On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) (2 page)

Three

Lying there, next to a normal-sized man, the young woman looked pathetically small. Arms flung out in abandon, legs spread-eagle, she seemed to have landed where she was having fallen from a great height.

She had on a thong.

A frilly, pink thong.

Where the hell are the rest of her clothes?
Hester stared in disbelief at her husband and the girl positioned on the bed like a pair of bronzed bookends. Despite the way their skin glistened in the heat, Hester was sure they must both be dead. Shocked, she shrunk from touching either of them. She had to do something, yet she was unable to think of what that something was.

God, she didn’t want to keep looking at them, but she couldn’t turn away. And what conclusions might she draw? What were they doing here? Together?

A cloud began passing in front of the sun, and since the roof was gone, she watched its shadow advance across them until they were in the shade. The room turned cooler and Hester shivered. If they were dead, it was for the best, because then she wouldn’t have to kill them herself.

The cloud moved on, and the sun forced Hester to shield her eyes.
Walk away, go in the kitchen, find the cell phone, call the goddamn police.

Instead, she fixated on the tendrils of wet pubic hair that had escaped from Nina’s pink thong.

Shells? Where were the shells she’d gone to find?

Nina must’ve listened to Hester warning to keep an eye to the sky, that computer models weren’t perfect. “You never know with Mother Nature, Nina.”

Hester had offered to make the girl breakfast, but Nina hadn’t wanted any. Every day since she got here last week, she seemed to be eating less and less, and she didn’t seem to have a whole lot to say to Hester. When Hester confided that Nina might be having some kind of problem, Al said, “For God’s sake, Hester, she’s fine. It’s all in your imagination.”

My imagination? Hester could see Nina was too thin, and Hester worried she was starving herself or depressed or something mental like that. Hester worried about her like a mother would her own child. From the first time Nina walked into Hester’s English classroom three years ago, Hester had been…well, drawn to her, inexplicably drawn to her.

Al, who was the school’s vice principal, warned Hester, as he always did, not to get too attached to any of her students. “When they graduate, they’ll forget all about you, and then I’ll have to listen to how miserable that makes you so, please, for Christ’s sakes, save me the trouble.”

Hester, uncharacteristically, ignored Al. Nina was her favorite. Nina was special. Nina and she were close and would remain close. So when the girl called crying because she was having terrible problems at the community college and needed to talk to Hester, Hester sent her money for a flight down to Pleasant Palms. She didn’t tell Al about it until after the fact, until it was too late for him to stop her, until she could gloat, “See, Mr. Know-It-All, Nina hasn’t forgotten me. She needs me. She needs us both.”

Al, true to form, was completely against what Hester did. He tried several arguments on his wife, the main one being that Nina Tattoni was plenty old enough to take care of herself. Hester didn’t often cross Al, but in this case whatever he said didn’t matter. What mattered was, Nina was coming to Florida.

“Thou doth protest too much, husband,” Hester joked. “Besides, it’s a done deal. I already sent her the money.”

As soon as Nina got off the plane, though, Al seemed to change his mind. He paraded her around the trailer park, introducing her to everyone as though she were an exotic pet who said nothing much but was so unusual and cute it didn’t matter. He sat next to her on the beach, pretending to read the latest from Corbin or Patterson, while Nina slathered her bikini-clad body with lotion and stretched out on her towel like a well-oiled princess.

Hester watched them and stifled any nasty thought that tried to surface. Al’s interest was fatherly. They never had any children, so why wouldn’t he enjoy pretending Nina was his? And all along hadn’t she wanted them to be close?

This fascination of Al’s would wane. Hester would help it along. She’d have sex with her husband, lots of sex, and maybe even do to him what she seldom did anymore, but what she knew he liked best. It would reignite things between them, take his mind off Nina, and all would be as it should.

That had been her plan, but now the sight of Nina lying next to Al sickened her. What glaring proof that everything had backfired. Sweat was blinding Hester. She wanted to curl up somewhere, fall asleep, and wake up in the recent past, before this. She closed her eyes; fireworks exploded inside her head. She squeezed her eyes tight. The vision of Nina’s naked body emerged through the blackness. And—she had to admit it—she was momentarily satisfied by how, despite the sweltering heat, frozen-in-place the girl seemed.
Maybe she really is dead.

Hester opened her eyes and forced herself to look at Al. He was on his back, mouth agape, limp penis resting on his thigh like a half-stuffed sausage. His feet flopped out sideways. His arms were over his head, the hair in his pits as black, wet, and curly as his pubic hair. The salt and pepper hair on his head thick and stubborn. Sunspots dotted his tan face. His neck sunburnt. His Roman nose as aesthetically sculpted as ever. His brown nipples hard and nubby like pinched dry clay. His appendectomy scar, a pale, lipless, closed mouth.

Yes, she recognized each separate part of this man; but right at the moment she couldn’t reckon the sum of those parts—the whole person, Alexander Bruno Murphy, whom she had loved long and intensely. If the man in front of her opened his eyes, she would have nothing to say to him, except maybe, who the fuck are you, really?

She wasn’t one to curse, but that expletive came to mind easily. Why should she feel like the intruder in her own home? Why should she feel like she opened the wrong door? Like she interrupted them in the middle of…something secret?

Hester rolled her aching shoulders up and back. She was burning hot. She spread her feet a bit to steady herself. Another cloud came. A slight breeze lifted the ends of the sheers on the window and jiggled the heart-shaped leaves that were still all over the room. They twinkled like flashing bits of green neon. Then the cloud was gone, and the air in the room collapsed in on her.

Shame on you, Al, shame on you
, she thought, as something on the periphery of the moment jogged her memory.

