While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “Sadie, if I could do this any differently, I would.”

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks a lot, Mom,” she said. There was a muffled clunk, and the line went dead.

  I was frozen for a moment, holding on to the phone. Then I hung it up. I turned around. Daniel and I stood looking at each other, over the clutter of mail, of grocery bags of food on the kitchen table, over the dancing, joyous dogs, who had finally assembled to welcome me home.

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound normal. My throat hurt. “I guess the police have been in touch with Eli.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  Dear Sadie,

  I know you are still angry with me, and though that’s painful for me, I can understand it. I am only sorry that you are in any way touched or affected by all this business, which is so unrelated to you, finally. It is unfair. It seems unfair to me too. What I find myself hoping is that at some point your deep admiration for Jean will, not diminish, but be tempered enough by time and experience to allow you to consider the possibility that despite her understandable shock and anger at what’s happened, she is simply wrong about Eli Mayhew. That he did in fact say to me what I reported to the police he said to me. That he did in fact do the thing he said he did, which was, in a moment of rage and passion and deep hurt, to kill someone dear to me, someone whose very sweetness and gaiety and affection were, I think, a kind of torment to him.

  This is a long story, Sadie, and perhaps one I should have told you. It’s never been clear to me exactly what you girls need to know of my past, or your father’s past, what stories are the right ones to tell and what are better kept private. Certainly everyone, maybe even you, too, Sadie, has done things that seem shameful. I probably didn’t tell you many of those about myself, unless they were funny somehow. Why? Maybe because I didn’t want to condone my own behavior by claiming it. Maybe because I wanted to think of certain things I’d done as being not really who I am. Also because I was ashamed, I suppose. Because I wanted your love and admiration.

  This story, the story of Eli and my lovely friend, was different. It seemed to me too frightening, too awful in its message—that we are never safe, that evil can descend on us at any time—to inflict on you or Nora or Cass. (At least this is the message I’d always taken from it.) I wanted to spare you such news about life.

  Now there’s a different message, I guess, something having to do with our inability really to know or guess at the secret depths of another person. Perhaps that is what you are feeling about me now, too, since you are so certain of my perversity, or my craziness, in doing what I’m doing. Who the hell is she?

  But that is what I’ve felt about Eli too. I wouldn’t have believed, either, that he did what I now say he did. But he told me he did, and he explained it very, very well, Sadie, in ways I couldn’t have invented. It fit with everything I knew about what happened—and I was the one who found my friend, seconds after she died. Her name was Dana, and she was beautiful and lighthearted and loving. You remind me a little of her.

  I suppose I am trying to defend myself to you. But I’m also asking for your forgiveness: in ways that are very complicated indeed, I do bear some responsibility for this chain of events. I hope that you will at some point feel again that I’m a trustworthy part of your life. That you do know me.

  Lovingly,

  Mom

  I walked to the post office to mail this. Somehow I couldn’t bear to leave it in our box with the flag up. It seemed too private. It seemed too awful that I should have had to write it at all. But Sadie hadn’t called in more than a week, in spite of three messages I’d left for her and at least one call I’d overheard Daniel making, trying to intervene on my behalf.

  I waited up for Daniel that night. I wanted to tell him about the letter. I wanted to talk, if that was possible. He was late getting home.

  At ten-thirty I decided to walk the dogs. It had been so long since either of us had taken them out that they were hard to roust. Finally, though, we were gathered by the door, they were leaping on me, mauling me in their excitement, and we stepped outside into the dark.

  I hadn’t realized how cold it was. The temperature must have been near zero, the dry stillness was almost frightening. The sky was vast, and the stars were somehow more distant than usual. My breath froze and pinched in my nostrils. By the time we were halfway around the common, even the big dogs were ready to turn back. Shorty, lagging behind me, would stop and stand painfully for a moment, with one paw, then another, lifted, trying to offer it some relief from contact with the biting-cold ground. I carried him the last half block or so home. He was shuddering in my arms.

  In the house, I undressed quickly and got ready for bed. When I came back into our room, all the dogs were curled up on the coverlet, waiting for me. I had to shove and bounce them around to make room for myself.

  It was just after eleven. This was very late for Daniel. Perhaps he’d gone out for a drink with someone after the meeting.

  What meeting?

  I couldn’t remember what he’d said when he went out, what he was supposed to be doing tonight. It occurred to me that if Daniel were a different person I might worry about that, about whether he’d found someone sympathetic to listen to the sad tale of his wife’s betrayal, of the ugliness she’d brought into their lives. Shorty had begun to snore gently.

  I turned the light off. In the dark, the silence of the house and the empty village outside seemed to change. I heard, suddenly, the ticks, the creaks of the old wood shifting in the cold. I heard the onrush of a car passing, the slow rise of the wind. One of the dogs whimpered in his sleep, licked his chops. His feet twitched as he chased something, killed it, in a happy dream. I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could surprise himself, could surprise me, by being such a person too. Would he let himself do such a thing? I didn’t think so. And then I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?

