Home. She hit the remote in two places at once and the gate swung, the garage door revved. She nosed the car in and parked and turned the engine off. The door slung down behind her and she rested in the plush quiet—and again woke, this time feeling misshapen, stiff. A struggle to warp from the car and flatten past her husband’s storage containers and gas bottles, to open and close the townhouse’s inner door. The alarm system chimed and she disarmed it then tapped on the lights and unlatched the shuttered closet containing the mechanicals and engaged the AC. For a second, the irregular patterns on the hallway’s slate floor eddied then stilled. Then she slogged past her office and climbed the tower-steep stairs. Dazzle of clean counters. Double oven perfect for multi-course feast-making though she and Rand mostly used it for fancy frozens. She dislodged a glass from a cabinet and stocked it with ice. The ice sizzled and popped and she held the tumbler to her sore forehead then exhumed her handset from her bag. Exhaustion grew in her like weeds and she felt winched open, exposed, a rustling inside her like scurrying rats. What to say! She tried to recall when she’d last spoken with Jane’s dad but failed. Marilyn set her device on the counter and swizzled the ice with her finger then ran it along her gums until she felt them shrink. She felt like something chalked on a sidewalk, all outline. Once more her ears rang. Call. Call. The fridge’s motor sounded like a zipper opening and closing at high speed.
Coward. In the darkened bedroom she dropped fully clothed onto the bed. She panted into dreaming then choked on and off into consciousness. A car parked on the street outside. Jane-y, Marilyn heard. She heard, Mare-i-lyn—in Mrs. Allen’s soprano some distance from the root cellar where the girls once shushed each other among sacks of potatoes and onions. Medallions of spider webs swagged the low ceiling—it took buckets of bravery to get here but now the girls were outside plucking poisonous berries from the Allens’ hedge. Fake slurping and belching, the girls slipped into the shade of the lion-maned elm. Girls! Come out, come out, wherever you are. Mrs. Allen’s voice grew louder, closer. The girls thrilled at hiding in plain sight.
You’re going to catch it, Jane suddenly crowed, pointing at some spatter on Marilyn’s sneaks.
Dripping red.
She gasped. Her pulse staggered and leapt. In her hypnagogic toppling, wind stropped her ears and she toppled off a cliff.
You awake? Rand said. Mare?
High above, the ceiling was a floating socket. On the edge of the bed sat her husband, furred with wriggling dark curlicues. He smelled sour, sharp like scallions. Don’t shut me out, he said. Please.
She coiled upright. In the corners of the room tessellations appeared—crowns of antlers, dark nests with their shadow treasures, all that once flocked to her deep in the freezing back chambers of flooded mines and far inside caves and wrecks, narcosis’ brood. With each the dire need to check her gages every minute to remind herself where and who she was, recall how she’d return in one piece. A miracle, it seemed to her now, that each time she’d made it back.
He thumped the wall over the headboard with his fist. Talk to me. You think it’s my fault? That I put a gun to her?
No, she said.
He stretched onto the mattress and she felt his corrugated breaths. Do you wish it had been me? he said.
Her stomach rumbled, or his did. How unfair their bodies with their idiot needs. How their bodies went and went. If he was guilty, she thought, so was she. She snapped on her bedside light. He flung an arm over his eyes.
Do you wish it had been me? she said.
Marilyn, he said after a silence. We’re all we have.
24
Sunlight bladed through the blinds. The sheets felt oily slick. He lay sprawled carelessly as litter across his side of the bed and part of hers. Littermate. Her uncovered bare legs seemed to stretch far from the rest of her. Across the room, paint strokes wavered unevenly where the walls met and a watermark she’d never noticed before oozed. He stirred and the sheets seemed to foam. Her peripheral vision flanged—an occlusion then a flare. The wall stain fluxed and she fixed on the dresser and then the windowsill as if fighting seasickness. He sighed in his sleep and she remembered. Last night, bestride her, he’d wiped her lips with his glans, pre-ejaculatory liquid seeping from his urethra, his testicles high and tight. She’d opened to him and he fucked her face like a drawer slamming repeatedly. Then they’d arked at their trunks, torsos rearing. Pure humping. They were all each other had. Until an image of Jane bobbed like an apple in Marilyn’s vision. She howled and clawed. Mistaking her efforts, he pinned her hips and came, then fell into a fast slumber still inside her. She slept too, awoke in the night with his dick shrunken and slipped from her.
The wooden floor beneath her feet with its boards in even strips steadied her now. Full morning. He began to snore and she backed from the room.
Jane. Wide-spaced eyes and pale wheat-coloured brows. Two days ago, a girl soon to be stolen to darkness, she’d reclined in a summer meadow on an island called Flowerpot, her teeth picking around the pit of a plum—the single piece of fruit she’d agreed to eat from the robust picnic supplied by her friend while Rand and Leo post-lunch dipped in the bay. I know it’s exciting, Marilyn could have said then. You’re all caught up but maybe you should slow down, take things one step at a time. And then Marilyn could have suffered Jane’s hall-of-mirrors retort. Like you did? Because isn’t the danger the attraction? The attraction, the danger? Which is exactly when Marilyn might have just said, Stay the fuck away from my husband.
Descending the townhouse stairs, she squeezed the railing as if she might wring moisture from it. Two days ago on that island Jane’s eyes had shone like ball bearings. She was, Marilyn thought now, a woman not yet stolen. But already called.
She took refuge in her office with its shelves arranged with boxes of computer programs and manuals and colour swatches, stacks of spiral-bound drawing pads. Her multi-screen workstation was ornamented only with a framed photograph of her and Rand on a boat, formally attired in their tuxedo-black drysuits. The happy couple.