Paige had stood in the kitchen as I watched that night. She’d stared up at the dark stairwell, as she’d done night after night since Aaron’s death. As if someone might come down the steps.
That was where he’d done it. He’d taken his pills, crushed up in the bottom of a glass of red wine, to dull his nerves or to steel his resolve. Standing on the other side of the window that night, before I saw him hanging, I saw the glass on the table. The single glass of red wine, mostly empty. I wondered if he used the stepladder I saw tucked in the corner next to the fridge. Or if he’d stepped over the staircase railing halfway up. How he was sure the banister would hold.
Paige had been humming a tune, shushing the baby. But her voice sounded too far, too dulled by the glass between us. On impulse, I’d held the phone to my ear, dialed their home line, heard the ringing inside. I’d seen Paige’s body stiffen. But then I’d heard footsteps racing behind me. I’d quickly hung up and spun around, staring into the shadows but seeing no one. I’d tucked my head down and kept to the shadows, darting around the corner and into the entrance of the nearest bar. So dark and hazy, my hands shaking with adrenaline as I ordered that first drink to still my nerves.
Maybe even then she was there. Watching.
Maybe she had tried before. Several times that day. On the subway; as I paid for my coffee. Maybe the day earlier in the aisle of the grocery store. Maybe she’d tried twenty times before I picked up my head and noticed.
Nothing so perfect can be left to chance alone.
Aaron showed back up because I was looking for him. I was always looking for him.
I searched every year, every month: Aaron Hampton.
Watched as he got his Ph.D. Married Paige, their smiling faces in the society section, the photo taken at the yacht club where her family were members. Boats and sails in the twinkling lights behind them.
I watched as he started teaching. I watched, and I waited, and every time I typed his name, I felt the darkness, the empty gap of time, into which I still, all these years later, cannot see.
That was the preamble and I craved the conclusion.
Until finally, finally, I had my story. Could see the connections, feel the pieces sliding around, could focus him clearly in my sights. A story I knew my boss would want, that the people would want. “Four suicides in one year,” I told Logan, and his eyes lit up like a spark.
The source. The source was a twenty-two-year-old female, just graduated, living with her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend. I did not make her up. I changed some details to protect her identity. And I hid her away so nobody could find her.
They thought I did it to bring an innocent man down, but I did not.
I did it to give voice to that anonymous girl whom no one could identify. I did not regret it.
Truth and story—doesn’t matter which comes first as long as you get where you need to be at the end.
As long as you end at the truth, all’s fair.
Still—maybe I sometimes felt robbed by his death, as if he were still winning, still saying even from the other side: Can’t prove anything.
And so I’m still drawn to this window I know so well.
I could see curtains shifting now, a fan overhead, someone moving in the kitchen. And then a door creaking open, the outside light flipping on, bridging the gap between my world and theirs.
CHAPTER 35
I pressed myself into the brick behind the stack of garbage bins, hoping she wouldn’t see me. But she had a garbage bag in her arm, and something crackled from her hip, radio static. A baby monitor. I held my breath, but I’d been cornered. She stood in front of the garbage containers, the trash dumped in, and said, “Turn around or I’ll call the police.”
So, what option did I have? I raised my hands in front of me, and I turned around.
She wordlessly sucked in a breath.
What can I say, really, about how Paige had changed through the years?
More so than I’d thought when she was just a shadow behind the curtains, with her lines and colors softened and filtered through the double-paned window. Or when she was just a whiff of a person moving through the crowd while I focused on the red ponytail in the distance, the smoothed-back part, the frizz she could never fully tame, on which she grew less and less compelled to try as time went on.
Paige in the flesh aged ten years in an instant. Or maybe that was motherhood, automatically bumping you up a generation from your peers. Or losing your husband, finding him swinging from the banister. Either way, this was the Paige who stood before me: Her face had gone grayish, and her freckles had faded to nothing, or maybe that was the makeup. But I didn’t think so, because the under-eye circles were hollowed and obvious, her cheeks drawn in, the bones of her face more pronounced. The lines around her eyes radiated outward, as if she were squinting at me. But the rest of her had filled, breasts and hips and stomach, to bear and care for a child.
She wore a wool coat, but her collar was exposed, and I knew she was cold—she must have wanted to tuck her chin down against the wind, but she wouldn’t. Her lips were pink, her mouth slightly open, hair pulled back but not entirely successfully. Her hazel eyes usually seemed more green than anything else—but now they were dull, deadened. Whatever I had been about to say, to try, I lost my nerve at the sight of her.
She reached her hand into her coat pocket, never taking her eyes off me, and for the briefest moment, I thought she’d pull a gun—and that I wouldn’t blame her. That everyone walking by on the cross streets wouldn’t notice a thing, minding their own business. But instead she pulled out a phone.
“Wait,” I said, and she held the phone at her hip, undecided.
“One call,” she said. And her voice, after all this time, was so familiar, so close. It played tricks on me, made me slip back to thinking we were friends, that I could mend this. “One word from me and you’re in jail.”
She held that phone in front of her, and I could see her chest rising and falling, and what I’d first thought was fear, I now knew was something else—it was laced with something more, a feeling of power. My fate was in her hands, and she knew it.
“I moved away,” I said, hands held out, as if the phone were a gun pointed at my chest. “I don’t live here. I don’t come around here. I don’t call. I’ve moved, and I’ve moved on.”
“How nice for you,” she said. “You’ve moved on? Is this supposed to make me feel better? Then what the hell are you doing back here, hiding out behind my house?” Her face scrunched up in disgust. “Looking in my window?”
“I need your help,” I said.
She started coughing, bent over at the stomach, shaking from a laugh that came out wrong. “I think you’d better go now, Leah.”