Sitting up quickly, she was certain she heard the doorbell ring. She said, “Jay, I was just dreaming—”
“Let me do the talking,” Jay said. He smiled at her, but she thought he looked different, as though his face was broader than she had noticed before, and his face was moist with perspiration. She put on her robe and followed him downstairs. When he opened the door, two policemen stood there. Linda saw behind them another policeman and also a policewoman and, in the driveway, the two white police cars. The policemen were very polite. “Can you show us where the guestroom is? Where you had the guest Yvonne Tuttle staying?”
Jay said, “Of course. Linda, take them down.”
Linda’s mouth was extremely dry as she turned to go down the ramp to the guest area. The bedroom was in darkness, and as Linda started to enter, her hand reaching for the light switch, the policewoman stopped her, saying, “No, please leave everything.” And the policeman said, “Mrs. Peterson, why don’t you go back upstairs now?”
Linda turned quickly, calling out for Jay.
Jay was shaking his head slowly as the policemen stood in the kitchen with their arms at their sides. “We thought she seemed odd from the very beginning, but I’m sure you understand I don’t care to discuss any more of this without speaking to my lawyer. I’m represented by Norm Atwood, and you know what he’ll say. This is outlandish, entirely ridiculous. I don’t imagine the county looks forward to a lawsuit from me.”
One of the policemen said, “Why don’t you ask him to meet us at the station?”
“Honestly.” Jay smiled. “I know you folks pride yourselves on being meticulous, but this is just outrageous.”
“Where’s Yvonne?” Linda suddenly asked, as the men were gathering by the door.
“She’s at the county hospital, ma’am,” said one of the policemen.
“She says I tried to rape her,” Jay added.
“Yvonne? She did? But that’s insane,” Linda said.
“Of course it’s insane,” Jay said calmly. “Honey, I’ll be back soon.”
The policewoman stayed behind with one of the policemen. Linda said, “What are you doing?”
“Have a seat, Mrs. Peterson. We’d like to ask you a few questions.” They were very polite. They asked about Yvonne. What was she like?
“Oh, horrible!” Linda said.
In what way?
“She was rude to us, never spending time with us.” Linda suddenly remembered about the pajamas and blurted that out too. “She accused me of—of stealing her pajamas.” The policewoman nodded sympathetically while the policeman wrote something down.
“And was she rude to your husband as well?”
Too late, Linda realized that she should have said nothing. They were very nice to her when she said she was not going to talk to them anymore. They explained that a search warrant was being obtained for the guestroom, that evidence might be taken, possibly the sheets, pillowcases, things like that.
The next morning, Jay slept heavily in their bedroom. Toward dawn, Norm Atwood had brought him home. Jay had been charged with third-degree battery and released on bond. Norm explained that Jay had most likely been charged because Yvonne was in such a condition of hysteria, running down the road at three A.M. in underpants and a T-shirt, then knocking on a door in town, and that there was a small bruise on her wrist that could conceivably indicate a struggle. Norm said the state would still have difficulty proving it was not an encounter of consent, that it was always hard to prove, with no witnesses, the matter of consent. Now Linda sat motionless in the back garden beside the glaring blue swimming pool. In her pocket her cellphone rang, and she clicked it on.
Her daughter said, “Fuck you, Mom. Just fuck you both. I’m never coming home again.”
Linda rose and went inside to the living room and sat on the far end of the couch. She felt a little bit out-of-body because she had a sensation of being young again, walking down a road on an early summer evening with school girl friends past fields and fields of corn and fields of soybeans, the whole world filled with the bright green of new life, the sun setting so that the entire sky was colored in glorious celebration, the air on her bare arms she recalled too, all freedom, all innocence, the laughter—
Norm Atwood had arranged an appointment for her in the afternoon to drive to Layton to see her own lawyer: She had marital privilege, he explained—she didn’t have to testify against Jay about anything he had told her. But anything she had seen she would be put on the stand to report under oath. Linda tried to understand this as she sat on the couch, but she felt that all parts of her had stopped; she was in neutral. She looked about her. The Hopper painting hung on the wall with an indifference so vast it began to feel personal, as though it had been painted for this moment: Your troubles are huge and meaningless, it seemed to say, there is only the sun on the side of a house. She got up and moved into the dining room, sitting at the long table. A few years earlier, her daughter had found something on her father’s computer, and the girl had screamed and screamed and screamed. Dad screws women right in the house, and you do nothing? You’re more pathetic than he is, Mom, you make me sick.
It had started as a private game, a way of breaking domestic boredom, creating a Linda Peterson-Cornell that seemed daring, provocative, a person her husband appreciated more.
While Linda was growing up in northern Illinois, her father had managed a successful feed corn farm. Her mother, a homemaker, had been a scattered woman, but kind; their last name was Nicely, and Linda and her two sisters were known as the Pretty Nicely Girls. It was a pleasant childhood, and then her mother suddenly, so suddenly it seemed to Linda to happen while she was at school one day, moved out and into a squalid little apartment, and it was the most terrible thing Linda could imagine, worse than if her mother had died. After a few months her mother wanted to return home, but Linda’s father refused to allow it, and the image of her mother living alone in a tiny house—after the squalid apartment—and having given up her friends, all of whom reacted with fear as though her mother’s attempts at freedom might be contagious, terminal, along with the estrangement of her daughters, because their father pulled their loyalty to him; all this was—by far—the strongest event in Linda’s life. The week after Linda graduated from high school she married a local boy named Bill Peterson, then she divorced him one year later, keeping his name. In college in Wisconsin she met Jay, who with his intelligence and vast money seemed to offer a life that might catapult her away from the terrifying and abiding image of her mother alone and ostracized.
—
Now, as Linda sat at the end of the dining room table, the doorbell rang, though at first she wasn’t sure she had heard right. It rang again. She peeked through the curtains and did not see anyone, so she opened the door cautiously and it was skinny Joy Gunterson, saying, “Linda, I just had to come over.”
Linda said, “No you didn’t, no you did not. You have nothing in common with me, do you hear? You have nothing in common with me. Go away.”
“Oh, Linda. But I do—”
“I’m not going to end up living in some trailer, Joy.” It amazed her that she said this, no part of her had any inkling she would say that. It seemed to amaze Joy too. The woman, shorter than Linda, had a look of confusion shift onto her face.
Probably this mutual surprise prevented Linda from closing the door. So Joy had time to shake her head and say, “Oh, but, Linda—see, it doesn’t matter where you live. That’s what you find out. When the person you love more than anyone spends his days in a cell, then you’re in a cell too. It doesn’t matter where you are. You’ll find out who’re your real friends. They won’t be who you think. Trust me on that.”