Water Under the Bridge: Josie

I let myself in with the key Jude gave me because Kate hasn’t answered her phone in two days. He called from wherever he goes when he goes—he never says, and I’ve learned not to ask—and told me she’d been sick. Check on her, he said. Not asked. Told. Like I was on payroll. And the sad part is, I didn’t even mind.

The house smells like bleach. Not the lemon-scented kind you spray on a countertop and feel good about yourself. This is the kind of bleach that means business. Industrial. Angry. The kind that makes you wonder what lost the fight.

I call her name from the bottom of the stairs. Nothing. The dog follows me down the hall. I get him into his kennel in the laundry room, where he goes berserk, which is just his baseline personality, frankly. That animal has the temperament of a Vietnam vet, and I mean that with respect to both parties. I should leave. I should absolutely leave. Instead, I go upstairs, because apparently I’m the kind of woman who walks toward the thing that scares her. My therapist would call this progress. Ryan would call it stupid. They’d both be right.

✦

Their bedroom looks like no one has ever lived in it, slept in it, or had a single human feeling inside of it. The bed is made so tight you could perform surgery on it. No photos. No clutter. Just a glass of water on one nightstand and a leather notebook on the other.

I open the notebook because I am a terrible person. I’ve accepted this about myself.

It’s not a diary. It’s not a planner. It’s a list of names I don’t recognize, written in handwriting so beautiful it looks like it belongs in a frame. Some of the names have been crossed out. Clean, single lines. Final. Beneath them, notations I can’t decode—dates, letters, numbers—a language that belongs to someone else’s life. And at the bottom of one page, in smaller script, a sentence that doesn’t belong on a nightstand in the suburbs: He doesn’t get to decide when it’s over. I do.

I close it. Put it back. Line up the spine with the edge of the nightstand. My hands are steady, which surprises me. The rest of me is not.

✦

I’m coming out of the master bath—where I flushed the toilet for an alibi I hope I’ll never need—when I hear the front door. Then the laundry room. Then silence from the dog, instant, like someone flipped a switch. I’ve seen that animal drag a forty-pound bag of mulch across the yard like a war trophy. The only thing on earth that shuts him up is her.

“Josie.”

Her voice drifts up the stairs like it weighs nothing. Not a question. She already knows. The dog was kenneled, which means he was loose when I came in, which means I’m the one who put him away, which means someone is in her house. She knew before she set her keys down. “Please tell me you’re robbing me. I could really use the insurance money.”

I come downstairs with a face I’ve assembled on short notice. “Jude asked me to check on you. You weren’t answering.”

“Phone died.” She holds up a hardware store bag like it’s evidence in her own defense. She does not ask why I was upstairs. She doesn’t even glance at the staircase. She just looks at me—that look, the one that makes you feel like she’s already finished a conversation you haven’t started—and smiles. “You look awful. Come sit down.”

“Thanks. You really know how to make a girl feel welcome.”

“It’s a gift,” she says, and something in the way she says it makes me think she’s not talking about hospitality.

✦

In the kitchen, she pulls a knife from the block. Not a butter knife. Not a paring knife. The kind of knife that has its own origin story. She starts slicing an apple like she’s being graded on precision, each piece fanning out on the cutting board like it’s auditioning for something.

“Jude worries,” she says without looking up. “It’s sweet. In a controlling, mildly suffocating way.” She pauses. “But I guess that’s marriage. You pick someone to slowly drive you insane and then act surprised when it works.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. She slides me a plate of perfect slices and pours me water I didn’t ask for. Then she leans against the counter and looks at me like I’m a puzzle she’s almost solved.

“Do you ever think about killing Ryan?”

“Excuse me?”

“Not seriously.” She waves the knife like she’s swatting a fly. “Just in theory. Like when he leaves his shoes in the doorway or doesn’t hear you the first four times. Homicidal ideation.” She bites into a slice. “Backbone of a healthy relationship.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s communication.”

“Sure.” She chews. “That too.”

She holds my gaze one beat too long. Then she laughs, and I laugh, and we’re just two women in a kitchen being ridiculous. Except I can still feel the weight of that notebook in my hands.

“You know your problem?” she says, already moving on, rinsing the knife. She says it the way you’d say you know what sounds good for dinner.

“You’re too available. Ryan calls, you answer. He asks, you come running. Jude calls, and here you are.” She dries the blade, puts it back in the block with the edge facing in. Doesn’t look at me. “Nobody values what’s always there. That’s just economics.”

She says it like she’s telling me the weather. Like it’s nothing. Like she didn’t just put a pin in every quiet disappointment of my marriage and pop it.

✦

That night, Ryan asks about my day. He doesn’t look up from his phone. “Fine,” I tell him. “Checked on Kate.”

“She good?”

“She’s great.” I mean it the way you’d describe a wildfire from a safe distance.

He asks me something else. I don’t answer right away. I let it sit. I think of Kate at the counter, the blade catching light, the way she said nobody values what’s always there like she’d just told me the time.

“Jos?”

“Hm?”

“I said did you eat?”

“Just an apple.”

He looks up from his phone. First time all night. It works.

And that’s the thing about Kate. The thing I can’t explain to Ryan or my therapist or anyone. She says something offhand, something small, and it rearranges the furniture in your head so quietly you don’t realize it’s been moved until you’re tripping over it in the dark. I should be thinking about the notebook. The names. The lines through them. The sentence at the bottom of the page.

I should be scared. I should probably run.

But all I can think is that I need to go back to that kitchen. It should make me run.

It doesn’t.