The Walk Out

I got dressed in the living room.

I did not go into the bedroom to change. I was not going to undress and redress in any room of that house that had Derek’s clothing in a closet. I pulled my sweater back over my head and stepped back into my pants, slow, the way you move through a house at the end of a life you are no longer going to live in, and when I was dressed I sat down on the edge of the coffee table because my knees were not entirely ready for standing yet.

The Verdict Killer was in the armchair.

The mouth of the mask was still lifted. He was watching me not with the surgical surveillance from earlier in the night, but with a softer, lower-wattage attention, a man letting a woman come back into her own body at her own pace.

"Saoirse."

"Yes."

"You are going to be asked questions in the next three days. Listen to me."

I listened.

"You will report him missing forty-eight hours from now. Not tonight. Tonight you go to your mother’s. In the morning you go to work you go back to the client in Carroll Gardens, you return the etching, you sign the paperwork. You do not call in. You do not tell your clients anything has happened. You let Thursday and Friday pass looking like Thursday and Friday."

"Then," he said, "on Saturday morning, you call his office and ask if he came in Friday. They will tell you he did not. You call his mother. Call her in that order. His mother, because of what she is, will call the police before you have time to. You will not be the one who files the report. You will be the wife who became concerned when his mother did."

He paused.

"When the detectives come and they will come you tell them the truth about the marriage. Not the worst of it. The shape of it. A marriage that had gotten cold. Arguments. A husband who drank more than she wanted him to. A wife who had been thinking, in a general way, about leaving, and had not yet brought it up. You tell them you were not home on Tuesday evening you were at your mother’s apartment in Sunnyside. Your mother will confirm this."

"She will?"

"She will, because you will have been there since Tuesday night. Which you are about to be."

I understood.

He was building me an alibi that was not a lie. He was simply moving the clock a few hours, an inch so that the true sentence ‘I was at my mother’s when my husband disappeared’ could be said by me, under oath, without my voice betraying a single syllable.

"One more thing," he said. "You do not have to remember any of this. I have already arranged Thursday through Saturday in a way that will not depend on you. Your only job is to go to your mother’s tonight, to work tomorrow, to live your life, and to answer questions when asked. If you remember nothing else of what I just said, remember this sentence: ‘He had been drinking more. I had been thinking about leaving. I don’t know where he is.’ Three sentences. You can repeat them in that order to any detective, any neighbor, any cousin, at any hour of any day for the next two months, and they will be true."

I repeated them, once, under my breath.

He nodded.

I stood up.

I moved through my house for the last time.

I went to the bedroom. I took a small duffel from the closet the one I used for overnight client trips, the one Derek had never bothered to look inside and I packed it the way I packed a delivery: efficiently, in order of importance, with the eye of a woman who had spent a decade learning what to bring and what to leave behind. Underwear. Two sweaters. A pair of jeans. The winter coat from the back of the hall closet, which I put on, and the two hundred and fourteen dollars I took from its inside pocket, which I moved into the wallet in my bag. The paperback from the nightstand. The pink lacquered box, which went into the duffel wrapped in a sweater.

Under the mattress, the journal. I took it.

From the dresser, a small framed photograph of my grandmother on the porch of her house in Donegal, taken the summer before she died. I took it. From the closet floor, a pair of old boots I had not worn since the first year of the marriage because Derek had said they made me look like a farmer. I took them.

I did not take the wedding photographs. I did not take the things we had bought together. I did not take my wedding ring — I took it off in the bathroom and I laid it on the edge of the sink, and I looked at it for one long second the way you look at a thing you cannot believe you wore for three years without understanding its weight, and I left it there.

I walked back through the living room.

And I looked at the chair.

I had been going to take it. I had been planning, in some quiet corner of the back of my head across the last hour, to ask the Verdict Killer to help me lift it into the back of the van to bring it with me to my mother’s, and from there to whatever new apartment I was going to find next, and to keep it in every room of every life I was going to live for the rest of mine.

I stood in front of it.

I understood, looking at it, that I was not going to take it.

The chair had been, for two years and two months, the geography of my interior life. Four strides of distance. A place to put my body. A small consignment-store rebellion bought on the day after the burner. I had loved that chair. I had needed that chair. I had survived, in part, because of that chair.

I did not need it anymore.

I was not going to be a woman who needed four strides between herself and her husband, because I was not going to have a husband. I was not going to be a woman who needed a specific corner in a specific room to put her interior life in, because my interior life was going to be permitted, from now on, to live in the whole of any room I happened to be in.

I put my hand on the cushion. Once. Goodbye.

I walked past it.

The Verdict Killer was standing at the door.

He had replaced the mouth of the mask. The silver was whole again. Full-face, tarnished at the edges, the almond slits dark.

I wanted him to lift it one more time.

He did not.

I understood, without him needing to tell me, that the lifting had been a thing for the earlier room, in the earlier hour, and that the silver going back into place was his way of saying the night was closing. He was not going to give me his face at the door. He was not going to kiss me goodbye with a mouth I could remember the shape of in the daylight. He had given me what he had given me in the living room. He was not going to make it bigger by repeating it.

He held the door open.

"Drive carefully."

Three words. Low. Through the slit.

I looked up at him.

"Will I see you again."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"Not unless I decide you should."

He did not say it cruelly. He said it the way you tell someone the weather unhurried, factual, the sentence of a man who had, across seventeen kills, learned to never promise a woman anything he had not yet earned the right to.

I nodded.

I did not cry.

I walked past him, out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the street, into the van.

Brooklyn to Sunnyside is thirty-five minutes at four in the morning.

I drove it with one hand. The wrist the Verdict Killer had not been able to fix because he was not in the business of fixing lay in my lap the way it had lain across a whole evening. The radio I did not turn on. The streetlight I watched change twice on empty corners, the whole of Brooklyn asleep around me, and the van moving through it the way the van always moved, easy and invisible, and the pink box in the passenger seat where my handbag usually sat, and the ring I had left on the edge of the sink still probably sitting there, and my mother in Sunnyside who did not know yet that I was coming.

I parked in front of her building.

I climbed the stairs.

I stopped, on the landing, and I stood for a long second outside her door because I had not yet, in the whole of tonight, been a person who was asking someone else to receive her and then I raised my good hand and I knocked, small, the way you knock on a door at four in the morning when you do not want to frighten anyone inside.

I heard her footsteps.

I heard the slow turn of the chain.

I heard the door open.

Siobhán was in her robe. Her hair was down. She had not, I could tell, been asleep she had the specific alertness of a woman who had been awake already, who had been awake because it was four in the morning and you do not sleep well after a certain age, who had been sitting on the edge of her bed with a book and a lamp and the radio low, who had heard footsteps on the landing and had known, the way only a mother knows, exactly whose footsteps they were.

She looked at me.

She did not look at the wrist. She did not look at the duffel. She did not ask.

She opened her arms.

"It’s alright," she said. "It’s alright now."

I walked into them.

And that was the end of the first part of my life.