Sunburn: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  She and Adam don’t say a word on the drive home. Adam and Eve, on a raft, but where is the raft taking them? What happens when only Adam gets kicked out of Eden, but Eve gets to stay despite being the one that everyone has pegged a sinner?

  In the weeks since Cath died, Polly has straightened out her name issues, opened accounts. On paper, she is still technically Pauline Hansen. It’s easier that way for now. When the divorce comes through, she’ll go to Social Security, reclaim her maiden name. And it’s simple enough to tell people that Polly is a nickname for Pauline. Simple, because it has the virtue of being true. She has a checking account with her new address on Lilac Way. She has put down roots, shallow as they are.

  And now they’re being ripped up.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks Adam. You, not us. She wonders if he notices. But Adam notices everything. Not much gets by him. Not much gets by her, either.

  “I’m not going to find anything else here,” he says.

  “Not as a cook. But aren’t there other things you can do? What were you doing when we met?”

  “Oh, I had just finished sailing a boat up from Florida to Rehoboth and was driving back to Maryland.”

  “I can’t remember—how did you end up in Belleville?”

  “Car trouble. My truck threw a rod. Look, what about Annapolis?” he asks.

  “What about it?”

  “There’s always work for—someone like me. I can find some kind of job to carry us through the winter. You can, too. The legislature will be in session, the local restaurants will be slammed. We’ll be together. Isn’t that what matters?”

  “Is it?”

  “It is to me.”

  “I like it here.” Her voice is petulant and she knows it, hates herself for it. She doesn’t do petulant. Petulant is for weak women, dependent women. She doesn’t need him, even if he’s been helping her carry the rent on this place.

  She wants him, though. Adam is the first man, the first thing she has ever chosen for her own pleasure and delight. That’s hard to give up.

  “I’ll look,” Adam says. “But without a paycheck for me and your tips as small as they are—”

  Nothing left to do but try to save the evening with a joke. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with my tips.”

  He laughs. Adam is probably a good man, all things considered. She wants to make a life with him. But she had been hoping to make a life here, too. Which will she choose? Is the choice even hers?

  And maybe Belleville isn’t the answer. Maybe she likes it because it felt like a kind of cockeyed destiny. She reminds herself that the plan, back in June, was to find a job, build up a nice little nest egg, then head to Reno. But after Cath died, she feared that leaving would make Adam even more suspicious of her. She should be almost divorced now, her prize within reach. She stayed in Belleville for Adam. Why won’t he do the same for her?

  “I love you,” she says to Adam.

  “I love you, too.”

  “That should be enough.”

  Should, should, should.

  * * *

  The next day, he sits down with the PennySaver and the News-Journal. “I could commute,” he says. “If that’s what it takes. Work in Baltimore during the week, be here on weekends.”

  “But then you’ll have the cost of another place.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll still help with the rent here.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  She wonders if he is as exhausted by all the lying as she is.

  36

  When Adam crosses his own threshold for the first time in months, he finds himself thinking of a few lines from Kipling that his father taught him long ago.

  Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne

  He travels the fastest who travels alone.

  Only “The Winners” is not really an homage to traveling solo, as Adam learned in college, but a case for selfishness. Kipling’s “heretical ode” urges us to make use of others’ labor, then leave them behind.

  Is that what he’s done? Or is he the one being left behind? He’s baffled by Polly’s refusal to come with him. It’s not a bad place, this apartment, a one-bedroom in a high-rise with partial views of a deep park known as Stony Run. But it’s sterile, charmless. The apartment, so long neglected, doesn’t even seem to register his presence. It goes on without him, like the automated house in that Ray Bradbury story, postapocalypse.

  And that’s fine. He has never wanted to be rooted to any one place and this address is exactly that, an address, nothing more, a concession to a world that demands a place to send bills and the annual auto registration. The lease is month by month. The furniture is rented; even the plates and glassware are rentals. Things weigh you down.

  Things and people.

