by Leah Stewart
The woods are at first just silent, and then that silence resolves itself into its component parts: the sound of air, the sound of water.
“All right,” Zoe says finally. She pushes herself off the railing, carefully sets her glass on it. “I don’t actually drink,” she says, conversationally, and then she moves past Jennifer. Into the house, then through it and out the other side. Jennifer can hear her. She moves slowly, as if to give Jennifer time to come after her, to tell her not to go. Jennifer listens until she’s sure the car is gone. Then she waits, watching the house across the pond, but minutes tick by in empty silence. Where are you, Margaret? Don’t you want to see what you’ve done?
Back inside, the house has an air of aftermath, though little is disarranged. The cars the boys were playing with are still out on the floor. The dishes are still on the table. The tiger Zoe brought sits propped against the teapot. Jennifer picks it up. Squeezing its little tummy, she swallows and swallows again. Then she throws it in the bin with the rest of the toys.
Soon she’ll have to pack up. Before the story spreads. Before the clients cancel. Before the looks in the grocery store. She surveys the house with an eye that’s already grown nostalgic. Upstairs Milo is curled up in a tight ball, watching a toy commercial. Jennifer sits beside him, puts her arm around him, and pulls him close.
“Is everybody gone?” he asks, and she says yes. She can sense his agitation. He knows something has happened that hasn’t been fully explained. But he also seems to know better than to want the explanation. He starts telling her about the TV show. Many hours later, when it’s bedtime, she lets him fall asleep in her bed.
But then she is the one who can’t sleep. Around two in the morning she gets out of bed and puts her clothes back on. She scoops up Milo, gently, gently, and carries him stirring and murmuring out to the car. He doesn’t wake as she buckles him in. She drives to Margaret’s house, pulls slowly, slowly up the drive. There’s no way to be totally silent but the lights are all out and everyone seems to be asleep. Everyone—by which she means Margaret and Zoe. She knows Zoe is still here because of the truck in the driveway. Tommy’s truck.
She eases out of the car, closes the door so it doesn’t latch. Then in the dark she walks over to the truck. She puts her hands on it. It feels like metal feels. She looks into the cab. All she can make out in the dark is a new tear in the fabric of the ceiling. It doesn’t have a sense of Tommy about it. It doesn’t speak for him.
Lights come on, and she jumps back from the truck. Too late for a clean getaway—Margaret has those little streetlamps with which people line their walkways, and when Jennifer crosses to her car she’ll be clearly lit by them.
The creak of the screen door, and then the sound of a cane on knobbly pavement. It’s Margaret, then. Trust Margaret to come outside when she hears an intruder, instead of calling the police.
Jennifer steps into the light. “It’s me, Margaret. It’s Jennifer.”
Margaret stops where her face is still in shadow. “So it is,” she says.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Jennifer says.
“She’s asleep.”
“I thought she would be.”
“You thought right.”
There’s a long silence. “Well,” Jennifer says.
“Did you kill him?” Margaret asks. Matter-of-fact, as if it’s an everyday question.
“Ask Zoe.”
Margaret waves a dismissive hand. “Zoe’s been acting out of hurt, can’t you see that? Hurt and grief and loneliness. Zoe doesn’t know what she thinks. I want to know if you killed him.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Margaret repeats.
“Why do you care? What does it matter?”
“It matters,” Margaret says.
“I loved him,” Jennifer says. She felt fierce before she spoke, but now there are tears in her eyes. She shouldn’t have said that out loud. “I couldn’t help it.” Her voice is shaky. Stop it, stop it! Just stop talking. Just run away.
“I know,” Margaret says.
“What do you mean you know? What could you possibly know?”
“Oh, Jennifer.” Margaret sounds so weary. “Please answer my question.”
“So you can tell Zoe?”
“No. I’d never do that.”
“Why then? I don’t understand.”
“You’d understand if you’d listened to me. Don’t you see what’s happening here? I’m letting you tell.”
