White Space Season 1

the “experts” said “someone” should have picked up on.
    Five days of having her husband’s life dissected and invaded by specialists, authors, and news anchors, who were all suddenly experts on the subject of Roger Heller.
    But there had been no sign. Not that she’d seen, anyway.
    But Liz wasn’t even sure if she would have recognized a sign if it had been there. Though Roger was sweet, he was often in his own world — distant and holed up in his office for hours on end on nights and weekends. But he’d always been that way.
    He needed his personal space to write. He’d had a few stories published in literary magazines, and a few articles in writing magazines, but he’d never been able to finish a novel, not one that he liked, anyway. And after he turned 40 last year, he began to spend even more time than ever writing, convinced he was running out of time to write the “Great American Novel.”
    Though Roger’s distance had bothered her at times, it wasn’t as if she didn’t have her own life going on. Until Aubrey was born in May, Liz was a ninth grade English teacher at the school, which had kept her busy day and night. She had decided to take an extended maternity leave so she could be with Aubrey until her daughter turned one. During her leave, Liz managed to get a few freelance illustration gigs for magazines and a few websites. She’d always loved cartooning, and was thrilled to have a chance to get back into it, and make money in the process. She had hoped to get enough work that she might never have to go back to teaching. The way things were going, she could work from home and not have to put Aubrey in daycare. They could’ve gotten by on Roger’s salary and her freelance work.
    Now everything was in limbo.
    With trying to get her husband’s body from the medical examiner’s office so she could arrange a funeral, she’d not even had time to figure out whether Roger’s insurance policy would pay out, or whether she or the children could collect his pension or Social Security. She was pretty certain that insurance wouldn’t pay anything since he shot himself.
    As for everything else, Liz had no idea.
    Then there were the families of the victims. She wasn’t sure what they might do, and didn’t know if they could sue his estate or her for civil damages. She needed to talk to a lawyer, and soon. But at the moment, she was overwhelmed, and all she wanted to do was crawl into bed and wake up when everything was over.
    But now she was a single mother, raising two kids on her own. Well, raising Aubrey on her own. Alex was self-sufficient, though that could change now that his father was gone. The two had been so close, and though Alex hadn’t shown much emotion in the past few days, it had to be tearing him up.
    Liz closed her eyes, the sound of the TV barely audible over the sound of the baby monitor on the nightstand beside her bed. The monitor that had kept her up so many nights, braced for the sound of Aubrey waking to another nightmare, or a stuffy nose. But at that moment, the sound of Aubrey’s fan coming through the monitor was giving Liz comfort, a white noise to drown the thoughts racing through her head.
    Liz was drifting off when a sound woke her; her daughter murmuring.
    Aubrey did that a lot at night as she shifted between phases of sleep. She’d make sounds for a few minutes, and would either wake up crying or drift back to silent sleep. Some nights, Liz was lucky to get four hours of shuteye between Aubrey on the verge of waking, or actually waking and needing to be comforted back to sleep. Liz didn’t remember Alex being such a finicky sleeper, but perhaps that was just a rose-tinted memory.
    Liz waited anxiously, and then her daughter grew quiet again. Liz drifted into sleep, praying for a night without visions of “rampages.”

    **

    1:11 a.m.

    Liz woke to the sound of Aubrey giggling over the baby monitor.
    Though she was tired, she wasn’t too exhausted to find some joy in the sound of Aubrey laughing in her sleep. She smiled, found the remote, turned off the TV, and cast the room into darkness.
    Liz’s eyes were heavy. She closed them again, listening to the soft white noise, waiting for it to lull her back to sleep. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep when another sound came through the monitor.
    More laughter, followed by a sound she couldn’t possibly have heard, a whispered “shhhh.”
    Liz’s eyes shot open, as she reached out and turned