  There is no mail, not even junk. When it became clear that he was going to be stuck in Belleville for a while, Adam got a P.O. Box in Denton, had everything forwarded there. “Everything” was his utility bills, his credit card bill, his monthly bank statements, and the occasional missive from Irving, who was so cheap he preferred a stamp to a phone call. A postcard stamp at that, usually a bland souvenir card with terse questions and demands. “Anything?” “Call me.” The last one arrived September fifth and had a bushel of blue crabs on the front. On the back, Irving had written in large block letters: CONTRACT TERMINATED. It was postmarked Sept. 3, the very day that Adam called Irving and told him he was quitting. But he let Irving have the last word, let him pretend that the postcard was sent before Adam called him.

  Adam’s answering machine is also empty because he checked it remotely once a week. In the beginning, there had been calls, inquiries about work. The past couple of weeks, it has been mostly wrong numbers. At least, he assumed that the hang-up calls were wrong numbers. Who else would keep calling a machine and hanging up?

  Now he has to work the phone like some rookie telemarketer, checking his traps, trying to rebuild his business. Adam has always marketed himself as the king of surveillance, the guy who can get fast results where others would let the minutes pile up. He begins dialing the various lawyers, insurance brokers, people who have used him from time to time, people who might know people who know people in need of a private detective. Not Irving, of course. Adam knows he burned that bridge by coming up empty after so many weeks on Irving’s payroll. Doesn’t worry him. Irving was a small-timer on his roster, usually used Adam to check out the occasional slip-and-fall case at his strip center.

  Cold-calling is a pain, but it yields results. Adam’s business thrives on misfortune and distrust, two things that know no season. He picks up a few small jobs—surveillance on a divorce case, some financial investigation for a prenup. The bride is willing to sign, but she thinks the groom is hiding assets, maybe in a dummy family foundation registered with the state. Isn’t love grand? But, good, he’ll start earning again. When he ended his relationship with Irving, things got thin, pretty fast, living off what Mr. C was paying. Adam had to dip into his savings the last few weeks, especially as he began to cover more of the bills for Polly. Adam never touches his savings. His parents, like him, cared nothing for possessions or money. But they believed that one should live within one’s means. Savings were sacrosanct. They lived so carefully that there was a nice inheritance for him once both were gone. Out of respect for them, he keeps that money separate and uses it for his trips and adventures. It’s a choice they would respect. His parents wouldn’t want their only son to settle for Belleville, not even for love.

  He sits at his dining room table, which has a view of the high-rise next door, which makes it cheaper than the apartments that have only the expansive southern exposures. People pay so much for views and then, within a few weeks, don’t even notice them. Art is better than views, his mother always said, especially if you paint your own. She could and did, huge, vivid abstracts. He has two of her canvases, but he has never bothered to hang them. He’s saving them for a day when he might put down roots.

  What if his
mom were alive? What would she think of Polly? His mother was a trusting, openhearted person who saw the good in almost everyone. The only person she never liked was Adam’s wife. But she was right. Lainey—she always said it was short for Elaine, Adam always pointed out it was the same length, letter-wise and syllable-wise—wasn’t for him. She couldn’t indulge his wanderlust. What wife would? Could Polly?

  This forced separation will give them a chance to see, he reasons. Rationalizes. Not much bullshit gets by him, not even his own. Maybe if you never marry a woman, she never becomes a wife. Polly says she never wants to marry again. Yet there she is with the weekly PennySaver, looking longingly at houses in Belleville. Could anyone dream smaller? The tiny scale of her desires—Adam, a house, a bed-and-breakfast—makes her achingly precious to him. He just needs to bring her up to his level, take her hand and lead her to a peak where she can see the world spread out at her feet, imagine something bigger. Even a partial view of a park called Stony Run would be a step up for Polly.

  But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. He thinks of Polly’s face when they stood next to the dying bonfire the Friday before Halloween. She was happy that night, and it wasn’t the feverish glee of a firebug. Right? She just likes bonfires. And movies about fires. True, she also was married to an arson investigator, but she didn’t like him. Everything can be explained.

  He drinks a beer, watches the news. Polly is a quiet woman, but a solitary silence is different from one shared by another person. He misses her silence.

