My husband was a reticent man, the type who would sneak off to the car to masturbate, so believe me when I say I had no idea about what he had done. Everything became a blur when the police arrived to take him away. The man I had been married to for twenty-three years furrowed his brow, the same orchestrated show of confusion he adopted when convincing me he lost something (his glasses, his gum, papers from work, always something vague yet oddly specific), before he slid his bare feet into winter boots impeccably preserved despite their seven seasons of winter, and disappeared into the cold night.
The pristine state of his boots was a detail the jury would take into account later, but in the moment I would tiptoe into the darkened kitchen and watch my husband from the window, his profile glowing against the dim light of his cellphone. His arm jerked, mechanical, business-like. Clouds of breath escaped his lips. He was never more than three minutes.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” I would ask upon his return, careful to sound only mildly interested.
“Yes,” he would answer, and that was it, which was why I wanted to believe the police had the wrong man when they arrived at the house that night.
There was never any sign of admission on him. I never suspected anything untoward when he abruptly left the dinner table to answer an apparent work call, or when he spent long hours away from home. I understood that he had needs I could not fulfill. Our sex drives had become misaligned—his, the hunger of a teenage boy, and mine, suddenly belonging to an old woman. I never made demands of him. I never asked him to explain the unaccounted hours. I figured that we had tacitly come to some type of agreement. I became the clueless wife, the cliche of all cliches.
There were nights when he would arrive home late, headlights streaming over the wall of our bedroom as I lay alone. My breathing would quicken at the abstract despair of no longer having the bed to myself. I had become an architect of my solitude, enjoying its angles and deep spaces. I fantasized about divorce—severing everything neatly in half, going our own ways to explore whatever it was each of us wanted to separately navigate. There was so much I couldn’t provide for him, I imagined. Silent demands I could not deliver. For me, it was the emptiness that was attractive. Hours of nothing, of contemplating frost on the window, arranging china in cabinets that smelled of stale decades-old air. There was a shadow life existing alongside the one I was living, occurring without me, like a river running beneath ice. I needed to tap into it somehow. I had always been a solitary woman. For John, divorce would benefit whatever he was doing out there. I could only imagine, though I never fathomed the extremes that he constructed for himself.
The dance was always the same—holding my breath until his headlights flicked off and blackened our room, listening for the knock of his bootsteps, the slam of the front door, him coming up the stairs. I would wait for him to reach the top step that creaked, knowing I had only a few minutes left in my private world, then exhale once the drum of shower water against the bathroom tiles could be heard. I could see him unbuttoning his shirt, stepping out of his jeans. Undressing in front of one another had become as quotidian an activity as peeling an orange. I had the scrum of hair across his chest memorized, the freckles like shy crop underneath, his manhood pendulant, the rest of him sturdy, well-maintained considering his age. My lungs would tighten in a dreadful anticipation until I felt his body lie down next to mine.
Any man can shower after a long day.
Before coming to bed.
Wanting to smell good for his sleeping wife. But I should have known.
They quizzed me about this later. Hadn’t I been suspicious of the immediate and methodical showers upon his return? Or how the treads of his boots were always brushed clean, looking new as the day he bought them?
Did I know?
I began to cry.
No, I did not.
◆
Our son Noah was supposed to attend university but took a gap year and never ended up going. I sold the house following the trial and asked him what we should do next. I tried to put a positive spin on our situation—we can start fresh anywhere in the world. Where do you want to go? But he didn’t want to go anywhere, not with me, not with money that came from selling that house. An expectant couple ended up placing the winning bid; two young lovers starting anew. I’m sure they were aware of us—John—and the activities that took place during our ownership, but the adjusted listing price was handsome enough, permitting them to overlook all that. Noah stopped referring to John as his father. Him, That Man, and The Fucking Monster were common epithets spewed. Noah craved independence. A teenager thing, I told myself, he wants to feel free. I transferred twenty thousand dollars into his checking account and haven’t heard from him since.
I moved someplace that felt far away, which might have served me well had all of this happened thirty, forty years ago, before everyone had internet. In the online world distance is an illusion, the truth only a google search away. I chose a rural town and did my research while the property, a hundred-year-old farmhouse, was still on the market. I studied the distance between it and everything else. I parked outside the grocery store, watching as toothless twenty-year-olds with bevvies of toddlers emerged pushing shopping carts piled high with junk food. I waited an hour in my car and counted how many people entered the library: zero. How many entered the pharmacy, the jingle bells over their door audible from inside my vehicle: fourteen. Methadone, I figured. I wondered if they were the type of people who would notice me, recall my last name from the headlines and shiver when they heard it, glance twice in the grocery store. I hoped they weren’t. There wasn’t much else in town, if you could call it a town. Just a place to buy groceries, the post office, and a liquor-convenience store.
