No Hiding in Boise Read online

  The guy with the gun is looking around, as if he has someone specific in mind.

  “Hey!” I shout again.

  He doesn’t acknowledge me.

  I run at him, decide I need to tackle him.

  He must see me out of the corner of his eye because he turns.

  He looks scared.

  He looks like a scared little boy.

  “Give me the gun,” I say.

  He fumbles with it in his hand. I know what’s going to happen before it does.

  It occurs to me that I might not die of cancer after all.

  ANGIE

  I CAN’T STOP THINKING about what I’ve found on Cale’s phone. I almost get in two car accidents on my way to pick up Evie from day care. I text Sahana, telling her I need her to come over after I put Evie to bed. I can’t sit with this information alone.

  I try to look like I’m paying attention while Ms. Janie recaps Evie’s day for me.

  “She ate all her broccoli today. She didn’t nap great, but that’s nothing new,” she says.

  Evie has never been much of a napper. When she was an infant, we would put her in the swing. It was the only way to get her to sleep. We got the portable kind, carried it from room to room. We used it so often that the batteries ran out every week. When she grew out of the swing, I resorted to putting her in the jogging stroller and taking her for long walks at nap times. The movement put her to sleep. I begrudged Cale on those walks, begrudged that he got time to himself in the house to relax while I worked up a literal sweat. I waited for him to offer to do the Nap Walk, but he didn’t. Sahana said I should just ask him to do it, and I said what every disgruntled wife-mother says: “I don’t want to ask him. I want him to want to do it on his own.”

  Evie tugs on my skirt.

  “Do you want to show mommy the sandbox?” Ms. Janie asks. “She was so into the sandbox today.”

  Evie nods, her eyes full of light and glee.

  “Go and play. I’ll be there in a minute,” I tell her.

  She holds up one finger, parrots back, “A minute.” It’s her newest thing.

  When Evie is out of earshot, scooping and dumping sand repeatedly and laughing like a maniac, I say to Ms. Janie, “I need to tell you something.”

  She raises her eyebrows almost to her hairline.

  “Cale is in the hospital,” I say.

  Ms. Janie is so young—early twenties. She is all sunshine and rainbows. I feel like in telling her about Cale, I am contributing to the inevitable disillusionment all of us experience as we get older and realize how cruel the world can be.

  “Oh no,” she says, her blue eyes big and wide.

  “Yeah, so I’ll be doing drop-off and pick-up for a while,” I say. “And I haven’t really explained anything to Evie. She hasn’t asked where he is yet.”

  Evie is accustomed to Cale being away for two- or three-day business trips. Even on those trips, she doesn’t ask about him, which both relieves and saddens me. I feel like she would ask about him more if she saw him as an essential part of her daily life. But maybe I’m making more of it than it is. Maybe toddlers are kind of like dogs—living only in the present, abiding by the “out of sight, out of mind” principle.

  Ms. Janie nods her head and says, “She seemed as happy as can be today, but I will let you know if she asks about her daddy.”

  Those words—her daddy—make my heart clench. No matter what problems existed between Cale and me, he will always be her daddy. Evie will always be blissfully unaware of his shortcomings and my resentments. Or that’s the hope.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Ms. Janie twists her mouth to one side, as if contemplating something. Then she says, “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  This is her way of asking what’s happened, why Cale is in the hospital.

  “It is pretty serious, I’m afraid,” I say.

  I can’t bring myself to tell her about the shooting. I feel as compelled to protect her innocence as I do to protect Evie’s.

  “Evie,” I call, using my daughter to get me out of this conversation with Ms. Janie, “we have to get home for dinner, okay?”

  Evie looks up, mid-sand-scoop, and gives me a pouty face. I go to her, kneel next to the sandbox, take the blue plastic shovel when she hands it to me.

  “This is fun, isn’t it?” I tell her.

  She dumps a shovelful of sand on my hand and laughs.

  I do the same back to her.

