Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Hold on, I need to rest. Lift to the
right. Hold on, you’re going too fast. Watch out, my fingers
my fingers!
) will be its own much-needed team-building
exercise. After the sofa, we’ll pick up lunch from the corner
deli, bagel sandwiches to eat on the road. Cold soda.
Nick lets me keep the sofa, but our other big items are
staying in New York. One of Nick’s friends will inherit the
bed; the guy will come by later to our empty home – nothing
but dust and cable cords left – and take the bed, and then
he’ll live his New York life in our New York bed, eating two
a.m. Chinese food and having lazy-condomed sex with
tipsy, brass-mouthed girls who work in PR. (Our home itself
will be taken over by a noisy couple, hubby-wife lawyers
who are shamelessly, brazenly gleeful at this buyers’-
market deal. I hate them.)
I carry one load for every four that Nick grunts down. I
move slowly, shuffling, like my bones hurt, a feverish
delicacy descending on me. Everything does hurt. Nick
buzzes past me, going up or down, and throws his frown at
me, snaps, ‘You okay?’ and keeps moving before I answer,
leaving me gaping, a cartoon with a black mouth-hole. I am
not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want
my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to
baby me a little bit. Just for a second.
Inside the back of the truck, he fusses with the boxes.
Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the
loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags.
But by hour three, it is clear that we’ve sold or gifted too
many of our belongings. The U-Haul’s massive cavern is
only half full. It gives me my single satisfaction of the day,

---

that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of
mercury. 
Good
, I think. 
Good
.
‘We can take the bed if you really want to,’ Nick says,
looking past me down the street. ‘We have enough room.’
‘No, you promised it to Wally, Wally should have it,’ I
say primly.
I was wrong
. Just say: 
I was wrong, I’m sorry, let’s take
the bed. You should have your old, comforting bed in this
new place
. Smile at me and be nice to me. Today, be nice
to me.
Nick blows out a sigh. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want.
Amy? Is it?’ He stands, slightly breathless, leaning on a
stack of boxes, the top one with Magic Marker scrawl: 
Amy
Clothes Winter
. ‘This is the last I’ll hear about the bed,
Amy? Because I’m offering right now. I’m happy to pack the
bed for you.’
‘How gracious of you,’ I say, just a whiff of breath, the
way I say most retorts: a puff of perfume from a rank
atomizer. I am a coward. I don’t like confrontation. I pick up
a box and start toward the truck.
‘What did you say?’
I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry,
because it will make him more angry.
Ten minutes later, the stairs are pounding – bang!
bang! bang! Nick is dragging our sofa down by himself.
I can’t even look behind me as we leave New York,
because the truck has no back window. In the side mirror, I
track the skyline (the 
receding skyline
– isn’t that what they
write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is
forced to leave her ancestral home?), but none of the good

---

buildings – not the Chrysler or the Empire State or the
Flatiron, they never appear in that little shining rectangle.
My parents dropped by the night before, presented us
with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and
the three of us cried and hugged as Nick shuffled his hands
in his pockets and promised to take care of me.
He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I
feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it
will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel
like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and
unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to
be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary.
I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

---