Dottie looked at him. At it.
—We’ll have some things to figure out with the layout and everything, he said, but I think we should go for it. It has room for a hot tub and a great view of the Divide. The girls will have to share a room but they won’t mind. Are they too old for bunk beds?
—The girls? You mean Carol and Lydia?
Tomas froze when he saw the look on Dottie’s face. Her lips tapped together, then turned into a smile that crinkled her eyes. Water dripped from the ad in her hand. At first the joy he felt was inconceivable, like nothing he’d experienced in a decade or more. She appeared as happy about this prospect as he was, and he thought he might actually yelp with joy at the symmetry that for so long had been missing from his life— But then she began to laugh. She reached out her arm and dropped the ad and laughed.
—Are you completely clueless, she finally said, or is that part of the act?
—What?
—Whatever happened to good old-fashioned cheating? You really thought I’d just run off with you? Is that why with the ring? That’s so sweet. I mean it, Tomas—you are so sweet!
Tomas couldn’t speak. He became aware of muscles constricting in his face.
—C’mon, she said. Don’t get hurt feelings. You had to know I wasn’t going to elope, for Christ’s sake. We’re not teenagers.
He saw the soaked ad for the cabin stuck to the linoleum and felt a slow surge of knots popping up his spine until finally there was nothing left to do but to erupt—so he did, and he watched his hand swipe the boom box so hard that it skittered right off the back of the toilet and arced through the air, its cord stretching over the sink, lobbing toward Dottie in the tub, flute rock blasting, and when her arms shot up to cover her face the boom box bashed into her elbow, tearing her skin, and then it hit the rim of the tub and splashed through her thighs and into the water with a thunk. The music stopped underwater. Tomas thought immediately of electrocution, of voltage, and in a panic Dottie tried to stand out of the tub but her feet slipped and she bashed her tailbone on its edge before plunging back in. A wave sloshed to the floor. Blood dripped from her elbow.
Tomas looked at the black electrical cord. One end was still plugged into the wall above the sink, but the other end had popped free of the socket in the back of the boom box as it had fallen.
—It came unplugged, he said. It shouldn’t have shocked you.
—It didn’t. I don’t think.
—That’s good it didn’t.
He realized he was smiling. Dottie pressed a washcloth against her bleeding elbow. Water beaded on her face and she blinked hard.
—Could I have died?
—Well, he said, somewhere in Japan there’s an engineer we should be thanking.
—What?
—For making the cord as short as he did. Everything’s okay.
—Everything’s okay?
Dottie rose to her feet and ripped a towel from the rack and tightened it roughly over her body, as if suddenly angry at her nudity.
—It was an accident.
—You fucking loser.
—Dottie?
—You fucking loser. Get out of my house.
Tomas stood still for a long moment. Then he walked into the hall and plunged his fist straight through the drywall opposite the bathroom door. He worked his fist out of the wall and crumbles of gypsum rained on the carpet below. He felt no reaction, no pain—just the satisfaction of punching.
—Get out of my house! Dottie screamed. Get out— Tomas turned down the hall and before he knew it he was out on the sidewalk, feeling stunned, walking away from Dottie’s house, rubbing his dusty knuckles in the cold.
Less than forty-eight hours later, Carol’s green mittens were there on the bench, right next to his daughter.
He braced an arm against the mudroom wall.
—what’s the matter?
—Nothing. I’ll grab you a blanket. Then we go.
Over the back of the couch in the living room a gray blanket was tented into the girls’ sleepover fort, but he walked right past it and stood in the mouth of the hall, clenching his jaw, just down from the body pile.
The hallway carpet was soggy in spots and umbras of blood marked the walls. Across from the bathroom, he could see the place where Dottie had hung a family photo over the hole he’d punched. The photo itself was faceup on the carpet below. It was several years old and showed, behind a sunburst of broken glass, the O’Toole family smiling and wearing matching white turtlenecks and freshly feathered hairdos— And now they were together in the doorway down the hall, just visible from the spot where he stood. Tomas tried to avoid looking at them, but their gray limbs clung to his vision like a burr. He wanted to go back to the beginning, to jab his finger into the exact moment that led to this unraveling, but as he meandered through his memory all he found were more insistent images of Dottie: Dottie leaning over the library counter to laugh at his misbuttoned dress shirt. Dottie phoning him while drunk on Gallo wine at three in the morning. Dottie dipping her finger into his strawberry sundae at the Dolly Madison shop on Sixth Avenue.
Dottie in her suds, putting on his dead wife’s ring. The ring he’d engraved years ago with the words A rose for my Rose. The ring that would point to him.
As he stepped deeper into the hall, pieces of glass snapped on the carpet beneath him. He could see Dottie’s arm flopped out from the pile, just near the bedroom’s doorjamb. Through the sour haze he reminded himself that he needed that ring, that leaving it behind was not an option, so he knelt near the bodies and planted his palms on the carpet to scootch closer. He heard something pop. Pain raced through his hand. He held up his palm and watched a red bead roll down his wrist and soak into his cuff. When he wiped the blood away he could feel the itchy tip of a glass splinter in the pad beneath his thumb. He must have gasped, because he could hear Lydia squirming on her bench in the other room.
—daddy?
—Stay put. I’m coming.
The splinter came straight out when he pulled on it—a sharp shard, the size of a snapped toothpick—followed by a small tide of blood. He pressed his hand to his thigh and felt the cut pulsing there, bleeding into his jeans, but his attention remained focused on getting that ring. Because if anyone else were to find it— The air around him was thick and sour as he inched toward the bodies. He found it difficult to breathe and felt a pressure in his ribs so strong he thought he might rip down the middle. But finally he could see, splayed at the base of the doorjamb, Dottie’s small hand, darker and fatter than it had ever been, adorned with a bevy of rings.
He reached toward her, blood beading on his fingertips.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE