Page 85 of Wrong Mail

The question opens in me, and the answer is already there before I can stop it. I can't tell if Henry put it there or only gave it the last push. It has been gathering for days, from pieces I didn't want to fit together. The hidden gun. The green dot over the hospital. The complaint to the board. The man who died in that hospital the night David was inside it. The sedative in the blood. Lena's name through the study door. Chris accusing David of an affair with Julia at my birthday party.

And for the first time, I'm not thinking of Henry.

I put the phone down. The part of me that is still a journalist wants to find an angle in it, but there isn't one. A man apologized and stepped back.

David has never really apologized for anything.

But Henry did.

I go and find my coat.

I head over to Julia's.

It's not far. Nothing on the point is far. I go down the road in the gray light, with the cedars dripping water onto my shoulders. I catch myself fiddling with the band at my wrist, rolling the bead under my thumb the way Julia taught me. Feel it, breathe, come back. Stop picking at things you can't fix, Julia would tell me, and then she'd smile and change the subject before I could ask if she was all right.

5661 is the last house.

I've spent a hundred afternoons there, and there's always some kind of noise. Music, the television, or Julia's voice on the phone through an open window.

Chris's car isn't in the drive. Good, I tell myself. She said to come when he was out.

The front door is already open.

Not wide. It’s off the latch, standing a hand's width from the frame, as if someone meant to close it and the wind pushed it back open. I stand on the step, knock on the open door, and call her name into the gap. Nothing comes back.

Then I hear water.

It reaches me before I understand it. Water running upstairs, then the steady splash of it hitting water. A tap left fully on. It sounds like it’s been running for a long time.

"Julia?"

I push the door wide and head in.

I’ve never once walked into Julia's house uninvited, but I do it now with my pulse in my throat. I pass the coat rack and the bowl where she drops her keys. Her keys are still in it. Her handbag is on the chair.

One of her shoes lies on its side at the foot of the stairs.

I don't stop. The water is louder now, and it's the only thing in the house with anything to say.

"Julia, are you home?”

Still no answer.

I start up the stairs with one hand on the rail. That’s when I look down. The runner is soaked dark. When I look up, I see water flowing down the wall of the stairwell, a slow shining sheet over the paint.

My heart starts hammering in my chest.

I imagine what I'm about to find before I reach the top. I climb toward it anyway.

The bathroom door is open. The floor is a river, an inch of water, maybe more, running out over the sill and down toward the stairs.

The tub is overflowing on every side, the tap still thundering into it. The whole room roars.

And Julia isn't in it.

There's no one in the water, no one on the floor, no one behind the door. There is only the tub pouring itself out onto the tile in a room with the light left on.

I turn off the faucet before I check the other rooms.