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SADIE
Seven Weeks Later...

The siren woke us at some point in the middle of the night. I heard the scream of it. I saw the dazzling lights that streamed in the bedroom window as Will grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and sat up abruptly in bed, adjusting them 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 affair alone, but all of it, everything—it was our chance to make a new beginning, a fresh start. Or so Will said.

We’ve been here less than two months, so that we’re still getting the lay of the land, though we found jobs quickly, Will and me, he working as an adjunct professor teaching human ecology two days a week, over on the mainland.

As one of only two physicians on the island, they practically paid me to come.

I press my lips to Will’s mouth this time, my ticket to leave.

“I’ll see you tonight,” I say, calling again to Otto to hurry up or we’ll be late. I grab my things from the countertop and tell him I’ll be in the car waiting. “Two minutes,” I say, knowing he’ll stretch two to five or six as he always does.

I kiss little Tate goodbye before I go. He stands on his chair, wraps his sticky arms around my neck and screams into an ear, “I love you, Mommy,” and somewhere inside of me my heart skips a beat because I know that at least one of them still loves me.

My car sits on the driveway beside Will’s sedan. Though we have a garage attached to the house, it’s overrun with boxes that we have yet to unpack.

The car is cold when I arrive, covered in a thin layer of frost that has settled on the windows overnight. I unlock the door with my key fob. The headlights blink; a light turns on inside.

I reach for the door handle. But before I can give it a tug, I catch sight of something on the window that stops me. There are lines streaked through the frost on the driver’s side. They’ve started to liquefy in the warmth of the morning’s sunlight, softening at their edges. But still, they’re there. I step closer. As I do, I see that the lines are not lines at all, but letters traced into the frost on the window, coming together to form a single word: Die.

A hand shoots to my mouth. I don’t have to think hard to know who left this message for me to find. Imogen doesn’t want us here. She wants us to leave.

I’ve tried to be understanding because of how awful the situation must be for her. Her life has been upended. She lost her mother and now must share her home with people she doesn’t know. But that doesn’t justify threatening me. Because Imogen doesn’t mince words. She means just what she said. She wants me to die.

I make my way back up the porch steps and call through the front door for Will.

“What is it?” he asks, making his way from the kitchen. “Did you forget something?” he asks as he cocks his head to the side, taking in my keys, my bag, my coffee. I didn’t forget something.

“You have to see this,” I say, whispering now so the boys don’t hear.

Will follows me barefoot out the front door, though the concrete is bitterly cold. Three feet from the car I point at it, the word inscribed in the frost of the window. “You see it?” I ask, turning my eyes to Will’s. He sees it. I can tell as much in his expression, in the way it turns instantly distressed, mirroring mine.

“Shit,” he says because he, like me, knows who left that there. He rubs at his forehead, thinking this through. “I’ll talk to her,” he says, and I ask defensively, “What good will that do?”

We’ve talked to Imogen many times over the last few weeks. We’ve discussed the language she uses, especially around Tate; the need for a curfew; more. Though talking at would be a more fitting term than talking to because it isn’t a conversation we have. It’s a lecture. She stands while Will or I speak. She listens, maybe. She rarely replies. She takes nothing to heart and then she leaves.

Will’s voice is quiet when he speaks. “We don’t know for certain that she left this here,” he says softly, floating an idea by me, one I’d rather not consider. “Isn’t it possible,” Will asks, “that someone left that message for Otto?”

“You think someone left a death threat on my window for our fourteen-year-old child?” I ask, in case Will has somehow misconstrued the meaning of that word Die.

“It’s possible, isn’t it?” he asks, and though I know that it is, I tell him, “No.” I say it with more conviction in my voice than I feel, because I don’t want to believe it. “Not again,” I insist. “We left all that behind when we moved.”

But did we? It isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that someone is being mean to Otto. That someone’s bullying him. It’s happened before. It can happen again.

I say to Will, “Maybe we should call the police.”

But Will shakes his head. “Not until we know who did this. If it’s Imogen, is that really a reason to involve the police? She’s just an angry girl, Sadie. She’s grieving, lashing out. She’d never do anything to hurt any of us.”

“Wouldn’t she?” I ask, far less sure than Will. Imogen has become another point of contention in our marriage. She and Will are related by blood; there’s a connection there that I don’t have.

When Will doesn’t reply, I go on, arguing, “No matter who the intended recipient, Will, it’s still a death threat. That’s a very serious thing.”

“I know, I know,” he says, glancing over his shoulder to be sure Otto isn’t on his way out. He speaks quickly, says, “But if we get the police involved, Sadie, it will draw attention to Otto. Unwanted attention. The kids will look at him differently, if they don’t already. He won’t stand a chance. Let me call the school first. Speak to his teacher, the principal, make sure Otto isn’t having trouble with anyone. I know you’re worried,” he says, voice softening as he reaches out, runs a comforting hand along my arm. “I’m worried, too,” he says. “But can we do that first,” he asks, “before calling the police? And can I at least have a conversation with Imogen before we just assume this was her?”

This is Will. Always the voice of reason in our marriage.

“Fine,” I tell him, relenting, admitting that he might be right. I hate to think of Otto as an outcast in a new school, of him being bullied like this.