“You’re letting me tell?”
“I think you might want to.”
Jennifer blinks. In the dark she can’t make out Margaret’s expression. She sees the gleam of her white hair, her white cane, her two pale hands. “Yes,” she says. “I killed him. Yes. I killed him. I did.”
Margaret says nothing. How dare she say nothing?
“I killed him,” Jennifer says.
“I know,” Margaret says. “I heard you.”
What was her tone? What is she thinking? Jennifer can’t tell, won’t ask, won’t wait around for more. “Goodbye,” she says, or thinks she says. She gets into her car, where her son is still sleeping, and leaves Margaret and all that Margaret knows behind.
Where should they go now? she asks herself, hands on the wheel. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere far away. She went to Hawaii, once, with Tommy. They went to the island of Kauai, on a honeymoon funded by his mother. They rented a one-room cottage with a huge bed enclosed by a mosquito net whose purpose seemed romantic rather than protective. They woke with the sun to the sound of roosters crowing. They ate pineapples and lychee fruit. They hiked an eleven-mile trail along a breathtaking coastline and spent the night on a beach, with other hikers and an outpost of hippies who shared the milk from their goats. Jennifer was purely, truly happy on that island, and so was Tommy, and she could go back there now to live with her son and tell him stories about his father, whom she loved. His father, who slept beside her on a starry beach and was a wonderful man.
The Unsolvable
Zoe is gone. When she got back from Jennifer’s, she said, “I don’t think my mother loves me.”
“Oh, Zoe,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“She hates me.”
“Can a parent hate a child?”
“Clearly,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that. Did my father hate me, those times when he looked at me like he did? The time he looked at me, a plump and clumsy child in my heavy shoes, and said, “Every father hopes his daughter will be a butterfly”?
I offered what I could in the way of consolation: food, company, a bed. She wanted to hear more about my family history. I told her about my mother’s older sister, who held court in her big house for years and years, and how my mother always felt in her shadow. Then about my grandmother’s sister, who was addicted to laudanum. I told her every story I could think of. I didn’t mean for them all to be sad, but that is so much of what there is.
After she was settled, I still couldn’t sleep. And so I was awake when I heard Jennifer outside. I didn’t tell Zoe about her mother’s late-night visit. I think it’s best if she forgets she has a mother now.
This morning I fixed her eggs. I poured her orange juice. I walked her outside. “Call when you get home,” I said. “I want to know you got back safe.”
“I will. I promise.” She hugged me. “Thank you for trying to help me,” she said.
I said she was welcome and patted her on the back.
At the door of her car she paused. Her eyes were glistening. “Did my mother really call me?” she asked. “Because she said she didn’t. She said it was you.”
I didn’t have time to think about what was kinder, the lie or the truth. Even with time to think I still don’t know. “It wasn’t me,” I said.
Zoe nodded. She swallowed. “I really don’t know why I came here,” she said. “I don’t know what I want from her.” She looked at me like I might have answers, but I don’t. I have none.
He came in li
ke all of them, on a stretcher. I saw right away that he had a chance to live—he wasn’t gut shot, he had all of his head. His hand was bandaged—it looked like a finger or two was missing—but the real trouble was his legs. He was a tall man, and I would have bet that after the surgeons got done he would be much shorter. He could wait, though. He could wait. He was moaning. He opened his eyes and saw me and in his gaze was the desperate pleading pain I’d grown used to. He said, “Please, nurse,” and automatically I soothed him. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll take good care of you.”
But then I took in his face. You see, he was the man. He was the one. I hadn’t realized it, so focused on his injuries, on whether he would live or die. He was the one who did that to my friend. To Kay. I’d known all along what he looked like, though I’d never known his name. Because I followed her, the night she went out with him. I followed her out of the tent a few minutes after she left, and though my intent had been to call her name, to stop her, to attempt reconciliation, just as I spotted her—no, no, I was about to lie. Why? Why always lie, until we are dead? I was about to say her date appeared and stopped me speaking. But the truth is once Kay was in earshot I had minutes to catch her—three, four, maybe five—and instead I followed without speaking, without her knowing I was there. I obeyed an impulse to go unnoticed. Maybe I wanted to get a look at her date. Maybe I wanted to see the life she lived without me. Because I was jealous, or because I was curious, or afraid, or, or, or. I don’t know why. I just know that’s what I did.
