Hello, Corinne
David tore at the broken edge of the wall with his bare hands.
Drywall came away in chunks, then a slat snapped, then another, and the hole grew until it was big enough for a grown man's shoulders, and the whole time the woman inside watched him with those streaming brown eyes and did not make a sound, because the tape wouldn't let her.
"I've got you," he heard himself saying.
"I've got you, I've got you."
He reached in and she flinched — flinched from his hands — and that small motion broke something in him that never fully healed.
He went slower.
He slid his arms under hers, and she weighed almost nothing, and he lifted his wife out of the wall of their own house and into the light of the closet she had picked the paint for.
Behind him, Corinne's voice, strange and bright.
"Oh my God. Oh my God, David, who is that? How did she get in there?"
He didn't answer.
He knelt on the floor with Emma against his chest and worked a fingernail under the corner of the duct tape.
"This is going to hurt. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He peeled it back as gently as his shaking hands allowed, and the first thing Emma Calloway did with her freed mouth was not scream, and not speak.
She turned her face toward Lily and tried to smile.
Her lips cracked when she did it.
"Hey, baby," she whispered.
Her voice was a ruin, a dry hinge, barely air.
"You found me."
Lily made a sound David had never heard a child make and folded into her mother's side, and Emma pressed her bound wrists over the girl like a gate, and for a moment the closet held only the sound of the two of them breathing each other in.
"Water," David said.
"Corinne — water. Call 911. Now."
Corinne didn't move.
She stood in the closet doorway with one hand at the collar of her blouse, and her eyes were moving fast — from the hole, to Emma, to the hole again — and later David would understand she was doing math.
"David, sweetheart, think," she said.
"We don't know who this woman is. She could be — people get into houses, squatters, there was that story in Dayton — we should wait outside for the police, we shouldn't be touching her—"
"It's Emma."
His voice came out level and wrong.
"It's my wife."
"That's — no. Honey, no. Emma left you. You showed me the texts yourself. This poor woman is obviously sick, look at her, she probably crawled in from the crawlspace and got stuck—"
"Her wrists are tied, Corinne."
Silence.
David pulled his own phone from his pocket and dialed 911 himself.
David worked at the rope while he cradled the phone against his shoulder, and the 911 operator's voice was saying something calm and far away, ambulance, officers en route, stay on the line, and Lily wouldn't let go of her mother's shirt, and Emma's eyes never left Corinne.
Never once.
Not while David sawed the rope loose with the multitool from his nightstand.
Not while he held the water glass to her mouth and told her small sips, small sips.
She drank, and coughed, and drank again, and all the while she watched the woman in the doorway the way you watch a dog that has bitten you before.
Corinne had gone quiet.
She had her arms crossed now, and her face had rearranged itself into something soft and stricken, the face of a woman standing bravely inside someone else's tragedy, and she said, mostly to the ceiling:
"I just don't understand any of this."
Emma swallowed one more sip of water.
She lifted her head off David's shoulder, slow, deliberate, the tendons standing out in her neck like cords, and when she spoke, her wrecked voice was almost gentle.
"Hello, Corinne."
The room stopped.
David felt the words before he understood them, felt them like ice water down the spine, because his wife had been inside a wall for seven months, and the woman in the doorway had walked into his life five months ago, and there was no night, no morning, no version of the world in which the two of them had ever met.
Corinne's arms came uncrossed.
"What did she say?"
"You heard me," Emma whispered.
Downstairs, hard knocking — Police department, open the door — and Lily jumped, and David couldn't move, couldn't look away from the doorway.
Because Corinne was smiling at Emma.
Only for a second.
A small, private, almost fond smile, the kind you give an old friend across a crowded room, and then it was gone and she was crying prettily and calling out, "Up here, officers, please hurry," and David knelt on the closet floor holding his wife and understood, with total clarity, that he had let something into his house that he did not understand at all.
Emma's hand found his.
Her voice was almost gone now, but she got the whole sentence out.
"Don't leave Lily alone with her. Not for one minute."
