Page 124 of All These Beautiful Strangers

It was pitch-black and cluttered with old furniture, covered in sheets, and piles and piles of boxes. It smelled slightly of mildew. I was working my way through the labyrinth when I hit my shin on something hard.

“Ouch,” I muttered into the darkness.

I turned the flashlight of my phone on the sharp, boxy edge I had walked into. The light revealed a pair of dusty old suitcases.

At that moment, the overhead light to the basement flickered on. I heard Dalton at the head of the stairs. I should have turned the light on my phone off and ducked down for cover, but I couldn’t move. Something about the suitcases had caught my eye. It was the print—a faded brown paisley. My mother had had a pair just like them once.

“You down here, Charlie?” Dalton called.

I could hear his footsteps coming down the staircase, but I couldn’t see him. My view of the stairs was blocked by a refrigerator-sized box. I reached out and ran my finger along the label on the face of the luggage—Burberry.

I dropped my phone and took a step back. Yes, these suitcases were just like the ones my mother had owned, the ones that she had taken with her when she left.

I felt like I was falling, falling, falling, as my heart hammered away in my chest and my breath grew shallow and my head rushed to make sense of it all.

It was just a coincidence, I told myself. Hundreds of people had the same luggage as my mother. It was just a coincidence that Margot had the same old set of luggage in her basement. These weren’t those suitcases. They didn’t belong to my mother.

Only . . . only, what if they did? I remembered my mother’s luggage had a rip in the inner lining. If I opened the suitcase up, and there was the same rip . . .

I reached toward the suitcases again, but something hard pinned my arms to my sides. It was Dalton. He had found me, and he had me in a viselike grip, his arms around me like a steel cage.

“Got you,” he said.

Thirty-Six

Alistair Calloway

August 4, 2007

Charlotte, still in her bathing suit and boat shoes, rolled around the living room floor with her sister. They were playing some sort of game that only they understood. Seraphina grabbed Charlotte by the ankles and Charlotte retaliated by blowing a raspberry onto her sister’s cheek. Seraphina erupted into shrieks of laughter.

“Why don’t you two go up to your room and play?” I asked as I threaded my way around them and sat on the couch with my briefcase.

“Fiine,” Charlotte said, nailing the type of exasperation that a teen would be proud of, even though she was only seven. Seraphina mimicked her.

“Fiine.”

As the girls laughed and stumbled up the stairs, I heard Grace come in from the back patio.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Grace said. “Want to put burgers on the grill in an hour?”

I looked up from the reports in my lap. “Sure,” I said. “Sounds good.”

I squinted down at the small type on the page and the words blurred slightly around the edges. I glanced around me, hunting for the spare pair of reading glasses that I kept at the lake house. They weren’t on the coffee table. I got up and went into my study across the hall, searched the desk, pulled out the drawers, but the search came up empty. Then I remembered. I’d left them upstairs in the bedroom the other weekend. I’d been reading before bed, and I’d set them on the nightstand.

Upstairs, Grace had closed the door to the bedroom, so I knocked lightly and then tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, so I went in. I heard the bath running. As I walked over to the nightstand, I saw the bathroom door was ajar. I could see through to the mirror behind the vanity, and in the mirror, I caught my wife’s reflection. She was naked, standing outside the shower, her hand under the faucet, testing the temperature of the water. I felt my stomach clench at the sight of her.

The morning after our fight, I’d sent flowers, a bouquet of purple hyacinths and tulips. I called her that evening from the office. I was working late, a carton of Chinese takeout growing cold next to my keyboard. Really, I couldn’t bear to go home to our empty apartment, to the bed where I slept alone and the quiet rooms where Charlotte and Seraphina’s things were pristinely tucked into cubbies and drawers, untouched. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, with the knowledge of what I had done, what Grace had done, of what we had done to each other.

I picked up the phone and called the lake house. Grace answered after several rings, slightly breathless, as if she had run to catch the phone before the call dropped. I pictured her on the cordless in the upstairs hall, ushering the girls through their bedtime routine. I could almost hear them giggling in the bathroom behind her, the water running in the sink as they brushed their teeth. Grace would be wearing that old pale pink silk robe I’d gotten her for Mother’s Day several years ago, the one that was fraying in the sleeves.

“Hello?” she said again into the phone.

“Grace,” I said. “It’s me.”

She was quiet. I could see her in my mind’s eye. She was biting her lip, the phone to her chin, as she debated whether or not to hang up.

“Did you get the flowers?” I asked.