Mary Kubica - When The Lights Go Out - The addictive new thriller from the bestselling author of The Good Girl

At Lily’s suggestion, I wait in the car while she goes inside to meet with the landlord. I hold my breath, knowing it’s liable the landlord will soon discover the same slipup as the college’s financial aid office. That my social security number belongs to a dead girl. And she’ll deny my application.

But, to my great relief, she doesn’t. It takes less than fifteen minutes for Lily to emerge through the front door of the greystone, a key ring in hand. The keys to the carriage home. I breathe a sigh of relief. As it turns out, Lily let on about my mom and for that reason, Ms. Geissler approved the application without vetting me first. Out of sympathy and pity. Because she felt sorry for me, which is fine by me, so long as I have a place to live. A place that doesn’t remind me of Mom.

As we pull away, I stare out the window and toward the imposing home. It’s masked in shadows now, the sun slipping down on the opposite side of the street, burying the greystone in shade. The house is dignified but solemn. Sad. The house itself is sad.

From the third story, I watch the window shade slowly peel back, though what’s on the other side I can’t see because it’s shadowy and dim. But I imagine a woman, a widow, standing on the other side, watching until our car disappears from view.

eden

July 26, 1996 Egg Harbor

It just so happens that we do have neighbors.

They came this afternoon after Aaron had gone off to work, a pregnant Miranda and her two boys, five-year-old Jack and two-year-old Paul. They came trudging down our gravel drive, Miranda pulling both boys in a red Radio Flyer wagon so that by the time they arrived she was sweaty and spent. She’d come to deliver a welcoming gift.

It was the sound of wheels on gravel that caught my attention as I stood on a ladder, painting the living room walls a pale gray, the windows and doors open to expel chemical scents from the air. This is how I now spend my days when Aaron is away. Unpacking boxes of belongings. Cleaning the insides of closets and cabinets. Painting the home.

I saw them through the window first, heard the tired woman growl at the boys to stop crying and to behave , her cheeks flushed red from the heat and the pregnancy and, I guessed, the desire to impress. Her blond hair blew around her face and into her eyes as she walked. Her body was cemented with a short maternity dress, fastened to her with sweat. On her feet were Birkenstocks. In her eyes, exhaustion and discontent. From the moment I first spied her out the open window I knew one thing: motherhood did not suit her well.

I set down my painting supplies and met them on the porch. Dropping the wagon’s handle, Miranda introduced herself first and then the kids, neither of whom said hello, for they were far too busy clawing their way out of the wagon, elbowing one another for room on the porch step. I didn’t mind. They had blond hair like their mother, and if it weren’t for the apparent age difference could have easily been twins. They fought one another, vying for the right to their mother’s free hand. The bigger of the two won out in the end and as he slipped his hand inside Miranda’s, the little guy fell to the ground in a puddle of tears. “Get up,” Miranda commanded, her sharp voice jabbing through the placid air, apologizing to me for their manners as she tried hard to raise Paul from the ground. But Paul was a deadweight and wouldn’t stand, and as she tugged on his underarms he cried out in pain that she’d hurt him. Tears came pouring from his eyes .

“Damn it, Paul,” she said, pulling again roughly on those underarms. “Get up.”

What she saw were naughty children making a fuss, embarrassing her, making her feel humiliated and ashamed. But not me. I saw something else entirely. I dropped down beside little Paul and held out a hand to him. “There’s a tree swing in the backyard. Let’s go have a ride on it, and let Mommy rest awhile?” I said. His pale green eyes rose to mine, snot gathering along his nostrils, running downward toward his lips. He wiped at his nose with the back of a dirty hand and nodded his sweet little head.

Miranda had walked far to bring us a blueberry loaf, more than a block in the heat. The pits of her dress were damp with sweat, the cotton pulled taut across the baby bump. When she spoke, her voice was breathless, exhausted, burned-out from the energy it took to raise two boys on her own, and she confessed to me that this time—while running a hand over that baby—she was hoping for a girl.

She sat on a patio chair, kicking off her Birkenstocks and resting her swollen ankles on another seat as I poured us each a glass of lemonade, conscious of the dried paint on the backs of my hands.

Miranda’s husband, she told me, is employed by the Department of Public Works. She stays at home with Jack and Paul, though what she always wanted to be—what she used to be in her life before kids—was a medical malpractice attorney. She asked how long Aaron and I have been married and when I told her, her eyebrows rose up in curiosity and she asked about kids.

Do we have them?

Do we plan to have them?

It seemed an intimate conversation to have with someone I hardly knew, and yet there was a great thrill at saying the words aloud, as if cementing them to reality. I felt my cheeks redden as I thought of that morning before dawn when Aaron rose, dreamlike, above me, lifting my nightgown up over my head. Outside it was dark, just after four o’clock in the morning, and our eyes were still drowsy, heavy with sleep, our minds not yet preoccupied by the thoughts that arrive with daylight. We moved together there on the bed, sinking into the aging mattress. And then later, while grinning at each other over mugs of coffee on the dock, watching as the fleets of sailboats went floating by on the bay, I had to wonder if it happened at all, or if it was only a dream.

When Miranda asked, I told her that we’re trying. Trying to have a child, trying to start a family. An odd choice of words for creating a baby, if you ask me. Trying is how one learns to ride a bike. To knit, to sew. To write poetry.

And yet it was exactly what we were doing as Aaron and I made love with reckless abandon, and then followed it up a week or two later with a home pregnancy test. The tests were all negative thus far, that lone pink line on the display screen notifying me again and again that I wasn’t yet pregnant. I tried not to let it get the best of me, and yet it was hard to do. It wasn’t as though Aaron and I minded the time spent trying ; in fact, we enjoyed it quite a bit, but with every passing month I yearned exponentially more for a baby. For a baby to have, a baby to hold.

I never mentioned to Aaron that I was taking the pregnancy tests.

I took them while he was at work, watching out the cottage window as his car slipped from view and then, when he was out of sight, rushing to the bathroom, where I closed and locked the door in case he mistakenly left something behind and had to return for it.

And then, when the single pink line appeared on the display screen as it always did, I wrapped the negative pregnancy test sticks up in tissue and discarded them discreetly in the garbage bins.

Miranda beamed when I told her that we’re trying. “How exciting!” she told me, her smile mirroring the one on my own face.

And then, helping herself to a slice of her own blueberry loaf and running a hand over her bump for a second time, she said that her baby and my baby could one day go to school together.

That they could one day be friends.

And it was a thought that filled me with consummate joy. I grinned.

I’d been a lone wolf for much of my life. An introvert. The kind of woman who never felt comfortable in her own skin. Aaron changed that for me.