A knock on my window, manicured blood red fingernails. The real estate agent. The smoke from her cigarette fogged the glass; she didn’t turn away as she exhaled. I thought of John, alone in the car. What he had been masturbating to. (No longer a who but a what.) How they warned the courtroom before showing the photos from his cell phone as evidence. His trophies. Their faces. The gore. My ignorance.
“Ready to see your future home?”
The agent seemed committed to making at least a crack in my tough exterior, a heel down on ice, but I wasn’t looking to make friends. In fact, I had shunned everyone I had once been close to. Friends John and I had known for decades, whose milestone birthdays we celebrated and cottages we slept in, became strangers badgering me for information. I skirted their messages of veneered concern—always laced with the intent of fishing for details—and marked their e-mail addresses as spam, blocked their phone numbers.
I tailed the agent, Wanda, for twenty miles, watching the exhaust swirl from her tailpipe. I was drawn to the property for its seclusion. Clapboard houses strung the country road, a deer here and there in the fields, the butterscotch slush in a perfect line down the center of the road, freshly plowed. The midday sun was brash in a way that it only ever is in winter, its rays unsparing.
“Home sweet home,” Wanda sang as she slammed her car door shut. I hadn’t agreed to anything yet, but she was a hound for optimism, I could tell.
She pressed a folder against her chest, neatening stray papers, pinching at paper clips. I counted how many buttons she had left undone on her blouse, a trail leading to her cleavage. She reminded me of a seventies ski bunny, dramatic fur trim on her boots, the outline of underwear visible beneath faux denim yoga pants. This was a woman who could sell a house to a man, down to pretending like she came with it as an accessory. She was the type of woman who was useless to other women, especially older ones, versed in where her strengths lay. Wanda was a woman my husband would have wanted.
She hurried me through the property, shrugging at the popcorn ceilings, the bad pipes. Everything, she assured me, could be easily fixed. This house just needs some love. An hour later I signed the papers. She crouched over the peeling vinyl countertop and pursed her lips, watching my pen scratch out a signature. Her breasts spilled out of her blouse like two drunk pumpkins.
“You,” she promised, smiling, “will be happy here.”
It sounded rehearsed, something she might have heard on one of those real estate shows where all the women are much blonder, with more money and better complexions. I could picture her practicing the phrase, the beaming grin, on the drive over.
The sun was beginning to wane, not yet four in the afternoon, the lethargy of early winter settling in. I already felt like the house was a mistake, the way purchasing a new love seat or dress can be. I had never lived alone before. An aftershock of panic: I should have found someplace even further away, but nowhere would ever be far enough.
“Oh look!” Wanda pointed to a murmuration of starlings that were swooping through the sky beyond the dirty window. “Pretty!” Her voice shimmered with the easy astonishment of a toddler.
Admittedly, it was pretty, how they twisted into a tornado of black, never losing rhythm with one another, unfolding like an accordion before morphing into new shapes—an hourglass, a wave, a whale, and at one point, a face. I watched Wanda from the corner of my eye, gathering the papers, sticking them back into the folder as if she had orchestrated the birds herself to serve as distraction.
The last of the sun shone against her pock marks, paved over with layers of foundation two shades too dark for her skin tone. The flutter of her false lashes sounded like a dubbing of the birds’ wings. John would have lasered in on her. She was, as some articles had cruelly described his victims, an easy target. Distracted, unassuming. I was, ironically, someone who never let their guard down. I digested the possibility that had we lived in that town five years ago, she could have been one of them. Immediately I softened my regard of Wanda, which was easy as switching gears on a bike, a task that felt impossible forty minutes earlier.
There was something I had recently noticed about myself that I felt I had to keep an eye on, like the growth of a mysterious new mole: how quick I was to lacquer my demeanor against anybody I perceived as a threat, which was everyone. To pretend to be genial was an exhausting chore. I expected that everyone had an agenda, wanted to know more, was only talking to me to find out about John, as if my own existence had diminished to a clue or footnote in the why of his actions. A prickly exterior had replaced whatever existed for me before. I used to be friendly. In my previous life I would say hello to the mailman, ask how his day was going. I used to compliment cashiers on their jewelry or manicures. In these exchanges, I would mean it. Now I barely spoke to anyone.
