It was really a very fine mattress. That is, if one discounted the finger-sized hole in the plush fabric.
I’d already planned it out in my head.
Amelie, dear. That woman Mrs. Landry down the street—she has a very fine mattress. Certainly less than 15 years old.
She’d quip back that a week’s worth of back pain wasn’t cause to spend a fortune on some cushions, and we’d drop the matter entirely.
But this had turned into something else. Most people would’ve overlooked a black hole in a mattress as some sort of installment error. Especially when one happened to see it drooping beside a mailbox on their neighborhood run. But it was not the hole that drew my eyes—rather, the liquid spreading from it. Dark like the pinot noir Amelie and I had sipped last night.
I could hardly think a few drops of wine were to blame. Especially when I learned that the owner of the house, Mrs. Landry, had suffered a “great tragedy” the previous day.
It wasn’t an unpleasant conversation that started it. Amelie and I had just sat down to dinner. We’d been gossiping about my daily woes as a technical analyst, while she remained as reticent as ever about the extravagances of clinical psychology (“doctor-patient confidentiality”) when the words slipped in, as casual and unassuming as just about everything my wife said.
“I saw in the news that Thomas Landry died last night.” She picked at a morsel of her baked potato, setting a piece of skin on her tongue. So posh. Who ate the skin anyway.
Thomas Landry. The name alone had me breathing in the brisk October air again, the pleasant waft of laundry detergent down the block, the smell of Lydia Dabne’s carefully cultivated flower garden next door.
And, of course, the mattress leaning against the Landry’s mailbox.
I shifted in my seat, twirling my fork between two fingers—an annoying habit I’d promised to give up. I resorted to tapping my knee instead.
This was news. Thomas Landry. I could imagine his wife clear as day, the braided hair, the lopsided grin, the pink lips that disappeared into her teeth when she spoke. Her daughter too, auburn hair like autumn, floral dresses, and the same braid in her hair. Always the braided hair.
Amelie was staring at me. I cleared my throat. “Landry, that’s right,” I said flatly, tapping my fork against the ivory. “I’d…forgotten the woman was married.” I was, among other things, a remarkable liar.
Thankfully, Amelie was too interested in her baked potato to pay me much mind. “It couldn’t have been more than a year ago. He was much older than her.” She readjusted her headband against the golden line of her scalp.
I settled back in my chair. “How’d he go?” Spoken with the vague enthusiasm of someone who had nothing better to do than wonder about the death of a man four houses down.
“They haven’t said. Might’ve been some sort of illness.” She shrugged and continued picking at the potato skin. “He was getting on in years.”
I contemplated mentioning what I had seen today on the Landry’s curb. A mattress in and of itself was hardly of note; people discarded old shit all the time (even weightless, body-conforming, mid-condition memory foam mattresses). But a hole in the mattress? Right in the middle too, where a back pressed into it.
A bleeding back. A back that had been shot.
That’s not entirely true. Realistically the bullet would come from the front and, depending on the range, slip just past the spine and into the—
“—listening to me?” Amelie’s fork nearly blinded me as it waved in front of my face.
My mouth was open. I hurried to close it. “What?” I mumbled.
“I asked if you went for a run today.”
This woman had a way of lingering right on the cusp of what I was thinking. I blamed the PhD. Despite our unspoken pact that she would never use her clinical skills on me, I got the feeling she had to restrain herself. Like clamping down on your knee to stifle an itch.
“Hmm?” I asked, playing off a daze. “Oh. Only a walk today.” It would’ve been the perfect time to mention my back and beg for a new mattress, but I didn’t want to argue. I was too busy fantasizing about pinot noir and old men and holes in mattresses.
I was an older man myself, come to think of it.
“Eat your potato before it gets cold,” Amelie said, popping another piece of skin between her red-stained lips.
***
I’d seen the mattress on a Friday. That meant I had the entire weekend to look out the window and pray for the garbage truck.
When the truck comes, all your delusions will be gone. This was one of Amelie’s rare tactics that I actually employed: projection. Imagine bad thoughts on a whiteboard you erase or parchment you set on fire. Or even as the mattress on the Landry’s curb that’s about to get taken to the garbage.
But my imagination wasn’t good enough. I needed to see the truck to believe it. I’d always been a terrible Christian for that very reason. I needed evidence.
I stood at the sill and waited. Checked my watch (an Apple watch—yet another of my wife’s silent attempts to improve my health). 7:18 am. We were both early risers, even on weekends.
