?”
Because clearly if they were asleep, then they saw and heard
nothing.
“I also asked the Nilssons if they’d seen anything out of the
ordinary over the last few days. Strangers lurking about, unfa-
miliar cars parked along the street.”
“Yes, yes,” I say, nodding my head quickly because he also
asked this question of Will and me. “And?” I ask, trying to hurry
things along so that I can get on to work.
“Well, it just so happens that they did see something out of
the ordinary. Something they haven’t seen before. Which is say-
ing a lot seeing as they’ve lived half their lives on that street.”
And then he taps away at that tablet screen to find his interview
with Mr. and Mrs. Nilsson.
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MARY KUBICA
He goes on to describe for me an afternoon just last week.
It was Friday, the first of December. It was a clear day, the sky
painted blue, not a cloud to be seen. The temperatures were
cool, crisp, but nothing a heavy sweater or a light jacket wouldn’t fix. George and Poppy had gone for an afternoon walk, Officer Berg says, and were headed back up the steep incline of our
street. Once they reached the top, George stopped to catch his
breath, pausing before the Baines’s home.
Officer Berg goes on to tell me how there Mr. Nilsson rear-
ranged the blanket on Poppy’s lap so that she didn’t catch a draft.
As he did, something caught his attention. It was the sound of
women hollering at one another, though what they were hol-
lering about he wasn’t sure.
“Oh, how awful,” I say, and he says it was because poor
George was really shaken up about it. He’d never heard any-
thing like that before. And that’s saying a lot for a man his age.
“But what does this have to do with me?” I ask, and he reaches
again for the tablet.
“George and Poppy stayed there in the street for a moment
only, but that’s all it took before the women stepped out from
the shade of a tree and into view and George could see for him-
self who they were.”
“Who?” I ask, slightly breathless, and he waits a beat before
he replies.
“It was Mrs. Baines,” he says, “and you.”
And then, from some recording app on his device, he plays for
me the testimonial of Mr. Nilsson which states, “She was fight-
ing with the new doctor lady on the street, the both of them
were hooting and hollering, mad as a hornet. Before I could
intercede, the doctor lady grabbed a handful of Ms. Morgan’s
hair right out of her head and left with it in her fist. Poppy and
I turned and walked quickly home. Didn’t want her to think we
were snooping or she might do the same thing to us.”
Officer Berg stops it there and turns to me, asking, “D
oes
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this sound to you like an altercation between two women who’d
never met?”
But I’m speechless.
I can’t reply.
Why would George Nilsson say such an awful thing about
me?
Officer Berg doesn’t give me a chance to speak. He goes on
without me.
He asks, “Is it often, Dr. Foust, that you swipe handfuls of
hair from women you don’t know?”
The answer, of course, is no. Though still I can’t find my
voice to speak.
He decides, “I’ll take your silence as a no.”
His hand falls to the door and he pushes it open against the
weight of the wind. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, “so that you
can get on with your day.”
“I never spoke to Morgan Baines,” is what I manage to say just
then before he leaves, though the words that emerge are limp.
He shrugs. “Alright then,” he says, stepping back out into
the rain.
He never said if he believed me.
He didn’t need to.
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Mouse
Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her
real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father
had called her that.
The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She
didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he
might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do
that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it
was something special between her father and her, even if she
didn’t know why.
Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas
about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she
had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of
mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue
to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her
Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.
She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse.
If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip,
ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father
could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom,
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climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could
search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along
with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but
she didn’t see any whiskers there.
Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but
something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.
But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do
with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it
had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something
else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father
ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cook-
ies that he called her Mouse.
Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other
kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them
up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw
her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing
its way through wood.
Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night,
when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the
sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pocket for a late-
night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.
Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to
her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew
that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly
turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would
taste just as good as the cookie had.
But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with
the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her.
There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased
her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of
hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.
But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called
her Mouse.
Because by then, she already was Mouse.
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MARY KUBICA
Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories
up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her
head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a
girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even
cartwheels on the moon if that’s what she wanted to do because
Mouse didn’t need silly things like oxygen or gravity. She was
afraid of nothing because she was immortal. No matter what
she did, no harm could come to imaginary Mouse.
Mouse loved to draw. Her bedroom walls were covered in
pictures of her father and her, her and her teddy bears. Mouse
spent her days playing pretend. Her bedroom, the only one on
the second floor of the old home, was full of dolls, toys and
stuffed animals. Each animal had a name. Her favorite was a
stuffed brown bear named Mr. Bear. Mouse had a dollhouse, a
toy kitchen set with pretend pots and pans and crates of plastic
food. She had a tea set. Mouse loved to set her dolls and ani-
mals in a circle on her floor, on the edge of her striped rag rug,
and serve them each a tiny mug of tea and a plastic donut. She
would find a book on her shelf and read it aloud to her friends
before tucking them into bed.
But sometimes Mouse didn’t play with her animals and dolls.
Sometimes she stood on her bed and pretended the floor
around her was hot lava oozing from the volcano at the other
end of the room. She couldn’t step on the floor for risk of death.
Those days, Mouse would scramble from her bed to a desk,
climbing to safety. She’d tread precariously across the top of the
small white desk—the legs of it wobbling beneath her, threat-
ening to break. Mouse wasn’t a big girl but the desk was old,
fragile. It wasn’t meant to hold a six-year-old child.
But it didn’t matter because soon enough Mouse was clam-
bering into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the bed-
room floor. As she did, she took extra care not to step on the
floor, breathing a sigh of relief when she was safely inside the
basket. Because even though the basket was on the floor, it was
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safe. The basket couldn’t get swallowed up by lava, because it
was made of titanium, and Mouse knew that titanium wouldn’t
melt. She was a smart girl, smarter than any other
girl her age
that she knew.
Inside the laundry basket, the girl rode the waves of the vol-
cano until the lava itself cooled and crusted over, and the land
was safe enough to walk on again. Only then did she venture
out of the basket and go back to playing along the edge of the
rag rug with Mr. Bear and her dolls.
Sometimes Mouse thought that that, her tendency to disap-
pear to her bedroom— quiet as a church mouse, as her father put it—and play all day was the reason he called her Mouse.
It was hard to say.
But one thing was certain.
Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And
then she no longer did.
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Sadie
I’m sitting on the floor in the lobby of the clinic. Before me is
an activity table, the kind meant to keep kids entertained while
they wait. The dark carpet beneath me is thin and cheap. It’s
unraveling in spots, with stains that blend into the nylon so you
wouldn’t see them unless you were as close to it as I am.
I’m cross-legged on the floor, sitting on the side of the activ-
ity table that faces a shape sorter. I watch on as my hand drops
a heart shaped block into the appropriate opening.
There’s a girl on the other side of the table. At first glance,
she looks to be about four years old. She wears a pair of crooked
pigtails. Strands of blond hair have come loose from the elas-
tics. They fall to her face, hang into her eyes where she leaves
them be, not bothering to shove them away. Her sweatshirt is
red. Her shoes don’t match. One is a black patent leather Mary
Jane and the other a black ballet f lat. An easy enough mistake
to make.
My own legs have begun to ache. I unknot them, find a dif-
ferent position to sit in, one better suited for a thirty-nine-year-old woman. The waiting room chair catches my eye, but I can’t
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rise from the floor and leave, not yet, because the little girl across the table is watching me expectantly.
“Go,” she says, grinning oddly, and I ask, “Go where?” though
my voice is strangled when I speak. I clear my throat, try again.
“Go where?” I ask, this time sounding more like myself.
On the floor, my body is stiff. My legs hurt. My head hurts.
I’m hot. I didn’t catch a wink of sleep last night and am paying