Friday
Episode 5 of 5 of My Husband’s Second Phone by Helen Abbott
Here is what you do when a man is watching your house from close enough to use your wifi.
You make breakfast.
You put the second phone in the drawer with the takeout menus. You wake your daughter, and you do her hair the way she likes, two braids, and you do not look at her ceiling. You put her in the car and you drive her to school and you wave at the teacher. You come home, and you do the dishes standing at the sink where anyone parked on the street could see you, and you do them slowly.
That was Wednesday. That was Thursday.
Cole came Thursday night through the back, after dark, the first time he had been in my house in six years. He didn’t hug me. He put a bag on the counter and said, “Where’s the kid sleeping,” and I said, “With us,” and he said, “Good,” and that was the whole reunion.
The plan was simple, which is the only kind that works.
The man on the other end of that camera had been watching a house where nothing happened. He’d been watching it for weeks. He was waiting for something he could use. So on Friday, we would give him something to use.
At seven on Friday evening I went into Ruby’s room, and for the first time in five days I looked up.
It looked like a smoke detector. That’s all. A white plastic circle on the ceiling with a small green light, and I stood under it and let it see my face, and I let my face do what it wanted to do, and then I got Ruby’s little suitcase out of the closet and started packing it.
Slowly. Where he could see.
Her pajamas. Her dinosaur book. The stuffed rabbit. I folded everything twice, the way you do when you are leaving in a hurry and you want to be careful about it.
Then I picked up my own phone, the one that wasn’t clean, and I called the neighbor, and I said, loud enough, “Can you take Ruby tonight? I’m getting her out of here. I’ll explain later. No, he doesn’t know.”
I hung up. I zipped the suitcase. I turned off the light.
Cole was in the garage. Nate was in the kitchen, in the dark, with the second phone. And down at the end of the street, in a car with the engine off, was a man named Dan, who Cole went to school with and who wears a badge, and who had listened to Cole for twenty minutes on Wednesday and then said, “Okay. Friday. I’ll be there.”
One man. That’s all it takes if he’s the right one.
We waited.
The phone buzzed at 7:41.
R: He’s moving.
At 7:52 headlights came down our street, slow, and stopped two houses up.
At 7:55 the doorbell rang.
I answered it.
I had thought about this part more than anything. I could have let Nate answer. I could have stayed in the kitchen. But I had spent five days not looking up in my own house, and I wanted to be the one who opened the door.
Blake stood on my porch with his hands out of his pockets, palms open, the way a man stands when he’s practiced looking harmless.
“Grace. Hey. I know it’s late.”
“It’s late.”
“I was driving by. I saw the lights. I just, is everything okay? With Ruby?”
He was looking past me. Up the stairs. Toward her room.
“Ruby’s fine.”
“Because I heard.” He stopped. He rearranged it. “Because I had a feeling. That something was going on. I just want to make sure she’s safe, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“What did you hear, Blake.”
“I didn’t say I heard anything.”
“You did. You said heard. Then you changed it.”
His face did something small. Just for a second.
“I’m going to ask you to take your phone out,” I said. “And I’m going to ask you to show me what’s on the screen right now.”
“Grace.”
“Right now.”
Nate stepped into the hall behind me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
Blake looked at him, and then at me, and then his hand went toward his jacket, slowly, and the light on his phone came up as he pulled it out, and I saw it before he could turn it away.
A white ceiling. A lamp. A small bed with a suitcase on it, and the room empty, because my daughter was asleep in my bed with the door locked and her uncle in the garage.
He’d been watching her room while he rang my doorbell.
“Give it to me,” I said.
He didn’t. He turned to go. And Dan was already on the walk, and Cole was already at the side of the house, and it was over in about the time it takes to say it, with no shouting, and Blake saying my name over and over like it was a password that had stopped working.
I went inside and shut the door.
We took the smoke detector down together the next morning. Nate on the chair, me holding the flashlight, Cole at the door with his arms folded, watching, the way he used to watch me do my homework when he was supposed to be helping.
It came away in one piece. A white plastic circle with a wire hanging off it, lighter than it should have been for what it had done.
Ruby came in while we were standing there looking at it.
“Is that the light?”
“That’s the light,” Nate said. “It’s broken. We’re taking it down.”
She held out both hands.
“Can I have it?”
We looked at each other. All three of us. Nobody had an answer that was better than the question.
Nate put it in her hands.
She turned it over once, looked at the lens, decided it was nothing, and took it to her room and dropped it in the toy box with the blocks and the plastic horses.
It’s still in there.