Wanda said she would be in touch with the next steps.
The two of us watched the starlings until they disappeared.
◆
I spent Christmas alone. Texts to Noah bounced back, message failed to send politely coming up in lieu of I changed my number, go fuck yourself, Mom.
I took my therapist’s suggestion, strung Christmas lights around the window frames. Tried to get my mind off things. There were boxes of decorations leftover from the old house—a wall-hanging advent calendar whose numbers I dutifully changed each day of December, counting down even though I knew Christmas would feel hollow. Centerpieces for tables which now required no center, since the axis had been blown off kilter and I revolved around nothing, no family, no man, no son, only myself. I chopped down a baby fir from the back field, felt an air of ceremony while crowning the star. I liked nights after a fresh snow, feeling tucked in and safe, reading in silence as the lights twinkled. Some nights I cried at the irony, because it was exactly the life I had craved while I was with John, though it had come at the cost of four dead women.
I saved Noah’s childhood decorations to hang up last, things he had made in kindergarten—laminated drawings of angels, styrofoam cones painted green and rung in tinsel—remembering which of his teachers had been the creative ones, the ones I secretly admired and wanted to befriend at the time. On Christmas Eve I planned on making dinner for myself. I set the table with dollar store festive crackers and our old placemats, a spot for Noah in absentia, but ended up in my car, driving just to drive. I kept going until I reached the nearest city, which was not near at all. I ordered a Whopper from Burger King, adopted a cat from the Humane Society. She was already named—Claws, for Mrs. Claus. Something I might have scoffed at in my former life, something that kind of melted my heart now.
Strange cars pulled into the driveway at all hours. Some flashed their lights in what I interpreted to be signal, others would idle on the shoulder of the road with their headlights off, reminding me of sharks waiting to strike. The undecipherable shadows behind the wheel forced my mind to travel to John, imagining that his lawyer had somehow brokered an early release, that he figured out where I lived. My heart raced the way it would when he returned home after his outings and crawled into bed next to me. I figured he was having an affair, not murdering innocent women. Until the cars arrived I never rehearsed what might happen the next time we met face to face, what he or I might say, which of us would be the first to apologize. I could picture myself folding like a house of cards, taking the blame even though I had nothing to apologize for.
It was hard to tell what color the cars were in the dark. I huddled by the window, dimmed the light on my phone and typed whatever identifying details I could into the Notes app, afraid that whoever it was would break in to kill me. The trial had been an education. Because of it I learned to fill in the blanks. To provide what lacked. I could leave clues behind like breadcrumbs, offer stats about my hypothetical killer’s clothes or hair color on my iPhone. Once the sun went down I would turn off every light, a ritual, leaving only the Christmas lights on to blink and strobe across the snowy windowpanes and the buried gardens outside them.
Even the cat was apprehensive about moving around. Some nights I felt like she was an offering. If anyone crossed the threshold—if John came back or if a maniac broke in—they could sacrifice Claws, take her first in place of me. Her slaughter would buy me time to flee. It made me question why I chose a place so remote, quiet enough that I could hear the slush spinning beneath the tires as the cars noted the new vehicle—mine—in the driveway. I could hear their cell phones ringing through the double pane, astonished when whoever had owned the house before me didn’t answer until eventually they clued in and drove away.
◆
A man showed up early in the morning on New Year’s Eve, his truck’s engine mute against the fresh snow, my yard and all the acres beyond it a carpet of alabaster.
“I can do your driveway,” Grant offered by way of introduction. He nodded over to the plow mounted onto his pickup, hatless and scarfless, his face defiant against the elements. “I do pretty much everyone’s around here.” Neither his grammar nor his teeth were perfect.
At our old place in the city, a shovel would suffice in clearing whatever would fall. Here, I quickly learned, a snowblower or friendly neighbor was necessary for snow removal.
“How much will I owe you?” I asked him from the front door. The cold whispered against my ankles and bare neck. “I’d like to pay in advance.”
I felt annoyed by his assumption that I couldn’t or wouldn’t shovel my own driveway. I certainly had the time. Was it because of my age? Did he perceive it to be some kind of handicap? Besides, I didn’t keep cash on me. It would cost—what?—twenty dollars each clearing, I estimated, and given the amount of snow that was forecasted to fall between New Year’s and March it would be difficult to travel to and from the ATM in town each time. His offer of assistance was more of an inconvenience than anything.
“Welcome to the countryside,” he replied, beaming incredulously. “You almost look sad that I’m telling you this is for free. It’s on my route. Takes me five minutes. What, you never had anyone do something nice for you before?”
