by Lisa Unger
The rules dictated a hasty retreat, a return to the fold. Like my nephew, I could suddenly see five moves ahead and know that I was out of my depth. And yet I kept moving, pushing the door, heading inside the apartment like a lemming to the precipice.
Inside, the lighting was dim, all the shades drawn. I heard the ringing of a cellular phone, light and musical. It stopped. Then, a second later, it started ringing again. I stayed rooted in the door frame, my hand still on the knob. Finally, I stepped through onto the hardwood floor.
“Hello?” I said. “Camilla?”
The phone had stopped ringing, and muffled street noise was the only sound I heard. The apartment was tidy, with simple inexpensive furnishing-a matching beige overstuffed couch and chair, a low coffee table, an older television on a stand by the window. A large Oriental rug on the floor, some cheaply framed posters, a gray throw blanket over a footstool. The phone started ringing again. I could see it came from a handbag, which lay on the couch next to a coat.
I moved toward the sound. That’s when I saw her lying on the floor, legs folded demurely to one side, blood spilling an angry red on the floor, on her clothes, sprayed on the white wall. Her impossibly white throat bore a deep gash so dark, so hideous, it almost seemed fake. She was dressed in white jeans, a tight white blouse, now marred with gore.
There was a thick thud within my center, a tingling at the wound in my head that spread across the top of my skull and traveled down my spine. I tried to take in the details of the scene, to process what was before me. But the whole room was shifting and tilting. I was only aware of a terrible nausea, a desire to get away. Then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
“Isabel. Don’t turn around.”
But of course I did. And there he was. My lover, my friend, the stranger with whom I’d shared my life. I found myself reaching for him but he backed away. The lines that connected us, that would have drawn us together the day before, were sundered. He was on the water and I was onshore. He had drifted, not far but too far to reach. He was in view but gone for good.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked him. I glanced down and saw the gun in his hand. There was blood on his hands, on his shirt.
Even these things failed to shock me into fear. I could have-should have-been screaming, begging, weeping. But instead I found myself floating above it all, observing… the body on the floor, my husband’s hands wet with blood. He was so familiar, the surface so well known. But his depths were pure mystery, uncharted, now undiscoverable. All I could think to say was, “Why have you done this?”
When the words were in the air, my middle clenched with nausea. I looked down at Camilla Novak, her stillness, and saw the finality of it all. A door had closed. None of us would ever walk though it again. Our life, my life, was gone. Still, there was no rage rushing to the surface, no tears, no urge to yell. The girl on the floor was dead. But I was undead, moving around stiff and unnatural, my soul sucked from me.
“There’s no answer for that,” he said quietly. “Not one you’ll understand.”
His voice sounded different, gravelly and cold, seemed to echo from those unknowable depths. I didn’t know anything about my husband, if asked, couldn’t extrapolate on one certain detail to understand all the evil he had done.
I don’t know how long we stood like that, two strangers who recognized each other from another life. When he started to move toward the door, I made to follow. But he lifted the gun and I froze. I looked at his face, a cool and distant star. He’d use that gun, without hesitation. He’d kill me where I stood and walk away. The knowledge cut too deep for pain.
“Isabel. Don’t come after me.” I was used to this tone. Paternal. Uncompromising. “Start over. Forget. You’ll be fine.”
I think I smiled at him. Then, beneath the thin mantle of numbness, a rage filled me, replacing any love I’d ever had for him. It was a transformation that took place in minutes-no, seconds.
“If you think you’ll walk away from this, you’re wrong. I’ll find you or die trying.”
I saw something on his face-anger, fear, pity, I couldn’t tell. He opened his mouth to speak but then changed his mind. I didn’t try to stop him as he moved toward the door again. I closed my eyes instead, willing him away. When I opened them, he was gone.
Part Two. Dead reckoning
Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions-what we do-that we are happy or the reverse… All human happiness and misery take the form of action.
– ARISTOTLE
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
– E. L. DOCTOROW
14
“You mean there aren’t ever any new days?” Trevor asked. He was young, really young. Anyway, too young for an existential crisis. “Just the same days repeating over and over again forever?”
There was something like horror on his face, as if he couldn’t believe life could be that mundane, with so few surprises. I’d been charged with watching him for the afternoon while Linda took a meeting with her agent and Erik was with Em on some father-daughter trip. Trevor and I had planned for a walk to the chess shop off Washington Square Park, then some kind of high-caloric snack his parents would never allow between lunch and dinner. Maybe he was five or thereabouts.
At the chess shop, we’d lingered for nearly an hour, inspecting chess pieces of all shapes and sizes and incarnations-dragons and wizards, Alice in Wonderland characters, medieval courts, Smurfs. There were elaborate boards of marble and glass, soapstone and metal, plastic. In the end, he chose a simple wooden set with hand-carved pieces. Our Trev, the purist. He had his prize in a bag and we were sitting on a bench in the park, near the speed-chess players, with the leaves changing colors and NYU students moving about with dense backpacks, some kids doing skateboard jumps, and a homeless man aggressively jangling a cup of change.