  * * *

  He drives to Annapolis the next day to see if there’s any kind of nonprofit set up in the family name of the suspect groom. Unlikely, but it’s a basic thing to check and he likes having a reason to go to Annapolis, a smallish town that doesn’t feel like a small town. When he’s finished checking the state office for nonprofit filings, he buys a sandwich and eats it at the foot of Main Street, looking out on the bay. Where is Polly this time of day, what is she doing? Probably reading the goddamn PennySaver or taking a walk. He liked how Polly would get up in the morning and go out, letting him sleep, then slipping back into bed before he awoke. Not many women would do that.

  And not many women would kill someone and blow up their own apartment to cover it up.

  He finds he can’t finish his sandwich, so he feeds the leftovers to the gulls. Six months ago, when Irving came to him with this job, Adam thought it would be a few weeks of work, enough money to allow him to take off about now. Instead, he’s rooting around in one soon-to-be-married couple’s finances. And tomorrow, he’ll be watching a woman whose husband believes her to be having an affair. Quite a life you’ve made for yourself, Adam, my boy.

  He drives back, straight into the sunset. It’s different from the sunset he remembers from Belleville, the slow flattening of an orange disk over the endless fields. It was so flat there. Flat in every sense. Dull, every day the same, only the rotating specials at the restaurant helping him distinguish between Wednesday (“spaghetti” night, although it was homemade fettuccine, rolled out and cut without even a basic pasta maker, then tossed in a deep, rich lamb ragu) and Friday (roast chicken). He’s looking forward to watching Monday Night Football, drinking a beer, in his own home.

  Only it’s not home, he realizes, as he watches the Browns lose to the Steelers. It can never be home, even if he bought his own furniture, signed a longer lease, hung his mother’s paintings.

  Home is wherever Polly is. For better or worse.

  37

  Polly is depressed as the holidays approach, although she denies it, even to herself, embarrassed by the cliché of her feelings. Not that anyone notices her mood, or seems to care. And it’s not as if she has great holiday memories unless she reaches all the way back to childhood. The orange Schwinn parked in front of the Christmas tree, its basket filled with Nancy Drew books. The tiny brass monkey in her Christmas stocking when she was eleven.

  Ditmars freaking out over how dry the tree was and knocking it over, breaking half the ornaments. Ditmars throwing a plate at her head when the Thanksgiving turkey was overcooked and she made the mistake of not serving his mother’s oyster dressing.

  Her life is a series of holding patterns. With Adam, who drives over almost every weekend, but never talks about the future. With Gregg, who has not answered her open-ended inquiries about moving forward with the divorce. With Max and Ernest, her own private hell. She likes to tell Adam: “They have only two topics. One of them is the weather and the other one isn’t.”

  She decides November feels dreary because she remembers where she was a year ago, the giddy high of planning her escape. She had just hired Barry Forshaw to sue the hospital and while he was properly cautious about keeping expectations low, she knew they would do okay, even with a settlement. On Thanksgiving Day, Polly made the smallest turkey possible—it was only the four of them, Gregg, Savannah, Jani, and her—and didn’t trouble herself too much, taking any shortcut that modern convenience could bestow, buying the sauerkraut instead of preparing it herself, a sacrilege in her mother’s book. (Polly’s mother was old Baltimore. Polly should make Adam sour beef one day, and cabbage rolls.) Thanksgiving a year ago, when it was time for the blessing, Polly-still-Pauline bent her head over a plate of white meat and ready-made cranberry sauce and bakery-bought Parker House rolls and gave thanks for what she had decided would be three million dollars, give or take. Take, it turned out, because Forshaw was getting 40 percent, plus whatever interest her money generated while it waited for her. She was not a big believer in signs or portents, but the number three had been swimming in her head for days and she believed it was more than superstition. Let other people play El Gordo, the big state lottery with a ten-million-dollar jackpot. She was playing her own game.

