Picture Perfect Alibi

The photograph in the hallway was crooked when I came downstairs, and I noticed it before I noticed my own face in the glass.

That was the kind of person I was. A straightener of frames. A smoother of edges. My house could have been burning around me and I would still have crossed the room to rescue a tilted picture before I touched the tap.

I left the frame for later. That was my first mistake, though I didn’t know it yet.

The kitchen was already clean.

The granite island gleamed under the pendants in that specific way that meant it had been wiped down with something stronger than water, a faint, almost medical sharpness in the air that I only caught at the edge of breathing. The bar stools had been tucked in at identical angles. The fruit bowl, which Mia had toppled at some point the night before, sending a clementine rolling under the fridge, had been restored. One clementine short, as it happened, but only I would have noticed.

Daniel was at the counter with his back to me, holding a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“Am I?”

He did not turn around.

I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than was necessary, watching the slow rise and fall of his shoulders under the blue shirt I had ironed on Sunday. In another life, four years ago, say, when we had still been something like happy, I might have crossed the room and put my arms around his waist from behind. In this life I went to the drawer where we kept the tea bags and chose one with careful attention, as if the choice mattered.

“It’s six-thirty,” I said.

“Is it.”

He sipped his coffee. I put the kettle on. The kettle, which was a copper thing we had been gifted for our tenth anniversary by a couple we no longer saw, caught the pendants and threw a warped strip of gold across the cabinets. I looked at it for too long, and for a moment, I could not have said why, I had a very clear, very small sensation that I was a guest in my own kitchen. That I had let myself in with a key I wasn’t sure was mine.

Then it passed, the way those things always passed, and I turned to the fridge to get the milk.

Mia came down at six-fifty-two, eight minutes later than I had asked for and eight minutes earlier than I had actually expected. She was seven and a half and already a negotiator.

“Mom. My hair.”

“Sit.”

She slid onto a stool and I stood behind her with the brush and began the small, daily archaeology of removing whatever she had done to herself in her sleep. In the mirror above the coffee station I watched her watch me work. She had Daniel’s eyes, or what Daniel’s eyes had been before whatever had happened to them had happened. Brown, unguarded, slightly too large for her face.

“Is Daddy going to work?”

“Daddy’s always going to work.”

“Today, though.”

I pulled her hair into a ponytail and said, “Yes. Today.”

She accepted this without comment, which was itself a kind of comment. Seven-year-olds understand a great deal more than the world wants to admit. Mia had been watching her father for months now with a small, patient attention that I had noticed and filed away and declined to examine.

Daniel had not turned around.

“Cereal or pancakes,” I said.

“Pancakes.”

“We don’t have time for pancakes.”

“Cereal, then.”

I set the bowl in front of her and she ate with the same unhurried composure she did everything else, and I drank my tea, and Daniel stood at the counter with his phone and did not speak, and the pendants shone against the copper kettle and threw the warped light across the cabinets, and none of us, not even Mia, remarked upon any of it, because we were a family, and this was breakfast, and that was how it was done.

At six-fifty-eight, Daniel’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen, and in the fraction of a second before he answered I saw his face do something. It was not surprise. It was something closer to arrangement, a quick, practiced rearrangement of features into the shape he wanted to be wearing when he picked up.

“Marcus,” he said into the phone. Pleasant. Casual. “No, now’s fine. Give me two minutes.”

He walked out of the kitchen without looking at me. A moment later I heard the door to his office close, and then, and this was new, this was the first time, I heard a slight definite click of a lock turning.

Mia looked up from her cereal.

“Daddy has a lock on his door now?”

“Daddy likes his privacy,” I said.

“Since when?”

“Eat your breakfast.”

She ate her breakfast. I drank my tea. Outside, a sprinkler on the lawn at number eleven turned itself on and began its slow, hissing arc, as it did every morning at seven, because in Oak Hollow every sprinkler knew its hour and kept it.

At seven-oh-four I carried Mia’s empty bowl to the dishwasher and, on the way back, I stopped. I don’t know why I stopped. The door to Daniel’s office was closed, and the hallway was empty, and the house around me was doing its morning hum. Everything in its place. Everything quiet.

I listened.

Through the door, Daniel’s voice, low, controlled, unfamiliar. The voice he had not used with me in a long time, and never in our house.

“—then tell him we haven’t had that conversation, Marcus. Because we haven’t. And we are not going to, because the minute we have it, we don’t control what happens next—“

A pause. Someone on the other end speaking.

“I’m aware of what he’s threatening. I’m also aware of what he can prove. Which is, last time I checked, nothing. Keep it that way.”

The floorboard under my left foot, which had creaked for seven years, chose that moment to do what it did.

The voice on the other side of the door stopped mid-sentence.

I walked away from the door, slowly and without turning my head, the way you walk away from something you want to pretend you have not seen.

The school run was performed, as always, in public.

Our street, Linden Crescent, Oak Hollow, the kind of address people put on Christmas cards with a little smug flourish, curved in a slow horseshoe around a manicured green, and every morning between seven-fifteen and seven-forty-five it became a, synchronized theater. Mothers in yoga pants and fathers in quarter-zips and children with backpacks the size of their torsos, and all of us smiling at one another in the particular way we had agreed upon: wide enough to be seen, brief enough not to require conversation.

I kissed the top of Mia’s head and fastened her into the back of the Audi and waved across the hedge at Bethany Morrow, who was fastening her own daughter into her own Audi and waving back.

“Good morning, Nora!”

“Good morning, Beth!”

It was a code, not a greeting. It meant: I have seen you, you have seen me, neither of us will tell the truth about our mornings, and this arrangement suits us both.

