“Yes. You call her Patricia?”
“I’m not sure I have ever called her anything. If I phone her—which I assume is where this conversation is going—I expect I will call her Detective Bryant.”
She noticed a family strolling toward them: a family of three with a son who was probably nine or ten. They looked so happy, Kristin thought. The parents were smiling at something their son had said. She tried not to be jealous, but she pined for that sort of casual joy. She missed the experience of communicating with her husband without sarcasm, anger, or wariness—or (worse, perhaps) depending upon Melissa as a semaphore. How was it possible they had had that only two days ago?
“If you’d like,” Richard was saying, “I will call her. And, yes, I’ll ask her when we can go home.”
She considered correcting his use of the plural pronoun, but that would only be bitchy. They could discuss when he should return home later. By phone. When their daughter wasn’t walking beside them. “That would be great,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Of course. There is one more thing.”
She almost stopped walking. Instead she succumbed to superstition and took a long, careful step so that her foot did not land on a sidewalk crack. “Okay.”
“Well, it’s good news. I can seriously help whatever cleanup team we bring to the house—whether that’s tomorrow or Tuesday or, I guess, even Wednesday. The bank wants me to take a little leave of absence. But I’m fine. It’s all good and it makes sense.”
“How long is a little?” she asked. The news didn’t knock the wind from her the way it might have before the bachelor party. Before two men had been killed in her house. Before her husband had taken an escort upstairs, stripped, and…
She pushed the thought away.
She knew this was devastating to him and he was putting a brave spin on this for her. Like most men, he was what he did. He was an investment banker. He worked hard. He liked his job. He probably liked (And what was the right noun? How could she have been married to him for so many years and not know?) banking more than she did teaching—and she enjoyed teaching a very great deal. At least she did most of the time. She turned toward him and tried to see the hurt and the fear (because surely this scared him) behind the facade. And she did see it in the way his lips quivered ever so slightly when he tried to smile, and she could see it in the way that he blinked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll figure it out. Not long. I mean that: not very long. And the good news? I’m getting paid. And I like the idea of getting to go home before the two of you and working with the cleanup crew. I’d love to make sure that the house is in tip-top shape so that when you walked in the door you’d never even know what happened.”
She thought of what he had told her about the couch. And the painting. She thought of the bodies in the living room and the front hall. He was, she understood, kidding himself. They’d always know what happened. Always. Still, she reached for his hand as they walked. It was a reflex. They walked the last block to her mother’s in silence, but holding hands. When they arrived, she nodded at the doorman.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked Richard.
“Of course! Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. Remember, I’m still getting paid.”
“It’s not money I’m worried about. It’s you.”
“Well, I’m fine, too. I mean it.”
She rather doubted he was, but she wasn’t going to press him. She simply reminded him to call her once he had spoken to the detective—or whoever at the police station could tell him anything. She watched him kneel and hug Melissa. She accepted another kiss from him on her cheek and his hands on the waist of her jacket. Then she waved good-bye and led their daughter back upstairs to the apartment. She was, she realized, unmoored by his touch. But she was also unprepared to have him beside her in bed.
…
As Kristin was falling asleep that night in her mother’s guest bedroom, her daughter beside her, she replayed in her head her conversation with her brother. They had spoken by phone that evening after dinner.
“You should be glad he told you that he went upstairs with the girl,” he said. “I think a lot of men would have lied. They would never have told their wives anything.” She was relieved that her brother hadn’t donned his therapist superhero cowl and asked her how she was feeling.
“But did I really need to know?”
“You said you asked him. He didn’t lie.”
“Or maybe he did. Maybe he did have sex with her.”
“Okay, then. As you just asked yourself: Did you really need to know? Maybe he was sparing you. He was drunk, it was meaningless. So he dialed down what really happened. He told a white lie.”
“That’s not a white lie.”