  Four weeks later, the hospital, perhaps keen to close the fiscal books on 1994, had offered $3.3 million. Barry took $1.5—more than 40 percent, by the way, but he nickeled-and-dimed her for almost every paper clip along the way. That left her with $1.8 million. Still, not bad. Twelve years ago, her father’s lungs, wrecked with mesothelioma, had earned him only $250,000 and he was too far gone to enjoy a penny of it. When her mother had died in Florida while Polly was in prison, she left what little she had to her nieces and nephews. Polly’s aunt, who still lived in Dundalk, came to see Polly in prison and said, “Well, what can you expect? You broke her heart.”

  Polly took her aunt off her visitors’ list, which left exactly no one. She had no family. She had lost whatever family she had when she was convicted and the state, at her behest, took custody of Joy.

  Polly knew the night Joy was born that something had gone wrong, that the doctor had dithered in failing to order a C-section. But Joy’s condition wasn’t immediately apparent and Polly decided she was just a nervous Nellie. For a few weeks, she was a normal new mother. Exhausted and terrified, but all first-time mothers are exhausted and terrified. There were even unexpected fringe benefits. Ditmars treated the mother of his child quite differently from the way he had treated his bride.

  Until it turned out that the child was disabled.

  The day they learned how severe Joy’s cerebral palsy was, Ditmars went out drinking with his work buddies, leaving Polly home alone to weep and wonder at what she had done, what she hadn’t done, saying good-bye to every small dream she had held for her child, even dreams she never realized she had. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, she had been in Marshalls and seen a pair of Mary Janes, a child’s size 5, and even though she knew it would be years before her child could wear them—and, even though she didn’t know her unborn child’s gender, at Ditmars’s insistence—she had to buy those shoes. They were $65 marked down to $7. How she had marveled at that original price, wondering what it would be like to be the kind of person who could spend $65 on shoes that a little girl might wear three, four times before growing out of them.

  Five months later, the night of the diagnosis, she held those shoes to her face and wept. Maybe Joy would wear them one day, b
ut she would never walk, not a single step. She would probably not speak, doctors said. Her body, as Polly understood it, would look the way Polly felt—twisted, stunted, useless.

  When Ditmars came home and found Polly asleep at the kitchen table, that box of shoes nearby, he focused on the original price, even though the Marshalls price and the final reduction were visible. He began hitting her with the shoes, calling her a whore, saying it was her fault, that she hadn’t taken proper care of herself, that she was probably sneaking coffee and beer and God knows what else during her pregnancy. They were flimsy little leather shoes, but they hurt as he slapped her face with them. They left welts and Polly, who had long learned to hold her head high no matter the bruises or the welts or the cuts, hated those half-moon shapes on her cheeks.

  Now, almost fifteen years later, that $3.3 million doesn’t seem like enough, but it wasn’t the doctor’s fault that Polly married Ditmars. That was her choice, her mistake, and she shouldered it, almost without complaint. She had tried complaining to her mother in the early years, only hinting at how badly Ditmars treated her, but her mother said, “Marriage is hard.” Now that her mother is dead, Polly feels more generously toward her—so funny how that works—and she can see her side of things. Her mother probably felt bad that she couldn’t help Polly. Just because she moved to Florida, it didn’t mean she didn’t love Polly.

  Three point three million. Okay, 1.8 million. It sits, one hundred miles to the west, waiting for her in a money market account in Barry Forshaw’s name. Monday through Friday, Adam is about the same distance to the west, doing whatever it is he does. He says he has found a short-term gig as a claims adjuster. Polly can’t be bothered to ask the questions that would expose his lies. Eventually—when, why are things taking so long, why does everything she need have to take so long?—he will know he should have trusted her.

  She hears Adam’s pickup truck rolling up the driveway. It’s not a bad trip, not on a Friday night in November, especially as he doesn’t leave until well after rush hour. I come to Belleville for you, I don’t want to sit around waiting for you to get off. He brings her cash, every week, to help pay the rent. She doesn’t want to take it, but she needs it. Things are so slow, her tips so small. How had Cath made it, during the winter months? Polly suspects she was skimming receipts. She wonders if she should float that idea with Mr. C as a way of making a case for a raise, but it seems mean, tainting a dead woman’s reputation.