“Two shall be as one.”

Isn’t that what Father Ferrara said when he married us? Two are one. We are one and the same in marriage. His sin, mine. His humiliation, his guilt, his shame, all mine.

Hester blinked the sweat from her eyes and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the opposite wall. She ran her fingers through her tangled long hair, trying to get it off her face. It fell into a natural center part, and her silver roots looked like a bald streak down the middle of her head. Already she needed to get another dye job. What a project it was keeping up with what used to be her honey-colored tresses. She didn’t want highlights. She didn’t want to be a bleached blonde. She just wanted to look like she used to.

But she didn’t, and wouldn’t ever again. The round apples of her cheeks had thinned. Her eyelids were puffy. Her mouth was a sad little hill. Her breasts looked like two barely inflated
U
’s, her nipples putty-colored asterisks in their valleys. One was streaked with blood. She was covered with cuts and scratches from her valiant effort to clear the mess away to save her, son-of-a…, philandering husband. She looked more like a boy than a middle-aged woman. She looked like that boy, Ralph. Was Ralph his name? She was trying to remember. It had been a while since she’d taught British lit,
Lord of the Flies,
but
wasn’t Ralph the name of the one who ran from the others, the one they tried to hunt down?

Hester’s body looked thin and powerless. How had she had the strength to do what she just did?

“I can’t recall ever looking like this,” she said to the mirror as her knees stared back at her like the faces of two upside-down babies. She hardly recognized herself, and that was distressing to her, but now was not the time for self-pity. She turned away, remembering how Al always used to say she “cleaned up well.” There was never anything wrong with her that something from the makeup counter couldn’t fix. She had to tell herself that. She had to believe it. She’d constructed her life on a fault line. A tremor of doubt, the whole foundation might crack. A quake of significant magnitude might make her whole damn world crumble.

Bad enough I found them together, the two
…?
What were they?
She hesitated to form the word in her mind.
Lovers?

You think you know your man, and then, even after decades together, he arches an eyebrow or laughs a certain way or does something you’ve never seen him do before, and, suddenly, you are struck with the most frightening feeling of all: ignorance.

Hester struggled to reconcile the lingering “before” with the clamoring “now.” And she couldn’t, because they were galaxies apart. It was beginning to make her go mad trying to put two and two together. Before she retired at the end of last year, when she was still teaching English, she asked one of her students why she hadn’t turned in her research paper.

“Shit happens,” was what the brazen teenager said to Hester.

Shit happens? That was it, and Hester was supposed to know what that meant, to accept that kind of an answer, that kind of disrespect.

Hester decided to let the fact that the girl had used foul language go in order to get to the facts. “Exactly what kind of s-h-i-t happened, Angela?”

Angela let her jaw drop. Her mouth fell open like a puppet’s before she smirked and answered, “Shit, all kinds of shit. It happens all the time. You know what I mean, Mrs. Murphy.”

And that was supposed to get her off the hook. The big, old, screwed-up universe was to blame, not anyone as powerless as poor little Angela.

Hester might not have agreed with Angela’s philosophy then, but she did now because here she was knee-deep in s-h-i-t, and she certainly had done nothing to cause it.

Al still hadn’t moved, so Hester stepped closer to the bed, rallied what courage she had, and put two fingers on his carotid artery. He looked older in the unforgiving light, but not old enough to be dead. She wasn’t sure if there was a slight pulse or not. Touching him felt weird, and she removed her fingers quickly.

She was still holding the hammer as she shuffled through the loose leaves and broken branches and trailer parts to the other side of the bed. Against the pattern of white shells on her favorite sheets, Nina’s long curly brown hair spread out around her face like damp seaweed on a beach. Her wet, matted bangs covered her eyes and nose. Her mouth was open, the inside like the pearly inside of a conch. Her small chin was tilted as though she were trying to balance something on the tip of it. Hester, standing there with sweat running down the small of her back, had the chilling sensation there was no hope for Nina.

What to do?

Hester felt the weight of the hammer and squeezed the handle. Gently she bumped it against her thigh.

Again and again.

There! There.
She thought,
I don’t know what to do
.

She felt stuck between them now, just as she probably had been for a while without ever knowing it. Or had she? Had she known deep inside and done nothing to stop it? Had she, perhaps, wanted it to happen?

No, never.

She heard…no, she saw something. At least she thought for a second she had. She stopped swinging the hammer and held her breath. She stared around the bedroom, remembering all that happened in it since Al and she first bought the place several years ago. They’d fly down from New Jersey for long weekends. She’d bring a stack of essays to grade. Al would take them away as soon as they got on the plane. He wouldn’t let her look at them until the flight home. The rest of the weekend they lounged on the beach, ate, drank, and made love.
Love, love, love, all I ever needed was love.

Hester looked down at her husband, at her former student. Something inside her snapped.
Throw yourself on the bed between them, be with Al one last time before the truth has to be faced, before the police come, before everyone finds out what a sham your marriage is?

She imagined Nina waking up, watching her and Al, wanting Al.

It was absurd, yet the black feeling welled up. She hated Nina.

No, she hated Al.

Let it go back to before. Nina on the beach, Al taking a shower, me sipping coffee, paging through a magazine.

But her life would never be the way it was, because of them.

It was quiet, so unearthly quiet, like the split second when the tide pulls a wave out and the next one hasn’t broken. That split second of absolute silence.

They deserve to die for what they did to me.

Hester fought against this hateful conclusion, against the wave of anger breaking over her.

It passed, but something worse came into her head.

Nina’s nipples, large and dark, glistened like eyes watching Hester, the only thing watching her. They made her look back at them. She couldn’t help it.