“Sometimes.” She thinks of the moment of contact with Margaret, the resistance under her skin, the longing that pulsed against it. Something about the old lady—her anger? Her grief?—makes Jennifer turn the memory aside.
Megan thrusts her arm out, and Jennifer instinctively steps back. “I’m not trying to hit you!” Megan laughs. “I want to see what you can intuit about me. I’m really sore right here.” She runs a finger up and down her right forearm.
“Ah,” Jennifer says. “You type too much.”
“Is that all?” Megan makes a playful expression of disappointment. “How boring.”
Her arm is still out. “I’m not a fortune-teller,” Jennifer says. But then she puts her hand on Megan’s arm. She presses her thumb along it. “You are really tense here.” In fact Megan’s tendon is so tight Jennifer’s thumb slips off it, and Jennifer senses that the tension there radiates throughout Megan’s entire body, as if Megan, who seems so easy with herself, is actually permanently braced against a blow. “Are you stressed about something?”
“Oh,” Megan says lightly. “Always.” She steps back, pulling her arm from Jennifer’s grasp, like she’s the one reluctant for intimacy.
But maybe Jennifer misread that reluctance, as five minutes later Megan is relating a morning phone call with her mother, apparently a critical and controlling person who never lets Megan get a word in edgewise. As she talks, Megan gets a sharp edge of anger and frustration in her voice and then, trying to pull back, accuses herself of overreacting, of being too sensitive. “My mother just wants the best for me,” she says. “But it would be nice if she found it possible to believe I might be the one who knows what that is.”
Jennifer feels a sudden sharp longing for her own mother, for both her parents, her sweet bookish uncritical parents. Before she and Milo came here, they stayed with her parents for months. After the police finally gave up, in a kind of aggressive backing away that made it clear they still didn’t believe her, her parents grew cheerful. Her father resumed his habit of singing hits of the seventies—John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens—as he tidied up the house. She stopped him one afternoon as he was straightening magazines on the coffee table, in the middle of the chorus of “Sundown.” She put a hand on his arm. He turned to look at her, surprised at the touch. They were not a physical family. The love between them was strong, but its expressions were tentative. She said, “Dad.”
He looked worried. “Yes?”
“Aren’t you ever going to ask me if I did it?”
“Did what?” he asked, though of course he knew, so she didn’t answer. She waited. He looked at the magazines in his hand, gave them a final tap, then laid the neatened pile carefully down. He shook his head. She waited for him to say he didn’t need to be told she was innocent to know it was true. He said, “No, I’m never going to ask.” She could tell by the determined way he said it that he’d come to that decision quite some time ago. He’d decided not to seek the answer, which meant part of him thought it might be yes.
She cried. Her father put his arms around her and she wept against his chest. She might’ve been a child. All he wanted was to give her comfort. She wondered later if he took her weeping as confession. What it was, really, was heartbreak. Because at that moment she understood—completely, thoroughly understood—that no one in that town, not even her parents, would ever be able to separate her from that question. It didn’t matter who she’d been before. Now she was what the answer made her, and since yes could never be uttered and no could never really be believed, she would forever be the woman who might have. She was the woman whose own daughter thought she could. She imagined the moment—at ten, at twenty—when Milo would want to know whether she killed his father. And she knew she couldn’t let him become that. A person who had to ask.
Clues
Today is Tuesday, not that it matters. Today she made her third visit to my house. I don’t care about the days of the week anymore, except as they help me know when to go to the doctor and when not to expect the mail. I had an appointment yesterday, which is why she couldn’t come then. “You’re doing very well, Ms. Riley, considering,” Dr. Bell said.
“Considering what?” I snapped, though I knew damn well.