The Baby Monitor Caught Him, So I Played It at Sunday Dinner novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Frequency
At 2 a.m. the baby monitor picks up a whisper from the house behind hers, Martha records a man promising to leave at Christmas in her husband's voice, kisses Jonas when he comes home, and texts his mother to put the whole family at Sunday dinner on the 15th.
"Say it again," a woman whispered out of my baby monitor.
It was 2:07 in the morning, and my daughter was asleep on her back in the crib with both fists beside her ears.
The whisper did not come from her.
I was standing over her in my socks with a burp cloth on my shoulder, and my phone was already in my hand.
I pressed record before I understood why.
Then I held it against the speaker of the receiver and stood there, not breathing.
A man answered her, and he was whispering too.
"I leave at Christmas. I told you. After Mutti's Christmas Eve I tell her, and I'm out by New Year's."
I knew that voice.
I had heard it say my name every night for five years.
Under it I could hear a refrigerator humming and a chair taking someone's weight.
The room was a kitchen, and the kitchen was not mine.
Our monitor was picking up some other house on the same channel.
"You said Easter," the woman whispered.
"That was before the hospital."
His voice dropped lower.
"She hasn't been right since the hospital. I can't do it to her while she's like that. She keeps the house."
The woman made a small sound, almost a laugh.
I knew that laugh too.
Lena Kuhn had laughed exactly like that in September, standing in my front hall with a casserole, looking down into my daughter's car seat.
Lena rented the house on Hickory Street behind our back fence.
She had dated my husband for a year when they were twenty-three, ten years before I met him.
She had a baby of her own, seven months old, and she had told me, smiling, that his father was out of the picture.
In the monitor, a baby made a thin waking noise.
"Hey, little man," the man whispered. "Go back to sleep."
Then the receiver clicked and went to static.
The phone said nearly twelve minutes.
I came home from the hospital on the first of September, and for a month I cried in the shower where he couldn't hear it.
I had told him so twice.
He had held me both times and said he was sorry I was hurting.
I sat down in the rocking chair with the phone in my lap.
I played it again with one earbud in, so I would be sure.
I played it a third time.
Then I sent the file to my own email and to a cloud folder nobody in his family could open.
I copied it to the old tablet in the hall closet, which nobody but me ever charges.
My hands were steady, and that frightened me more than anything on the tape.
Jonas worked the eleven-to-seven shift at the rail yard, walking the trains with a lantern and a hammer.
Thanksgiving dinner at his mother's had run until ten, and he had gone straight from the dishes to work.
He kissed me at the door and said, "Sleep, Marty."
I did not go back to bed.
I sat in the dark with the baby breathing and the receiver glowing green and waited for six-forty.
His truck came into the driveway at 6:41.
I heard the door, the boots on the mat, the quiet way he hung his coat up so the hook wouldn't knock.
He came up the stairs and stopped in the nursery doorway with frost in his stubble and his lantern still on his belt.
He looked at me in the chair.
"You're up," he said.
"She was fussy."
He crossed the room in three strides and lifted the baby out of the crib, so gently that she didn't wake.
She fit against his chest with her cheek in the hollow of his collarbone.
He began to hum the German song his mother sang about counting the stars, low and flat.
I watched him do it.
I wanted to be sick, and I wanted to put my face in his neck.
Both of those were true at once.
"Your hands are cold," he said.
He took one of mine in his free hand and held it against his stomach, under his shirt.
He was warm from the truck heater.
I let him.
His skin was hot and I felt the muscle there flinch at how cold I was.
"Marty."
"Yes," I said.
"Did you eat?"
"No."
"I'll make toast," he said. "You'll eat it. Then you'll go to bed and I'll take her until noon."
He leaned down and kissed me, slow, with the baby between us.
His mouth tasted like coffee and cold air.
My body answered him before I could stop it, and I hated that more than I had hated the whisper.
"I'm just tired," I said against his jaw.
"I know."
He laid her back in the crib and went down to the toaster, still humming.
I stayed where I was and thought it through in a list.
If I screamed at him in my own kitchen, he would say I had misheard.
He would say I was exhausted, three months postpartum, hearing things.
His mother would back him up, because the Rowes did not air things.
So I wasn't going to scream.
I picked up my phone and opened my messages to Hannelore, his mother.
Hannelore ran Sunday dinner at one o'clock, every week, at the big table in Kettering, and nobody sat at it who had not been told.
I typed, Can we do the fifteenth with everyone? Both boys. Annelise too. I'll bring the pie.
I pressed send before the toast popped.
Her answer came while I was still sitting there, with the toaster ticking downstairs and his humming coming up the stairwell.
Both boys, she wrote. Annelise too. I'll set the big table.
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