Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  The world swam before him. People in work clothes were rushing for trains. Couples were kissing. He glanced at his watch. How could he have slept so long? It was now the next day. He passed a newsstand and picked up a paper, and there it was, a scream in his ear:

  TWO DEAD IN MURDER-SUICIDE.

  They thought he was dead.

  He saw his name and his photo, the one from the high school yearbook, where he was sitting at his desk, looking contemplative. And beside his picture was Lucy’s. She was laughing into the camera, so beautiful that he wanted to weep. An unnamed guy had called and said he and his girlfriend had seen someone jump into the river. The guy had called out, but the person had vanished. They had heard the splash and seen the rings of water, and they had seen enough to identify William by the picture. Then they had found his car, the keys in the ignition.

  Something knocked in William’s head. There, farther down, the head of the school gave a quote about how William had been fired, and William flushed with shame. Reporters had talked to his neighbors, who said that he was quiet and that he and Lucy were a lovely couple.

  And William thought, We were. We were a lovely couple.

  They talked to Lucy’s family. But the family refused to comment, and well they should, because what did they really know about what Lucy and he had been to each other? And they talked to his mother, who couldn’t believe he had done such a thing. “It’s not in his nature,” she said. She said that she hadn’t heard from him in a while, that she knew he was in Pennsylvania but she knew nothing about a girl.

  A girl.

  He had, of course, told her he had a new job in a tiny rural town, a dot on the map. He hated lying to her, but he couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t mention to someone what he was doing and where he was. He knew she didn’t drive, so he knew she’d never show up. He had even lied to Lucy, telling her he had a two-day conference when he was really going to visit his mother. She hadn’t seemed to mind. He had driven all the way to Boston to see his mother. They had ordered food, and she hadn’t had enough money, so she saw his wallet and went to get money and noticed the photo of Lucy that he carried, and then another of the two of them kissing. She held up the photo. “You want to tell me about this?” she said quietly, and when he couldn’t speak, she touched his face. “I only want the best for you,” she said, and he believed her. The whole time he told her, she was quiet.

  “What about her family? They must be going crazy.”

  “They don’t care about her. But I do. I love her,” William said. “As soon as she’s eighteen, we’re getting married.” He saw the fear buckling his mother’s brow. Her hands flew up like birds. “You’ll meet her,” he promised. His mother came toward him and hugged him. “If you love her, I’ll love her, too,” she said, and then he knew it was all right.

  Now he put his head in his hands. He knew his mother. The shock she must have felt reading about Lucy’s death. About his. He couldn’t let her think he was dead.

  He called her from a pay phone. He heard the shock in her voice. “You’re alive,” she cried. “Oh my God. The police were here—the newspapers . . .” She burst into tears.

  “Don’t cry,” he begged. “I’m sorry. Mom, I’m sorry.” He waited for her to stop crying. “I didn’t kill her. It was an accident.”

  He heard her blowing her nose. “Listen to me,” he said. “The newspaper stories aren’t true. I loved her.” He pressed the receiver against his head. “You have to believe me.”

  “Where are you? You have to tell the police you’re alive—”

  “They think I did it,” he said. “The newspapers already have me in jail. Right now, it’s better if they think I’m dead.”

  He could hear her breathing. “Honey—” she said.

  “It was an accident, I swear on my life. You have to believe me. You can’t think I did it.”

  “We’ll get you a lawyer. The best one in Boston.”

  “You don’t understand. They’ve already convicted me. If I go in now, they’ll think I planned it to look like I was dead. I’ll look guiltier than ever.”

  She was quiet again. “You must need money,” she said finally.

  “I’ll find work. I’ll be all right.”

  “Go far away,” she said quietly. “And then somehow let me know where you are.”

  IF HE WAS going to vanish, he should do it in a place where there were lots of transients, where he’d blend in. He wasn’t sure where that would be yet. His mind was filled with Lucy. He thought of that moment when he was standing on the lip of the bridge. He should have jumped.

  HE COULDN’T RISK renting a car, plus he didn’t want to use up the rest of his money. Instead he stood on the edge of the highway, hitching. A beat-up red sedan pulled over, and a kid, his hair tied back in a ponytail, waved at William to open the door. “Where you headed?” the kid asked.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Dennisport. I need some beach.”

  Cape Cod. There were lots of transients there, summer people who came and then left, and who could keep track of any of them? William opened the door. “That’s where I’m going, too,” he said.

  By the time he got there, he had given himself a whole new identity. He was Eddie James. He was thirty-one years old, born in Oregon; his parents had been sheep ranchers and now they were dead. He had no siblings. No cousins. He worked odd jobs. He had never married and had no kids. The more he told himself the story, the more he began to like it, to think of himself as Eddie, to like having such a simple, spare life with no one attached to it.

  He’d grow a beard. He’d keep his head shaved.

  William’s luck was terrible, but Eddie found a job at a soup kitchen the day he arrived, hired by a woman named Marianne, her frizzy yellow hair caught in a kerchief, who also helped him find a room he could afford and gave him an advance on his earnings. When he thanked her profusely, she clasped his hands in hers and said calmly, “Oh, honey, we’ve all had hard times.”