“You were up again last night,” Amelie said while she brewed her morning cup of coffee at the counter. Decaf. She treated her body like she treated her patient’s minds. Very carefully.
At her comment, I sighed. I’d been diagnosed with sleepwalking for the past year. Sometimes it was harmless, but there was one particularly brutal night where I had woken up on the floor of the garage with a nasty scrape on my hand. Since then, Amelie had taken precautions.
It’d gotten better these last few months, up until about a week ago. Evidence of a troubled mind. Amelie never said this, but we both knew she was thinking it.
Sometimes I really hated that stupid pact.
I accepted her offer for my own cup of coffee—decaf was not bitter enough for my taste, but I needed something to distract myself—and closed my eyes.
Maybe I’d ought to tell her. Amelie, I’d say. Have you noticed that mattress by the Landry’s mailbox?
She’d roll her eyes until I could see the whites. If this is your way of telling me we need a new mattress, I—
There’s a hole in it. And a red stain. How do you figure that?
She’d blink once. Twice. Wondering if I was being serious or only humoring her. Once she had decided on the latter, she’d unleash a sigh too big for her body. I figure someone stained their mattress and decided to trash it, she’d say stoically. Now hurry and drink your coffee, dear. It’s getting cold.
The perfect deflection. Drink your coffee before it gets cold. Eat your bacon before it gets cold. Denis, for God’s sake, won’t you eat your baked potato before it gets cold?
***
The garbage truck never came. It seemed I’d have to endure all the “what-ifs” for the weekend.
I couldn’t help thinking there was a reason. In that way, I suppose I was a good Christian. One strike for “seeing is believing” but one back for believing in fate. And if this was not fate, what was it?
Amelie was right. I needed to get out more.
We watched football on TV. Amelie is not a connoisseur of sports, but she thinks I like it, and in her mind sitting through a sporting event is the kind of noble sacrifice a good wife makes. She doesn’t know that I like football in the way all old men seem to like football.
Giving you back the testosterone you don’t have. I heard the words in Amelie’s voice and stifled a chuckle. There was no denying I had what many would call an “overactive imagination.”
As our home team worked their way down the field, I wondered how the bullet entered his body. The ribs or the chest? Did it skirt the lungs or bust them completely?
How about the shooter? Was he standing over Thomas or in front of him? I imagined Thomas startling in the night. His gray combover all askew, his eyes rheumy as he stared at the door. Thinking it was his stepdaughter getting a drink in the kitchen. Or Rebecca—Mrs. Landry—shuffling with some papers at the table. Valid rationalizations.
Then he’d sit up farther and notice the shadow in front of him. He’d squint at the hulking shoulders and ski mask, and just when he realized he was about to be shot, bang!
No, no, no. White board. Eraser. Wipe it away.
Though I hurried to eradicate it, even I couldn’t deny it was a compelling narrative, if an unrealistic one. If Thomas had been shot by a thief, surely Mrs. Landry would’ve said something, not to mention there’d be loads of evidence to prove it. Likely she’d have been killed herself, along with her daughter. So then, how did it happen?
I realized I was chewing my nails. I stopped immediately. My cuticle was bleeding. I watched the crimson drip down my thumb like ink on parchment. Like pinot noir, only darker. Thicker.
***
“Amelie, dear,” I said from my special place on the couch. We were on the final episode of The Bachelor. Only two girls remaining, Cece and Sarah. Amelie wanted Sarah. I thought Cece was prettier. Not that my opinion counted for anything.
Amelie would kill me if any of her work friends knew she watched The Bachelor. Apparently it was in poor taste considering her profession. I didn’t understand it, but I reveled in this one thing that no one else knew.
Now though, we had hit a lull in the drama, so I took the opportunity to ask, “How much blood comes out of a bullet to the chest?”
I wasn’t looking at her, but I could feel the way she shifted, her grip tightening on tonight’s second glass of pinot noir. “What’s prompted this?” she said.
Those three words shuddered through me, wrenching open the floodgates of my regret. I recognized that tone, usually muffled behind her office door. Her doctor’s voice.
“Nothing in particular,” I replied insouciantly. I didn’t so much as blink. As I said, I was a skilled liar.
I don’t know if she bought it or thought it was better to indulge me anyway, but she said, “Well. I suppose that would depend on a variety of factors.”
“Such as?”