I pulled out of the drive. Mia watched the houses slide past and hummed something from a cartoon. In the rear-view mirror I could see Daniel standing at the front window of our house, holding his coffee, watching me go.

He did not wave.

He had not, I realized, waved in a long time.

The drop-off line at St. Catherine’s Primary was its own piece of choreography, and I performed it with the distracted grace of a woman who had done it six hundred times. Kiss. Backpack. Go.

Just as Mia slid out of the car, Karen Laskey, who had co-chaired the autumn book fair with me, who had drunk my wine at Christmas, who had cried on my shoulder through her husband’s affair, caught my eye through the windshield of the SUV in front of mine. Then, very slightly, her gaze slid past my shoulder as if I were not there, and she turned back to her phone.

It was nothing, I told myself. She was busy. She had a meeting. She had not, probably, even seen me.

But Karen Laskey had never once in six years failed to wave.

I waited until Mia disappeared through the blue doors, then pulled out of the curve and took the long way home, past the duck pond and the community gardens, because I wanted another five minutes of being alone in my car, and I did not yet want to consider why.

At the traffic light on Elm, I took out my phone.

There was a photograph of Mia from the weekend, she was standing on the garden steps in her yellow sweater, laughing at something Daniel had said, and I had not yet posted it. I opened the editing tool. I brightened the highlights. I warmed the shadows. I pulled the saturation up two points, because two points was the difference between a photograph and a memory, and I wanted my followers to have a memory.

I typed: Saturday mornings with my girl. ♡

I did not type anything about Daniel, although Daniel had been the one saying the thing that had made her laugh. It had not occurred to me to crop him out of the picture. He had simply not been in it. He had been behind the camera, which was where he had begun to live.

I posted it.

I put the phone down.

The light turned green.

I had just pulled back into the drive when Bethany Morrow’s voice came over the hedge.

“Nora! Hold up!”

I turned. She was in her running shoes now, walking her yellow Labrador, and her face had on it a particular expression that I had come over the years to recognize as the Oak Hollow Special, a smile composed of careful, plausible concern.

“Hey, Beth.”

“Quick one.” She stopped at the end of my drive, panting a little. “I meant to say yesterday. Were you out driving late Thursday night?”

I felt my face do something small.

“Thursday?”

“Last Thursday. Or maybe the one before, I lose track. Martin thought he saw your car down on Route 9 around one in the morning. Coming back into town. He said he tried to wave and you drove right past him.” She shrugged. “He probably got it wrong. You know Martin. Sees Audis everywhere. I just thought I’d ask.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

I said it without thinking about it, which was what a truthful person would do, and so I told myself I had been truthful. But my face was still doing its small thing, and Bethany was still looking at me with her careful plausible smile, and the back of my neck was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the morning.

“Probably a rental,” Beth said.

“Probably.”

“Cute post, by the way. Mia’s little laugh.”

“Thanks, Beth.”

She jogged off, the Labrador padding after her, and I stood in the drive for a moment longer than I needed to, watching the back of her head bob around the curve of the crescent, and then I went inside, and I closed the front door behind me with rather more care than it required.

The house was silent. Daniel’s Tesla was gone from the drive, he had left during the school run, without saying goodbye, which was not new enough to register as a fresh wound, only as the ordinary low hum of our marriage.

I made a second cup of tea. I do my best thinking with the kettle on.

I stood at the island and let the house do its morning thing around me. The fridge hummed. The dishwasher clicked through its final cycle. Somewhere upstairs, one of the radiators sighed.

Everything in its place. Everything gleaming. Everything quiet.

And underneath all of it, a feeling, small and dull, like a coin lodged in a shoe.

I had driven somewhere.

Recently.

At night.

I could not, when I reached for the memory, locate the destination. Or the route. I could, distantly, feel my hands on the wheel. I could feel a cold of the driver’s side window against my temple. I could see the green of a traffic light, a specific traffic light, low and close, the kind you find at a crossroads with no buildings, blooming through the windshield.

There was a smell, too. Something faintly chemical. Not petrol, not cleaning fluid, but adjacent to both. A sharpness at the back of the throat.

And a sound. Just the once. A man’s voice, very close, saying something I could not quite catch. A single short syllable. Maybe a name. Maybe only the start of a word.

But I could not, for the life of me, remember where I had been going, or whether I had arrived, or whether I had come back.

I told myself it was a dream.

I have told myself a great many things were dreams over the years. It’s a useful skill. You want to know why someone like me could live the life I was living and never once ask the obvious questions, it’s because I had, through long and dedicated practice, become exceptional at not asking them.

I drank my tea.

The feeling did not pass.

My phone buzzed on the island. A text from Daniel.

Going to be late tonight. Don’t wait up.

No explanation. No punctuation beyond what was necessary. No love, or x, or the little animated heart he had used, once, five years ago, when we had been going through a phase of being kind to each other.

I stared at the message for a long time.

I typed okay. I deleted it. I typed okay x. I deleted it. In the end I did not reply at all, because I had the sudden, unreasonable conviction that any answer I gave would be the wrong one, and that he was watching his screen somewhere, waiting to see which wrong one I chose.

At eight-forty I opened my laptop at the island and tried to write the email I had been meaning to write to the PTA about the spring gala seating plan. I got as far as Dear all, and then I looked up, and my eyes, because they were my eyes and they knew what they were doing, went to the hallway.

The photograph was still crooked.

I remember thinking, even in the moment, that this was strange.

I cleaned that frame every Sunday. I had cleaned it three days ago. I had, on Sunday evening, stood in the hallway with a microfibre cloth and a bottle of vinegar solution and I had run the cloth over the glass in neat, overlapping passes, the way my mother had taught me, and I had stepped back to admire the result, and the photograph had been straight.