Since We Fell

“You’re drunk.”


“I’m buzzed,” she said. “What’s at the offices in Cambridge?”

“Nothing. It’s never used. A friend owns it. If we need it—like, say, you’re coming over and we have warning—we dress it. Just like a stage.”

“So who are the interns?”

“You’ve already had your two questions.”

But in that moment she saw the answer, as if it had descended from the heavens decked out in neon.

“They’re actors,” she said.

“Ding!” Caleb checked an imaginary box in the air before his eyes. “Gold star. Did Brian leave the camera store with anything?”

“Not that I saw.”

He checked her eyes. “Did he go to the bank before or after the camera store?”

“That’s a second question.”

“Be kind.”

She laughed so hard she almost threw up. Laughed the way flood victims and earthquake survivors laughed. Laughed not because something was funny but because nothing was.

“Kind?” she said. “Kind?”

Caleb made a steeple of his hands and placed his forehead to their point. A supplicant. A martyr waiting to be sculpted. After no sculptor arrived, he raised his head. His face was ash, his eye sockets dark. He was aging as she watched.

She swirled her wine but didn’t drink it. “How’d he fake the selfie from London?”

“I did it.” He rotated his glass of bourbon on the countertop a full three-sixty. “He texted me, told me what was up. You were sitting right across from me in Grendel’s. It was all just hitting buttons on a phone, snatching an image here, an image there and running it through a photo program. If you’d looked at it in hi-res on a decent computer screen, it probably wouldn’t have held up, but for a selfie supposedly taken in low light? It was easy.”

“Caleb,” she said, the wine definitely hitting her now, “what am I part of?”

“Huh?”

“I woke up this morning, I was someone’s wife. Now I’m . . . I’m, what, I’m one of his wives? In one of his lives? What am I?”

“You’re you,” he said.

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re you,” he said. “You’re unaltered. Pure. You haven’t changed. Your husband’s not who you thought he was. Yes. But that doesn’t change who you are.” He reached across the counter and took her fingers in his hands. “You’re you.”

She pulled her fingers free of his. He left his hands on the counter. She looked at her own hands, at the two rings there—a round solitaire diamond engagement ring sitting atop a platinum wedding band with five more round diamonds. She once took them to be cleaned at a jeweler’s on Water Street (one, she now realized, Brian had recommended), and the old man who owned the place whistled at them.

“A man who would give you such precious stones,” the old man said, adjusting his glass. “Whoo. He must love you very much.”

Her hands began to shake as she looked at them, at the flesh, at the jewels, and wondered if anything, anything in her life, was real. These last three years had been first a crawl and then a climb toward sanity, toward reclamation of her life and her self, a series of baby steps taken in a tsunami of doubt and terror. A blind woman walking down a series of corridors in an unfamiliar building she could not remember entering.

And who had arrived to guide her? Who had taken her hand and whispered, “Trust me, trust me,” until she finally did? Who had walked her toward the sun?

Brian.

Brian had believed in her long after anyone else had gone home. Brian had pulled her out of the hopeless dark.

“All of it was a lie?” She was surprised to hear the words leave her mouth and surprised to see the tears fall on the marble countertop and on her hands and on her rings. They rolled down the sides of her nose and off her cheekbones and into the corners of her mouth; they burned a bit.

She moved to get a Kleenex, but Caleb took her hands again.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Let it out.”

She wanted to tell him it wasn’t okay, any of it, and would he please let go of her hands?

She pulled her hands out of his. “Leave.”

“What?”

“Just go. I want to be alone.”

“You can’t be alone.”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“No,” he said, “you know too much.”

“I . . . ?” She couldn’t repeat the rest of his threat. It was a threat, wasn’t it?

“He won’t like it if I leave you alone.”

Now she repeated it. “Because I know too much.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

She’d left the gun in the chair over by the picture window.

“Brian and I have been at this for a very long time,” he said. “There’s a lot of money at stake.”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

“And you think I might tell someone?”

He smiled and drank some bourbon. “I don’t think you necessarily will, but I think you could.”

“Uh-huh.” She carried her wineglass with her to the window, but Caleb came right along with her. They stood by the chair and looked out at the lights of Cambridge, and if Caleb looked down, he’d see the gun. “Is that why you married a woman who didn’t speak the language?”

He said nothing and she tried not to look down at the chair.

“Who doesn’t know anyone in this country?”

He looked out at the night, but moved his hip slightly closer to the chair and kept his eyes on her reflection in the window.

“Is that why Brian married a shut-in?”

Eventually, Caleb said, “This could be so good for everyone.” He met her eyes in the dark glass. “So don’t make it bad.”

“Are you threatening me?” she said softly.

“I think it’s you who’s been doing the threatening tonight, kid.” And he looked at her the way the rapist, Teacher Paul, had in Haiti.

Or at least that’s how it felt in the moment.

“Do you know where Brian is?” she asked.

“I know where he might be.”

“Can you take me to him?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because he owes me an explanation.”

“Or?”

“Or what?”

“That’s what I’m asking. Are you giving us an ‘or else’?”

“Caleb,” she said, and hated how desperate she sounded, “take me to Brian.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Brian has something I need. Something my family needs. I don’t like that he has that and hasn’t told me.”

She felt herself trying to swim up through the wine again. “Brian has something you . . . ? The camera store?”

Caleb nodded. “The camera store.”

“What—?”

“He has something I need. And you’re something he needs.” He turned to face her, the chair between them. “So I’m not going to take you to him just yet.”

She reached down, grabbed the pistol, thumbed off the safety, and pointed at the center of his chest.

“Yes,” she said, “you are.”





22


THE SNOWBLOWER


Driving them south in his silver Audi, Caleb said, “You can put the gun away.”

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