“Chuck. You don’t know anything,” she whispers.
“I know there’s no such thing as Us versus Them. I know we want to blame someone so we look around, find a person who is not Us and point the finger. We ask, where’d all that violence come from? Not us, we say. It was them. But they are us, Ada. A better question is where does violence really come from? Don’t tell me Cain and Abel. Don’t tell me evil, Ada. That’s bullshit. There’s no such thing as evil.” He pauses a moment. “I’d like to ask you, what’s the difference between a hurricane and a terrorist attack?”
She leans up against the door. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke. What’s the difference?”
Ada doesn’t say anything so Chuck answers for her. “Not much for the people who don’t survive.”
Her head is pressed on the jamb. “Can you try the door once more? Really try it.”
“What in the shit are you doing?”
“Just try. Please.”
He shoves, backs up and shoves again, like he’s getting mad, ramming his shoulder against the wood. The door holds. The chair legs are caught solidly in a crevice between tiles. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Trapped a man in your damn bedroom?”
“Used a chair to lock a door.”
“Well, fuck. Congratulations,” he says. “I’m not sure what to tell you. Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
“Chuck.” She whispers it, leaning into the door. “Can you hear me?”
He waits a moment. “Yeah.”
She bites into her lip without cutting it, just enough to make the pain shoot down her legs and into her toes. She lowers her voice even further. “I want to tell you something.”
“All right. Yeah. Tell me.” He lets out his breath.
“Terrorists didn’t kill Henry. He was nowhere near 9/11. That’s just what I tell people.”
Chuck is quiet. Ada pictures him still naked on the other side of the door.
“They didn’t?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
Chuck could always just climb out the window. He’s not really locked in. He just doesn’t know he’s free. “I did,” she tells him and backs away from the door, noticing how, after that, Chuck has very little to say.
*
The new stream has swollen. It’s crested above the lanai. Muddy, debris-filled water is rushing up against the windows. Bending low, Ada looks through the glass. Minuscule grains of sand and dirt glisten. The whole storm in miniature swirls there, tiny golden grains floating in the brown water. The world moves forward in small sudden moments: a phone call from the human resources department, an icy road in winter, a shotgun, a diagnosis. Our existence in the miniature. Each bite of food. Each teenage heartache. The brown flecks in the water. The little baby who never even had a name. Lizards, kingbirds, bugs. But mostly the little baby whose death didn’t mean anything to anyone because it happened on such a large and horrible day.
Ada hadn’t killed anybody, not even Henry. She’d only wanted to, longing for a bit of violence that would set the world right. Henry’s alive and well back in Rhode Island. Still married to his wife, about to become a father.
*
“Pregnant?” Henry’d said to Ada. “That was not part of the deal.”
But Ada never realized there was a deal.
“Pregnant?” he’d said. “That’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” as if it had occurred immaculately. Henry left and didn’t come back and didn’t call or even seem to wonder what happened to the baby she was growing inside her. It wasn’t immediate, but soon Ada started having evil thoughts about Henry. Hunting accidents, car wrecks, and, though he was too young for a heart attack, Ada wished he wasn’t. Garden shears through the lungs, tractor mishaps, poison, each imagined death torturous and deserved.
She hadn’t meant to fall in love with a married man. Ada hadn’t even known Henry was married until they’d been together for months, and then it was too late because up north falling in love is like animal husbandry. It’s necessary. It’s so cold in the winter.
She’s going to explain this all to Chuck later. She’ll tell him about Henry, who was never her fiancé. She’ll tell Chuck that she had a miscarriage on 9/11 and it meant nothing to anyone but her. She’ll tell Chuck how small each life is when she’s ready to tell the truth. Soon she’ll let Chuck out of the bedroom and tell him how once it snowed for eight days straight in Rhode Island. She’ll tell him how she and Henry would go grocery shopping together and if Henry ran into someone who knew his wife, he’d always pretend that he was just helping Ada out, as if there were something wrong with her mind, retarded or something, he had to take care of her. The floors of the grocery store would be slick from people tracking slush in on their boots. The cashiers kept their parkas on inside. But Henry’d grip the yellow plastic handle of the cart. His strong hands, his wedding ring, and it seemed he was holding on to the whole world, making things steady and even as breath. Ada would see his hands and consider crying or screaming or throwing canned tomatoes, bricks of coffee at his head. She’d turn toward the shelf. Lightbulbs. She’d read the packages, looking for just the right wattage. She’d look down at the linoleum, swallowing the heat behind her eyes, and all the while Henry would wait patiently, smiling, so full with all he had, a wife and a girlfriend. Sometimes she could build up a resolve of hatred for him. I’ll leave, she’d think, but it would never work. She’d take one look at his camouflage hunting coat and get lost in that familiar pattern and all she’d want to do would be to rent a video, go home with Henry for the rest of her life, and watch dumb movies on TV.
But that didn’t happen. Henry didn’t want to be a father to her child and he didn’t want to get divorced. He left and Ada lost the baby at six and a half months, though two doctors said there was no good reason why she, a healthy woman, should miscarry.
*
The end table would be just the right weight. She could lift it above her head, let the heft of wood have its way with the glass wall. At first there would be just a small crack, a spiderweb that would creep all the way down to the ground, though soon the force of the flood would break through. The window would crash into her living room, allowing the water to enter. Bits of glass in the brown flood. Water would flow into the house, down the hallways, into the kitchen, a shallow river in her dining room. It would flow up against the new sofa and into the low cupboards that are still mostly empty except for some old cassette tapes that Ada can’t even listen to anymore because all she has is a CD player. She’d watch the water make its way through the house and up to the bedroom door. Chuck’ll forgive her. He’s made for forgiveness.
*
“Sorry,” the emergency room doctor in Rhode Island had said.