by Karen Brown
She put the car back into park. “The sooner we’re away from here, the better.”
I pictured William’s corduroy coat, his copper hair matted with blood. Had I somehow caused him to fall? Had he really been about to shove me down the stairs? Once again, the solid truth was lost to me. After David Pinney, even when I tried to re-create those moments—taking up the hammer, the sound as it met his skull—I could not.
The ice tapped against the metal roof. The wipers made their scraping noise.
“Remember the game we all used to play at the pool?” Del said.
We’d catch each other standing along the pool’s concrete rim, unaware, and push each other in.
“Have a nice fall,” Del said, her voice soft.
The surprise of it, the shock of the cold water, was thrilling. It was a great joke, and once it had happened to you, you were always suspicious. Always suspecting. It got so you had that tingling feeling all day, waiting for someone to trick you. It got so that if you were angry at someone, you could give them a shove and none would be the wiser.
“This wasn’t my fault,” I said.
I watched another tremor move through her, shaking her arms, her torso. “Something was off last night,” she said. “You sleeping like that. It didn’t make sense after you’d slept all day.” She sounded calm, but then she had probably been up all night, and that flatness in her voice was exhaustion. “The wine. He insisted on pouring yours. I couldn’t let him take you alone this morning.”
I felt my chest constrict and tighten. “You think he planned to hurt me?”
That was it—the easiest thing to accept. But I somehow doubted William had any sort of plan. I’d forced him to act when he wasn’t prepared, accused him of things and held on to evidence that might convince anyone—even Officer Paul—that he might be implicated in Mary Rae’s death. Del and I sat listening to the sleet, to the wipers grazing the melting windshield ice.
“This might be an efficient way to get rid of cheating husbands,” Del said. She slit her eyes at me. “He didn’t cheat with me. I don’t know where you got that. He did come to my apartment, but he was looking for his portfolio.”
Del had overheard our argument, my accusations.
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Maybe one of the other girls in his nudie photos,” Del said, tapping her nails on the steering wheel. “Maybe Jeanette.”
“You sound like you’re trying to throw blame on someone else to divert attention from yourself,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “I didn’t even like him.”
“You made him a special cake,” I said.
“I did that to make you think I liked him,” Del said. “I was trying to be nice.”
We could go on and on and never arrive at the truth. I would simply have to choose to believe one thing over the other.
“Now that we’ve got that taken care of, I’m going to get us out of here,” Del said. “Unless you think we should wait to see if his spirit lights up the place.”
She put the car in drive and skidded out onto the road, into the middle of nowhere.
I looked behind me at the grounds, the stately trees, and the line of woods. I looked for the shape of him along the road, his figure in the headlights.
We drove through farmland spread for miles in either direction. Del fiddled with the radio, her hand shaking, and found a station playing Dixieland jazz, and we passed through a landscape distorted by the windshield ice—the wide open space, the few remaining outbuildings of an old farm, their gray, splintery wood darkened by the sleet, jutting like carcasses.
“There are bones of families out there,” I said. Spread under layers of soil, compacted in their separateness. The Dixieland band played its tinny hopefulness. We drove this way for a long time until we could see nothing of the land we passed through save an occasional kitchen light in a house set off the road. Then we reached an intersection, a small town, like Milton, with a gas station and a diner, and Del pulled into the diner’s parking lot. After David Pinney died we’d gone on, pretending he hadn’t. I could say we were murderers now. This didn’t happen to other people twice.
“We should eat something,” she said.
William would be hungry and cold in the asylum. Then I realized he would feel nothing, and that seemed even more oppressive.
The diner was in a wood-framed building with wide panes of steamed glass in front. A large exhaust fan spit out smoke from the fryer. Inside we stood in the warmth in our coats. A waitress told us to sit anywhere. She had on a rust-colored apron, black slacks, and a plain white T-shirt. The patrons spoke in loud voices, laughing, telling stories over their food. Del shrugged out of her coat.
“I want meat loaf,” she said.
We walked down the row of booths and picked one along the window. I took off my coat and slid into the booth across from her. From the menus, large plastic rectangles, comically large, Del ordered her meat loaf and I ordered a cheeseburger, French fries, coleslaw, an ice-cream soda.
“Remember the old Sea Shell Restaurant?” Del said.
It would be Del and Jane and me, and two or three of the summer boys, all of us wedged into the booth to eat greasy cheeseburgers and thick fries from plastic baskets. The time right before David Pinney died was solid and clear, but it was as if there were no memories after. The dead had begun to appear to me, their pitiful expressions reeking of lost love, and they erased any other memories that might have formed.
The waitress brought our food and we ate as if we hadn’t in days.
“I want to remember this,” I said. “This after part.”
Del put a forkful of meat loaf in her mouth and chewed. “You will.”
The waitress eyed us, a teenager who probably had plans that night after work—a date with her boyfriend at the bowling alley down the street. They might kiss in the car for a long time after. She might not be able to foresee her life without him. We ordered sundaes and coffee. We watched her put on her coat and go home, and a new waitress take her place, an older woman with gray hair and ropy veins in her hands. When the waitress brought our bill, I discovered that neither Del nor I had any money with us.
