She's Mine

Chapter One: Two in the Morning

The house made three noises at night, and Nicki Ridley knew all of them.

The first was the furnace, which came on with a soft thump under the floor and then breathed for eleven minutes before it clicked off. The second was the freezer in the utility room, which shuddered when it cycled, a low grinding hum that traveled up through the linoleum and into her heels. The third was the big silver maple in the side yard, whose branches dragged along the gutter above the kitchen window whenever the wind came in from the west, which in late October it almost always did.

Three noises. She had catalogued them in her first week alone in the house, back in July, when Lottie was three weeks old and Nicki had spent every night sitting upright in bed with her heart going like a bird in a shoebox, sure that every creak was a man in the hallway. Naming the sounds had helped. Naming things always helped. If you could say what a noise was, it could not become anything else.

It was 2:04 in the morning on the last Tuesday in October, and she was working.

The desk was a hollow-core door laid across two file cabinets, shoved against the wall of the second bedroom that they still called the office even though half of it had become a nursery annex — the changing table, the tub of wipes, the folded stack of muslin swaddles she never used anymore. Lottie slept in the bassinet at Nicki's left elbow, four months old, one fist up by her ear like a boxer at rest. The monitor camera watched her from the crib in the actual nursery across the hall, pointing at an empty mattress, because Lottie had not slept in the crib in nine days and Nicki had stopped pretending she would.

On the screen in front of her, the waveform crawled.

She wore the good headphones, the closed-back ones Ethan had bought her for Christmas two years ago when she still thought transcription was temporary. The foot pedal sat under her right shoe: press to play, release to stop, tap left to rewind five seconds. Her fingers moved without her. This was the strange gift of the work — after eleven years, her hands had learned to take dictation directly, bypassing the part of her that thought, so that on a good night she could type four thousand words while some deeper animal part of her brain went off and worried about the electric bill.

Tonight's file was an insurance hearing out of Marion County. An orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Prentiss was explaining, for the fourth time, why a man's shoulder had not healed.

"— and what I'm telling you, counselor, is that the imaging from March is not consistent with the mechanism of injury described in the claim —"

Nicki typed. The furnace thumped. The house breathed.

"— you can ask me the same question in six different ways, but the labrum doesn't lie —"

And under it, threaded through the surgeon's flat Midwestern drone like a hair in food, something else.

Nicki's foot came off the pedal. The recording stopped.

She sat very still. In the sudden quiet of the headphones she could hear her own pulse, a soft muffled thud, and beyond the padding, faintly, the freezer beginning its cycle.

She had heard a voice. Not the surgeon. Not the attorney. A woman's voice, low and breathy, three or four syllables, laid down underneath the audio so faintly that it was less like hearing and more like the memory of having heard.

"Okay," she said out loud, and her own voice sounded absurd in the little room. Lottie did not stir.

She tapped the pedal left. Left again. The cursor jumped back ten seconds. She pressed play.

"— you can ask me the same question in six different ways, but the labrum doesn't lie. The tissue is either torn or it isn't."

Nothing under it. No woman. Just room tone, the hiss of a cheap conference-room microphone, a chair creaking somewhere, the deposition officer clearing his throat.

She rewound again and turned the volume up until the hiss became a small white ocean and the surgeon's voice was too loud, painfully loud, a man shouting about labrums directly into the center of her skull.

Nothing.

She pulled the headphones down around her neck. The room came back: the desk lamp with its warm bulb, the pile of unopened mail, the baby monitor screen on its stand showing the crib in grainy infrared, gray and green, the mattress empty, the mobile hanging motionless above it.

"You're tired," she said.

This was objectively true. Lottie had been up at 11:40, at 12:25, and at 1:10. Between the second and the third, Nicki had eaten half a granola bar standing at the kitchen counter with her eyes closed and had a sort of waking dream about a hallway. She was thirty-four years old and she had not slept more than three consecutive hours since the twenty-fourth of June.

There were things sleep deprivation did that nobody warned you about. Not the yawning, not the fog. The other things. The way a coat on a hook became a person for a quarter second. The way you could hear the baby crying in the shower, hear it clearly, hear the pitch and the catch of it, and come out dripping to find her asleep and silent. Nicki had asked about that at the six-week visit and the nurse had laughed and said, oh honey, everybody gets phantom crying, it's the hormones, it goes away.

So. A phantom voice on a bad recording. Fine. Add it to the list.

She put the headphones back on and worked for another forty minutes and got the file finished at 2:51. She ran the spellcheck, flagged two inaudibles, zipped the document, and sent it to the agency with a note to Marla saying the audio quality on this one was rough and could they please stop taking work from that particular court reporter.

Then she sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.

The money was going to be all right this month. Not good. All right. Ethan's last settlement had been light because of the two days he'd lost in Tulsa waiting on a load, and the truck payment came out on the third, and Lottie had outgrown everything at once the way babies did, but if Nicki took the two hearings Marla had offered for next week and stayed up late, it would be all right. It was always all right. It was all right the way a man holding a door shut with his shoulder is all right.

She closed the laptop. In the dark, the baby monitor glowed.

She looked at it the way she always did — not really looking, just checking, the way you check a stove you know you turned off. Gray crib. Green shadows. Empty.

Nicki lifted Lottie out of the bassinet, and the weight of her, the hot dense living weight, made something loosen in Nicki's chest that she hadn't known was clenched. Lottie made a small sound, a creaky little door-hinge sound, and burrowed against her collarbone.

"I know," Nicki whispered. "I know. Me too."

She carried her down the hall to the bedroom, past the nursery door, past the closet with the water heater in it, past the framed photograph of herself and Ethan at the courthouse in Vandiver five years ago, both of them laughing at something the photographer had said. She laid the baby in the co-sleeper attached to her side of the bed and got in without brushing her teeth.

Ethan's side was cold and flat. He'd be somewhere on I-70 by now, or parked at a truck stop outside Effingham, asleep in the bunk with his phone charging on the shelf. He'd call at six. He always called at six, so she could hear his voice before the day started, and so he could hear the baby.

Nicki lay on her side facing Lottie and put one finger inside the small curled hand and let the exhaustion come up over her like water.

The last thing she thought before she went under was not a thought at all so much as a shape: those three or four syllables under the surgeon's voice, the rhythm of them, the tender breathy give of them.

It had almost sounded like a person saying something kind.

It had almost sounded like a person leaning very close to a microphone in an empty room, saying something kind, about somebody she loved.