  HE NEVER STOPPED missing Lucy, but it hit him hardest at certain times. When a young woman with curly blonde hair came into the soup kitchen, he stopped to stare at her and then gave her extra soup. One day, when a couple came in holding hands, gazing at each other, he felt like a broken elevator, catapulting to the bottom, out of control. And at night he dreamed about her, always the same scene with the gun, and he’d bolt awake, bathed in sweat, calling her name, missing her so much it was driving him crazy, but she never answered.

  He never stopped being afraid. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. It was like hands constantly clapping. One day a cop wandered into the kitchen, and William, stirring a big silver pot of chili, froze. There was no place to run except through the kitchen and then outside into a dead end, a wall so high he’d never even try to climb it. He kept his head down, pretending to concentrate on the food. The cop sauntered toward him, and William felt himself sweating. He dared to meet his eyes. “Chili today, hot tamale,” the cop said, giving a little laugh. He patted William on the shoulder. “Just dropped in to make sure everything’s copacetic.” William nodded, forcing himself to smile, to look as if everything was easy. The cop wandered over to talk to Marianne, tilting his head, flirting, but William didn’t relax until the cop left.

  A month after Lucy died, he walked to a pay phone and finally risked calling his mother again.

  “William—” She said his name as if she didn’t believe it was really him. He listened to her cry on the phone. She told him to set up a PO box so she could send him money. “No one will trace it,” she cried. “No one’s looking.”

  “Make it out to Eddie James,” he told her.

  “I love Eddie James,” she said. “I know Eddie James is a good man.” And then she hung up the phone, and he listened to the dial tone and tried to believe that Eddie James was a good man, too.

  MORE AND MORE he noticed the regulars in the soup kitchen, and they began to talk to him. A single mom told him how she and her son were living in
a cardboard box, and he called the shelter for her and got her a room. A guy who had been fired from his job told William about his wife, how she had left him when their bankbook was depleted. “My heart’s punched full of holes,” he said, starting to cry, and William reached over and took the man’s hands in his.

  “It helps to have a sympathetic ear,” the man told him.

  William stayed late and got to the soup kitchen early, and he worked seven days a week because what else was there to do? And before long, he would walk down the street in the little town and people would call out, “Hey, hey, Eddie,” and wave to him.

  And after a while, he felt himself becoming that guy, becoming Eddie. Eddie would never marry, would never have another woman, but that was his penance. He had dared to believe it could be possible to be someone brand new.

  Chapter 27

  Charlotte waited until William was finished talking. “You think I believe you?” She blinked back tears. “Is any of this story true?”

  “It’s all true,” he insisted.

  “Your mother knows you’re alive?” She thought of how innocent Diana had made herself out to be.

  He nodded.

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Why would I lie now?” He was looking at her the way he used to when she first came to his class, his eyes deep pools. She jerked her gaze away from him.

  “You have to ask me that?” she said. “There was a lamp smashed on the floor.”

  “It wasn’t a struggle. She knocked it over before I even got there.” He leaned closer to her, so that she could feel the heat of him.

  “She was the one who put bullets in the gun,” William said. “Not me. Never me.”

  “Lucy wrote a lot of things,” Charlotte said. “I have her journal.” She tried to remember whether Lucy had said anything about loading the gun, but all she could remember was how terrified Lucy was, how much she wanted to get away, and how she’d risk anything to do it.

  William stiffened. “Lucy wrote fiction.”

  “She was afraid of you,” Charlotte said. “Patrick told me.”

  William frowned. “Who’s Patrick?”

  “She worked at his farm stand.”

  “Now who’s the one telling stories?”

  “She wrote that you were controlling,” Charlotte insisted.

  “What’s controlling? Is loving someone so much you try to make everything perfect for them controlling?” He shook his head. “You knew me, Charlotte, from high school. You know what kind of person I was. You think I changed so much from then?”

  “I didn’t know you,” she said, but she thought back. She remembered the thrill of being in his class, how the air crackled because you never knew what he was going to teach or how he was going to teach it. He came dressed up like a monk to talk about Chaucer. He once ran around the room, leaping from desktop to desktop, chanting, “Da-da-da-da!” to explain Dadaism to them. And she remembered how so many of the girls liked him, how they dressed better and wore their shortest minis to his class. She was one of those girls who had a crush on him. She had wanted him to make her feel special.

  “I remember.”

  “Do you?” he said. “You were sort of unaware.”

  “Fuck you. I was the smartest person in your stupid class.”

  “Then you would have known that it was you I loved first.”

  She felt something, like a small electric shock. “What are you talking about?”

  “Back then, Lucy was so unsure of herself. She was all over the place, like wildfire, taking everything in its path. But you—you were like a compass. You knew just where you were going. You were true north. Just shining out there.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “You came into my class and you sat in the front and you were so smart.”

  She remembered how she had wanted to impress him. She was always asking him questions, but when he answered he seemed to look right through her.

  “You seemed older. You knew all these books. You knew who you wanted to be in life and you had this plan for how you could become it. I didn’t know how you did that, and I admired it. I couldn’t wait for you to come to class, to hear what you might say or ask or do. And you were so . . . lovely.”

