But she hadn’t won, poor kid. Not even that story—not even that—could alienate Tommy. He’d cried, in a desperate choking way that made Zoe say, “Daddy, please, I’m sorry, Daddy.” Over and over he said, “This is all my fault.” Limp and wrung out, Jennifer sat in a chair and watched all this, until Tommy dropped to the floor in front of her and, looking up at her with those eyes and those unabashed tears, said, “I’m so sorry, babe,” and then it was her turn to cry. That was Tommy. He literally fell at her feet.
She doesn’t want to think about what it was to give in to Tommy. To stop resisting. Resisting was so hard. Their love was a cobweb and when she fought it she just wound herself tighter. If she stopped fighting—the pleasures of being held that tight! If she thinks about it she misses it, and then she grows angry at herself.
It was after that they conceived Milo, and then things were lovely for a while. Not, of course, with Zoe. What was it Zoe held against her most—the image of her mother with her hand inside a strange man’s jeans? The sight of her father crying? Jennifer thinks it was the fact that Tommy forgave her, which, like all things, must have been Jennifer’s fault.
Later, her ex-lover told the cops she’d once said she wanted Tommy to die, though that wasn’t exactly what she’d said. He’d asked, again, why she didn’t leave Tommy, and she’d tried to explain what she couldn’t explain—she fell in love with Tommy so young, she’d surrendered herself to him.“You can rebel, can’t you?” he said, and his voice was sharp and loud with frustration. “You can leave.”
“You’ve surrendered yourself,” she said. “You can’t leave because you’d leave yourself behind, and that’s impossible. All I can do is wait for him to die.”
If she’d known what was coming, she’d never have said such a thing. At the time she wasn’t picturing the man in the interview room at the police station, offering his damning paraphrase. She was lying in his bed next to him, with his naked leg pressed against hers, and he’d wanted an explanation, as people always do, and against her better judgment, she’d tried to give him one, and had learned once again that she should have chosen silence. People don’t understand. This is something she needs to remember in the face of Megan’s sympathetic gaze, in the face of her own bifurcated impulse, so very much like Margaret’s: conceal, reveal; reveal, conceal. People don’t ever understand. No one will love us if they know the worst and yet if they don’t know the worst we can’t trust their love. Her whole life the only person who’s ever really known her is Tommy. She wishes she hadn’t told Megan his name. She likes the way Megan’s looking at her now, the charmed affection, the confident assumption of intimacy. Open as a rose, Margaret said. Shining in the light.
Jennifer’s been silent too long, because Megan prompts her. “Where’d you go?” Megan says. “Are you thinking about your client? Margaret?”
Jennifer nods. She pictures Margaret, alone in the lonely woods. Banished, or in hiding. Under an enchantment, maybe of her own design. Her house is so quiet, quieter even than Jennifer’s. The grandfather clock, though it makes a noise, somehow amplifies the silence. In the guest room, two high, ornate twin beds have the grand severity of thrones. The king and queen will see you now. The dresser is squat and unfriendly. The antique mirror watches with haughty disdain. Maybe it’s the silence that brings these things to life. Margaret is the Beast in the castle, before Beauty came along. Or maybe after she was gone.
“I am curious about her,” Jennifer says. “About what happened to her. But I don’t know if I really want to know.”
Ticktock
I cannot get the world’s attention. That is what it means to be old. I shout but no one can hear me. I am of no consequence. People imagine I don’t know that, talking to me with their voices that pat pat pat me on the head. Feigned interest, faux concern. As if this fools me. As if you fool me, world. I know you don’t give a shit.
Jennifer has touched my naked skin, seen the inside of my house, rummaged in my medicine cabinet for all I know. She caught me on tape. She wrote me down. No detective could have infiltrated better. I have been investigated. She got me to talk.
And what do I know about her in return? Nothing. Nothing! Except that there is something to know. Of that I’m certain. There is something to know. But all my stratagems for solving her mystery have ended only in exposing my own.