“You need to talk to your wife,” Alison said. “She has something she has to tell you.”
You know nothing about anything, he thought. But he would not speak even to curse her. He opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it decisively behind him, without looking back.
Alison lay back on the bed, her heart pounding. How could she be the one to tell him? He clearly did not know. He was willing to throw everything away, but to throw away this would have been beyond thinking. It would have poisoned everything even more than it already was.
You could have done it just once, her animal brain informed her, pissed. Nobody even knows you’re here. You could have done it and walked away and at least you would have done it. The part of her which understood Kyle better than he understood himself dismissed this. He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself, it said. Wanna bet? said the animal. Alison barely tracked the back-and-forth, as she listened for the sound of a car door, in the distance, slamming shut, the turn of the motor, the gentle crunch of the gravel under the wheels as it moved off. That wife better be driving, she thought. Kyle is drunk. But she’s not. She’s not drinking, because she has a secret to tell him. She listened to the end of the night for what seemed a lifetime. Finally, the sounds came: The car door slammed. The gravel crunched. The car drove off.
Alison remained on the bed, staring at the ceiling, the walls, the Matisse, the jewelry box, the wine bottles, the dark air beyond the windows. She heard the rest of the party drain off. Dennis was doubtless passed out on some couch in some room somewhere.
Alison’s reptilian brain, thwarted in its main purpose for coming—a purpose so nearly achieved—was clever and determined, and no longer willing to take no for an answer. There was no reason to stay in Cincinnati; the entire city and her history there was a trap and a disease and a punishment. She had to get out, and get out for good.
She waited another ten minutes. Then she got off the bed, went to the dresser, and opened the jewelry box, emptying its contents first onto Felicia’s duvet, and then into one of the many handbags Felicia had so helpfully left on a shelf of her walk-in closet. Alison then crept down the back stairs and peered into the kitchen, which was deserted. The house was empty. Alison made her way back to the main hallway, where her coat waited for her in a tidy little heap right by the front stairs. She picked it up, put it on, and left, and the following day she informed her parents that she needed to return to New York immediately. Over their heedless protests, Megan drove her to the airport, where she took the first standby seat available.
By the time Dennis’s father and his wife returned to Cincinnati three weeks later, the trail was cold. No one could say when or how, even, the robbery took place. Two months later, Alison put down a security deposit on a tidy little studio apartment just six blocks from the Atlantic/Pacific Street subway station in Brooklyn. Three months later, she booked a pilot.
part two
nine
THE SCENE WAS A MESS. A good mess, but wow was it taking forfuckingever to figure out how to get the thing to click. It wasn’t like there were a ton of extras to wrangle, and God knows there wasn’t any fancy camera work going on, but there were about eight entrances and exits and meaningful shreds of conversation that were interrupted by plot elements from six other story lines and then yet more buildup to the climactic fight between Tara and Rob that was supposed to get to some place of white-hot rage in a back room of this location, and then end with them having sex on a pool table.