Page 86 of Beneath Her Skin

The familiar sting of his rejection stabs through her chest. It was two years of marriage before she finally got pregnant, and not from lack of trying on her part. “I’m not one yet.”

Kenneth grins that. “And I can’t wait, darling.”

He ducks out of the kitchen, and for a moment, Judith just stares at the empty doorway, her hand on her belly. Then she turns back to the pile of carrots and potatoes and onions. Nearly done. The meat is next, a big glistening hunk of cow flesh she’ll slice into bits small enough to fit on a spoon.

All this so Kenneth will keep his wandering eye in check when he’s in Pennsylvania, surrounded by the senior architects and their young and unmarried secretaries. Judith knows he looks—all men look—but she has heard from the other company wives that he doesn’t touch. Still, she worries. He’s the perfect husband in so many ways, doting and loving, buying this sprawling architectural wonder in the middle of the forest so they could have the space to raise a family. He tells her he loves her every day and showers her with chaste kisses.

What he doesn’t do is fuck her. And that’s why she worries about the secretaries.

You’re his wife, not his mistress,Judith’s mother told her shortly after their luxurious but disappointing honeymoon in Hawaii. They married only a year after meeting, in large part because Kenneth insisted on doing things traditionally, even with the sexual revolution blossoming around them on campus. Only kisses until the wedding night. And then, even with two weeks in the tropics, their wedding night was the only night they made love.

Don’t let him forget what he has waiting at home. That was the other thing Judith’s mother told her, Judith in tears, thephone cradled against her cheek.A good wife. That way, he’ll always come back to you.

Judith keeps cutting.

2

Kenneth leaves early the next morning, pulling his beloved Monte Carlo out into the gently drifting snow. It’s still dark out, but Judith gets up early fix to his breakfast and to see him off, clutching the neck of her robe shut against the cold.

“I’ll see you in a week, my love!” he calls out of the driver’s side window.

Judith blows him a kiss and calls out, “I love you! Be safe!”

And then the headlights sweep over her, and then he’s gone.

She goes back inside and turns the lock. They’re isolated out here, but you can never be too careful. Judith’s feral childhood taught her how dangerous empty woods can be.

The house feels cold and dark and sterile, except for the kitchen, which has the remains of breakfast soaking in the sink. Judith looks at them for a long time.

Then she goes back to bed.

When she wakes up again, two hours later, the bedroom is flooded with grey winter sunlight. She read in the newspaper that a snowstorm is supposed to hit this afternoon, and she can already feel it edging closer to their sprawling house in thewoods. At least Kenneth’s flight will have already taken off by now.

Judith gets dressed in front of the enormous plate glass window that looks out at the forest, taking her time pulling on her thick woolen trousers and slouchy turtleneck sweater. Kenneth hates when she does this, always worried that some wayward hunter traipsing through the trees will see her, but Judith likes the little thrill of it, standing naked before the entire world.

When she’s dressed, she goes through her usual makeup routine, out of habit more than anything. She curls and teases her hair. Then she goes into the kitchen and brews a fresh pot of coffee, still ignoring the dishes in the sink. The snowfall from Kenneth’s departure has slacked off, but the sky is heaving with the impending storm.

Judith puts on her snow boots and takes her coffee out to the little courtyard nestled between the two wings of the house. The house was designed forty years ago by Kenneth’s idol Herbert Erlich, an architect who trained under Frank Lloyd Wright, and this house was his magnum opus. It was designed, Kenneth told her when they moved in, to blend into the lines and patterns of the forest. In nice weather you can open all the windows and bring the forest into the house; in the winter, you can shut them to trap the warmth. But it’s all windows, so you can see everything: The forest. The sky. The courtyard, which right now is covered in a fresh layer of snow. As Judith drinks her coffee, she can see her reflection in the windows across the way, Kenneth’s office dark behind them.

Judith likes the house, although she likes it better during the mild summers, when everything is open and she can smell the cedar and pine as she tends to her chores. In the winter, the house feels like ice, even though it’s warm from the central heat blasting out of the furnace vents and the gas fireplaces scatteredaround the various parlors and sitting rooms. It’s the windows—all those windows with their views of the endless snowy landscape. It’ll be worse with the storm. The newspaper said they should expect up to two feet of snow.

Judith drifts through the courtyard until her coffee’s too cold to drink, then she goes inside and heats it back up in the microwave, an expensive appliance she still finds marvelous. She watches her coffee mug spin around inside, zapped by invisible energy rays, and tries to decide what she wants to do first, now that Kenneth is gone for a week.

The fallout shelter, she thinks, right as the microwave beeps. She pulls it open and her coffee steams like it’s fresh.

The fallout shelter is the one part of the house she has never seen. It was built in the 1950s, added not by the architect but by his son, who built it, Kenneth said, against his father’s will. “Can you imagine?” he said when they first discovered the entrance—a grey cinderblock door hidden behind a pair of inkberry shrubs. “Erlich was dying of throat cancer and he still tried to put a stop to it.”

“What’s in it?” Judith asked.

“Nothing,” Kenneth wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her back toward the house. “Dust. Rotted canned goods.”

That was shortly after they moved in, but Kenneth has always been strange about the fallout shelter. He says they should ignore it, that it’s not part of Erlich’s original designs for the house and should be treated as an affront. But he goes in there. Judith knows that he does. She’s seen him when she’s mopping the floors in the formal dining room, which is the only part of the house where the windows face the shelter entrance. He’ll go for one of his walks but emerge from behind the inkberry shrubs, his hands tucked in his pockets.

She asked him about it only once, three months ago. All summer long, she had watched Kenneth walk to and fromthe fallout shelter. Every weekend, he would flit around that entrance like a bumblebee.

One day, while he was in the office, she walked down there and found an enormous silver padlock on the door.

Curiosity burned her from the inside out. And something else, too. A sense of dread.

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