Old Maid For My Room, Young Maid For His Bed, I Kicked All Three Out novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: What the Camera Saw

Eli's bath-time details and the hall camera footage show every night, and the old maid with her thermos at ten.

I gave Eli his bath myself that evening, and I didn't let Britt help.

"I can do it, Britt," I said at the bathroom door. "Go and have your dinner."

"Are you sure? You need your rest, Mrs. Granlund."

"I'm sure."

She went, still smiling.

Eli sat in the tub with a plastic whale and told me about his week.

He told me the dinosaur at school was named Gerald. He told me a boy in his class had a loose tooth.

Then, with his chin on the edge of the tub, he said, "Britt sleeps in Daddy's big bed when you're at the hospital."

I kept the washcloth moving across his back.

"Only when I'm at the hospital?"

He thought about it, honestly, the way he thinks about everything.

"No. Before that too. When you were in your room with the door shut. She said it was a secret sleepover and I'm not allowed to say."

"Why are you telling me, then?"

"Because you're my mom," Eli said. "And Daddy laughed at me on the phone."

I rinsed his hair and wrapped him in a towel and held him longer than he wanted.

"You did the right thing," I told him. "Always tell me."

He nodded into my shoulder.

At ten the tea came.

I poured it into the fern, and Dorothea took the empty cup away without looking at the dirt.

At eleven the house went quiet.

I sat up in bed with my phone.

Four months ago Craig had put a camera in the upstairs hall and another by the stairs.

He said it was so I could watch Eli from bed and not worry.

He had set up the app on my phone himself.

I had never opened it once.

I opened it now.

The footage went back thirty days. I started at the beginning and ran it fast, with the sound on low.

Every night at about ten, Dorothea went up the hall to my room with her thermos.

Every night at about midnight, Britt came in from the little room over the garage.

She crossed the hall in her socks and let herself into my husband's room.

She never knocked.

She came out at five in the morning, when it was still dark.

All those nights I had been lying in the next room with the door shut, thinking I was a burden to everyone.

On last Tuesday, at the bottom of the stairs, after Dorothea left my room, Craig was waiting.

"Did she drink it?" he said.

"All of it," Dorothea said. "She was asleep before I closed the door."

"Good."

He put his hand on her shoulder, familiar and approving.

I looked at that on the screen and told myself the same thing each time.

He wanted me to sleep. He was worried about me. I had been awake so many nights after the first baby.

That was what I told myself.

I made it through twelve more nights of footage with my jaw clenched so tight my ears hurt.

Then I got to last Thursday.

It was the night before the bleeding started and I went into the hospital.

The hall was lit by the little lamp on the table.

I watched myself walk to the bathroom in my nightgown, one hand on the wall, and walk back to my room.

My door shut.

Two minutes later, Britt came out of Craig's room in my robe.

The green one. My mother's gift.

She laughed, low and happy, and leaned back against the doorframe.

Craig came out after her and pulled her in by the belt.

"Soon," he told her. "I promise. A few more weeks and she's out of the picture."

"You said that in August," Britt said.

"Well, now I mean it."

He kissed her.

I watched it all the way through, then watched it again.

I saved every clip to a folder I named "Recipes."

Down the hall, a door closed.

I put the phone face down on my chest.

My husband's footsteps passed my door and went on to his own room.

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