  I tried to call up the moment when I had decided I could be such a person. It seemed to me I hadn’t quite got there, not really. That I was still just playing with the idea of it when the ground shifted under me. But perhaps to play with such an idea was already to be a certain kind of person.

  I must have dozed off. A growl on the bed woke me, and then I, too, heard Daniel moving carefully through the house. The old pine boards croaked, the hinges on the bathroom door squealed faintly. I looked over at the glowing digital clock. Eleven fifty-two. The dogs shifted eagerly, but none of them got up. Too lazily comfortable where they were. Too warm.

  I was going to say something to Daniel when he came in, but I heard his whisper first, speaking gently to each dog, bending over them, luring them off the bed one by one. I lay still, silent. I was loving him too much, the solicitous, elegant quiet in everything he did, peeling his clothes off in slow motion, laboriously hanging his shirt on a hook. The hissing intake of his breath when the coins in his pocket jingled faintly as he stepped out of his pants. If I spoke, he would become the other Daniel, the Daniel who had not yet forgiven me, who would be polite, stiff, only carefully responsive. In the dark, I lay still and watched the shape of my Daniel, the real Daniel, sitting slowly, carefully adding his weight to the bed. I imagined that as tenderness toward me. He whispered to one of the dogs, somewhere on the floor.

  I was loving him, I was loving his voice. I was taking from him what he couldn’t give to me. I felt his slow slide into the flannel sheets, the little shudder of pleasure at the warmth of the pockets the dogs had made. He smelled of toothpaste, of wine. He shifted toward me, perhaps to take heat from my side of the bed. I lay utterly still, happy—joyful—with what I was stealing.

  The police called me at work the next day. Detective Ryan. Could I come in? No urgency, he just wanted to go over things, see where we were now. I explained that my next day off w
as Monday. That was fine, he said. “Like I said, this is just to catch you up, more or less.” We fixed a time for Monday morning and hung up.

  It preyed on me through that day, a Wednesday. It was my surgery day, though there wasn’t that much to do. We had a teeth cleaning on an ancient Lab—anesthesia was the issue there, not cutting—two spays, and the removal of an extra toe that seemed to be bothering a mixed-breed puppy. Mary Ellen was assisting me. One of the spays, a cat, was pregnant, and we lifted out the tiny, beautifully intricate embryos and carefully set them aside. Mary Ellen wanted to take them into her son’s day care center to show to the kids.

  While we were working, I was thinking about it, I heard Detective Ryan’s loud voice. I pictured the homicide department’s cheerful office, the hum of machines, of people working and talking. “You can only go one step at a time,” Daniel had said to me over breakfast that morning when I told him about the letter to Sadie.

  Well, yes. But I realized now, pulling the sutures on the shaved flesh below me, that I wanted to take this step, this next step available to me, before Monday. I wanted to take it now. I’d stopped myself from trying to force things, with Sadie, with Daniel. But any step out of all this that was made available to me was one I wanted already to have taken.

  As we were washing up, I asked Mary Ellen if she could cover for me the next day. When she said she would, I went to the front desk to talk to Beattie. She called up my schedule on the computer and we reviewed it together, deciding who could be rescheduled, who would need to see Mary Ellen tomorrow, whom Beattie should telephone. She was, as she always was in this kind of situation, helpful and efficient.

  When we’d mapped it all out, she sat back and looked up at me. “Business or pleasure?” she asked. She wore two spangled barrettes in her dry, thin hair, one above each ear.

  “What?”

  “Your day off.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “Exactly neither,” I said.

  She called after me. “That’s right. Don’t tell me anything.”

  I stepped back into the doorway. “Beattie, you don’t want to know.” A lie, if ever there was one. She sniffed. She knew it too.

  I called that evening and left word for Detective Ryan that I’d be in in the morning, but when I arrived at the counter in the homicide department the next day, he was out. “I left a message,” I said. “Last night. Maybe he left some kind of message back for me?”

  “What is this regarding?”

  He was an older man, much older than Detective Ryan. His hair was yellow-white, thick and curly. His face, too, was white, almost unnaturally so. Parchment color.

  “It’s about an old murder case. Dana Jablonski. That was the victim’s name.”

  “I’ll ask around,” he said.

  I watched him move from desk to desk, stopping to laugh at one or two. He disappeared into the part of the long room I couldn’t see from my side of the counter. I stood there for some minutes, my hip beginning to ache. Finally another man, this one truly young—a kid, I would have called him—came up and said, “Mrs. Becker?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m Detective Lewis. I know something about the Jablonski case. What were you coming in for?” He smiled at me, a kind of goofy, pointless smile. He had big teeth, oversize for his mouth.

  “Just to get caught up, I guess. I don’t know if Detective Ryan had any more questions for me or not. I told him I’d come in Monday, but then I didn’t want to wait that long. I’m sorry if this is an inconvenience. I can come back Monday if this won’t work.”

  “No, it’s okay. Why don’t you come in, sit down.” He opened the partition to allow me to pass. “I’ll go over what we’ve got and be with you in a minute.”

  “Are you sure it’s not a problem?” I was already stepping in.

  “No problem. I was working on it with him earlier. I just need to catch up, and I’ll be right with you.” Over a white button-down shirt, he was wearing a shiny green Celtics jacket.

