She can leave, of course. Even absent Cath’s threats, there are good reasons to leave. Adam is acting oddly. She never planned to stay past Labor Day. She has things to do. Why not leave? Leaving solves everything. And she won’t have to pay Cath a dime. That’s how stupid Cath is. She doesn’t realize that, with blackmail, it’s one or the other. You can’t tell someone to leave and expect to be paid off. Why would Polly, once gone, care what anyone in Belleville thinks of her?
Adam. It grieves her to leave him behind, vulnerable to Cath’s lies, if not to Cath herself. He will think the worst of Polly. That she’s a killer, a liar, a rip-off artist. And maybe she deserves his low opinion, but only if he knows the whole story, not whatever jumbled mess that Cath relates. If she leaves now, Cath wins.
Cath can’t win.
Footsteps on the stairs. She watches the knob turn. Even the knob, squeaking in alarm, seems surprised when the door fails to open. Now it rattles, turning back and forth, as Adam whispers her name.
“Polly? Polly? It’s me.”
Of course it’s you. Who else would be at my door this late? She says nothing, just stares at the knob, mesmerized.
“Polly?” Louder now.
She stands still, barely breathing. He knows she’s here. Where else would she be? How much do you want me? she thinks. It’s not vanity on her part. It’s vital information.
She hears him retreating down the stairs. Okay, that’s it, she has to leave town, he’s not going to stand by her. She is already mentally packing. She’ll rent a U-Haul, load up her things. She could be in Reno next week.
Then his footsteps roar back, it’s like a big wave rolling in after a series of small ones have lulled you into thinking the surf is calm. To her shock and delight, the door flies open with what sounds like one swift kick, the frame splintering.
He rushes in and she is terrified, but only for a moment. This man will never hurt her. She jumps up, her arms circling his neck, confident of being caught.
*
“What was that?” he asks later.
“What?”
“That stupid game with the door. Did you not tell me to come by tonight?”
“We have trouble,” she says. “And very little time to decide what to do. Cath’s figured out that we’re together. She’s willing to do anything—anything—to force me to leave town. A woman scorned and all that. You won’t believe the lies she’s willing to spread.”
He doesn’t ask about the lies. Interesting.
“I’ll go with you,” he says without hesitation. More interesting, still. How much does he know? And how? Yet he’s loyal to her, still wants her.
“Let’s sleep on it,” she says. “I don’t trust decisions made in the middle of the night.” She is telling the truth. Although she killed Ditmars in the middle of the night, she planned it by day. For weeks and weeks she planned. She was planning his murder even before she realized it. The universe all but told her to do it.
It began with a nurse’s aide, who came to help twice a week. Respite care, they called it. At first, Polly would use those hours to grocery shop. Then she found the film series at the museum, free on Thursday afternoons, and she escaped the long Baltimore summer in that cool, hushed place. Afterward, she’d go to the sculpture garden, studying the families in the museum restaurant, wondering what it would take to be like them. She couldn’t believe that they were the same species on the same planet, that’s how far away their lives seemed to her.
The summer of 1985, the film series was all black-and-white films from the 1940s. Double Indemnity. Mildred Pierce. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Polly didn’t understand at first how they were linked, why the series was called Raising Cain, but then someone explained they were all based on books by a Maryland man who had lived in Baltimore and Annapolis, grown up on the Eastern Shore.
When fall came and the film series ended, she began going to the library and looked for the books that had inspired the movies. Be bold, Walter Huff told Phyllis Nirdlinger—no wonder they had changed the name for the movie. Not even Barbara Stanwyck could play someone named Nirdlinger and make her sexy. Polly began to study the encyclopedias, the ones that didn’t circulate. There was a diagram of the human body layered on three color transparencies that showed exactly where everything was. The heart is not really on the left side of the body, although we place our hands there to say the pledge. It’s much closer to the center. And it tips slightly, almost as if it were drunk.
Once you know where the heart is, then you need to know where the rib cage is. Because even the best knife could break on a bone. Night after night, Polly slipped her arms around Ditmars, tickling his chest softly. Counting his ribs, willing her fingers to memorize the topography of his body. She needed the best knife she could find, so she squirreled away money, bought a beauty of a Japanese butcher knife, one she never used for carving.
She would get one chance. Only one. She went to sleep night after night next to her husband, praying for the literal strength to kill him.
“Sleep?” Adam asks.
“Eventually,” she says, putting her hand in his. They lie on their backs, side by side, like brother and sister. When she tells him everything, he will understand.
Right? Right?
*
Polly is up with the sun. Adam finds her at the kitchen table, not a stitch on, drinking hot coffee. No matter how warm the day, she always wants to start it with a cup of hot coffee.
“So we go, right?” he says. “There’s nothing to bind us here.”
“Casper will have a heart attack if you leave. He’ll do anything for you.”
“Summer’s almost over. Doesn’t matter how good the food is. No one’s going to come to Belleville just for the food.”
“They might. If the place were nice enough. A little paint, cosmetic changes. It could be something really special.”
“I don’t see that happening.”
“Maybe not right away. But it’s more your place now than his. He’d probably do whatever it takes to keep you. I don’t see why we should have to go.”
“But if you don’t want Cath to tell people about you—”
“Maybe she should go.”
“She’s pretty rooted, best I can tell.”
“They say the big trees topple over fastest. Because they don’t bend.”
“What are you saying?”
“The only power she has over me is what she knows. I’m going to tell you what she’s got on me, Adam. What she thinks she’s got on me.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No, I do. I need you to decide if you want to be with me once everything is out in the open.”
He takes the mug of coffee out of her hand, says: “Baby, I do know.”
“What, exactly?”
“I know who you used to be. What you did.”
“How?”
A pause. “She already told me.”
“And?”
Years go by. Dinosaurs roam the earth, find extinction, mankind begins, Jesus dies on the cross. Columbus sails to America, the world wars are fought. All those things happen while she waits for him to reply.
“I don’t care.”
He loves her. He actually loves her.
“Then I’ll tell her tonight that she can say whatever she thinks she knows. I’m not leaving. And today, I’ll tell Casper. I don’t want him to hear it from her.”
“You said she wanted money from you.”
“Can’t get blood from a stone.”
He falls to his knees in front of her, almost as if he were about to propose, which delights and terrifies her in equal measure. But all Adam wants to do is bury his head in her midsection like a child. They remain this way for a very long time, Polly cradling Adam’s head, grateful the world has finally sent her the man she needs, the man she deserves.
20
Adam clocks Cath making a beeline for him the first chance she gets at work. It’s Thursday, the last day of August, they’re busy at lunch and dinner. Mr. C can get by with Cath alone on the lunch shift, but he’ll need both his waitresses for dinner.
“Your girlfriend’s not who you think she is,” she says.