  Sometimes I wonder if this—the often mindless and repetitive toddler play—is one of the reasons for Cale’s funk. If he would talk to me, I would assure him that nobody loves taking a doll’s shoes on and off one hundred times or pretending to drink tea from tiny plastic cups for an hour. The trick is to imitate Evie’s joy. Somehow, in doing that, I feel some of my own.

  We dump sand on each other’s hands a few times before I tell her that we have to go home for dinner. When she whines, I tell her I have crackers in the car. Evie loves crackers—Goldfish, graham, Ritz, saltine. They are approximately 80 percent of her diet.

  We wave to Ms. Janie on our way out. She gives me a sorrowful look that is supposed to convey pity, I guess. It annoys me.

  EVIE AND I go through our evening routine. I try to be engaged, though I can’t stop thinking about what’s on Cale’s phone. Evie eats her pasta—she will eat only penne noodles, no other shape—and a handful of Ritz crackers. I consider that good enough. We play on the floor of the kitchen with her dolls. I wait for her to poop so I can change her diaper and put on her pajamas. When she is changed, I heat up her bottle of milk. I’m sure I was supposed to stop giving her a bottle months ago, but it calms her before bed. She loves it, and it gives her nutrition that I figure she needs; she’s not big on drinking milk at any other point in the day. I used to walk her around while she drank her bottle, but she’s gotten so heavy. We sit now, her on my lap, and I watch her suckle. It feels like years ago that she was on my breast. Just recently, we’ve started taking baths together. She always looks at my nipples curiously, as if she’s perplexed by them, as if she has no recollection of them being her former food source. Sometimes she pinches them and laughs when I say, “Ouch.”

  “All done?” I say to her when the bottle is empty.

  “All done,” she says.

  “Ready for night-night?”

  She nods.

  She doesn’t fight bedtime, probably because she is so tired from refusing to nap.

  When I lay her in her crib, I sing my usual lullabies and then say, “Sweet dreams. Mommy and Daddy love you.” She usually just stares at me when I whisper, but tonight she whispers back:

  “Daddy?” It’s a question more than a statement.

  “Yes, Daddy loves you,” I say.

  “Daddy?” she says again.

  It’s as if she’s just realized she hasn’t seen him in a few days.

  “We love you, sweetheart,” I say.

  She furrows her little brows.

  I go through another round of the lullabies and she starts to doze off, whatever concerns she had forgotten in the name of needed rest.

  I LEAVE THE front door open for Sahana and go to the kitchen to wash dishes. I’m at the sink when I hear her come in, talking on her cell phone. She lowers her voice, knowing I will kill her if she wakes Evie.

  She paces the kitchen while finishing her call, then sets her phone on the counter and says, “What a day.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “I bet my day beats yours.”

  “No doubt,” she says. “But can I vent anyway?”

  I appreciate this about Sahana—her honesty, her refusal to pity me.

  “This guy wants to sue me because he says I’m responsible for his wife filing for divorce. His wife is my client,” she says.

  I roll my eyes. “There can’t be any merit to a lawsuit like that.”

  “I wouldn’t think so, but I still had to call my lawyer. Just that phone call alone is probably going to cost me three hundred bucks.”


  I wince.

  “Anyway,” she says. She does a little shimmy with her whole body, as if shaking off the day, and then sits at the kitchen table. “Give me wine and tell me everything.”

  I retrieve a bottle of red from the wine fridge that Cale bought with his last bonus. I pour two glasses, then sit across from her at the table.

  “So, work was actually fine,” I tell her, because I know she was worried about me going back so soon. “It was good to kind of go through the motions, ya know?”

  “Classic distraction mechanism,” she says. “Not that I’m judging. Sometimes survival is dependent upon distraction.”

  “Okay, Dr. Ravani,” I say.

  Sahana takes a long sip of wine, and I do the same.

  “I visited Cale at lunch,” I say.

  “Any news?”