  He led me once again to the room with the large table, and I pulled out a chair to sit down. “Can I get you anything?” he asked from the doorway. Part of their training, apparently.

  I shook my head. “No. Thanks.” And he was gone.

  It was nearly fifteen minutes before he returned. “Got it figured out why he called you, I think,” he said, sitting down himself, several chairs away from me.

  “Good,” I said. There was something too large about all his features, I saw now—lips, nose, eyebrows, ears—as though his face hadn’t grown into them yet.

  “Basically,” he said, “I think Detective Ryan wanted to let you know that we most likely won’t go anywhere with your information.”

  I was breathless for a few seconds. “But why? I mean, he thought you would, I think.”

  “Yeah, but . . . well, see, it would need to jive with something else. It would need to”—his hand flapped back and forth—“open something up. And the thing is, it doesn’t. What it’s come to is, it’s your word against his.” He looked at me with a keen and curious disinterest, and shrugged.

  “So he denied it. That he’d told me he killed Dana.”

  “Dr. Mayhew. Yeah. He denied it. Denied he said it, denied he did it.” This seemed somehow to please him. “He was pretty adamant.”

  I thought for a moment. “But he would be, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, when we looked back at what we had in the box, nothing jumped out, if you see what I mean. What you said he said to you doesn’t make anything make more sense. Which is kinda what you look for. For corroboration.” He flashed his big teeth at me.

  I was genuinely puzzled. “But it does make sense. I mean, there were no fingerprints, and he told me he was wearing gloves. That connects. And he could so easily have gotten rid of stuff in the lab, which is what he told me he did.”

  “Yeah, but none of that’s conclusive in any way. None of it’s news. I mean, we all knew way back then—you knew too”—he smiled again—“that the killer was wearing gloves. And, I mean, anyone could have pointed out at any time that Dr. Mayhew had the means to get rid of stuff. It’s nothing new, you see what I mean?” His voice was boyish also, there was an energy, an enthusiasm, in it that was startling to me.

  “But he told me,” I said. My voice, by contrast to his, sounded dry and weak.

  “And he says he didn’t tell you.”

  We sat facing each other over the big table. His mouth was slightly open.

  “But why would I make all that up?” I asked at last.

  “Well, that’s a problem, but it’s not our problem.” The teasing half smile lifted his face again.

  “But he has much more reason to deny it than I do to invent it.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I was irritated. “Well, of course he does. Why would I want to make all this . . . trouble for myself if it weren’t true?”

  “Well, it’s trouble for you, but it’s trouble for him, too, isn’t it?”

  “Well, why would I want to make trouble for him, then?” I could hear that I was beginning to sound frazzled.

  He lifted his hand. “You tell me.”

  “There isn’t any reason. In a way, I barely know the man. I have no ax to grind here.”

  “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.”

  “I don’t. I assure you, I don’t. Why on earth would I want to put anyone through this unless it was true? What kind of monster of ill will would I have to be to do such a thing?”

  “It would be ill will, all right.” He sounded almost amused.

  “But I have no such ill will. I have no reason for it.”

  He let a little silence accumulate between us before he said, “Tell me something.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Were you ever, like . . . attracted to Dr. Mayhew, Mrs. Becker?”

  And suddenly it was clear to me what Eli had said, how he’d defended himself. And even in that moment of clarity, with its accompan
ying sense of danger, I was aware also of being pettily annoyed, of wanting to say, “Look, I’m the doctor; he’s the mister.” For a moment I was speechless, but finally I said, “Is that what he told you?”

  “Well, you know, we wondered, too, so we asked him why he thought you would go to all this trouble. It was an idea he had, let’s say.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not true.”

  “So you were not attracted to him.”

  Detective Lewis had blue eyes, bright blue below the heavy eyebrows, and they were steady on me now as he waited.

  “I was attracted to him, but I didn’t seek revenge on account of it.”

  “But you were attracted.”

  “I had been, yes.”

  “Were you disappointed in your attraction?” He was smirking, his lips tight over the big teeth.

  “How elegantly you put it,” I said. “No. No, I wasn’t. My attraction ended when Mr. Mayhew confessed to me, when he told me he’d murdered my friend.”

  “So you weren’t pissed off at him that he didn’t respond to you.”

  “Not by that time; no.” I shook my head.

  After a pause, he said, “Did you ask him to meet you at the Ritz Hotel? Did you call him?”

  “That is true, but—”

  “So you were still attracted to him at that point. At the point at which you called him.”

  “Why are you talking to me this way?” My voice was shrill. “I’m not accused of anything.”

  “Well, you are, kind of. You made some serious charges against Dr. Mayhew, and it’s possible you did that vindictively.”

  “I didn’t.” He was still looking at me, and I thought suddenly of how he must see me. Old. Desperate. Disappointed. I had dressed drably, I realized now—I suppose to seem responsible and reliable to Detective Ryan. This guy would be seeing it another way.

  He shifted now in his chair. “What were your expectations, Mrs. Becker, when you went to the Ritz Hotel to meet Dr. Mayhew?”