I keep thinking of Jennifer’s face in the light from my little streetlamp. How, at last, the rock rolled away from the cave. I looked at her and I saw her. Nothing was hidden, nothing stashed away. It was astonishing to see, miraculous as starlight—a human face without a trace of the mask. At the sight of it my heart thrilled and broke. And I kept my own face in the dark, so that she would not know it.
It wasn’t when she said I killed him that this happened. It was when she said I loved him.
I’ve started rereading another Agatha Christie, in hopes that its tidy structures will help me contain my own life. Detectives are after certainty. That’s why people like them—they paper over the unsolvable with deductions and photographs.
I sit here with my book, waiting for Zoe to call.
What Jennifer Did
He was propped up in bed with his foot in that boot. Surgery had fixed the break, but three weeks later it still hurt. He’d been augmenting his prescription meds with other painkillers. One of his drinking buddies had a hookup, Jennifer assumed. She hadn’t asked. Tommy had taught her to be uncurious. She’d found his stash, three fat bottles in a little brown paper bag like you use for school lunches, or drinking liquor in the street. She was standing near the bed with the bag in her hand, and they were fighting. “So now the drinking’s not enough?” she said. “Why not start gambling? Why don’t you go fuck a prostitute? Or maybe you have already.” She was suddenly struck. She asked, in a small, quiet voice, “Have you?”
He had the nerve to look affronted. “No,” he said. “How could you ask that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you won’t do,” she said.
“How could you say that? How could you think that? I’m in pain, Jennifer. My ankle fucking kills me all the time. The pills are for the pain. I don’t know where the rest of this is coming from.”
“You do know where,” she said flatly. And looking at his face, she could see that he did. He knew he’d failed in all the ways she said he had, and he knew he’d fail her again in the future, just as she said he would. He looked at her—raw and naked and sorry, so sorry—and then his expression hardened.
“Just give me the pills,” he said.
“Fine,” she said. She took all three bottles out of the bag and opened them and shook them over the bed, a rain of pills, saying, “Fine, fine, fine,” while Tommy said, “Jesus, stop it, stop it.” A furious duet. When the bottles were empty, she was panting, and she threw them at him, so that he had to duck. “Here are the pills,” she said. “Why don’t you take them. Take them all.”
She grabbed his glass from the bedside table and took it into the bathroom, where she filled it so full it spilled when she set it back down next to him. “Thought you might need this,” she said.
He was looking at her with what she thought was a dull hatred, but would seem to her later to have been blank despair. “You wish I was dead,” he said, and his voice was flat and cold with conviction.
“Wow, Tommy,” she said. “You catch on fast.”
Did she think he’d do it, when she left him there with the water and the sea of pills? Did she believe you catch on fast would be the last thing he’d ever hear her say? These are the questions she asks and cannot answer. With time she’s arrived at what she thinks was in his mind when he swallowed every pill she gave him. She believes he loved her, and that for him that love had always transcended everything, his transgressions and hers, and finally he’d understood that for her it no longer did, hadn’t for a long, long time. He’d thought they had a great love. She convinced him at last that it was an ordinary one. Believing that, he despaired. If his story wasn’t an epic romance, then it was a squalid little tragedy.
But it was a great love, Tommy. It was. And she is so, so sorry.
The Lives I’ve Saved
Jennifer is gone. Jennifer and her little boy. I don’t know where they went. I hope they’re happy there. I sit out on my back deck and see nothing at the house across the pond. No lights. No people. A few weeks ago I drove over there and looked in the windows. The house is empty, neat as a pin. No stray toys on the floor, no lost crayons. No clues. No evidence.