Down on the first floor I pad around to all the doors and windows and check that everything is locked and secure. Sometimes we get careless. On nonhumid days, we leave the windows open to allow a breeze. Or after letting Kugel out, we’ll forget to lock the back door. It was never like that when I was a child growing up in Queens in the eighties. The threat of crime was ever present. I learned to take off my earrings before I rode the subway and to hold my house keys between my fingers in a fist, ready to jab a guy’s eyes out.
But in Eastbrook? I have never felt unsafe. Even after that poor nanny was killed a few blocks away last year. It was a tragedy, of course, but an aberration. Perversely it was the random horror of the act, a girl shot dead in the middle of a robbery, that drove home how safe the neighborhood was.
“It’s so unlike our neighborhood,” people said. “Things like that just don’t happen here.”
I peer out the window at the tranquil street. Nothing. Not a soul out on this night.
I curl up on the couch, pull a throw around me, and drift off into a restless sleep. A few hours later, I wake to the whir of the coffee grinder in the kitchen. I pop up.
I need to get Rachel up or she’ll be late for school.
Once I am standing, I remember—Rachel has graduated. She’s not even in the house. No one needs me to get up. No one needs me to do anything.
“Coffee?” Miguel asks when I appear in the doorway to the kitchen. Without waiting for an answer, he grabs the moka pot from the stove and fills my favorite mug, the one with a photo of Zach and Rachel as toddlers. I watch him whip in the sugar and add steamed milk, just the way I like it, the way his parents used to make it for him when he was a little boy growing up in Union City, a Cuban enclave in northern New Jersey.
He puts the mug on the island in front of where I usually sit.
“I saw you ended up on the couch this morning. Everything okay?”
I lower myself onto a stool and bring the mug to my face to breathe in the rich coffee scent. “I’m just not sleeping well.”
“Did you take an Ambien last night?”
“What?” I put the mug down, annoyed that he’s starting in on me before I’ve even had my coffee. “No. I told you. I don’t take them anymore. That’s how I know I did not take one Saturday night.”
“You don’t know that, mi amor.”
“Actually, I do know it. I’m very careful about not mixing Ambien and alcohol.”
He sighs. “Look, I don’t want to upset you, but what’s the point in having the same conversation over and over? You don’t even remember ordering Millie’s.”
“Because I didn’t! I need you to entertain the possibility I am telling the truth.”
“It’s not about truth, Car. It’s about memory. Memory is very unreliable.”
“I know what I know.”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “Let’s just drop it. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you healing.”
“But it does matter. If someone came in here—”
“Whoa, whoa.” His grin is sly and disarming. “Slow down.Came in here?”
“Yes. And put that empty bottle of wine in the garbage.”
He stares at me but says nothing. Finally, I break eye contact and avert my gaze, focusing on the red LED clock on the microwave as it changes from 8:03 to 8:04. I don’t want to have this conversation with him, especially not first thing in the morning. How can he not know that I need his full and unconditional support?
Miguel puts a plate of buttered raisin toast in front of me. “You’re not planning to work today, are you?”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“No,” he says carefully. “What about the support group the doctor mentioned?”
“Why? I’m not going crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were. But you’re talking about people breaking in and planting empty wine bottles. You asked the police to fingerprint it.” He cocks his head. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’?”
“Yes, because you say it all the time.”