I told Del I’d check William’s wallet. I felt full, and warm, the grease coating my tongue. I slid out of the booth and went out to the car. I leaned into the backseat where Del had tossed William’s bag and unzipped it. On top was the Leica. He was rarely without it—it was always on its strap around his neck. I lifted it and the back fell open, and the film spilled out. It was all that was left of him. The cold was awful, and despite everything I didn’t want to imagine him trapped in the asylum for the night. I stuffed the camera back into the bag and quickly dug out his wallet. And then I remembered the other roll of film—the first one he’d shot, and taken out of the camera, and placed in his coat pocket. It was too late to go back, to find him and retrieve it. Once he was found the film would be found and developed, and they would see the images. And maybe he’d gotten a shot of me.
My hands were numb, but I managed to take some bills. Del sat in the booth, watching me through the restaurant window, and I closed the car door and returned to pay the bill. I couldn’t tell her, not when she believed we were safe.
We got directions home from a patron sitting in a booth by the door. We were over an hour away, and I told Del I’d drive. For that length of time we traveled in silence. Del fell asleep, her head against the window. At our house we parked in the street and climbed slowly from the car and entered the vestibule. The first night William came, when I kissed him, we believed things about each other that were never true enough. His beaver-skin hat still hung on the peg where he’d left it. I thought of him slipping into Del’s apartment. Had he been looking for the portfolio? I felt another rush of panic at the thought of having left him behind. And of the roll of film in his pocket.
Del reminded me, in this moment, of our mother—steadfast, stoic. She put her key in her apartment door and s
wung the door open. The faint scent of incense, of last night’s meal, wafted out. Then she stepped inside and closed the door. The lock turned, as if she were barricading herself against me.
After we’d hidden David Pinney’s body, the threesomes and foursomes continued to play the ninth hole, hitting their drives, their putts, getting caught in the rough. None of their monogramed balls ventured near the stand of willows. Our friends continued to swim at the pool afternoons, but Del refused. She’d gone out once and been confronted by the stray dog—its dark shape darting out from beneath the privet hedge. From then on she told our mother she wanted to stay inside. Some days I was able to stay inside as well without drawing suspicion, but more often than not I was the one who had to pretend that nothing was wrong. One day at the pool Jane Roberts asked me where that boy was.
“What boy?” I said. I felt a buzzing, flickering faintness.
“The one you said you liked.” she said.
She had on another boy’s aviator sunglasses and lounged on her towel in the grass. I told her I didn’t know where he was. “I don’t even know his name,” I said. I laughed at my own carelessness, and she laughed along with me. I pretended I was interested in another boy at the pool, and I flirted with him, and we went out to the movies with Jane and Paul Grant. I tried not to think about David Pinney under the willow. It was the animal control people, called by my mother’s report of the stray dog, who found his body. His photograph was in the newspaper, but I barely looked at it. He had on a suit and tie, the photograph taken on the occasion of his sister’s wedding.
A variety of local boys were initially questioned as suspects, though none confessed and nothing tied any of them to the crime. Everyone believed he’d been the victim of a crazed drifter, someone from beyond the neighborhood, summoning a picture of a man riding the rails into town, slipping from an open car under cover of darkness to do his evil deed. His family’s ties to the Spiritualists by the Sea darkened the camp’s reputation further, and for a while people wanted to shut the temple down. But eventually, a sort of hush settled over the tragedy, though the case, still led by Detective Thomson, remained open.
On the stair landing I considered confessing everything to Geoff. He’d call the authorities and have the asylum searched, William’s body found. We could tell the truth about the accident, and trust that no one would ask about the teenage boy found dead near our family’s property in Connecticut. But Detective Thomson would know—he’d follow up. He’d come talk to me, to Del. I was too tired to play games with Detective Thomson.
Was David Pinney a friend of yours?
No.
Not a friend?
Not really.
What about your sister, Delores?
No.
But he was often here, at the pool?
Sometimes.
He was a good-looking boy, wasn’t he? Did any of the girls have crushes on him?
Not that I know.
But you noticed him, didn’t you?
I noticed he was sometimes here, if that’s what you mean.
I put Geoff’s car keys under the mat, and I stood outside the door to my apartment, wondering if William, or some version of him, would be waiting for me in the duck-carved chair. I was afraid of his being there, of what that would mean. The dead had appeared to me with their awful longing, their torment at being separated from their loved ones plain in their expressions. I was afraid to see that look in William’s face, to know that I’d made a terrible mistake. The room was dark. I turned on a lamp. The light cast a round shape on the floor. The place was empty and cold. And that night I was glad for it.
