As one of only two physicians on the island, they practically paid me to come.
I press my lips to Will’s mouth this time, my ticket to leave.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I say, calling again to Otto to hurry up or we’ll be late. I grab my things from the countertop and tell him I’ll be in the car waiting. “Two minutes,” I say, knowing he’ll stretch two to five or six as he always does.
I kiss little Tate goodbye before I go. He stands on his chair, wraps his sticky arms around my neck and screams into an ear, “I love you, Mommy,” and somewhere inside of me my heart skips a beat because I know that at least one of them still loves me.
My car sits on the driveway beside Will’s sedan. Though we have a garage attached to the house, it’s overrun with boxes that we have yet to unpack.
The car is cold when I arrive, covered in a thin layer of frost that has settled on the windows overnight. I unlock the door with my key fob. The headlights blink; a light turns on inside.
I reach for the door handle. But before I can give it a tug, I catch sight of something on the window that stops me. There are lines streaked through the frost on the driver’s side. They’ve started to liquefy in the warmth of the morning’s sunlight, softening at their edges. But still, they’re there. I step closer. As I do, I see that the lines are not lines at all, but letters traced into the frost on the window, coming together to form a single word: Die.
A hand shoots to my mouth. I don’t have to think hard to know who left this message for me to find. Imogen doesn’t want us here. She wants us to leave.
I’ve tried to be understanding because of how awful the situation must be for her. Her life has been upended. She lost her mother and now must share her home with people she doesn’t know. But that doesn’t justify threatening me. Because Imogen doesn’t mince words. She means just what she said. She wants me to die.
I make my way back up the porch steps and call through the front door for Will.
“What is it?” he asks, making his way from the kitchen. “Did you forget something?” he asks as he cocks his head to the side, taking in my keys, my bag, my coffee. I didn’t forget something.
“You have to see this,” I say, whispering now so the boys don’t hear.
Will follows me barefoot out the front door, though the concrete is bitterly cold. Three feet from the car I point at it, the word inscribed in the frost of the window. “You see it?” I ask, turning my eyes to Will’s. He sees it. I can tell as much in his expression, in the way it turns instantly distressed, mirroring mine.
“Shit,” he says because he, like me, knows who left that there. He rubs at his forehead, thinking this through. “I’ll talk to her,” he says, and I ask defensively, “What good will that do?”
We’ve talked to Imogen many times over the last few weeks. We’ve discussed the language she uses, especially around Tate; the need for a curfew; more. Though talking at would be a more fitting term than talking to because it isn’t a conversation we have. It’s a lecture. She stands while Will or I speak. She listens, maybe. She rarely replies. She takes nothing to heart and then she leaves.
Will’s voice is quiet when he speaks. “We don’t know for certain that she left this here,” he says softly, floating an idea by me, one I’d rather not consider. “Isn’t it possible,” Will asks, “that someone left that message for Otto?”
“You think someone left a death threat on my window for our fourteen-year-old child?” I ask, in case Will has somehow misconstrued the meaning of that word Die.
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” he asks, and though I know that it is, I tell him, “No.” I say it with more conviction in my voice than I feel, because I don’t want to believe it. “Not again,” I insist. “We left all that behind when we moved.”
But did we? It isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that someone is being mean to Otto. That someone’s bullying him. It’s happened before. It can happen again.
I say to Will, “Maybe we should call the police.”
But Will shakes his head. “Not until we know who did this. If it’s Imogen, is that really a reason to involve the police? She’s just an angry girl, Sadie. She’s grieving, lashing out. She’d never do anything to hurt any of us.”
“Wouldn’t she?” I ask, far less sure than Will. Imogen has become another point of contention in our marriage. She and Will are related by blood; there’s a connection there that I don’t have.
When Will doesn’t reply, I go on, arguing, “No matter who the intended recipient, Will, it’s still a death threat. That’s a very serious thing.”
“I know, I know,” he says, glancing over his shoulder to be sure Otto isn’t on his way out. He speaks quickly, says, “But if we get the police involved, Sadie, it will draw attention to Otto. Unwanted attention. The kids will look at him differently, if they don’t already. He won’t stand a chance. Let me call the school first. Speak to his teacher, the principal, make sure Otto isn’t having trouble with anyone. I know you’re worried,” he says, voice softening as he reaches out, runs a comforting hand along my arm. “I’m worried, too,” he says. “But can we do that first,” he asks, “before calling the police? And can I at least have a conversation with Imogen before we just assume this was her?”
This is Will. Always the voice of reason in our marriage.
“Fine,” I tell him, relenting, admitting that he might be right. I hate to think of Otto as an outcast in a new school, of him being bullied like this.
But I also can’t stand to consider the animosity Imogen has toward us. We have to get to the bottom of this without making things worse. “But if it happens again, if anything like this happens again,” I say, pulling my hand from my bag, “we go to the police.”
“Deal,” Will agrees, and he kisses me on the forehead. “We’ll get this taken care of,” he says, “before it has a chance to go too far.”
“Do you promise?” I ask, wishing Will could snap his fingers and make everything better, just like that.
“I promise,” he says as I watch him skip back up the stairs and inside the house, disappearing behind the door. I scribble my hand through the letters. I wipe my hands on the thighs of my pants before letting myself into the cold car. I start the engine and blast the defrost, watching as it takes the last traces of the message away, though it’ll stay with me all day.
The minutes on the car’s dash pass by, two and then three. I stare at the front door, waiting for it to open back up, for Otto to appear this time, slogging to the car with an unreadable expression on his face that gives no indication of what’s going on inside his mind. Because that’s the only face he makes these days.
They say that parents should know these things—what our kids are thinking—but we don’t. Not always. We can never really know what anyone else is thinking.
And yet when children make poor choices, parents are the first to be blamed.
How didn’t they know? critics often ask. How did they overlook the warning signs?
Why weren’t they paying attention to what their kids were doing?—which is a favorite of mine because it implies we weren’t.
But I was.
Before, Otto was quiet and introverted. He liked to draw, cartoons mostly, with a fondness for anime, the hip characters with their wild hair and their larger-than-life eyes. He named them, the images in his sketch pad—and had a dream to one day create his own graphic novel based on the adventures of Asa and