  I shake my head. “He’s stable, they say. For now. They’re monitoring the pressure in his brain. They may start to take him off the sedation medications in a few days.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I ask that question a lot. I guess they’ll see if he comes out of the coma on his own. Nobody seems to know anything for sure.”

  “How helpful,” she says.

  “I keep torturing myself with all the what-ifs. What if he doesn’t wake up? What if he does, but he’s not really Cale? What if—”

  She puts her hand up, like a crossing guard. “Stop right there. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  “Oh, I’m way past crazy at this point.”

  “Well, you started off a little crazy, so that complicates things.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “There’s something else,” I say. “The nurse gave me his belongings—wallet, phone, keys.”

  She looks at me expectantly.

  “I didn’t know if I’d be able to get into his phone, but I guessed his passcode.”

  “Of course you did,” she says without hesitation. “Men are idiots.”

  I take another sip.

  “And?” she asks.

  She is leaning so far forward that her chin almost touches the table.

  “Texts with the other woman?” she guesses, impatiently.

  There were no texts of interest, actually. Nearly all of the texts were work-related. Cale doesn’t even have a personal phone, didn’t see the point of paying for a separate phone when he could just use his company-paid work phone.

  “No texts,” I say. “But he had something weird in his Notes app.”

  I wouldn’t have guessed Cale even used the Notes app. I use it all the time—for my running grocery list, a list of funny things Evie says or does that I want to remember to tell her one day, a list of Netflix shows everyone says I need to watch. Cale had just a few notes: one related to fantasy football, which I couldn’t make sense of, one titled “Stocks” with a list of— not surprisingly—stocks, and the last one, which is the one I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

  “What?” Sahana asks. “You are telling this story way too slowly.”

  “Sorry,” I say. I don’t know why I’m hesitating. I guess I’m afraid of the face Sahana will make. It will be a face that confirms that my husband is not who we thought he was, a face that confirms that my marriage was deeply troubled.

  “Remember Tessa?” I say.

  I’d called Sahana after meeting Tessa at the hospital. She was immediately suspicious of the whole thing. Her first question: “Was she pretty?”

  “Yes,” Sahana says, the “I told you so” already in her tone.

  “Cale had a note in his phone titled ‘Tessa,’” I say.

  There it is—the face I feared.

  “What was in the note?” she asks, though I feel like her conclusion has already been drawn: my husband is an asshole.

  “That’s what’s weird,” I say. “It was like a list of things about her. Like he was stalking her or something.”

  Sahana looks disturbed. “Let me see.”

  I knew she would ask. I go to my purse, take out Cale’s phone, enter the passcode. I set the phone on the table, in front of Sahana, and let her read what I’ve already read a hundred times.

  Tessa

  23 years old

  Works Tu, Th, F, Sa, Su; 6pm-2am

  Has boyfriend (Ryan)

  Boise State U—wants to be nurse

  Likes classic rock

  Honda Civic (black)

  Moved from Bend last year

  Tattoo—birds flying—starts at wrist, up underside of arm “You could have done better but I don’t mind”

  IPAs = favorite beer

  Sahana pushes the phone away from her, as if it’s diseased, and looks up at me. “Ang, this is weird.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “It’s like he’s obsessed with her.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “I guess it makes sense why he ‘saved her life,’ as she put it,” Sahana says, using air quotes.

  “Do you think she knew about this? Like they had a thing and she lied to me?”

  Sahana shrugs. “I never trusted her from the moment you mentioned her name. I mean, she came to visit him in the hospital? That’s strange.”

  “It is, right?” I say.

  She nods. “It is.”

  “What does ‘You could have done better but I don’t mind’ mean?”

  She shrugs again. “Sounds like words exchanged between disgruntled lovers, if you ask me.”

  “What am I supposed to do now?” I ask.

  “Well, you can’t exactly confront Cale about it.”

  “Nope.”

  “You have her number, right?”

  “Tessa?”

  “Tessa.”

  “Yes, we traded numbers.”

  “Which is also extremely strange,” Sahana says.