I shrugged. Nothing, ever, had been free.
In the weeks that followed Grant would show up whenever it snowed, sometimes when I was only half-awake. I would invite him in, the kitchen heady with fresh coffee, and rattle off my concerns about security. He helped to install bolts in the old draw-up windows, a doorbell camera, motion censored lights at the end of the driveway, alleviating much of my anxiety.
“Get a gun, too,” he cautioned. “Just for peace of mind.”
“Is this area dangerous?”
“No. But there’re tons of addicts around. People will do anything for a fix, including dumb, irreversible things.”
I wanted the town gossip, to know the things I wouldn’t be able to tell just from looking.
“Sounds like you might have a story there.”
He shrugged. “Nothing you’d want to hear.”
I thought about what weapons I had. Knives from my knife block, the blades mostly dull. Vases I could smash and pierce a neck with, though it would be a shame to ruin them, even to defend my life. They had belonged to my grandmother. Sentimentalism aside, the thought alone was comedic—me causing harm to anyone. All those nights I spent asleep, dreaming beside John. How close I was to the danger without knowing it. How easy it would have been for him to wrap his hands around my neck, press the spare pillow against my face until I decided to quit struggling and slip away.
What haunted me most was that he didn’t.
I wished I could have told him to take me instead of them. Two of his victims had been mothers. Had been. Every night I fell asleep concocting my version of their last moments, these women I had never known yet knew so well, using the kaleidoscope of unfortunate knowledge I had; I pictured them begging for their lives, not so they could live but so that their children could be spared the trauma of their absence. I thought about Noah, how after he was born I refused to let anyone hold him, even my mother-in-law, even my own mother. No one’s hands were clean enough to touch him. I wanted to preserve the silken fabric of his newborn soles, the otherworldly scent of his scalp. As if the blue pools of his eyes would cheapen if anyone else peered into them. I would watch his eyelids twitch as he slept, wondering what he was dreaming about. As a new mother, when a knock arrived on the nursery door to ask if I was ready for dinner, I wished John would disappear. In a way I blamed myself for what happened. From the start, I wanted it to be just Noah and me.
And then it was.
And then it wasn’t.
I bought a gun and kept it in my nightstand. After that, anytime I saw a squirrel or deer or raccoon, I thought about how, if I really wanted to, I could kill it. Just like that and just because. I remembered the photo albums stashed in the bedroom closet, how I removed every photo of John. Paranoid, I tore them to confetti, threw the slivers of him in the trash before the move. What remained were dozens of photos of me, phantom arms draped around my waist, floating hands with no body attached. A baby Noah being held by a headless man. I understood why the illusion of power was intoxicating.
“So tell me,” I asked Grant one morning after he cleared my driveway. “Tell me about this house.”
The day was blue, too early for sunlight, the snow still virgin. We only ever saw each other in the creeping hours of dawn. The night before I had drifted to sleep, willing the snow to fall. Grant probably had other properties left on his route, but he took the time to talk, reaching into the truck for his thermos. Somehow, it seemed, we both had time.
“Wanda told you it was a grow-op?”
“No. But I kind of figured that out for myself.”
He lit a cigarette and the smell filled the space between us. I had never been a smoker, but that morning I wanted one too.
“Figures. She’s sort of infamous for withholding the truth to make a sale. Every house around here has history. Or maybe they don’t and we’ve all just been around long enough to assign the houses their own legend. Nothing crazy happened here, just drugs. You know how it is. Drugs can make people do ugly things, just like how ugly things can make people do drugs. Before all this, your house belonged to an old widow. She lived to one hundred and one, if that’s any promise.”
I hoped that the spirit of the old woman overrode whatever psychic residue was left over from the dealers.
“Can I bum one?”
I tiptoed toward him, the fleece of my pajama pants dragging through the snow. He opened his pack and let me slide the cigarette out myself, an intimacy. I was close enough to smell him, the dank musk of a man too consumed by life to shower on the regular. He cupped a hand against my face as he lit my cigarette.
“You’re getting visitors still?”
I nodded. “Almost every night.”
I wondered if he could smell me too, the lavender and almond salts from my bath the night before. It felt conspirational to smoke together in such proximity that early in the morning, while the rest of the countryside slept.
“Yep.” He coughed, spat, took another sip of coffee or whatever it was in his thermos, brutish as if to break the spell. “Stragglers. Haven’t figured out yet that their dealers have moved on to greener pastures.”