I saw him waiting for her. He had a pitiful bouquet clearly snatched from a roadside garden, and while I couldn’t hear him, I could see by his face that he’d made a joke about it but was also proud to have it on offer. I could see his face but not hers, so I’ve never known what she was thinking. That he was sweet? That his bouquet was charming? That she was happy to go on this date, after all? Or that he was too eager, too insistent, too something, something she already sensed. That she didn’t want to go with him, wanted to plead a headache and go back to the tent. But back in the tent there was me.
He held her down. I don’t know exactly what happened. She didn’t tell me. I didn’t ask. That was all she said: He held me down.
I killed him.
If he had been gut shot he might have bled out and died screaming, and that is what should have happened, that is what should have been. But it was only the legs! In all the chaos I had no trouble injecting the extra morphine unnoticed. It wasn’t even hard. I could have considered it sufficient punishment for him to live without his legs. But that would still have been living.
Learning to say, to mean, “only the legs”—how could you imagine that wouldn’t do something to a person?
I keep thinking of Jennifer’s face in the light from my little streetlamp. How, at last, the rock rolled away from the cave. I looked at her and I saw her. Nothing was hidden, nothing stashed away. It was astonishing to see, miraculous as starlight—a human face without a trace of the mask. At the sight of it my heart thrilled and broke. And I kept my own face in the dark, so that she would not know it.
It wasn’t when she said I killed him that this happened. It was when she said I loved him.
I’ve started rereading another Agatha Christie, in hopes that its tidy structures will help me contain my own life. Detectives are after certainty. That’s why people like them—they paper over the unsolvable with deductions and photographs.
I sit here with my book, waiting for Zoe to call.
What Jennifer Did
He was propped up in bed with his foot in that boot. Surgery had fixed the break, but three weeks later it still hurt. He’d been augmenting his prescription meds with other painkillers. One of his drinking buddies had a hookup, Jennifer assumed. She hadn’t asked. Tommy had taught her to be uncurious. She’d found his stash, three fat bottles in a little brown paper bag like you use for school lunches, or drinking liquor in the street. She was standing near the bed with the bag in her hand, and they were fighting. “So now the drinking’s not enough?” she said. “Why not start gambling? Why don’t you go fuck a prostitute? Or maybe you have already.” She was suddenly struck. She asked, in a small, quiet voice, “Have you?”
He had the nerve to look affronted. “No,” he said. “How could you ask that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you won’t do,” she said.
“How could you say that? How could you think that? I’m in pain, Jennifer. My ankle fucking kills me all the time. The pills are for the pain. I don’t know where the rest of this is coming from.”
“You do know where,” she said flatly. And looking at his face, she could see that he did. He knew he’d failed in all the ways she said he had, and he knew he’d fail her again in the future, just as she said he would. He looked at her—raw and naked and sorry, so sorry—and then his expression hardened.
“Just give me the pills,” he said.
“Fine,” she said. She took all three bottles out of the bag and opened them and shook them over the bed, a rain of pills, saying, “Fine, fine, fine,” while Tommy said, “Jesus, stop it, stop it.” A furious duet. When the bottles were empty, she was panting, and she threw them at him, so that he had to duck. “Here are the pills,” she said. “Why don’t you take them. Take them all.”
She grabbed his glass from the bedside table and took it into the bathroom, where she filled it so full it spilled when she set it back down next to him. “Thought you might need this,” she said.
He was looking at her with what she thought was a dull hatred, but would seem to her later to have been blank despair. “You wish I was dead,” he said, and his voice was flat and cold with conviction.
