The Vacancy

Chapter 1: The Bench

Amy Collins could tell you the odds that a forty-one-year-old man in Allegheny County would die in a single-car accident between midnight and four in the morning. She had worked out that number more than once. It was not a large number. It had never been large enough to matter, until it happened to her husband.

Twenty-six months later, she still worked it out for a living. She built mortality tables for Three Rivers Life on the eleventh floor of a gray tower downtown, where the windows looked across the Monongahela at the inclines crawling up Mount Washington. She took the deaths of strangers and turned them into rates, and the rates into prices, and the prices into policies that people bought so their families would be all right when the rates came for them. She was good at it. Her boss, Howard Klein, said she had the steadiest hands with a spreadsheet he had seen in thirty years. He meant it kindly. He did not know that steady was all she had left.

On Saturday mornings she drove her daughter to swim practice.

"You packed the blue goggles?" Amy asked, turning onto Forbes Avenue.

"The blue ones leak," said Sophie from the back seat. She was eleven and had recently decided that the front seat was for people who liked talking. "I packed the clear ones. The blue ones are in the trash."

"Those were twenty dollars."

"They were twenty dollars of leaking."

Amy almost smiled. She caught herself doing it in the mirror and let it go. Sophie had David's chin and David's way of winning an argument by making it sound like a fact. Some days that was a comfort. Some days it was a knife.

She dropped Sophie at the community center pool, watched her walk in with her bag bumping against her hip, and checked the clock on the dashboard. Two hours. For a year after the funeral she had sat in the bleachers for every minute of every practice, breathing chlorine, unable to let her daughter out of her sight. Then Lauren had told her, gently, that Sophie had started swimming in the far lane so her mother couldn't stare at her. So Amy walked instead.

Frick Park was a ten-minute drive away. She parked near the Blue Slide playground and took the trail down into the trees. It was late September, and the leaves had only started to turn. The air smelled of wet bark and someone's dog. A pair of runners passed her, then a man with a stroller, then nobody at all. She liked it best when there was nobody.

She did not cry anymore. That had been the first thing to go, around month eight. After that, she had stopped feeling much of anything, which her doctor called a plateau and her sister called a problem. Amy called it efficient. She packed lunches. She paid the mortgage on the house in Squirrel Hill that was too big for two people. She went to parent-teacher conferences and nodded. She had stopped expecting anything to reach her, and she did not miss being reached.

The trail curved down toward Fern Hollow Creek. There was a bench there, under a big oak, that she and David used to call the halfway bench, because it was where Sophie, at four, had always demanded to be carried the rest of the way.

A man was sitting on it.

Amy noticed him the way she noticed most things now, as a shape to be passed. Gray jacket, hands in his lap, head down. She was ten feet away when he looked up.

"Amy," he said.

She stopped walking.

It was David's voice. That was the first thing, before anything else, before her eyes had even caught up. It was the voice that had said her name across twelve years of kitchens and car rides and hospital rooms, a little hoarse at the edges, a little Pittsburgh in the vowels. Then her eyes did catch up, and it was David's face.

Not exactly. He was thinner than he had been. His cheeks had hollowed, and there was gray all through his hair, gray he had not had when she buried him. There were lines around his eyes that she did not know. But it was his nose, broken once in a high school soccer game and never set right. It was the small white scar on his left eyebrow. It was his mouth, open now, trembling.

She had seen him a hundred times in the last two years. In crowds, in the backs of buses, in the reflection of a store window. Every time, the stranger had turned and become a stranger. She waited for this one to do the same.

He did not. He stood up, slowly, the way you stand up near a frightened animal.

"Please don't run," he said. "I know. I know how this looks."

"Who are you?" Her voice came out flat and strange, as if someone else were using it.

"It's me." He took a breath. His eyes filled. "Amy, it's me. I'm sorry. I wanted to do this better. I had a whole plan, and I can't remember any of it."

He was crying. He was trying not to and failing, the way David always failed at it, his face folding up from the bottom. He put a hand over his mouth. That was when she saw his wedding ring.

It was on his right hand.

David had worn his ring on his left hand for eleven years. It had been buried with him, on his left hand, because Amy had asked the funeral director to make sure.

This man's ring was gold, plain, scratched in a way that looked familiar. And it was on the wrong hand.

"Your ring," she heard herself say.

He looked down at it as if he had forgotten it was there. Then he looked back at her, and something in his face broke open completely.

"Where I come from," he said, "that's where you wear it when your wife is dead."

The creek ran over its stones. Somewhere up the hill a dog was barking. Amy Collins, who could tell you the odds of almost anything, stood on the trail in Frick Park and could not think of a single number at all.

"Sit down," the man said softly. "Please. Before you fall."

She did not sit. But she did not run, either. Later she would understand that this was the moment everything turned, that the next two years of her life began in the space between those two choices. At the time, all she knew was that her legs would not move, and that the man in front of her was weeping with her husband's face.

"You have two minutes," she said. "Then I'm calling the police."

He nodded. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He sat back down on the halfway bench and left room for her at the other end, the way David always had.