“But how do you know? You don’t know what will happen in forever,” he said, always practical. “No one does.”
I shrugged, feeling the full weight of my failure to explain this matter. “It’s just the way it is, kiddo.”
It made a kind of hopeful sense that we might wake up one day and it wouldn’t be Tuesday or Saturday, but Purpleday or Marshmallowday. And on this day, things would be different; maybe gravity would be just slightly altered so everything would seem lighter, or the sun would have a slightly pinkish tint to it and everyone would look a little prettier.
“These markers of the passage of time are constructed by the human mind,” I told Trevor. He couldn’t have really understood me. But he seemed to, gazing at me thoughtfully. “The days are always the same because people made it that way. To keep order.”
He seemed to ponder this for a second, picking at a loose thread on his jeans.
“That’s stupid,” he said finally, bereft.
And I was suddenly mad at myself that I hadn’t allowed him the hope that one day in his life wouldn’t be exactly the day he expected it to be. I could have conceded that he was right, that, in fact, I did not know what would happen in forever. I backpedaled.
“Every day is different, Trevor, you know. Surprises and magic can happen anytime.”
He nodded quickly, as though at the advanced age of five he already knew this.
“But it will always happen on a Wednesday,” he said heavily. “Or a Monday.”
I’d always thought of Emily as the poet, but maybe Trevor had a little bit of the tortured artist in him, always striving to make the world match his vision, always wishing for stardust where there was only ash.
“Come on, Trev, let’s go get a shake and fries,” I said.
He brightened then, as though the conversation that left me grieving had never occurred. That’s the gift of childhood, the ability to be distracted from the big things by the little things.
* * *
FUNNY, HOW YOU find yourself thinking of the most inane things in the w
orst moments in your life. I could have run after Marcus but I didn’t. Instead I stood rooted, for I don’t know how long, stunned by the woman on the floor, by my encounter with my husband. It was impossible to reconcile my life as it was in this minute with the life I’d had just a few days ago.
I knelt down beside the woman I recognized as Camilla Novak from the photo Detective Crowe had shown me and put my hand on her shoulder. I’d just talked to her; it seemed impossible that she’d be dead. In spite of all the blood, I wondered stupidly if she might be breathing, like Fred had been. At first glance, I’d thought he was gone, since he’d been so pale, had lost so much blood. But no, her body was already unnaturally rigid, still.
I touched her for another reason, something less noble than hoping to save her life. I just wanted to see what that white, white skin felt like. I didn’t feel any revulsion in that moment.
Her flesh was like clay earth. Under my hand, I could feel the warmth draining. What leaves us? When the heart stops pumping blood through our veins, when the lungs stop filling and releasing, a door opens and something exits, leaving behind the bare stage. The curtain is open but the lights come down. What is it? It’s more than the failure of the machine to operate, isn’t it?
“Most people would flee from a dead body, get as far away as possible,” Crowe would later say. “Only in the movies do civilians lean in close to see if someone lying in a pool of blood-with her throat cut, no less-might still be alive. People literally swoon, faint, vomit at the sight of so much gore.”
“I’m not most people.”
“I’m getting that.”
But that was much later.
“Oh my God.”
I turned, startled from my thoughts, to see Erik standing in the doorway. He looked stricken, as if he might pass out. He turned away, took a step back toward the hallway.
“Shut the door,” I said sharply. “Lock it.”
“We have to get out of here, Isabel,” he said, glancing behind him. “Right now we’re going to that lawyer. What are you doing?”
“Christ, Erik,” I hissed. “Get in here and shut the door.”
He hesitated, seemed reluctant to leave the safety of the doorway, and then obeyed.
“Who did this, Izzy? Did you-”
“Did I?” I stared at him, incredulous. He looked so horrified, so much like Trevor, his eyes wide, this earnest line to his mouth.
He lifted his palms. “Then who?”
I looked back at Camilla Novak-her long, thin limbs, the exposed lace of her bra. On the coffee table there was a half-full cup of tea, the press of her lipstick on the rim. Her jacket and purse lay on the sofa. She was on her way somewhere when Marcus came to her door. She’d let him in. He might have been able to trick her from the street door. But she would have kept her apartment door shut until she saw him. She knew him; she opened her door and let him in. Then he killed her.
“Marcus was here,” I said.
“You saw him? Here?”
I nodded, thinking of that look on Marc’s face. It wasn’t malice really, or anger. It was a look I recognized, a superior kind of patience. Who was he?
“He killed her?”
“She was the only connection to the real Marcus Raine,” I said, so calmly. No emotion. I didn’t even sound like myself. I got up and walked over to Camilla Novak’s bag on the couch.
“What are you doing?”
It was a cheap knockoff, flimsy, fraying at the seams. I started rifling through its contents. A hot-pink cell phone, a purple sequined wallet, two tubes of lip gloss, mascara, tweezers. Then something else that gave me a little jolt of surprise.