  I don’t know how to explain that it didn’t seem strange at the time. Maybe it’s just that everything seems strange lately. I’ve lost touch with normalcy.

  “What do I say to her?”

  Sahana thinks about this. “Text her. Ask if she can meet in person. It’ll be easier to tell in person if she’s lying or not.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Sahana stands from the table and goes to my purse.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting your phone,” she says, holding it up for me to see. “I bet I can guess your passcode.”

  I cross my arms over my chest and let her try.

  “Damn it,” she says. “I could have sworn it would be Evie’s birthday.”

  I take the phone from her. “It’s my and Cale’s anniversary, actually.”

  I feel embarrassed admitting this, like a teenager confessing to a completely unattainable crush.

  “Aw, Ang,” Sahana says. She attempts a hug, but I push her away. I can’t handle sentiment right now.

  I open my phone and go to the text I sent Tessa, just “Hi.”

  I type something new:

  Tessa? Hi, it’s Angie. Cale’s wife. I was wondering if we could meet in person sometime soon.

  Sahana tells me to keep it short and simple, not elaborate on why. I set my phone on the table and pour myself a second glass of wine. Before I can take a sip, my phone buzzes again. Sahana grabs it before I can. She looks at the screen, then up at me.

  “Looks like you two have a date.”

  TESSA

  ON TUESDAY MORNING, I’m getting dressed and ready for the day when Ryan’s alarm goes off. I’m standing at the vanity in our bathroom. In the mirror, I can see him sit up in bed. I can see the surprise on his face when he sees me.

  “You’re up early,” he says groggily as I pat my face with powder.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I say.

  This has been true since the shooting. It’s just that usually I stay in bed, staring at the ceiling, watching the fan blades go ’round and ’round. Today, though, I have a 9:00 a.m. coffee date with Jed Ketcher’s mother, who does not know that I know who she is. Tomorrow,
I have a coffee date with Cale’s wife, Angie.

  “You have class today?” he asks.

  Normally, on Tuesday mornings, I do have class. I can’t even think about school though. Even if I was able to sit in the lecture hall without having a panic attack, I wouldn’t retain any information. I emailed my teachers last night, telling them what happened:

  I was at the scene of the Ray’s Bar shooting and will need some time to get my bearings.

  They said to take as much time as I need.

  I still haven’t told my mom, a fact that is getting weirder by the day.

  “Yeah, I have class today,” I say.

  I tell myself this isn’t really a lie; I do have class, I’m just not going. I want to be completely honest with him, but I know the truth will scare him. He wants to think I’m getting back to normal, whatever that means. He won’t consider meeting Joyce Ketcher or Angie Matthews “normal,” that’s for sure. In a week or two, I bet I’ll be back to my classes, feeling better. For now, though, I need to talk to Jed’s mother, and I need to find out why Angie wants to talk to me.

  “Come here,” Ryan says, motioning for me to join him in bed.

  I comply, sitting on the edge of the bed. He wraps his arms around me, pulls me down against his body. He wants to have sex. Morning is our usual time; we both like the thrill of rushing, trying not to be late.

  I squirm in his grasp, giggle to disguise my discomfort. I have no interest in sex right now. I haven’t had interest since the shooting. I want to be annoyed at him for thinking I’m able to close my eyes, press my body against his, and have an orgasm with ease, as if I didn’t just go through a traumatic event. But I know I can’t be annoyed; I am at fault for perpetuating the idea that I’m fine.

  “Babe, I have to get ready,” I say. Normally, saying such a thing is part of our foreplay.

  He reaches his hand under the waistband of my skirt.

  “Babe, I mean it,” I say.

  I press myself off him, careful not to look at his face because I don’t want to see what’s on it—irritation, impatience, frustration.

  He lets out a sigh and falls back on his pillow. Everything in me wants to say, “I’m sorry,” but I don’t want to make this a thing.

  “I’ll see you later?” I say, still not looking at him.