THERE are two Wils now. I think that’s what happens to a person after the worst day of his life: There’s the before and the after. I want more of Before Wil, whose eyes were clear and whose laugh came easily. But loving Wil means loving After Wil, too. His sudden twitches and unexplained shadows. That’s what I tell Minna early Sunday morning. She answered the door in her bathrobe and slippers, with a long white braid snaking down her back, looking like an old woman in a pioneer movie. Now we’re tucked in her bedroom, Minna under the sheets in an antique sleigh bed and me on a cream-colored club chair with a small stain that looks like red wine.
“I get it,” I say. “He’s not the same guy he was before. I can’t expect him to be the same.”
Minna gives me a look that is the old lady equivalent of no shit.
“What’s the but?” She yawns. The coffee I brought her sits untouched on her bedside table.
“There’s no but.”
“There’s always a but. You have three seconds, or I’m going back to sleep.”
“Okay, okay. But I don’t know how to help him. When he gets . . . far away.” I think about his face in the hotel room the other day. He was gone, too far away from me. Buried so deep beneath his shell that I was afraid he might never come back. “I don’t know what to do to make it okay.”
She doesn’t answer because she doesn’t need to.
“And before you tell me that there’s nothing I can do to change this or make it okay, I know. I can’t.”
“You can’t.”
“But it makes you crazy, watching somebody hurt so badly and not being able to do shit about it.” I sip my coffee.
“Of course it does. Grief itself is a kind of temporary insanity. We are crazy when we are suffering and when we are watching loved ones suffer. We’re animals. We snap, and wound, and snarl.”
I think about Wil in his kitchen, nipping at the detectives.
“If I knew what happened that night,” I say. “Maybe then.”
“You think knowing the details will change how helpless you feel.” Minna tilts her face toward mine. The early morning light makes her look younger. “Trust me. It will only make you feel worse.”
She’s wrong. There are only three people in the universe who are carrying the weight of what happened that night: Wil, Henney, and the man who killed Wilson. If Wil would just tell me, his load would be lighter. I would do that for him. I want to.
“Wil’s told me some of the details already.” I sound defensive. “Not about the night of the murder. About the kind of guy his dad was.”
“An asshole, if I remember correctly.”
“Which”—I rub my temples—“still doesn’t make sense, entirely. I guess I always thought Wil’s family was kind of perfect.”
Minna says, “No family is perfect, and it’s dangerous to think so. Do they still teach Tolstoy in school? ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ It’s the first line of Anna Karenina.”
“Depressing.”
“Not depressing. Realistic. No family is happy all the time. Families are living, breathing, flawed organisms.”
“You never talk about yours, you know. Your daughter?” I press my lips together as soon as the words slip out. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.
“You want to know about my Virgina,” she says, and her voice tells me it’s okay. She pulls the covers up to her chin, cocooning herself. I have the sudden urge to slide under the covers next to her.
“When I was young, I married a very charming, very intelligent, very handsome man who happened to love money and hate women. He was very smart. He didn’t show me who he was until after we’d married. And then it started, small things at first. He’d take the money I made in my receptionist job. For safekeeping, he said. So that I didn’t have to worry my pretty, little head about it. Finances were the man’s job.”
I can’t imagine anyone speaking to Minna that way. Not now, not then.
“Remember, it was a long time ago, and I’d been raised to believe that he was right.”
I picture Young Minna with smooth skin and jewel eyes.
“And then, as time went on, something else started to happen. My family, my friends, everyone I held close, started to drift away. I didn’t notice it at first. When I wanted to have my mother for dinner, he’d say he wanted me all to himself. When I wanted to see friends, he’d say I wasn’t being a caring wife. I needed to devote more time to him. And one day, I woke up and I realized: I was completely alone.”
“Scary.” I swallow.
“Terrifying. And so I did the stupidest, most wonderful thing I could have done.”
I bite my lip. “You had a kid.”
“I had a kid.” Her voice thins with the words, and they come faster now. “I felt sure that things would change once I had the baby, but they only got worse. He started calling me names. Stupid. Useless. Whore. He said no one could love me, not even my own child.” She is trembling.
“Minna,” I whisper.
But she doesn’t stop. “After a while, I became so depressed that I considered ending it all. The only thing keeping me on earth was Virginia. So I went to a psychiatrist, who prescribed me medication for depression. And I was in therapy for years.” She sits up suddenly, laughs. “It was my favorite hour out of the week. Other than bedtime for V, of course.”
I am wordless. Minna has had thousands of other lifetimes before this one. There is so much I don’t know.
“And things got better, but only because I built up a sanctuary in my head. When things got bad, when he got angry, I would disappear into myself and I would think about escaping to the mountains with my girl. I saved money on the sly. And when Virginia was three, I was ready to file for divorce.” She reaches for her coffee and takes a sip. Then she sets the mug on the bedside table. “Horseshit,” she announces.
“Divorce,” I remind her.
She nods. “When I filed, Virginia’s father told the judge I was an unfit mother.”
I bolt upright. “That is horseshit.”
“He said I was unstable, and told the judge I’d been on medication. He went through my things and found a journal I’d written in just after Virginia was born. I’d been sleep deprived and depressed, but we didn’t have a name for it then. I’d written some things that made it seem . . .”
“But that’s not fair!” I lunge forward and squeeze her arm. “Minna!”
“He got full custody. I had visitation, but it wasn’t enough. He told her that I was unwell. That I didn’t . . .” Her voice wavers. “That I didn’t . . . want . . . her. And she believed him.” Her lips freeze. She can’t even form the words. “By the time she was old enough to choose . . .”
“Minna! She can’t believe him, still!”
Minna hushes me and nods at the clock. “It’s early, Bridget. There are cranky old people around here for miles, you know.”