“What happened? Were the—,” I wasn’t sure how to say drug dealers kindly, “—former tenants arrested? Or…where did they go?”
He shrugged. “Not sure. I suppose when you’re doing something shady it’s not good to stay in one place for too long. People figure you out.”
It registered only then that I was in pajama pants, a sweater. Not dressed for the cold. The sudden mention of moving on, of having something to hide felt personal. Did he know about John? Had he gossiped with Wanda, googled my name? Word travelled fast in small towns, I knew. People talked. It was something I found myself bracing for—the inevitable slip.
Grant seemed to read my body language.
“Go inside. Warm up. If it snows again tomorrow I’ll be back and we can chat some more.”
The mischievous look on his face competed with his age. He must have been ten years younger than me, early to mid-forties. Was he flirting? I couldn’t tell. What could he possibly want with someone like me? Maybe it was because I was new. The allure of a mysterious woman. He must have known everyone else’s story by then.
I pretended to focus on Claws, traipsing delicate paths in the deep snow, tail like a mast. Grant nodded goodbye, reversed onto the road, and tapped his horn lightly before driving away. I watched his taillights lessen to two eyes against the glittering dawn, no other houses nearby to witness his exit. He did a good job, my driveway suddenly immaculate, and I took it to heart. Tomorrow, it would snow and he would return.
◆
Isolation suited me.
It was something I always craved but never had access to. An impossible luxury, always forbidden to me. In a way it felt like an answered prayer. I entertained the thought that all the roads in my life had arranged themselves to lead to that very moment, the same way John’s roads had led him to do what he had done. Certain factors were at play. Were the winter storms to blame? I shrugged and the world continued to engulf in white, withhold the answers to my questions.
By all accounts John had been a sentimental child. His mother used to recount how he would lean dangerously far out their third-floor apartment window to regard the shedding of the oak trees in the wet gold season. The ephemeral haunted him. What was it that he was reaching for and couldn’t grab? Surely not me. I was always there. That’s where the blame circled back to—could he sense that I never wanted to be there? That I considered marriage and child-rearing the motions?
Thoughts find me: I used to be good looking.
I look to the cat, who knows nothing of conventional beauty. To her, mouse guts are the most breathtaking thing. I am the cat’s entire universe, regardless of my past. A stunning revelation. She has no concept of the future. Her needs are immediate, as are mine. I draw a bath and soak for an hour, until the windows are fogged and the temperature against my skin eases. My fingers prune, my nipples soften. Outside it begins to snow again. If I willed the snow last night, then yes, I must have willed everything else as well. Inside, the pane is blurry with condensation.
A voice surfaces.
This was your calling. The disaster. Now you are yourself and you can learn to live from here.
Ruthless carnage is the defining marker of my life, how I divide the past into the present.
I plug my nose and submerge, the water murky with bath salts. I think I hear boots coming in through the front door. A drumming in my ear. It could be them, the addicts who remember the house, or it could be him, John. I stay under, imagining that it is safer to not know. My fate is insured. I know what will become of me. I’m counting on it. I resolve to transfer more money into Noah’s account on Monday. Bubbles pierce the water around me, they feel like fingers touching my skin. I imagine the red and blue lights of an ambulance whirring outside. I picture them coming for my body, moving slow because they expect the inevitable; the old woman who lives alone—I am already dead.
I keep my eyes closed underwater and conjure the face of the young male paramedic who might fish me out from the tub. Here’s what he will see: Bloody water. My lacerated neck, sagging breasts, the network of varicose veins, the deflated pooch of my stomach, the scar above my crotch, all these little cruelties secondary to the main trauma. I seize, thinking of how long the hair on legs is. I haven’t bothered to shave in a year. What was once considered counterculture is now just a way of life, something I never think twice about. Until now. Because he—this paramedic I craft in my imagination—will carefully pull the drain and watch as the molecules of me slip away until I’m accessible enough to be easily removed. But I want them to save the water, because in the molecules are clues to who I am, who I was. Shouldn’t they know everything? Won’t they care?
As they work to lift me from the claw foot tub, the young paramedic might picture his mother’s face in place of mine. He might imagine that it could have been anyone.
But in the end, it will be me. I press the razor against my calf, begin to shave.
Even if I die from natural causes, it will always be by the hand of John.
◆
I’m not sure how it happened, but Grant and I fell in love. He would plough the driveway and then I would invite him in for coffee, which eventually graduated to soft boiled eggs and toast. He would pet the cat, comb out her tangles, play with her whiskers as she gazed at him lovingly. I felt my heart aching, perhaps slanting whatever absence I felt from John and Noah toward Grant, morphing it into lust, though I never planned for love or sex. I thought that was done.
