А Финн - The Woman in the Window

“She was snooping around,” answers David.

I blush, fire back. “You took a box cutter from me.”

He steps forward. I see Little tense. “You gave it to me.”

“Yes, but then you replaced it without saying anything.”

“Yeah, I had it in my pocket when I was going for a piss and I put it back where I got it. You’re welcome.”

“It just so happens that you put it back right after Jane—”

“That’s enough, ” hisses Norelli.

I lift the glass to my lips, wine sloshing against the sides. As they watch, I swig it.

The portrait. The photograph. The earring. The box cutter. All of them knocked down, all of them burst like bubbles. There’s nothing left.

There’s almost nothing left.

I swallow, breathe.

“He was in prison, you know.”

Even as the words leave my mouth, I can’t believe I’m saying them, can’t believe I’m hearing them.

“He was in prison,” I repeat. I feel disembodied. I go on. “For assault.”

David’s jaw tightens. Alistair is glaring at him; Norelli and Ethan are staring at me. And Little—Little looks inexpressibly sad.

“So why aren’t you giving him a hard time?” I ask. “I watch a woman get killed”—I flourish my phone—“and you say I’m imagining it. You say I’m lying .” I slap the phone onto the island. “I show you a picture that she drew and signed”—I point at Alistair, at the portrait in his hand—“and you say I did it myself. There’s a woman in that house who is not who she says she is, but you haven’t even bothered to check. You haven’t even tried. ”

I move forward, just a small step, but everyone else retreats, as though I’m an approaching storm, as though I’m a predator. Good. “Someone comes into my house when I’m asleep and photographs me and sends me the photo—and you blame me.” I hear the catch in my throat, the crack in my voice. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I keep going.

“I’m not crazy, I’m not making any of this up.” I point a jittering finger at Alistair and Ethan. “I’m not seeing things that aren’t there. All this started when I saw his wife and his mother get stabbed . That’s what you should be looking into. Those are the questions you should be asking. And don’t tell me I didn’t see it, because I know what I saw .”

Silence. They’re frozen, a tableau. Even Punch has gone still, his tail curled into a question mark.

I wipe my face with the back of my hand, drag it across my nose. Push my hair out of my eyes. Raise the glass to my mouth, drain it.

Little comes to life. He steps toward me, one long, slow stride, clearing half the kitchen, his eyes fastened on mine. I set the empty glass on the counter. We look at each other across the island.

He places his hand over the top of the glass. Slides it away, as though it’s a weapon.

“The thing is, Anna,” he says, speaking low, speaking slow, “I talked to your doctor yesterday, after you and I had our phone call.”

My mouth goes dry.

“Dr. Fielding,” he continues. “You mentioned him at the hospital. I just wanted to follow up with someone who knew you.”

My heart goes weak.

“He’s someone who cares about you a lot. I told him I was pretty concerned about what you’d been saying to me. To us. And I was worried about you all alone in this big house, because you told me that your family was far away and you had no one here to talk to. And—”

—and. And. And I know what he’s about to say; and I’m so grateful that he’s the one to say it, because he’s kind, and his voice is warm, and I couldn’t bear it otherwise, I couldn’t bear it—

But instead Norelli cuts him off. “It turns out your husband and your daughter are dead.”

74

No one’s ever put it like that, said those words in that order.

Not the emergency-room doctor, who told me that Your husband didn’t make it while they tended to my bruised back, my damaged windpipe.

Not the head RN, who forty minutes later said, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Fox —she didn’t even finish the sentence, didn’t need to.

Not the friends—Ed’s, as it happened; I learned the hard way that Livvy and I didn’t have many friends of our own—who expressed condolences, attended the funerals, followed up sparingly as the months dragged by: They’re gone, they’d say, or They’re no longer with us, or (from the brusque ones) They died .

Not even Bina. Not even Dr. Fielding.

Yet Norelli has done it, broken the spell, said the unsayable: Your husband and your daughter are dead.

* * *

They are. Yes. They didn’t make it, they’re gone, they’ve died—they’re dead. I don’t deny it.

“But don’t you see, Anna”—now I hear Dr. Fielding speaking, almost pleading—“that’s what this is . Denial.”

Strictly true.

* * *

Still:

How can I explain? To anyone—to Little or Norelli, or to Alistair or Ethan, or to David, or even to Jane? I hear them; their voices echo inside me, outside me. I hear them when I’m overwhelmed by the pain of their absence, their loss—I can say it: their deaths. I hear them when I need someone to talk to. I hear them when I least expect it. “Guess who,” they’ll say, and I beam, and my heart sings.

And I respond.

75

The words hang in the air, float there, like smoke.

Behind Little’s shoulders, I see Alistair and Ethan, their eyes wide; I see David, his jaw dropped. Norelli, for some reason, turns her gaze to the floor.

“Dr. Fox?”

Little. I bring him into focus, standing across the island from me, his face bathed in full afternoon light.

“Anna,” he says.

I don’t move, can’t move.

He takes a breath, holds it. Expels. “Dr. Fielding told me the story.”

I screw my eyes shut. All I see is darkness. All I hear is Little’s voice.

“He said a state trooper found you at the bottom of a cliff.”

Yes. I remember his voice, that deep cry, rappelling down the face of the mountain.

“And by that point you’d spent two nights outside. In a snowstorm. In the middle of winter.”

Thirty-three hours, from the instant we dove off the road to the moment the chopper appeared, its rotors swirling overhead like a whirlpool.

“He said that Olivia was still alive when they got down to you.”

Mommy, she’d whispered as they loaded her onto the stretcher, sheathed her little body in a blanket.

“But your husband was already gone.”

No, he wasn’t gone. He was there, very much there, all too much there, his body cooling in the snow. Internal damage, they told me. Compounded by exposure. There was nothing you could have done differently.

There’s so much I could have done differently.

“That’s when your troubles started. Your problems going outside. Post-traumatic stress. Which I—I mean, I can’t imagine.”

God, how I cowered beneath the hospital fluorescents; how I panicked in the squad car. How I collapsed, those first times leaving the house, once and twice and twice more, until at last I dragged myself back inside.

And locked my doors.

And shut my windows.

And swore I’d keep myself hidden.

“You wanted someplace safe. I get that. They found you half-frozen. You’d been through hell.”

My fingernails gouge my palms.

“Dr. Fielding said that you sometimes . . . hear them.”

I squeeze my eyes tighter, straining for more dark. They aren’t—you know, hallucinations, I’d told him; I just like pretending they’re here every now and then. As a coping mechanism. I know that too much contact isn’t healthy.