“You know it isn’t,” he said.
How much easier it might have been to admit I had it, and yet as a child, caught in a lie, I had always found it easy to convince others that they were wrong: the lie mixed with what I pretended until the division between truth and untruth disappeared altogether.
“Where is it?” His voice was harsh, angry, transformed. Like the voice he used the night of the snowstorm. Then he closed his eyes, as if gathering his thoughts. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost guiltily. He stepped toward me, his hands tense in the air to make his point. “You’re my wife,” he said.
I had failed in that capacity. I was supposed to support him, no matter what. If I’d loved him, this rift would never have occurred, and we’d be having sex now on one of the old beds in the patient rooms. Except Mary Rae had sent me on this chase. The circumstances never seemed to be on our side.
“What is so fucking important about that portfolio?” I said, dismayed. “Is it the negatives in the back? The ones of Mary Rae?”
William paled.
“I made a mistake marrying you,” he said, his voice leaden. “You’ve lied to me—about other things, too. Don’t think I’m such a fool. You and Charles Wu? Is that it?”
“What?” I said. “Me? Weren’t you at Del’s apartment yesterday?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” William shifted his bag to his other shoulder.
It had grown darker, the shadows sifting out from the corridor. A voice was calling me from downstairs—Del. She had somehow gotten inside and was looking for us, tired of waiting in the car. “I’m ready to go home!” she called. I felt a rush of shame—for suspecting Del of her old ways, for doubting William and being such a terrible wife. I wondered if we could go back—despite everything, I told myself I had been happy. We could forget about this and forgive each other.
“I should have known you were as crazy as she is,” he said, under his breath.
I pushed past him, to the top of the stairs. “Del! Up here!”
And then he came for me, his hands gripping my forearms. His expression had altered to one I’d never seen—a dark caul seemed to have slipped over his features. He couldn’t love me. What had I been thinking?
“William, don’t,” I said, and I realized, with a vague disappointment, that I sounded like Mary Rae’s ghost in the encampment. Had this been who she faced when she died—this man, broken and disheartened by something she’d said or done or failed to do? The first time he’d spent the night in my apartment I’d watched him sleep, and his face had seemed a stranger’s.
Del had gotten closer, her voice louder, more panicked.
“This is your fault,” William said, anguished. “What do you expect me to do now?”
He held me at the top of the grand staircase, and I called Del again. We might have looked in the gloom as if we were dancing. His hands tightened on my arms, and I struggled to free myself, and in my struggle my legs tangled with his—the way legs tangle together in sleep under bedsheets, that twining of limbs during sex. We both lost our footing—me sprawling back onto the wood floor, William cartwheeling into the void where the staircase descended. I watched him flail for the banister, and then he fell backward, disappearing as he tumbled, his body curled in on itself. I put my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t hear the sickening sound of him falling, of his landing in a pool of darkness at the bottom.
From below, Del screamed. Maybe she thought it was me.
27
Did it anger me, the summer David Pinney died, that Del had claimed him as her own? The day after I found out, I came upon my mother on the terrace reading a magazine and I told her that Del had a boyfriend.
“And who would that be?” she said, flipping one page, then another. I could tell she didn’t really want to be bothered.
“I don’t know, a boy from the Spiritualists’ camp,” I said. “They snuck off to the barn together.”
My mother bit the inside of her cheek—something she did when she was nervous. She looked up from her magazine. “And what did she say they did?”
“She didn’t,” I said. “I thought you should know.”
That afternoon Del was told she had to accompany my mother to the Prison Store. I had Jane Roberts come over, and we spread our towels in the grass and waited for our other friends. It was a hazy day, the air dense with humidity. The cicadas whined overhead. Jane was sluggish and silly, and I knew she’d taken some of her mother’s pills. My grandmother came out of the house and called to me, and told me she was heading to a luncheon. She had on her pearl earrings, her floral skirt with the large peonies.
“Be good,” she said, as if she knew I would not. “It’s supposed to rain this afternoon.”