I did not move to the country to become somebody else.
I moved to the country and somebody else met me there.
My body rebelled. After years of dryness, a wetness between the legs. Asking for help with the firewood turned to dinner, turned to wine, turned to a darkened living room. The candle flaring in the kitchen, our only light. I felt myself falling asleep on the couch, my body surrendering, those hard and specific moldings of a male body pressed against mine. I felt good and safe there with him, like the things that happened between us were secrets whose complexity could never survive in daylight.
“Don’t go,” I found myself pleading when Grant would stand and steady himself at three in the morning. “Stay with me.”
My desperation surprised me. It reminded me of being teenage. Once upon a time I had been a lawless girl, slithering from second story windows, straddling drainpipes to escape into the idling cars of omnipresent boyfriends. Marriage tamed me, blunted my edges, domesticated my longings until they were muted altogether. Some nights Grant agreed to stay, and we would make love in my bedroom. During intercourse he became someone else, someone other than I knew him to be. Despite my age he called me things I imagined filthy twenty-year-old boys might call their loves. Say it back to me. I would comply, finding it erotic, caught up in the moment. I never thought about it after we finished, falling asleep beneath the tangle of quilts.
“Where were you thirty years ago?”
Grant would only ever laugh softly in response, humble, accepting my longing as a compliment. In that way he reminded me of John. Fond of adoration, however mild.
◆
Winter turned to something else. Trees stood bare, erect, skeletal. Sometimes I thought it was embarrassing to see the world like that, stark and semi-dressed, like it wasn’t ready to be looked at. I felt like a voyeur on the edge of my property, on solemn nameless, numberless afternoons without him, watching the buds rattle. Eventually the blossoms came, piercing through like swords of sore beauty. The cars stopped appearing in my driveway. They knew they no longer belonged. Maybe it had something to do with Grant’s truck being there. Or the psychic repellant of the gun in my nightstand.
The shifting of seasons signaled an eventual acceptance of changed circumstances. If I, in my current incarnation, could send a message back to the woman who was once married to John, the old me wouldn’t have believed that the present could be so agreeable—a big empty farmhouse, the cat and I, a relationship with a good man. Work took up so much of Grant’s time. Free time was hard to come by. I understood why he never wanted to talk shop. For the most part, we were exactly what each other needed.
He called one afternoon, asking if he could come over, that there was too much on his mind. I need to see you. When he arrived, a bouquet of supermarket carnations tucked into his armpit, we traded a look that superseded language. Somehow, it felt that we had known each other in another life.
“Do you believe in that?” he asked later, in bed, tipping wine into the coffee mugs on my nightstand. “Soul mates, that stuff?”
I watched the carnations, which had been placed into an antique vase shaped like a bullfrog’s vocal sac, slowly reanimate in the water. The moonlight lit them neon. My answer to his question was yes. Grant’s fingers traced the veins on my arm. He read my face, asked if I was feeling okay. I wondered if it were possible he was reading my mind.
I wanted to tell him that I was thinking of contacting John’s lawyers to ask whether he had tried to reach out, though I made it very clear during our separation, after the trial, that I never wanted to hear from him again and neither did Noah. I had only told Grant that my husband and I were divorced, that my son was grown and at university. Withholding that part of my life felt like a fair trade; he was reserved as well, always changing the subject when I asked whether he had ever been married, if he thought about having kids. It’s not something I want to get into, he would reason. But there was no use in frowning over my shoulder, looking backward to John, letting the memory of him hinder me any longer. The future—the great future that I had been waiting for my entire life, before I even knew I was waiting for it—was here, and I couldn’t ignore it.
The cat navigated the wastelands and highlands of our bodies, half-covered by quilts my mother had sewn. It thrilled me to know that her long hours of tranquility were meeting my own interminable hours of lust, in that late season of life.
“Claws love you so much,” Grant said, and the sentiment hit me so hard it made me cry. A different kind of violence. The unannounced, abrupt kind that comes in the form of love. I wondered if he meant to say I love you so much.
He was quick to notice my eyes, their tears.
“Was it something I said?”
I planned on asking him to move in with me.