“Wow, Tommy,” she said. “You catch on fast.”
Did she think he’d do it, when she left him there with the water and the sea of pills? Did she believe you catch on fast would be the last thing he’d ever hear her say? These are the questions she asks and cannot answer. With time she’s arrived at what she thinks was in his mind when he swallowed every pill she gave him. She believes he loved her, and that for him that love had always transcended everything, his transgressions and hers, and finally he’d understood that for her it no longer did, hadn’t for a long, long time. He’d thought they had a great love. She convinced him at last that it was an ordinary one. Believing that, he despaired. If his story wasn’t an epic romance, then it was a squalid little tragedy.
But it was a great love, Tommy. It was. And she is so, so sorry.
The Lives I’ve Saved
Jennifer is gone. Jennifer and her little boy. I don’t know where they went. I hope they’re happy there. I sit out on my back deck and see nothing at the house across the pond. No lights. No people. A few weeks ago I drove over there and looked in the windows. The house is empty, neat as a pin. No stray toys on the floor, no lost crayons. No clues. No evidence.
I did not mean to do them harm. I’ve never meant that. I’ve had many friends. I’ve saved many lives. I should have kept a record of all the lives I’ve saved.
Lately I go beyond standing beside the pond and imagining Virginia Woolf. Lately I fill my pockets with stones. Then I walk slowly back toward the house, tossing them out as I go. I won’t do it. There is Lucy, who may yet come visit, and now there is Zoe, who says she wants to visit, too. She has a friend she might bring down, someone who likes to hike. I think perhaps, if Zoe needs one, I might offer her a job for the summer. Her duties would be minimal. She could stay in the guest room, be there just in case. It would make Sue the librarian happy. We all get older by the day. Each breath, and we are older.
I stand at the edge of the water but I don’t ever wade in.
I will live until the last possible minute. I will have every second.
I am not sorry.
Acknowledgments
For more than fifteen years I tried and failed to write a novel based on the experience of my late grandmother, born Nina Jean Riley, in the Army Nurse Corps
during World War II. Though Margaret’s story bears only minimal resemblance to my grandmother’s, much of my information about what it was like to be a field-hospital nurse in the ETO came from conversations we had, as well as her scrapbook and her letters home to her parents. Kate Moore was also indispensable, in describing to me her time as a nurse with the Army Reserve in Iraq and helping me imagine what it’s like when casualties arrive. I read widely in WWII histories and found the following books particularly useful: Women Were Not Expected by Marjorie Peto; G.I. Nightingale by Theresa Archard; Bedpan Commando by June Wandrey; And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II by Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee; and No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II by Diane B. Fessler.
My thanks to Susan Autran for lessons on dancing and Suzanne Smith for lessons on massage; to Detective Jennifer Mitsch for invaluable advice; to Leigh Anne Couch for prompting my memory of Sewanee landmarks (I took some liberties); to Carmen Toussaint Thompson and the Rivendell Writers’ Colony for allowing me to stay there while I revised this book; and to Cheri Peters, Wyatt Prunty, and John and Elizabeth Grammer for bringing me there in the first place. I’m grateful for the support of UC’s Taft Research Center and my colleagues Jay Twomey, Michael Griffith, and Chris Bachelder.
My editor, Sally Kim, is all a writer could hope for: she always guides me toward a better version of the novel I’m trying to write. I’m so lucky to be working with her on a fourth book, and I’m grateful to her and to the other people at Touchstone, particularly Etinosa Agbonlahor. I’m equally lucky to have the fabulous Gail Hochman as my agent; she is a marvel of energy and insight. For early reads, my thanks to Holly Goddard Jones and Amanda Eyre Ward. My husband, Matt O’Keefe, line edited the manuscript, giving thoughtful consideration to every sentence, and the book is much better for his time and attention.
To my children, Eliza and Simon, thank you for letting me steal your funniest lines.
