Page 6 of Wrong Mail

Somewhere at the sealed-off end of the house, I hear the plastic sheeting stir, then go still.

I can’t stop reading.

One question keeps circling.

Why would the new neighbor have a stack of unsolved murders delivered to his door?

Chapter Two

He's leaving, and I hate it.

David's suitcase is by the door, and it's been there since last night. It's packed and zipped and pointed at the world outside, which is how I always know how my week will go before anyone says a word.

I've slid the clippings back into their envelope and left it face down at the far end of the island. I'll decide what to do about them later. That's what I tell myself. Later.

My husband comes down the hall in the good shirt, the pale blue one I like, checking his watch against his phone against some third clock only he can see. David moves through our mornings like a man being timed. Forty-two years old and he still takes the stairs two at once. He still has a surgeon's hands, steady the moment they touch anything that matters. When he sees me at the island, his face softens, and for a second I remember why I married him.

"There you are," he says. "Did you go out?"

"Yeah, to the audiologist. That follow-up in Seattle." I don't tell him I took a car service the whole way there and back rather than ask him to shift it to a day he could drive me. He doesn't ask, because we long ago stopped counting the small accommodations of my not driving. "What time's your flight?" I ask.

"Eleven forty."

"Have you eaten breakfast yet?"

"I’ll grab something at the airport."

"I don't understand why you don't just drive. Portland is only four hours south on I-5."

He crosses to the coffee machine and I watch him not look at the envelope, because there's no reason for him to look at the envelope. I feel absurd for even clocking it.

"Oh, just four hours?" He laughs. "That's four hours if nothing happens. It's August. Something always happens. I'd sit outside Tacoma for an hour, get in late with a headache, and be no use to anyone. So no, fifty minutes in the air and a car at the other end, and I walk in like a human being." He shrugs. “Anyway, the hospital's paying. I'm hardly going to complain.”

“Nice for some.”

“Please.” He almost smiles. "The conference wraps Thursday. I’m taking Sophie to dinner that night and then I fly back Friday morning. She picked the place. Some ramen thing she and her friends are obsessed with."

"Send her my love."

"I always do." He says it lightly, and it's true. It’s also the closest we come to the thing we don't discuss. Sophie is nineteen and lives with her mother in Portland. She has never once let me all the way in, and David carries the low, constant ache of it between us.

He pours more coffee. "You'll be okay, right? It’s just two nights."

"I'm a grown woman, David."

"That's not what I asked."

I look at him. There it is, the real question under the polite one, the one about the wine and the pills and the long nights and the locks I check twice. He asks it gently. He always asks it gently, which is somehow worse than if he snapped.

"I'll be fine," I say. "Julia's around. I've got Luna. I've got a whole list of nothing to do."

He comes around the island, sets his coffee down, and takes my face in both hands. He kisses my forehead and I let myself have the moment. I breathe in the smell of soap and the cedar of his aftershave.

Two years ago I never thought I'd be married. Then the crash happened, and it all moved very fast. It probably helped that he was my surgeon. He was the one who explained the damage, the hearing loss, the memory gaps, the things I might get back and the things I might not.

Everything was a blur of appointments and phone calls that stopped being about appointments. It was a whirlwind few months. Then a small ceremony with almost no one in it. After that, we left Oregon and came here for David's job in Seattle. People who took their time falling in love would call that reckless. Maybe it was. Some marriages go bad long before anyone leaves. I have written about a few of them. Ours is not one of them.

Ours has damage in it. Things we don't know how to talk about. Places neither of us knows how to touch without hurting the other.