А Финн - The Woman in the Window

I couldn’t look at him. My gaze bore through the windshield. I shook my head.

“I’ll answer it, then.”

“ No. ” I snatched at the phone. Ed held it from me.

It kept buzzing. “I want to answer it,” Ed said. “I want to have a word with him.”

“ No .” I knocked the phone from his hand. It clattered beneath my feet.

“Stop it,” cried Olivia.

I looked down, saw the screen trembling on the floor, saw his name on it.

“Anna,” Ed breathed.

I looked up. The road had vanished.

We were rocketing over the edge of the gorge. We were sailing into the dark.

54

A knock.

I’ve drifted off. I sit up, groggy. The room has gone dark; night beyond the windows.

The knock again. Downstairs. It isn’t the front door; it’s the basement.

I walk to the stairs. David almost always uses the front door when he visits. I wonder if this is one of his houseguests.

But when I flick the kitchen lights and open the basement door, it’s the man himself on the other side, looking up at me from two steps below.

“I thought maybe now I should start coming in this way,” he says.

I pause, then realize he’s trying to joke. “Fair enough.” I step aside, and he moves past me into the kitchen.

I shut the door. We eye each other. I think I know what he’s going to say. I think he’s going to tell me about Jane.

“I wanted— I want to apologize,” he begins.

I freeze.

“For earlier,” he says.

I twitch my head, my hair loose around my shoulders. “I’m the one who should apologize.”

“You did apologize.”

“I’m happy to apologize again.”

“No, I don’t want that. I want to say I’m sorry. For shouting.” He nods. “And for leaving the door open. I know that bothers you.”

An understatement, but I owe him at least that. “It’s fine.” I want to hear about Jane. Can I ask him again?

“I just—” He strokes the kitchen island with one hand, props himself against it. “I get territorial. Probably this is something I should’ve told you before, but.”

The sentence ends there. He swings one foot in front of the other.

“But?” I say.

He lifts his eyes from beneath those dark brows. Rough and ready. “You got any beer?”

“I’ve got wine.” I think of the two bottles on my desk upstairs, the two glasses. I should probably empty them. “Should I open a bottle?”

“Sure.”

I move past him to the cabinet—he smells of Ivory—and remove a bottle of red. “Merlot okay?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s a nice red.”

“Sounds good.”

I open another cabinet door. Bare. Over to the dishwasher. A pair of glasses clash in my hand; I set them on the island, pry the cork out of the bottle, and pour.

He slides a glass toward himself, tips it toward me.

“Cheers,” I say, and sip.

“The thing is,” he says, rolling the glass in his hand, “I did some time.”

I nod, then feel my eyes widen. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use that expression. No one outside movies, anyway.

“Jail?” I hear myself say, stupidly.

He smiles. “Jail.”

I nod again. “What did you—were you in jail for?”

He looks at me evenly. “Assault.” Then: “Against a man.”

I stare at him.

“That makes you nervous,” he says.

“No.”

The lie hangs in the air.

“I’m just surprised,” I tell him.

“I should have said something.” He scratches his jaw. “Before moving in, I mean. I understand if you want me to clear out.”

I don’t know if he means it. Do I want him to clear out? “What . . . happened?” I ask.

He sighs, faintly. “Fight in a bar. Nothing fancy.” A shrug. “Except I had a prior. Same thing. Two strikes.”

“I thought it was three.”

“Depends who you are.”

“Mm,” I say, as though this is wisdom not to be questioned.

“And my PD was a drunk.”

“Mm,” I repeat, working it out. Public defender.

“So I did fourteen months.”

“Where was this?”

“The fight or the prison?”

“Both.”

“Both in Massachusetts.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to know, like, details?”

I do. “Oh, no.”

“It was just stupid stuff. Drunk stuff.”

“I see.”

“But that’s where I learned to—you know. Watch out for my . . . space.”

“I see.”

We stand there, eyes downcast, like two teenagers at a dance.

I shift my weight. “When were you—when did you do time?” Where appropriate, use the patient’s vocabulary.

“Got out in April. Stayed in Boston over the summer, then came down here.”

“I see.”

“You keep saying that,” he says, but it’s friendly.

I smile. “Well.” Clearing my throat. “I invaded your space, and I shouldn’t have. Of course you can stay.” Do I mean that? I think I do.

He sips his wine. “I just wanted you to know. Also,” he adds, nodding his glass toward me, “this stuff is pretty good.”

“I haven’t forgotten about the ceiling, you know.”

We’re on the sofa, three glasses deep—well, three for him, four for me, so seven glasses deep, if we’re counting, which we’re not—and it takes me a second to catch up.

“Which ceiling?”

He points. “The roof.”

“Right.” I look up, as though I can gaze through the bones of the house to the roof. “Oh, right. What made you think of that?”

“You just said that once you can go outside you’re going to get up there. Check it out.”

Did I? “That’s not happening for a while,” I tell him crisply. Crispishly. “I can’t even walk across the garden.”

A slight grin, a tilt of the head. “Someday, then.” He places his glass on the coffee table, stands. “Where’s the bathroom?”

I twist in my seat. “Over there.”

“Thanks.” He pads away to the red room.

I keel back into the sofa. The cushion whispers in my ears as I rock my head side to side. I saw my neighbor get stabbed. That woman you never met. That woman nobody has ever met. Please believe me.

I can hear urine drilling into the bowl. Ed used to do that, pee so forcibly that it was audible even with the door closed, like he was boring a hole through the porcelain.

The flush of the toilet. The hiss of the tap.

There’s someone in her house. Someone pretending to be her.

The bathroom door opens, closes.

The son and the husband are lying. They’re all lying. I sink deeper into the cushion.

I stare at the ceiling, at the lights like dimples. Shut my eyes.

Help me find her.

A creak. A hinge, someplace. David might have gone back downstairs. I tip to one side.

Help me find her.

But when I open my eyes a moment later, he’s returned, flopping onto the sofa. I straighten up, smile. He smiles back, looks past me. “Cute kid.”

I swivel. It’s Olivia, beaming within a silver frame. “You’ve got her picture downstairs,” I remember. “On the wall.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Don’t know. Didn’t have anything to replace it with.” He drains his glass. “Where is she, anyway?”

“With her dad.” Swallowing wine.

A pause. “You miss her?”

“Yes.”

“You miss him?”

“I do, in fact.”

“Talk to them a lot?”

“All the time. Just yesterday, actually.”

“When do you see them next?”

“Probably not for a while. But soon, I hope.”

I don’t want to talk about this, about them. I want to talk about the woman across the park. “Should we check out that ceiling?”