“Stop it, don’t talk about them when you talk about this, don’t you ever.”
He nodded humbly, still holding lightly to her forearms. “I beat BD once—I beat him for twenty years—”
Sixteen, she thought again. Sixteen, and you know it.
“—and I can beat him again. With your help, Darce. With your help I can do anything. Even if he were to come back in another twenty years, so what? Big deal! I’d be seventy-three. Hard to go snoot-hunting when you’re shuffling around in a walker!” He laughed cheerily at this absurd image, then sobered again. “But—now listen to me carefully—if I were ever to backslide, even one single time, I’d kill myself. The kids would never know, they’d never have to be touched by that… that, you know, stigma… because I’d make it look like an accident… but you’d know. And you’d know why. So what do you say? Can we put this behind us?”
She appeared to consider. She was considering, in fact, although such thought processes as she could muster were probably not trending in a direction he would be likely to understand.
What she thought was: It’s what drug addicts say. “I’ll never take any of that stuff again. I’ve quit before and this time I’ll quit for good. I mean it.” But they don’t mean it, even when they think they do they don’t, and neither does he.
What she thought was: What am I going to do? I can’t fool him, we’ve been married too long.
A cold voice replied to that, one she had never suspected of being inside her, one perhaps related to the BD-voice that whispered to Bob about the snoots it observed in restaurants, laughing on street corners, riding in expensive sports cars with the top down, whispering and smiling to each other on apartment-building balconies.
Or perhaps it was the voice of the Darker Girl.
Why can’t you? it asked. After all… he fooled you.
And then what? She didn’t know. She only knew that now was now, and now had to be dealt with.
“You’d have to promise to stop,” she said, speaking very slowly and reluctantly. “Your most solemn, never-go-back promise.”
His face filled with a relief so total—so somehow boyish—that she was touched. He so seldom looked like the boy he had been. Of course that was also the boy who had once planned to go to school with guns. “I would, Darcy. I do. I do promise. I already told you.”
“And we could never talk about this again.”
“I get that.”
“You’re not to send the Duvall woman’s ID to the police, either.”
She saw the disappointment (also weirdly boyish) that came over his face when she said that, but she meant to stick to it. He had to feel punished, if only a little. That way he’d believe he had convinced her.
Hasn’t he? Oh Darcellen, hasn’t he?
“I need more than promises, Bobby. Actions speak louder than words. Dig a hole in the woods and bury that woman’s ID cards in it.”
“Once I do that, are we—”
She reached out and put her hand to his mouth. She strove to make herself sound stern. “Hush. No more.”
“Okay. Thank you, Darcy. So much.”
“I don’t know what you’re thanking me for.” And then, although the thought of him lying next to her filled her with revulsion and dismay, she forced herself to say the rest.
“Now get undressed and come to bed. We both need to get some sleep.”
– 10 –
He was under almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, but long after he’d commenced his small, polite snores, Darcy lay awake, thinking that if she allowed herself to drift off, she would awake with his hands around her throat. She was in bed with a madman, after all. If he added her, his score would be an even dozen.
But he meant it, she thought. This was right around the time that the sky began to lighten in the east. He said he loves me, and he meant it. And when I said I’d keep his secret—because that’s what it comes down to, keeping his secret—he believed me. Why wouldn’t he? I almost convinced myself.
Wasn’t it possible he could carry through on his promise? Not all drug addicts failed at getting clean, after all. And while she could never keep his secret for herself, wasn’t it possible she could for the kids?
I can’t. I won’t. But what choice?
What goddam choice?
It was while pondering this question that her tired, confused mind finally gave up and slipped away.
She dreamed of going into the dining room and finding a woman bound with chains to the long Ethan Allen table there. The woman was naked except for a black leather hood that covered the top half of her face. I don’t know that woman, that woman is a stranger to me, she thought in her dream, and then from beneath the hood Petra said: “Mama, is that you?”
Darcy tried to scream, but sometimes in nightmares, you can’t.
– 11 –
When she finally struggled awake—headachey, miserable, feeling hungover—the other half of the bed was empty. Bob had turned his clock back around, and she saw it was quarter past ten. It was the latest she’d slept in years, but of course she hadn’t dropped off until first light, and such sleep as she’d gotten was populated with horrors.
She used the toilet, dragged her housecoat off the hook on the back of the bathroom door, then brushed her teeth—her mouth tasted foul. Like the bottom of a birdcage, Bob would say on the rare mornings after he’d taken an extra glass of wine with dinner or a second bottle of beer during a baseball game. She spat, began to put her brush back in the toothglass, then paused, looking at her reflection. This morning she saw a woman who looked old instead of middle-aged: pale skin, deep lines bracketing the mouth, purple bruises under the eyes, the crazed bed-head you only got from tossing and turning. But all this was only of passing interest to her; how she looked was the last thing on her mind. She peered over her reflection’s shoulder and through the open bathroom door into their bedroom. Except it wasn’t theirs; it was the Darker Bedroom. She could see his slippers, only they weren’t his. They were obviously too big to be Bob’s, almost a giant’s slippers. They belonged to the Darker Husband. And the double bed with the wrinkled sheets and unanchored blankets? That was the Darker Bed. She shifted her gaze back to the wild-haired woman with the bloodshot, frightened eyes: the Darker Wife, in all her raddled glory. Her first name was Darcy, but her last name wasn’t Anderson. The Darker Wife was Mrs. Brian Delahanty.
Darcy leaned forward until her nose was touching the glass. She held her breath and cupped her hands to the sides of her face just as she had when she was a girl dressed in grass-stained shorts and falling-down white socks. She looked until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, then exhaled in a huff that fogged the mirror. She wiped it clean with a towel, and then went downstairs to face her first day as the monster’s wife.
He had left a note for her under the sugarbowl. Darce—
I will take care of those documents, as you asked. I love you, honey. Bob
He had drawn a little Valentine heart around his name, a thing he hadn’t done in years. She felt a wave of love for him, as thick and cloying as the scent of dying flowers. She wanted to wail like some woman in an Old Testament story, and stifled the sound with a napkin. The refrigerator kicked on and began its heartless whir. Water dripped in the sink, plinking away the seconds on the porcelain. Her tongue was a sour sponge crammed into her mouth. She felt time—all the time to come, as his wife in this house—close around her like a straitjacket. Or a coffin. This was the world she had believed in as a child. It had been here all the time. Waiting for her.
The refrigerator whirred, the water dripped in the sink, and the raw seconds passed. This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.
– 12 –
Her husband had coached Little League (also with Vinnie Eschler, that master of Polish jokes and big enveloping manhugs) during the years when Donnie had played shortstop for the Cavendish Hardware team, and Darcy still remembered what Bob said to the boys—many of them weeping—after they’d lost the final game of the District 19 tourney. Back in 1997 that would have been, probably only a month or so before Bob had murdered Stacey Moore and stuffed her into her cornbin. The talk he’d given to that bunch of drooping, sniffling boys had been short, wise, and (she’d thought so then and still did thirteen years later) incredibly kind.