She saved herself an immediate answer by taking a sip of wine. A small sip. Constrained. “Where the bullet entered. In the upper chest or lower chest. There are a lot of extremities there. And if the bullet went through cleanly or lodged somewhere inside.” She feigned an impassive shrug. “You forget, I’m a doctor of the mind.”
I shrugged it off and pretended to lose myself in the drama. Cece and Jim were preparing for the fantasy suites. I could sense Amelie watching me, but I kept my gaze forward, perfectly nonplussed. In reality, my earlier regret had been replaced by disappointment. She’d provided no new information.
Worse—now I’d given her a reason to worry.
We came to a commercial. Before I could press the skip button, she said, “They mentioned Thomas Landry on the news earlier.”
The news. The news! I’d been so distracted, I hadn’t even thought to calm my mind with the proof. How could I have missed it?
My pulse quickened, but I pretended to fumble with the remote as I asked, “Who again?”
“Thomas Landry down the street. It was a suicide. I guess he’d been separated from Rebecca for a while.” She shook her head in that slow way people did when speaking of tragedy, only harsher when you remembered these were the type of cases she dealt with on a daily basis.
Unless they reconciled, I wanted to say to her most recent comment. Unless they were in the same house and he died on that mattress.
Unless he was murdered.
“A real shame,” I said instead, hoping my deflation wasn’t visible on my face.
I jammed my finger on the skip button.
***
Sarah won, just like Amelie said she would. I was hardly watching. Suicide, suicide. This word replayed in my mind, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, like our coffee machine churning in the mornings.
How did he do it? An overdose? A knife? A gun? What else could account for that hole I’d seen in the mattress?
The mattress that was still sitting on the curb of the Landry house. How had no one else noticed that little splotch of darkness?
I didn’t believe my own assessments. I needed to test it. I needed to be bold, like Sarah when she confessed her love to Jim.
***
Amelie was a quick sleeper. It didn’t take long for her breathing to slow. Sometimes, when I really couldn’t sleep, I timed my breaths to it. I’d watch her, her long nose gleaming in the moonlight from the window, the last bit of lipstick staining her full lips. I had enjoyed kissing those lips, once.
I slipped out from under the covers and crossed to the closet. There was a safe buried under old tote bags and clothes that had fallen off their hangers. Code 1216. Amelie’s birthday. We’d been meaning to change it to something a little more original.
The safe was far too large for the small stash it held. A pair of diamond earrings belonging to Amelie’s late mother, some old financial documents, birth certificates, passports from our trip to Jamaica nine summers ago. Amelie must’ve been in a hurry to pull something recently because everything was in disarray. I pushed it all to the side.
Glock 19, 9mm. Standard home defense weapon. Needless to say it’d never been used. I fumbled for the ammunition and stuffed a few rounds in my pocket.
Ever so slowly, I slipped out the bedroom door and into the foyer. If Amelie asked, I’d say I went for a late-night jog. Say I felt guilty about falling into bad habits. Or that I’d been sleepwalking again.
I slipped into the frigid autumn air. My flimsy t-shirt offered little in the way of warmth, but my mind was too scrambled to turn back now.
I made the short journey to the Landry’s house. The lights were off. If Thomas and Mrs. Landry were separated, he’d likely croaked somewhere else. Maybe Mrs. Landry had taken her daughter somewhere. To forget. Or to distract themselves from aching memories.
I went immediately to the mattress. Relief flooded me as I noted the hole, exactly where I’d first seen it. I dared to come closer. In the glow of moonlight and distant street lamps, I could make out the slime-shaped stain.
I pushed my finger into the hole. Then I fished in my pocket for one of the bullets and slipped it out of the casing.
A perfect match. No. Just another of my delusions. In truth, the hole was slightly wider than the bullet, but this was to be expected of a gunshot. Memory foam was durable, but a bullet would tear even the most marketable material.
I took a few steps back and cast a few glances behind me. My watch read 2:04. A faint wind stirred the leaves over the sidewalk to my right. Deep breath in and out.
I aimed the gun. Took a step forward. Then back. If someone was laying flat, with their head a few inches below the top of the mattress, the hole would be in the upper left portion of their chest.
Right under the heart.
***
I dreamed that night. After I’d run home and stashed the pistol and ammo in the safe, I slipped back under the covers and fell into a fitful doze.
I saw myself like a movie. My thinning ginger hair. My scruffy beard with the bald patch on the chin. 39 years old. This was one of those depressing movies about a shitty man realizing he’d never really lived at all.
