Susan Wiggs - Just Breathe

No locks had been installed yet on the prehung doors of the huge, unfinished home.

She smiled as she pushed open the front door and sighed with relief. What could be cozier than sitting in front of the fire on a rainy afternoon, eating pizza? Quite possibly, this house was the only warm, dry place in the neighborhood.

“It’s me,” she called, stepping out of her boots so as not to muddy the newly finished hardwood floors. There was no reply, just the tinny sound of a radio playing somewhere upstairs.

Sarah felt a twinge of discomfort in her belly. Cramping was a side effect of IUI, and Sarah didn’t mind. The fact that there was pain lent an appropriate sense of gravitas to her mission. It was a physical reminder of her determination to start a family.

Shaking off the raindrops, she padded in stocking feet to the stairs. She’d never been here before, but she was familiar with the layout of the house. Though it wasn’t obvious to most people, Jack worked with only a few floor plans. The massive size and luxurious materials aside, he built what he unapologetically called “cookie-cutter mansions.” She had once asked him if he ever got bored, building essentially the same house, over and over again. He had laughed aloud at the question.

“What’s boring about netting a cool million on a tract home?” he had countered.

He liked making money. He was good at it. And she was lucky, because so far, she was terrible at it. Each year when they filed their income tax return, he would look at the revenues from her comic strip, offer her a generous smile and joke, “I always wanted to be a patron of the arts.”

At the top of the stairs, she turned toward the sound of the radio, her raincoat brushing against the machine-turned banister. “Achy Breaky Heart” was playing, and she winced. Jack had terrible taste in music. So bad, in fact, it was actually endearing.

The door to the master suite was ajar, and the friendly glow of the fire glimmered across the freshly carpeted floors. She hesitated, sensing…something.

A warning, beating like an extra pulse in her ears.

She stepped into the room, her feet sinking into the deep pile of the carpet as her eyes adjusted to the soft, golden light. The diffuse, kindly glow of the lifetime-guaranteed Briarwood gas logs flickered over two naked bodies entwined on a bed of thick woolen blankets spread in front of the hearth.

Sarah experienced a moment of complete and utter confusion. Her vision clouded and she felt light-headed and nauseous. There was some mistake here. She had walked into the wrong house. Into the wrong life. She fought against the panicky random thoughts playing Ping-Pong in her head. For a second or two she simply stood immobile, assaulted by shock, forgetting to breathe.

After endless seconds, they noticed her and sat up, gathering blankets to cover themselves. The song on the radio switched to something equally appalling—“Butterfly Kisses.”

Mimi Lightfoot, Sarah realized, was exactly as Jack had described her: the horsy type—dry skin and no makeup, hair in a ponytail. But with bigger boobs.

Finally, Sarah found her voice and spoke the only coherent thought in her head: “I brought you a pizza. And a Coke. Extra ice, the way you like it.”

She didn’t throw the pizza or spill the drink. She set everything carefully on the built-in media console next to the radio. She was as discreet and efficient as a room service waiter.

Then she turned and left.

“Sarah, wait!”

She heard Jack calling her name as she skimmed down the stairs with the speed and grace of Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. Shoving her feet into her boots barely slowed her down. In seconds, she was outside with her broken umbrella, heading for the car.

She started the engine just as Jack burst outside. He wore his good pants—the ones with the creases she had admired this morning—and nothing else. She could see his mouth working, forming her name: Sarah. She put the headlamps on bright and turned the car, feeling a satisfying crunch as the rear bumper of the Lexus toppled the custom river rock mailbox. Her high beams washed across the front of the house, illuminating the porch timbers and fine wooden window casements, the Andersen glass and the grand front entranceway.

For a moment, Jack appeared pinned by the glare, a prize buck frozen in the headlights.

What would Shirl do? Sarah asked herself. She gripped the steering wheel, threw the car into gear and floored the accelerator.

After creaming the newly constructed mailbox and mowing down the “Street of Dreams” lamppost, Sarah actually contemplated nailing Jack, too. Just for an insane moment, she allied herself with the crazed women you saw on TV being interviewed behind bars: “I didn’t think. My foot just pressed down and he hit the pavement…”

Somehow, she managed to aim the SUV away from him and toward the highway. She didn’t know what else to do and couldn’t think straight, so she headed home, exceeding the speed limit, like a horse sensing the barn after a long trek.

Predictably, her mobile phone rang right away. Jack was probably still half-naked. He probably still stank of Mimi Lightfoot’s scent of sex. Sarah killed the power on the phone and pressed the accelerator harder. She needed to get home, give herself some breathing space and figure out what to do next.

As she pulled into the landscaped, circular driveway, it struck her that this had never felt like her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children’s story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built…

It was nestled amid similar houses in the exclusive lakeside subdivision. The trees that shaded the lane were spaced perfectly apart, the mailboxes all matched and every home’s entryway lay a uniform distance from the curb. The neighborhood had been planned by a designer who worked for Daly Construction.

She wheeled into the spacious garage, nearly grazing Jack’s work truck—a custom F-350 Ford pickup—and hurried inside. Then she stopped cold. Now what? She felt so strange, almost traumatized, as though she’d been the victim of a violent assault.

She looked at the wall phone in the kitchen. The message light was blinking. Maybe she ought to call…who? Her mother had died years ago. Her friends…she’d allowed herself to drift away from people back home, and her Chicago friends belonged more to Jack than to Sarah.

What would Shirl do? she wondered, plucking the thought from the panic swirling through her head. Shirl was smart. Tough-minded. Shirl would remind Sarah to focus on practical matters, like the fact that she had a separate bank account. This was something they had set up during Jack’s illness, so she’d have access to funds if the unthinkable happened.

Well, the unthinkable had happened. Not in the way she had feared, though.

Her stomach cramped, a sensation she would ordinarily welcome after the procedure, as it meant that biology was at work. Now the discomfort meant something altogether different.

The phone rang. Seeing Jack’s number on the caller ID, she let it kick over to voice mail.

She sat in the dark house for a while, her sodden coat and boots still on. It was such a strange puzzle. Husbands cheated on their wives all the time; daytime TV was filled with dewy-eyed betrayed women seeking solace on national talk shows. The problem was as familiar to anyone as ring around the collar. Yet the issue had always brushed past Sarah like a wind pattern on a weather map from another part of the country. She could recognize it, imagine what it was like. She thought she understood.