“You’re getting prints all over everything,” Erik said. He stuffed his own fingers under arms folded tightly across his chest. Television had turned us all into crime-scene experts.
“Do you know what she said to me about him, the night we told you we were engaged?”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“Linda,” I said, annoyed that he wasn’t following my crazed train of thought. “What she said about Marcus?”
He shook his head, looked at me as if he couldn’t imagine what relevance this had, why I would be thinking about this now. His eyes fell on Camilla’s body and stayed there, as though once he’d allowed himself to look, he couldn’t look away.
“She said he was just like our father.”
He brought his gaze back to me quickly, looked surprised. We never, and I mean never, talked about my father, so raw and angry were the wounds his parting left in us.
“What do you think she meant by that?”
He rolled his eyes, started shifting from foot to foot-boyish, anxious. “Izzy Let’s go. We’ll talk about this in the cab.”
“I mean,” I said, all the unexpressed anger I’d had for her in that moment rising like a tide I couldn’t quell, “my father was a kind, loving man. He was warm, affectionate. He had a jovial way about him, a light.”
“I don’t know what she meant. I didn’t know your father.”
“She must have told you.”
“Isabel,” he said, walking over to me quickly, putting firm hands on my shoulders. “Listen. To. Me. We have to get out of here right now or call the police and tell them what’s happened. A woman is dead. Marcus was here. He’s a wanted man. He’s done terrible things. We’re letting him get away.”
“Oh, he’s not getting away. I promise you that. He does have a head start, true.”
“Iz.” He narrowed his eyes, gripped my shoulders a little harder. I could tell by the half-worried, half-angry look on his face that he thought I was in shock, losing it a little. He couldn’t have been more wrong. I’d never seen things more clearly. Or so it seemed at the time-with a head injury and a dead body at my feet, and my husband a murderous criminal on the run from the law.
“Just tell me what you think and then you can call the police.”
“Oh my God.” He bowed his head and released an exasperated breath. “Okay. She meant that the facade was different than the underpinnings. That Marcus presented one face, but that, like your father, there was a dark inner life. She felt his coldness. She said that your father was cold, too, in a way. Even though he seemed very sweet, very loving, that there was something about him that was afraid to truly connect, that was terrified of the intimacy of real love. He had a powerful need to isolate, that he was damaged in ways no one realized until his suicide.”
I found myself nodding slowly, a great sadness swelling inside me. She saw him, both of them, with her photographer’s eye. My writer’s brain saw other men, men I had created and explained.
I moved into Erik and let him hold me for a second.
“I’m sorry, Erik,” I said into his shoulder. Behind his back, I took Camilla’s little surprise from her cheap bag, which I still held in my hand. It felt cool and light, a game of play-pretend, a fantasy.
“This is not your fault,” he said. “Let’s call the lawyer and the police.”
“It is my fault. And really, I’m the only one who can fix this. Otherwise, it’s all gone-the money, my marriage, our family as it was. He steals everything and gets away with it.”
“Honey,” he said sadly, “it’s gone either way. We’ll start again.”
“No.”
I moved away from him and he saw the gun in my hand, sighed and rolled his eyes at the sight of it, as though it were a toy, as though I was throwing a childish tantrum.
“You tell them I pulled a gun on you,” I said, sounding a little shaky, a little nuts. “That you found me here and I wouldn’t go with you.”
He shook his head, gave me a disbelieving smile. “Oh, come on, Izzy”
“I love you. You’re a great husband and a great dad.”
He knew I’d never hurt him, and I knew he knew it. But we played out the scene; he saw something in my face and backed away from the door, put his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.
“I wasn’t enough to keep him with us. None
of us were.”
He blinked, somehow knowing I wasn’t talking about Marc. “This is not about your father, Izzy. This is not the same.”
I put Camilla’s bag over my shoulder.
“What am I supposed to tell them, Iz? The police? Linda and the kids?”
“The truth. Just tell them the truth. I pulled a gun on you and now I’m going after my husband.”
“The police are starting to think you’re guilty, that you had something to do with all of this. How am I going to convince them otherwise if you run off like this?”
“They’re right. I’m guilty, like any wife who is guilty for ignoring all the signs, all her instincts.”
“You’re not yourself, girl. Don’t do this.”
But I left him there and he didn’t come after me. And I left the building and ran up the street, then ducked into the subway. I wasn’t flying blind. I knew where to go, maybe where I should have been all along.
15
She never thought of that night anymore. It lived inside her like a room she never entered in a big, drafty old house. She might walk down the dark hallway might even rest her hand on the knob, but she never opened the door. She heeded Blue Beard’s warning, thought Pandora was a fool. There are some memories better abandoned. Common wisdom demanded examination of the past, probing of childhood pain and trauma. Then-acceptance, release, and ultimately forgiveness. But Linda wondered if this was always the best course. Maybe this was a philosophy that just had people picking at scabs, creating scars on flesh that might have healed better if left alone.