But then he did something drastic. He stood at the foot of a master bed. He felt the memory foam against his knee. So soft. He would’ve loved to sleep on it.
But the real Denis was only watching from the sidelines.
A faceless man wheezed in the bed. He stirred at the sound of the pistol cocking.
Denis raised the gun and shot him in the heart.
***
“Coffee, honey?”
My head throbbed. I turned on her. “What?”
Why did she have to look so done up? It was a Sunday afternoon. She was working on our taxes at the kitchen table. Her reading glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose, but it only accented her professionalism. As usual, her lipstick had been applied with a careful hand. She’d even braided her hair. She never braided her hair.
My hands balled into fists. I unclenched them slowly. “Yes, coffee,” I said.
She watched me. The lines on her face deepened, like the crumpled pages of those magazines she liked. Her mouth opened to say something, and for a moment all I could see was the potato skin on her tongue.
I barely noticed when she set the coffee in front of me.
“Drink before it—”
“Gets cold,” I finished. “I know.”
***
Amelie watched me all day. I thought she would make an effort to talk before bed, but she kept to herself. Her rosy silk gown shimmered against her thighs. She was beautiful, my wife. I didn’t notice it enough.
We laid back against the pillows. A few minutes passed. Perhaps an hour. My heart pounded. Yet still, her breathing did not slow.
Amelie’s hand reached out to squeeze my shoulder. Slowly so as not to spook me, she leaned closer. Her breath smelled minty and fresh, and her chin grazed my beard.
I love you. That’s what she would say. I prepared myself for it in a way no other man has prepared himself for a declaration from his wife of 13 years.
But she did not say she loved me. She said, “I know.”
I know. Know what? Sweat moistened my palms, and I had the urge to bite my thumbnail again. The dream kept creeping back. Me. The gun. The perfectly-shaped hole in the mattress.
Or was it something else?
It was a long time ago, I reminded myself. It must’ve been what, a decade by now? It didn’t mean anything.
They say it doesn’t matter how these things start. But you have to understand. Amelie’d been away on a retreat. It was a Friday. The bar was open. I’d seen the woman’s dark braid from across the room.
She’d been getting over something too. Except it wasn’t the painful mundanity of a man with no prospects, but the very real struggles of a young mother who’d just lost her husband.
And I. Well. Amelie had her gripes with me, but I was good at providing comfort. That night, I’d overestimated what Rebecca’s form of comfort was.
Mrs. Landry. I called her this in my head ever since she married Thomas Landry. A sort of mental reinforcement, a shield to the intimacy of what she really was to me. No, not what she was. What she had been. Once.
More than once. In my heart, it had always been more than once. And if that was true…
I did not realize I had gone back to the safe. My movements were rehearsed. I had done this before. Perhaps several times.
I checked the time. 12:16. The night was black and the moon was a fluorescent glow in the clouds. And there in its faint light was the mattress.
I didn’t realize until I had reached it that the moon was not the only light. 1612 Mulberry Lane was illuminated from the inside out.
My hands shook. Everything shook. The bullets in my pocket felt heavy.
But I needed to be sure.
How long did they watch me before I noticed them? Mrs. Landry—Rebecca—had come out to the porch in her rose-pink robe. Her young daughter lingered in the doorway behind her, and Rebecca spoke harshly. I filled it in myself. Go back inside.
I couldn’t look away from her. Her beautiful brown eyes dropped to the pistol.
It was me, I wanted to say. I don’t know how but it was me.
It’s okay, she’d say. She’d run to me, fold me in her arms. Make me stop imagining, for just a moment, like she had all those years ago.
I closed my eyes. In and out.
“Denis,” she said. A whisper that sounded like a scream.
Had I heard her speak since that night? I must’ve. But surely I would’ve remembered that.
I opened my eyes and stared at her. Tears glowed against her cheeks.
“It’s okay,” she said, and I could not tell if it was her or me.
But we both shared the same thought: I was the one with the gun. The one with the motive.
The sleepwalker.
I held those deep brown eyes for as long as I could stand. My hand tightened on the grip.
Then I did what I had grown quite good at over the past few years, in my own small way. Amelie would’ve been proud.
I ran.
[Image Credit : Photo by Galina Nelyubova on Unsplash]
Lauren Miller is an emerging fiction writer and poet based in Kansas. She recently graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in Creative Writing. Her work has previously appeared in The Kiosk Magazine and Discretionary Love.