I fantasized about what life could look like for us. Making dinners, maybe travelling. Turks and Caicos. Jamaica. Places I had been with John. He wouldn’t have to plough driveways, suffer through odd jobs to carve a living wage anymore. I could take care of us both, John’s life savings awarded to my new partner, a man he would never know. I half wondered if I loved Grant so much because my son wasn’t around to love, but when I thought of Noah a sense of autopilot took over; I had to focus on the road because Noah was everything beautiful that I was driving past and couldn’t touch.
“I know,” I said in response. “Claws loves you too.”
A reparation.
For the first time in my adult life, I felt no apprehension about nudity. When I was younger, with John, I would drape an arm over my breasts, shield myself in the bedsheets as I made my way to the bathroom. With Grant, I would parade nude, basking in the sensation of his eyes on me. My rear was dimpled with cellulite that erased itself in the dark and my doughy midsection became something I could look past, forget about even. And that was another thing—in the later years of our marriage John and I quit making love. Any semblance of attraction had faltered. I never initiated it; I endured it. I no longer viewed myself as an object of desire. I didn’t have time for it. With him, it always felt wrong. Perhaps that was part of the problem, not giving him enough attention. Maybe I was partly to blame for what John did. But he was sitting in a jail cell, and I was free. My greatest crime, I convinced myself, was marrying, staying with the wrong man.
◆
Our domestic routines, however fleeting, quietly thrilled me.
Watching Grant roll up his sleeves to wash dishes, the way he knew which of my drawers held the utensils, the tupperware. With Grant, life felt different and better. There were certain things I learned to let go; that I had never been to his house, for example. He insisted that it was a mess, in an embarrassing state of disrepair. That he didn’t have the money to fix it, and even if he did, he wouldn’t know where to start. But he had no idea how much I had in savings, that I could help him. All our barbecues, mid-afternoon romps in the pond had occurred at my place. I thought about the times he would show up late at night, exhausted and in need of affection.
It didn’t make sense. We deserved this, being near to one another.
“What if you lived with me?” I asked him one day, the two of us on a walk through the back field. He had brought two thermoses, more Baileys than hot cocoa, a pocketful of marshmallows. “We could have this every day.”
“You want me to move in with you?” Each of the words, as he repeated them, sounded like a hard digestion.
I turned back, toward the house, that period of autumn when the world is sun-bleached and blood red, in remission before enduring the final blow of the year’s seasons. The sound of combine harvesters razing nearby fields, like bees in the air, decorated his long silence.
“I like how things are. When I come to your place and see you smiling in the doorway, it feels like I’m coming home,” he said, and I believed him.
In front of us was unexplored terrain. So much had happened between our initial meeting and now, though none of it outside the bubble of my property. I wanted us to dress up, go out to dinner. Board a jet to Europe, get drunk on airplane wine. Hold hands and wander down Main Street. Rummage through estate sales together. Laugh at the town’s dismal attempt of a Christmas parade.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” He pulled a marshmallow from his pocket, mimed a melodramatic pout.
I didn’t want to be disappointed.
He pressed the marshmallow between my lips with his finger, his way of silencing me filthy with sweetness.
The wind teased our hair, bringing with it the scent of faraway bonfire, burning leaves.
“Come on,” he whispered, “this is perfect.”
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Trees stripped themselves bare again. At night the wind sounded brutal. Alone in bed I could hear the leaves flying, vicious against my windowpanes. It sounded like someone wanted to get in. Winter is my busy season, Grant explained. With all the rural driveways, parking lots in town to plough, we saw less of each other. I had many slow, ritualistic mornings of reading, of tea, of listening to the music of my home’s bones sighing against the weather. Without the welcome distraction of Grant, my mind went to Noah. I had peregrine hopes, wishing for him to reach out and let me know how he was doing.
The first snow came belatedly, in late November. I was in the back field when it began. I lay down in the clearing, watching it fall like confectioner’s sugar, coming down over the brim of my hat. I felt like a girl again.
I closed my eyes. Blinded to the world, I lived in an arcadian galaxy of no sound. Body numb, body serene. Still. At peace. I didn’t move.
When I stood up, I surveyed the scene around me: Feathery pines. Birch trees whose knots became eyes gawking at me from their trunks. Peels of bark danced in the wind—wallpaper trees, Noah used to call them. Not a footprint anywhere around, it was too cold even for the rabbits. The wind whistled through me like I wasn’t there. And I wasn’t. I was someplace else.
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For Claws’ birthday, Christmas Eve, I planned to buy several tins of cat food and empty them out, arrange them like a tiered cake. I drove into town, along the icy roads with the radio on, carols all the way to the grocery store. I hadn’t gone out of my way to decorate, though I hadn’t taken down the indoor lights from the previous Christmas, since they were good for year-round cheer. I had stopped calling my therapist for our weekly check-ins. Something about my almost-year with Grant had remedied certain chambers of pain.
