“If anyone asks where good old Will is, you can say he took off. You two hadn’t been getting along, and he said he was leaving you.”
Del took a piece of the chicken and put it in her mouth, then spit it out into the palm of her hand. I handed her a tissue, and she wrapped the chicken in it.
“So, we never went to the asylum in Buffalo.”
She widened her eyes, innocently. “That’s right,” she said.
“We borrowed Geoff’s car and drove to Connecticut to see our mother,” I said.
There was no body to hide this time. Only an absence.
“He’s gone,” Del said. “You’re free.”
I wanted to ask her exactly what she’d seen at the bottom of the stairs, but I hadn’t wanted to force her to relive it. I knew I should have seen his body, cradled his head as he drew his last breaths, apologized for saying the things I’d said, for making him miserable, for being a hard person to make happy. After all, I had no real evidence he had killed Mary Rae, and now I had even less chance to discover it.
I watched Del carefully. “Are you sure he was gone?”
She put another carrot in her mouth, chewed, ate another. She dipped a finger in the mashed potatoes.
Outside I could hear someone chopping at the snow on the sidewalk with a shovel. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “It doesn’t feel real.”
I covered my head with the afghan. After a few minutes, Del rose from the bed.
“You just have to forget it ever happened,” she said.
Those words I’d told her once. They hadn’t really done any good then, and I wondered if they would help me now. Del left the apartment and stood on the other side of the closed door. “Lock the door,” she said, and I knew she wouldn’t leave until I did.
I would accept that William was gone, that our life together would never resume the way it had been. He wouldn’t walk into my little bedsit, take a shower, sit at the desk in the corner, lie down beside me on the bed. He would never touch me again—what I had come to see as the basis for whatever grief I carried, though I understood that our physical closeness had a terrible edge to it.
But I believed I would see him again. This is what my curse allowed me—a correspondence remained, however uneasy.
*
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY classes began, and that afternoon I crossed the quad toward Tjaden Hall. The shadows lengthened on the snow. Students passed singly, their heads down against the wind. A group burst from the Green Dragon, clutching paper cups of coffee, laughing, clinging to one another, the girls in knitted scarves and hats. I felt something on my face and saw that it had once again begun to snow.
Inside the hall I had a reprieve from the wind. I went first to William’s office, drawn by a feeling that I might find him. I stood in the hallway, and something stirred behind the door—a rustling of papers, a movement, or breathing. I knocked, and the movement stilled. I pictured him behind the door, not wanting to be found. A man came out of the office next door and stopped beside me.
“He’s not scheduled to teach this semester,” he said.
“Oh, thank you,” I said. I wanted to say I was his wife and that he was missing, but all of these admissions seemed almost improbable in the real world. William had not been assigned any classes, and yet he had never told me. Everything he’d said, and not said, seemed suspect.
Later in the week I went by the class he usually taught, and it was true, someone else was teaching. It was as if William had simply been erased from my life. At night I had dreams of pushing him down the long stairs, of finding his body at the bottom. I’d awaken, sweat-drenched, and tell myself it was simply a dream. Still, I didn’t contact the authorities and report him missing. I thought of Detective Thomson, and I kept quiet.
One afternoon, two weeks after classes began, I took my film to the lab at school to develop the images and print contact sheets. These I poured over with my loupe. I had taken shots that day in the asylum, and in the photographs the day came back to me: the light crisp, the metal bedsteads flipped on end, the old wheelchairs with cane backs eaten through by vermin, There but for the grace of God go I, on a plaque and the paint coming off the walls in long, tender strips, like skin. The more frightening the objects, the more I could not stop looking—examining tables of cold rusted metal, instruments and wires and hoses and basins and tubs, all bathed in that tinted light. I imagined birds coming in and out through the broken windows, the sound of their beating wings amplified in the emptied rooms.