  She felt sickened. “I don’t—”

  “Don’t you know how awful it was for me? To feel those things? I knew it was wrong, and I was glad when you left my class. But Lucy never left.”

  He put one hand on her leg, and she couldn’t move. He looked directly into her eyes so she could see how sorrowful he was, and then for a moment she felt a pull toward him, as if his voice, soft and low, were an undertow tugging her deeper, grabbing hold. “You and me, we were always alike. Wanting to fix things, to make them better, including ourselves.”

  “Shut up,” she said, but his voice, so low, so deep, nipped at her.

  “We both lost Lucy,” he said, and she recoiled, jerking her knee away.

  “I was never going to tell you how I felt, but then one day we were talking about Fitzgerald in class, and you stood up to me. You said my thesis was wrong, and you wouldn’t back down. It unnerved me, that stubbornness. The way you kept insisting you were right. I didn’t love it. I hadn’t seen it before in you and it didn’t seem right. I decided it was better to leave you alone, and then you left. The next year, Lucy came in, and after that, there wasn’t anybody but her. I never even told her about any of this.”

  “You shouldn’t have loved either of us.”

  “Things never turn out the way you think, do they?” he said.

  Charlotte stood up, nauseated.What if she had known back then that he liked her that way? She knew the answer. She would have been as excited about it as her sister had been.

  “I have to go,” Charlotte said. She couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t enough air.

  “I didn’t kill Lucy,” he said. “Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m already in hell. Are you going to turn me in, anyway?” William said.

  “You don’t have the right to ask me that.” She couldn’t look at him anymore. She felt hot and dizzy. Even if he hadn’t shot Lucy deliberately, if it was really an accident, he had killed her in other ways, isolating her, taking her from them. If she had lived, he was going to move them farther out, Lucy getting smaller and smaller until she shrank to a dot. Or maybe he had shot her because she was leaving him, and he was the one who would vanish into nothing without her.

  She stared back at him one last time. The collar of his shirt was ripped and his face seemed broken.

  She walked toward the car, waiting for him to grab her, to try to stop her. He didn’t move to follow her.

  She sat in the car, her hands gripping the steering wheel. She would drive to the police and tell them where to find William. She would turn him in and let the police decide whether to believe him.

  SHE HAD ALWAYS thought she would be the one to redeem her sister by finding William. And maybe the bigger truth was that she had hoped she would redeem herself as well. And now it seemed too complicated and impossible and she didn’t know what was true or right anymore. She didn’t feel better; she felt worse.

  Charlotte cried, thinking, I was coming, I was. How could Lucy not have known she was coming? When had she stopped believing that Charlotte would always rescue her?

  Charlotte tried to wipe away her tears, but she was sobbing now. She couldn’t know for sure whether William was telling the truth. Even if William went to prison, how would it change anything that had happened? Lucy was dead. William was dead inside. This would never be all right. Not for Lucy. And not for her. And she was a fool to think otherwise. All that was left for her to do was to go into town and find out where the police station was.

  She’d tell them everything. Her foot was easing down on the gas when she heard a shot. The echo reverberated in the air, and she clapped her hands to her ears, slamming on the brakes. She leaped out of the car. Already, a wom
an from across the street had come out of her house in a floral housecoat, staring. A dog was barking. Charlotte ran to William’s house and yanked at the door, but it was locked. She banged and banged on the wood until she heard the whine of a police siren, the sound of neighbors coming out of their houses. The cops pried her fingers away.

  The police wouldn’t let her in the house. A detective stood outside with her and took down her story. Charlotte stood with both her arms crushed around her body. Another cop was talking to neighbors, and Charlotte heard bits of conversation. Eddie had been quiet. He kept to himself. He was friendly. He was standoffish. He sometimes had girlfriends. He had never had girlfriends. The cops wrote everything down.

  When the detective came out, he walked over to Charlotte. “Vultures,” he said, pointing to a car that was pulling up. The doors opened and a woman in a tight red suit climbed out, a notebook balanced in her hand.

  Charlotte nodded, her whole body tight as a wire.

  “Single bullet. To the head. No note.”

  She heard the click and whine of the cameras. A flash of light in her eyes made her squint. “Look, innocent guys don’t shoot themselves,” the detective said quietly.

  “How do you know?” Charlotte said, but the detective had turned away from her, pushing aside the microphone thrust in his face. No one was looking at her. No one knew who she was. She slipped back into her car and drove.

  SHE HAD ASKED the cops not to contact Iris, to let Charlotte at least be the one to break the news. Iris didn’t get the newspapers anymore, and she rarely watched the news, but by the next morning it would be in all the papers. Dr. Bronstein would know. Her friends. Everyone. The end of a manhunt, an announcer said. She clicked the radio off.

  She found Iris in her apartment, the sunlight splashing across her kitchen table, and as soon as Iris saw her, she gave her a hug. She doesn’t know yet, Charlotte thought. “Can we sit?” Charlotte said quietly.

  “Of course we can, honey.” Iris pulled up a chair and waited, her hands folded.