rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0b2acb12-a620-5b56-824d-b07d7e3a800f">Chapter 8
The very next night – Jack again phoned me telling me he’d be late – I parked in front of his office building and kept an eye on the front desk behind the glass doors. Was Jack hiding something? A thought had grown, slowly at first and I was reluctant to listen to it, but lately the voice had become louder. I wanted to see for myself, after all, had I not asked for it? Was I not incapable as a mother and just as incapable as his wife? I couldn’t blame him, looking in the rearview mirror seeing myself, couldn’t blame him at all. Even I didn’t recognize the woman staring back at me, pale and haggard.
I sat in my car, watched the traffic lights change and cars float by, and I waited until the security guard made his rounds. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor and found all the offices dark, except Jack’s.
I couldn’t make sense of the contorted voices drifting towards me through Jack’s office door, and so I imagined what hands were doing, where tongues slithered like snakes, what pieces of clothing were draped over office chairs or bunched around ankles like turtlenecks, what the room smelled like. As I listened to the voices and the laughter, I observed myself in the glass door panel, and I was dumbfounded by the woman I had become. No longer a woman, really, but a crone, in baggy clothes and stringy hair with a chilly triumphant cackle. I knew I was helpless, for the crone’s powers were infinite.
Seconds after I began pounding the door with my fists, Jack ripped open the door, looked at me, with surprise at first, then his eyes turned into rage. I didn’t speak, just turned and ran. I reached my car, shaking, unable to think, but I managed to drive home. When I pulled into the driveway, I was surprised I had made it there.
Aashi, the sitter, was asleep on the couch in Mia’s room. A medical student from India, chronically sleep-deprived yet easy-going and patient with Mia’s colicky behavior, she smelled of cardamom and anise and her upper lip appeared darker than the rest of her face.
My hand still hovered over her shoulder when she opened her eyes.
‘Ms Paradise, she didn’t wake up at all. I fed her around ten, and she fell back asleep right away,’ she whispered and brushed a blanket of black hair from her face, her colorful bangles dancing on her wrist.
‘She must have been really tired,’ I said. ‘We spent all day at the park, all that fresh air …’ What sounded like a pleasant outing had been nothing more but a screaming baby in a stroller until she fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
I looked over at Mia, picture perfect in her crib, her face angelic and placid while earlier she had thrashed her hands towards my face, her mouth a gaping wound.
Aashi left and I wandered around the house, unable to settle. I found myself in front of Jack’s office. I didn’t want to snoop; the trip to his office earlier, now nothing more than a moment of lunacy – but Jack was going to demand an explanation and I had nothing to give him. Nothing but a sea of irrationality. He was going to ask questions, he’d want to know what had possessed me to do what I had done. I needed a logical reason, proof of his infidelity, proof that he couldn’t be trusted any longer. I had to find a picture, a letter, a photograph, anything that would justify my outburst.
I stood in the doorway, taking in the shelves and filing cabinets. I had no idea what I was even looking for. Jack had started paying all the bills after Mia was born, handled all the paperwork, and I was glad he did. There wasn’t another chore I could manage, especially not anything that involved deadlines. But maybe his taking over the finances was just a way of increasing control over the woman who had floundered. It was ironic that the differences that brought us together – Jack’s sense of purpose, and his attraction to my carefree attitude towards life and, as he saw it, unpredictability – were the very things that were also driving us apart. That and the fact that I was an absolute failure as a mother.
The floorboards creaked as I entered the office and a familiar aroma of leather greeted me. Like an observer I stood beside myself, watched a woman scan fake paneling between rows of books, push at conspicuous spots. I observed her as she looked around, expecting an antique oil painting to fall off the wall, an envelope yellowed by age dropping to the ground, containing some clandestine content. The woman pulled open the desk drawers. Her fingers slipped, almost snapping her nails off, as she tried to open a locked drawer. I watched her run her fingertips alongside the bottom of the desk’s surface. She pushed here and there, looked under the keyboard and mouse pad and in the desk organizer. Reality greeted her harshly: no hidden drawers, no secret compartments, just a piece of contemporary office furniture. The woman jerked back into reality when the phone rang.
I backed away from the desk. The chair fell to the floor. Thud. The phone continuously nagged to be picked up.
Ring.
Ring.
Its pesky urgency was followed by a faint gurgle of an infant echoing through the house. The baby monitor on Jack’s desk with its light display indicated the volume of Mia’s cries. Six out of ten. Then the lights alternated from the middle scale of the digital display all the way to the top. The phone went silent and so did the baby monitor. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was midnight.
The phone rang again, slicing the air with urgency. I wiped the tears that were running down my neck, trailing inside my sweater.
Once again, the gurgling baby monitor turned into a whimper, the whimper into a howl and then into a full-blown bellow. The lights remained at the very top of the display window, until one last gurgle drifted off into the distance. Then there was silence. I left the study and went through the bedroom into Jack’s walk-in closet. A masterpiece of built-in shelves constructed of maple wood and hardware of brushed steel, next to mine, separated by a wall, both accessible by individual doors. Jack’s dress shirts, arranged by color, immaculately pressed, aligned on one wall, his shoes along the other. I looked up at the top row of storage shelves, reachable only with the attached rolling ladder.
Reluctantly I passed Jack’s full-length mirror in which he checked his designer suits, belts, and shoes every morning, afraid of the woman I’d encounter. I stepped closer and she stared back at me. I tried to force a winsome smile, yet her opaque eyes seemed empty, like doll’s eyes. Not one of those pretty dolls with an elaborate dress and curly hair, no, less than that, really more like a rag doll with crooked button eyes. I was unable to lift my gaze off her for she was familiar, a grotesque twin, a chilling replica of myself. When did the woman in the mirror become so powerful, so potent that I allowed her to make off with my prized possessions? My composure, my sanity, my joy, and the part of me that was a mother. The figure in the mirror was a stranger, one who looked at me with anger.
White noise on full blast. A voice escaped the subdued grain of the maple shelves, and unlike mine, it made sense.
The box, it said. Where is the box?
The box that didn’t fit with the rest of the items in the closet?
Yes, that one.
The box that was old and torn, which I noticed every time I hung up his clean clothes, he moved from the overhead storage one week to a lower shelf the next?
Yes, the old yellowed photo box with reinforced metal holes, rectangular and flat, larger than a shoebox.
Am I supposed to look for it and open it?
Yes, look for it. Then open it.
I pulled the ladder to the