He was going to be away for Christmas, visiting his sister’s family.
“What if I were to tag along?” I asked, bitter that he hadn’t suggested it himself first.
“I don’t think so.”
“What if you cancel? Say you have work stuff?”
We had loosely discussed Christmas months earlier—neither of us needed anything fancy—before his obstinate sister hijacked our plans.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s something I can’t get out of.”
I noticed his truck as soon as I pulled into the parking lot.
Maybe, I thought, he’s surprising me with a Christmas Eve dinner.
The idea excited me. He wasn’t going to his sister’s—he was buying cranberries for sauce, potatoes for mashing, a turkey. No one had ever prepared a holiday meal for me before. Throughout my marriage, I handled all aspects of familial festivities.
I breezed in. It had been over two weeks since I last saw him. It would be nice—our first Christmas together. What an improvement from the year before! I forgot about the cat food, instead stalking the aisles, searching for Grant. I pictured myself catapulting over his shoulders, burying my nose in his neck. I melted at the thought of his smell, my body buzzing with an electric giddiness.
I discovered him in the last aisle—the frozen section—with a woman and two children. His eyes met mine before I could form words or decide how to react. I caught him in the damning tableau of his everyday life—hand rubbing his pregnant companion’s lower back, a child wrapped around his leg. He knew his position was undeniable: the woman was not his sister, he could not pass her off as a relative, not with that type of embrace. Neither of us said anything. His wife did not know who I was, she was not aware of my existence in relation to Grant. This awarded me the right to remain; I could have been anybody, a harmless shopper. I stood there, close to them, clinging to the perverse power I suddenly found myself in possession of.
I can do anything right now.
Visions of me, a tornado, tearing boxes of pizza from the freezers, hurling them at the man who I thought loved me. Calmly informing his wife of her husband’s yearlong infidelity. Telling the children that their daddy was a liar. I wanted to know if I had been the only one. I could feel his eyes on me, eyes which always felt loving and accepting, suddenly tricked with trepidation.
Time suspended, and I leaned into it, knowing that despite there being multiple routes I could take, all the roads in my life had arranged themselves to lead into that very moment. I wanted to get closer to him. Them. I wanted, in equal measure, to move away.
His wife was younger than him and much younger than me. Venus de Willendorf belly, rotund with unborn child, unintentional inches of bare skin visible between the belt loop of her jeans and her winter coat. Her dishevelled blonde hair and cranberry roots, the wrinkles of exhaustion across her brow, and the kids, both redheaded and hyper, darting under the cart, reaching into the shelves, shouting, tearing cookies from a box. I had to do something, break from the statue trance I found myself in. I looked up: my reflection was patient, staring through me to the walls of the freezer. Confront the situation, cause a scene, or leave. I could feel that he hadn’t taken his eyes off me since my arrival. I turned back to him. Grant’s face wielded an apology, his expression begging me to have enough tact to not alert his wife to his infidelity, the onus placed on me though I had done nothing wrong; if I revealed it, his life’s implosion would be my fault. Suddenly I was a threat, standing in place of the woman he knew. Could I be as bad as John? Even a fraction as terrible?
I watched Grant with his family from a safe distance as he struggled desperately to mime normalcy. To pretend like he wasn’t losing his mind.
One of his children, coat unzipped, snot hanging from its nose, danced up to me.
“Hi,” it said, knocking against the freezer door I had opened.
I didn’t answer back. I was close enough to kick the child. My leg itched with want.
The child pugged its face against the glass, licked the door, then dropped down and began squirming like a grub, two gummy streaks of snot left on the freezer door in its wake. From my peripheral I saw the woman—Grant’s wife—turn in my direction.
“Bud—leave the nice lady alone,” she said, unaware of how close they were to the danger without knowing it.
My eyes briefly locked with Grant’s, each moment accumulating an apex charge. The second I turn away, the second I walk, I lose. I held onto that power for as long as I could.
I could feel Grant’s eyes on me as I walked away, though I didn’t look back.
I shoplifted four cans of cat food, an attempt to reorient my rage. I tried to breathe. Wanda, the real estate agent, entered the store as I left it, the tins of Fancy Feast rattling inside my coat pockets. She didn’t register me as I blew past her. I was a stranger. One year had passed and she had already forgotten me, forgotten her promise, that I would be happy here.
