on the bridge of his nose.
“What’s that?” he asked, holding his breath, disoriented and confused, and I told him it was a siren. We sat hushed for a minute, listening as the wail drifted farther away, quieting down but never going completely silent. We could hear it still, stopped somewhere just down the street from our home.
“What do you think happened?” Will asked, and I thought only of the elderly couple on the block, the man who pushed his wife in a wheelchair up and down the street, though he could barely walk. They were both white-haired, wrinkled, his back curved like the hunchback of Notre Dame. He always looked tired to me, like maybe she was the one who should be doing the pushing. It didn’t help that our street was steep, a decline to the ocean below.
“The Nilssons,” Will and I said at the same time, and if there was a lack of empathy in our voices it’s because this is what is expected of older people. They get injured, sick; they die.
“What time is it?” I asked Will, but by then he’d returned his glasses to the bedside table and said to me, “I don’t know,” as he pressed in closely and folded an arm around my waistline, and I felt the subconscious pull of my body from his.
We fell back asleep that way, forgetting altogether about the siren that had snatched us from our dreams.
In the morning I shower and get dressed, still tired from a fitful night. The boys are in the kitchen, eating breakfast. I hear the commotion downstairs as I step uneasily from the bedroom, a stranger in the home because of Imogen. Because Imogen has a way of making us feel unwelcome, even after all this time.
I start to make my way down the hall. Imogen’s door is open a crack. She’s inside, which strikes me as odd because her door is never open when she’s inside. She doesn’t know that it’s open, that I’m in the hallway watching her. Her back is to me and she’s leaned into a mirror, tracing the lines of black eyeliner above her eyes.
I peer through the crevice and into Imogen’s room. The walls are dark, tacked with images of artists and bands who look very much like her, with the long black hair and the black eyes, dressed in all black. A black gauzy thing hangs above her bed, a canopy of sorts. The bed is unmade, a dark gray pintuck duvet lying on the floor. The blackout curtains are pulled taut, keeping the light out. I think of vampires.
Imogen finishes with the eyeliner. She snaps the cap on it, turns too fast and sees me before I have a chance to retreat. “What the fuck do you want?” she asks, the anger and the vulgarity of her question taking my breath away, though I don’t know why. It’s not as if it’s the first time she’s spoken to me this way. You’d think I might be used to it by now. Imogen scuttles so quickly to the door that at first I think she’s going to hit me, which she hasn’t ever done, but the speed of her movement and the look on her face make me think she might. I involuntarily flinch, moving backward, and instead, she slams the door shut on me. I’m grateful for this, for getting the door slammed in my face as opposed to getting hit. The door misses my nose by an inch.
My heart thumps inside my chest. I stand in the hallway, breathless. I clear my voice, try to recover from the shock of it. I step closer, rap my knuckles on the wood and say, “I’m leaving for the ferry in a few minutes. If you want a ride,” knowing she won’t accept my offer. My voice is tumultuous in a way that I despise. Imogen doesn’t answer.
I turn and follow the scent of breakfast downstairs. Will is by the stove when I come down. He stands, flipping pancakes in an apron, while singing one of those songs from the jaunty CDs Tate likes to listen to, something far too merry for seven fifteen in the morning.
He stops when he sees me. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, voice strained.
The dogs circle Will’s feet, hoping he’ll drop something. They’re big dogs and the kitchen is small. There isn’t enough room for four of us in here, let alone six. I call to the dogs and, when they come, send them into the backyard to play.
Will smiles at me when I return and offers me a plate. I opt only for coffee, telling Otto to hurry up and finish. He sits at the kitchen table, hunched over his pancakes, shoulders slumped forward to make himself appear small. His lack of confidence worries me, though I tell myself that this is normal for fourteen. Every child goes through this, but I wonder if they do.
Imogen stomps through the kitchen. There are tears up the thighs and in the knees of her black jeans. Her boots are black leather combat boots, with nearly a two-inch heel. Even without the boots, she’s taller than me. Raven skulls dangle from her ears. Her shirt reads, Normal people suck. Tate, at the table, tries to sound it out, as he does all of Imogen’s graphic T-shirts. He’s a good reader, but she doesn’t stand still long enough for him to get a look at it. Imogen reaches for a cabinet pull. She yanks open the door, scanning the inside of the cabinet before slamming it shut.
“What are you looking for?” Will asks, always eager to please, but Imogen finds it then in the form of a Kit Kat bar, which she tears open and bites into.
“I made breakfast,” Will says, but Imogen, blue eyes drifting past Otto and Tate at the kitchen table, seeing the third, vacant place setting set for her, says only, “Good for you.”
She turns and leaves the room. We hear her boots stomp across the wooden floors. We hear the front door open and close, and only then, when she’s gone, can I breathe.
I help myself to coffee, filling a travel mug before making an effort to stretch past Will for my things: the keys and a bag that sit on the countertop just out of reach. He leans in to kiss me before I go. I don’t mean to, and yet it’s instinctive when I hesitate, when I draw back from his kiss.
“You okay?” Will asks again, looking at me curiously, and I blame a bout of nausea for my hesitation. It’s not entirely untrue. It’s been months now since the affair, and yet his hands are still like sandpaper when he touches me and, as he does, I can’t help but wonder where those hands have been before they were on me.
A fresh start, he’d said, one of the many reasons we find ourselves transported to this home in Maine, which belonged to Will’s only sister, Alice, before she died. Alice had suffered for years from fibromyalgia before the symptoms got the best of her and she decided to end her life. The pain of fibromyalgia is deep. It’s diffused throughout the body and often accompanied by incapacitating exhaustion and fatigue. From what I’ve heard and seen, the pain is intense—a sometimes stabbing, sometimes throbbing pain—worse in the morning than later in the day, but never going completely away. It’s a silent disease because no one can see pain. And yet it’s debilitating.
There was only one thing Alice could do to counter the pain and fatigue, and that was to head into the home’s attic with a rope and step stool. But not before first meeting with a lawyer and preparing a will, leaving her house and everything inside of it to Will. Leaving her child to Will.
Sixteen-year-old Imogen spends her days doing only God knows what. School, presumably, for part of it at least, because we only get truancy calls on occasion. But how she spends the rest of the day I don’t know. When Will or I ask, she either ignores us or she has something smart to say: that she’s off fighting crime, promoting world peace, saving the fucking whales. Fuck is one of her favorite words. She uses it often.
Suicide can leave survivors like Imogen feeling angry and resentful, rejected, abandoned, full of rage. I’ve tried to be understanding. It’s getting hard to do.
Growing up, Will and Alice were close, but they grew apart over the years. He was rattled by her death, but he didn’t exactly grieve. In truth, I think he felt more guilty than anything: that he did a negligent job of keeping in touch, that he wasn’t involved in Imogen’s life and that he never grasped the gravity of Alice’s disease. He feels he let them down.
At first, when we’d learned of our inheritance, I suggested to Will that we sell the home, bring Imogen to Chicago to live with us, but after what happened in Chicago—not just the