29
I found I was waiting for William to return, as if he had just gone off on one of his jaunts with his camera, even though the camera, what was left of it and its spool of film, was tucked away on a closet shelf among his sweaters. Part of me longed for him to return to explain himself, to settle things, and part of me dreaded it. I tried to reconstruct the moments of his fall, but they were unclear, blurred and wavering. I wondered if I was having some sort of psychotic break, like Del as a teenager. Then I told myself that if I wondered if I was having a breakdown, I probably was not. I took off Mary Rae’s necklace and set it on the table by the bed, next to the travel alarm clock. I’d abandoned my husband, injured in whatever manner, in that place, and I was certainly a criminal. That he may have intended me harm was beside the point, wasn’t it? I had only Del to rely on for that information. Her insinuation that he’d put something in my wine certainly explained my grogginess that night and the following morning, but I had no proof. And though I’d suspected we’d had sex that night—was I simply half-asleep and unaware? Or had it been something else?
What might have happened if Del hadn’t gotten tired of waiting in the car? The possibilities were ominous. Had he planned to kill me if I hadn’t provided the location of the portfolio? And once she’d insisted on joining us, was his plan simply altered to killing me and leaving Del to take the blame? I felt his grip on my arms, the way he pulled me toward the staircase. And what about Mary Rae? Clearly, it was William she’d loved and couldn’t bear to be separated from. What had happened to her?
Del came to my door with food—a miniature chicken potpie, steaming in its foil pan, glasses of milk and cookies, as if I were a sick child. On the third day of William’s absence she brought me a TV dinner. She plopped down beside me on the bed and set it in my lap.
“You’ve lost your creativity.” I picked up the fork and jabbed at the chicken cutlet in its compartment. “How long are you going to keep bringing me food?”
Del fished a carrot off the tray. “How long are you going to hide?”
“I’m not sure what to do now.” I took a bite of the chicken.
“Anything you want,” she said.
“Well, he’s been missing for over forty-eight hours. Should I report it to the police?”
Del had an aversion to police officers, doctors, and anyone involved in the role of public welfare. In her eyes they’d all either forsaken her or lied to her; their occupations involved the kind of trickery we undertook as children, misrepresenting the dead. They claimed to help, but they did not.
“That’s what you want to do?” she said.
I had to admit when I considered reporting William missing I felt a terrible vertigo, as if I were peering down into the gorge. I waited for Del to talk me out of it, for her to convince me I shouldn’t call anyone. Then she took Mary Rae’s journal out from beneath her sweater.
“Here,” she said. “Put this wherever you have that portfolio he was looking for.”
I took the journal from her and set it on the end table beside the little travel clock. I was waiting for more of her plan. There was always a plan with Del; some scheme would follow.
“And?” I said. “What?”
“If anyone asks where good old Will is, you can say he took off. You two hadn’t been getting along, and he said he was leaving you.”
Del took a piece of the chicken and put it in her mouth, then spit it out into the palm of her hand. I handed her a tissue, and she wrapped the chicken in it.
“So, we never went to the asylum in Buffalo.”
She widened her eyes, innocently. “That’s right,” she said.
“We borrowed Geoff’s car and drove to Connecticut to see our mother,” I said.
There was no body to hide this time. Only an absence.
“He’s gone,” Del said. “You’re free.”
I wanted to ask her exactly what she’d seen at the bottom of the stairs, but I hadn’t wanted to force her to relive it. I knew I should have seen his body, cradled his head as he drew his last breaths, apologized for saying the things I’d said, for making him miserable, for being a hard person to make happy. After all, I had no real evidence he had killed Mary Rae, and now I had even less chance to discover it.
I watched Del carefully. “Are you sure he was gone?”
She put another carrot in her mou
th, chewed, ate another. She dipped a finger in the mashed potatoes.
Outside I could hear someone chopping at the snow on the sidewalk with a shovel. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “It doesn’t feel real.”
I covered my head with the afghan. After a few minutes, Del rose from the bed.
“You just have to forget it ever happened,” she said.
Those words I’d told her once. They hadn’t really done any good then, and I wondered if they would help me now. Del left the apartment and stood on the other side of the closed door. “Lock the door,” she said, and I knew she wouldn’t leave until I did.
I would accept that William was gone, that our life together would never resume the way it had been. He wouldn’t walk into my little bedsit, take a shower, sit at the desk in the corner, lie down beside me on the bed. He would never touch me again—what I had come to see as the basis for whatever grief I carried, though I understood that our physical closeness had a terrible edge to it.
But I believed I would see him again. This is what my curse allowed me—a correspondence remained, however uneasy.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY classes began, and that afternoon I crossed the quad toward Tjaden Hall. The shadows lengthened on the snow. Students passed singly, their heads down against the wind. A group burst from the Green Dragon, clutching paper cups of coffee, laughing, clinging to one another, the girls in knitted scarves and hats. I felt something on my face and saw that it had once again begun to snow.
Inside the hall I had a reprieve from the wind. I went first to William’s office, drawn by a feeling that I might find him. I stood in the hallway, and something stirred behind the door—a rustling of papers, a movement, or breathing. I knocked, and the movement stilled. I pictured him behind the door, not wanting to be found. A man came out of the office next door and stopped beside me.
“He’s not scheduled to teach this semester,” he said.
“Oh, thank you,” I said. I wanted to say I was his wife and that he was missing, but all of these admissions seemed almost improbable in the real world. William had not been assigned any classes, and yet he had never told me. Everything he’d said, and not said, seemed suspect.
