Then she could what? Forget it?
Fat chance of that.
She bound the ID cards with the elastic, realized the driver’s license had somehow gotten back on top, and called herself a stupid bitch… a pejorative for which she would have slapped Bob’s face, had he ever tried to hang it on her. Not that he ever had.
“A stupid bitch but not a bondage bitch,” she muttered, and a cramp knifed her belly. She dropped to her knees and froze that way, waiting for it to pass. If there had been a bathroom out here she would have dashed for it, but there wasn’t. When the cramp let go-reluctantly—she rearranged the cards in what she was pretty sure was the right order (blood donor, library, driver’s license), then put them back in the LINKS box. Box back in hole. Pivoting piece of baseboard closed up tight. Carton of catalogues back where it had been when she tripped on it: sticking out slightly. He would never know the difference.
But was she sure of that? If he was what she was thinkingmonstrous that such a thing should even be in her mind, when all she’d wanted just a half an hour ago was fresh batteries for the goddarn remote control—if he was, then he’d been careful for a long time. And he was careful, he was neat, he was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy, but if he was what those goddarn (no, goddamned) plastic cards seemed to suggest he was, then he must be supernaturally careful. Supernaturally watchful. Sly.
It was a word she had never thought of in connection to Bob until tonight.
“No,” she told the garage. She was sweating, her hair was stuck to her face in unlovely spikelets, she was crampy and her hands were trembling like those of a person with Parkinson’s, but her voice was weirdly calm, strangely serene. “No, he’s not. It’s a mistake. My husband is not Beadie.”
She went back into the house.
– 5 –
She decided to make tea. Tea was calming. She was filling the kettle when the phone began to ring again. She dropped the kettle into the sink—the bong sound made her utter a small scream—then went to the phone, wiping her wet hands on her housecoat.
Calm, calm, she told herself. If he can keep a secret, so can I. Remember that there’s a reasonable explanation for all this
Oh, really?
— and I just don’t know what it is. I need time to think about it, that’s all. So: calm.
She picked up the phone and said brightly, “If that’s you, handsome, come right over. My husband’s out of town.”
Bob laughed. “Hey, honey, how are you?”
“Upright and sniffin the air. You?”
There was a long silence. It felt long, anyway, although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. In it she heard the somehow terrible whine of the refrigerator, and water dripping from the faucet onto the teakettle she’d dropped in the sink, the beating of her own heart—that last sound seeming to come from her throat and ears rather than her chest. They had been married so long that they had become almost exquisitely attuned to each other. Did that happen in every marriage? She didn’t know. She only knew her own. Except now she had to wonder if she even knew that one.
“You sound funny,” he said. “All thick in the voice. Is everything okay, sweetie?”
She should have been touched. Instead she was terrified. Marjorie Duvall: the name did not just hang in front of her eyes; it seemed to blink on and off, like a neon bar sign. For a moment she was speechless, and to her horror, the kitchen she knew so well was wavering in front of her as more tears rose in her eyes. That crampy heaviness was back in her bowels, too. Marjorie Duvall. A-positive. 17 Honey Lane. As in hey, hon, how’s life been treatin you, are you upright and sniffin the air?
“I was thinking about Brandolyn,” she heard herself say.
“Oh, baby,” he said, and the sympathy in his voice was all Bob. She knew it well. Hadn’t she leaned on it time after time since 1984? Even before, when they’d still been courting and she came to understand that he was the one? Sure she had. As he had leaned on her. The idea that such sympathy could be nothing but sweet icing on a poison cake was insane. The fact that she was at this moment lying to him was even more insane. If, that was, there were degrees of insanity. Or maybe insane was like unique, and there was no comparative or superlative form. And what was she thinking? In God’s name, what?
But he was talking, and she had no idea what he’d just said.
“Run that past me again. I was reaching for the tea.” Another lie, her hands were shaking too badly to reach for anything, but a small plausible one. And her voice wasn’t shaking. At least she didn’t think it was.
“I said, what got that going?”
“Donnie called and asked after his sister. It got me thinking about mine. I went out and walked around for awhile. I got sniffling, although some of that was just the cold. You probably heard it in my voice.”
“Yep, right away,” he said. “Listen, I should skip Burlington tomorrow and come back home.”
She almost cried out No!, but that would be exactly the wrong thing to do. That might get him on the road at first light, all solicitude.
“You do and I’ll punch you in the eye,” she said, and was relieved when he laughed. “Charlie Frady told you that estate sale in Burlington was worth going to, and his contacts are good. His instincts are, too. You’ve always said so.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like to hear you sounding so low.”
That he had known (and at once! at once!) that something was wrong with her was bad. That she needed to lie about what the trouble was—ah, that was worse. She closed her eyes, saw Bad Bitch Brenda screaming inside the black hood, and opened them again.
“I was low, but I’m not now,” she said. “It was just a momentary fugue. She was my sister, and I saw my father bring her home. Sometimes I think about it, that’s all.”
“I know,” he said. He did, too. Her sister’s death wasn’t the reason she’d fallen in love with Bob Anderson, but his understanding of her grief had tightened the connection.
Brandolyn Madsen had been struck and killed by a drunk snowmobiler while she was out cross-country skiing. He fled, leaving her body in the woods half a mile from the Madsen house. When Brandi wasn’t back by eight o’clock, a pair of Freeport policemen and the local Neighborhood Watch had mounted a search party. It was Darcy’s father who found her body and carried it home through half a mile of pine woods. Darcy-stationed in the living room, monitoring the phone and trying to keep her mother calm—had been the first to see him. He came walking up the lawn under the harsh glare of a full winter moon with his breath puffing out in white clouds. Darcy’s initial thought (this was still terrible to her) had been of those corny old black-and-white love-movies they sometimes showed on TCM, the ones where some guy carries his new bride across the threshold of their happy honeymoon cottage while fifty violins pour syrup onto the soundtrack.
Bob Anderson, Darcy had discovered, could relate in a way many people could not. He hadn’t lost a brother or sister; he had lost his best friend. The boy had darted out into the road to grab an errant throw during a game of pickup baseball (not Bob’s throw, at least; no baseball player, he’d been swimming that day), had been struck by a delivery truck, and died in the hospital shortly afterward. This coincidence of old sorrows wasn’t the only thing that made their pairing seem special to her, but it was the one that made it feel somehow mystical-not a coincidence but a planned thing.
“Stay in Vermont, Bobby. Go to the estate sale. I love you for being concerned, but if you come running home, I’ll feel like a kid. Then I’ll be mad.”
“Okay. But I’m going to call you tomorrow at seven-thirty. Fair warning.”
She laughed, and was relieved to hear it was a real one… or so close as to make no difference. And why shouldn’t she be allowed a real laugh? Just why the heck not? She loved him, and would give him the benefit of the doubt. Of every doubt. Nor was this a choice. You could not turn off love—even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love of twenty-seven years—the way you’d turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart, and the heart had its own imperatives.