On May 3, Cynthia Perkins woke up in her home on Terrace Drive at 6:00 A.M. She arose slowly and deliberately, careful not to wake her husband, Harvey, who was still snoring on the other side of the bed. Cynthia brushed her teeth, straightened her hair, and donned the slacks and cashmere sweater she had set out the night before. As she crossed her bedroom towards the door, she peeked through a thick linen shade and looked out at the street below. It was a foggy day, ominous in a funny sort of way. A Costco shopping bag morosely drifted across the sidewalk. Someone should really pick that up, thought Cynthia senselessly. Not to be deterred, she went about the rest of her morning, a blur of rote mediocrity. She woke Harvey at 7:00, her children, Jillian and Charlie, at 7:15. Eggs and bacon sat, hot and ready, on the kitchen island at 7:45, and at 8:00, she bid her family goodbye.

Every Tuesday, the Davenport Middle School PTA, of which Cynthia is president, meets in a bland second-floor classroom reserved for that purpose at 9:00 A.M. Yet, on this particular Tuesday, something was wrong; the murmurs began at 9:05.

“Now, where do you suppose Cynthia could be?” whispered June McNamara, a chubby, obnoxious woman of forty-six, to her friend Katherine Spiegel.

“I have no idea. But it’s certainly odd. The woman’s never late,” replied Katherine.

“I wonder. You know, I heard Harvey’s ‘ski trip’ was a stint in rehab for prescription painkillers,” June replied with no remorse.

“Well, I heard from my cousin, Sherry, whose daughter works over at Goldman's with him, that he’s been canoodling a whole bunch with that blonde bimbo he’s got answering the phones,” said Katherine, the excitement of gossip making her heart palpitate a little bit. “It’s a shame, you know. Such a nice, tidy woman.” They nodded in agreement. Suddenly, in the frenetic way characteristic of bored and lonely women, Katherine changed the subject. “Have you heard? Micky and I are adopting a German Shepherd, and I think we've settled on the name, Foo Foo. Here, I’ll show you a picture. Just too adorable for words!”

At 9:15, Ellen Schmidt called Cynthia’s phone which went straight to voicemail. Nevertheless, the ladies put it out of their minds. The meeting must go on, whether or not their president was in attendance.

Five o’clock came around, and Harvey Perkins returned home from his long day advising like-minded suburbanites on their financial portfolios. Leaning his briefcase next to the panelled, white front-door, he collapsed on the sofa in the family room and turned on a hockey game.

“Cynthia?” he yelled. “I could really use a snack, honey. Long day at the office.” No response. “Cynthia?” he tried again, looking around the room with squinty eyes. “Okay, what’s the problem?” he murmured, annoyed. Groaning with exasperation, Harvey pulled himself off the couch and started up the stairs. The floorboards creaked under his weight as he ventured down the long second-floor hall. He knew he should exercise more, but that could wait until after his fiftieth. At the end of the hallway was a large arched window, and as Harvey turned to enter his and Cynthia’s room, he noticed his figure silhouetted in the stained-glass. Seeing the misty, cold day frame his own melancholy, defeated image, Harvey felt a pang of depression which floated away as quickly as it had arrived. “Cynthia?” he reached out to no avail. Out of the corner of his eye, Harvey noticed a footprint pressed into the plush beige carpet. He moved towards it and noticed another, and another, and another. Knowing in every fiber of his body what he was about to witness, Harvey drifted slowly into the bathroom and stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream. He just stared, cold, empty, and alone, at the body of Cynthia Perkins, her head hanging back, her blue lips pursed together, and her arms draped limply over the sides of the claw-foot tub.

Harvey left the bathroom, stopping at his bed to lightly pat the aging, grey cat, Mittens. He remembered bringing Mittens home, fourteen years ago to the month, when the sun glinted off the green leaves, when the house filled to the brim with light and love. Pensively, Harvey recalled his young wife, her piercing green eyes reflecting the image of their new home, her stomach round, shielding Jillian inside. It crossed his mind that things could have been different. And then, something snapped inside of him. Harvey let go of the past, of the green trees, of his wife, of his child, of every responsibility bestowed upon him. He picked up the cat, not noticing the sharp claws digging into his arm, and walked out into the dark hall. He opened the stained-glass window, no longer saddened by its forlorn presence, and plunged his head into the biting wind outside. Suddenly, Harvey thought on a line of poetry he had read in college almost thirty years before. As the air rushed past his craggy, middle-aged face, he screamed,

“I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely. I am best so!” And he dropped Mittens, and watched him become a heap of blood and bones on the slate patio below. Leaving the window wide open so that the wind could circulate through the numb house, Harvey ran into the bathroom. In the mirrored medicine cabinet, he found a bottle of little white pills. And, using the small paper cup that rinsed the toothpaste out of his mouth every night, he washed every single one down his parched throat. He glanced again at Cynthia’s body, lying still and serene in the lukewarm bath water. He wasn’t empty any more. Figuring it was time to fall asleep, Harvey lay down atop the plush covers of his four-poster bed. But, as his eyes began to flutter closed, he noticed a woman in a white silk robe straightening her hair at the vanity across the room. It was Cynthia.

Harvey’s spirits sank. It had only been a dream. Here she was, in the flesh, his wife, and no longer could he be alone. Harvey’s misery, though, quickly turned to elation as he saw the object in Cynthia’s hand. It was a pair of scissors, gilded with smooth pearl inlays. She rose them over her head, and Harvey thought about the cloth it had trimmed, the wrapping paper it had torn, and the string it had cut. Then, the metal made contact with his cold chest, and Harvey whispered to his wife just one simple phrase.
“Thank you.”

Jillian and Charlie arrived home at 6:15 after lacrosse practice. It was Jillian who found them, her frigid mother dead in the soaking tub, and her father deceased on the pillow-top mattress, clutching tightly to the little scissors lodged in his breast. The police declared it a murder-suicide, but they would never quite put their finger on what had happened in Davenport that day. The bath water in which Cynthia took her last breath was found to contain a deadly strain of arsenic, poisonous when absorbed through the skin. Gossip about the event floated around town for the next few weeks but was quickly forgotten. Ellen Schmidt was elected PTA president, and the children went to live with Cynthia’s mother in a nearby town.

As for the house on Terrace Drive, it was sold three months after the incident to a young couple named George and Suzanne Marshall. Every morning, Suzanne wakes up at 6 A.M., brushes her teeth, straightens her hair, and puts on slacks and a sweater. During the day she sweeps and scrubs, stopping intermittently to watch Family Feud and sip a cold glass of Diet Coca-Cola. George spends his working hours advising like-minded suburbanites on financial matters. And at night, they curl up on opposite sides of the mattress and shiver in a dull sort of way. George and Suzanne are in every aspect the same as the sad souls that inhabited the house before them. Really, they are just like all of the residents of Davenport, living, as Thoreau once mused, “lives of quiet desperation.” Though death hasn’t found them yet, as it did Cynthia and Harvey on that fateful day in May, who’s to say they wouldn’t be better off?