SHUDDERVILLE FIVE (4 page)

He drew back as if he’d been burned. “What do you mean?”

“You’re in love with the
idea
of me,” she said forcefully. “You love ideas and theories, Will. You don’t really know how to love another human being. A flesh-and-blood person with flaws and mixed emotions and moods. It’s too messy for you. It’s not elegant enough, like your precious equations.”

He touched the lip of the bottle to his front teeth and gazed out the window at the moonlit icicles hanging from the neighbor’s rooftop. “I’ll come home early from now on,” he said.

She burst out laughing. Her eyes were threaded with tiny red veins, as if she’d been crying. “Right. Like that’s going to happen,” she said.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No. You always say you’ll come home early. And you never do.”

“
Always
, Charlotte? I
always
say that?
Never
, Charlotte? I
never
change? I’m
incapable
of change?” he said defensively.

She gave him a punishing look and stormed out of the room.

He closed his eyes and listened to the snow landing on the roof. It barely made a sound—just the whispering of ice crystals. It was like some beautiful, smothering dream you couldn’t wake up from. Charlotte was right, he didn’t understand anything about her—she was a stranger with violent mood swings and body issues and secret crushes on scruffy-looking love-struck boys, and a whole lot of baggage from the other side of the country. Will didn’t understand a thing.

He had managed to wish this moment into being over and over again. He and Charlotte had had this very same argument a dozen times now. Only she didn’t know it. For her it was always unique. For him, it was just another chance to get it right. But he seemed to botch everything. He would have to do it all over again. Tobias had warned him not to subject himself to the prototype again. They didn’t know what kinds of effects it would have on a human body over time. They were guinea pigs, the two of them. But Will had to fix things. He was determined to get it right.

He’d almost forgotten the most important question. He went to the bottom of the stairs, put his hand on the railing and said, “Charlotte? What flight did you book?”

*

On the plane, Will was belligerently, unapologetically cheerful.

“Coffee, please,” he told the perky flight attendant.

“Black? Cream?”

“Sugar.”

“One okay?”

“Three. Four.”

“Wow. You like it sweet.”

“Sure do.” He blew on the surface of his coffee, wanting the coldness out of his body. It was overcast and gray outside. They were halfway across the country, heading for Santa Barbara wine country. Spending Christmas with the in-laws. Horseback-riding and golf. He’d exchanged their tickets for a flight that wouldn’t crash.

“Will?” Her hand snaked toward him in the dark. “Let’s start over. Okay?”

“A fresh start?”

“Yes. Okay?”

“Yeah, we could do that.” He smiled and squeezed her warm hand.

There was a rosy glow to her face. She kissed him and leaned her head against his shoulder, and he could feel her long, sad sigh in her body. “If you don’t know that I love you, first and foremost, then there’s nothing more to say,” she whispered in his ear.

Things went pretty much as planned. Will had his breakthrough on the plane. He asked the stewardess for a napkin, wrote it all down and put it in his pocket. They didn’t argue. The plane didn’t crash. The Coke didn’t spill.

They spent a week in California wine country with the in-laws. They drove up to Solvang, bought a bottle of burgundy, got drunk and made love. They had a good time. Will began to relax. He began to believe she really loved him.

When they got home from their trip to Santa Barbara, Will immediately went to work with Tobias on their project. He didn’t keep his promise. Soon, he was working late every night.

Months passed. Every week, it got harder to pretend that things were okay. He suspected Charlotte of sneaking around behind his back. He suspected her of having an affair with one of her students—maybe Owen, maybe someone else. He spied on her as she went about her daily tasks—grading papers, giving lectures, counseling students, applying for grants. He observed her getting ready for bed at night and wondered why she was taking more time with her appearance lately. The only time they made love was when he asked her. He had to ask. She never initiated sex on her own.

In March, Charlotte started getting sick in the mornings. She would leap out of bed and run for the bathroom. One day she went to see her doctor, and when Will got home from work that night, she told him she was pregnant. She looked excited and flushed, but he was apprehensive about it. He asked a few too many questions, and she went to bed angry. That night he had a nightmare that the baby wasn’t his. He woke up and accused her of infidelity. When she protested, he accused her of lying.

The following morning, he apologized. He tried to pretend that he was excited about the prospect of having children, but his forced smile stretched the skin of his face. Over breakfast, he caught his wife looking at him like he was a monster.

He went to work, and that night when he came home, she was gone. She had packed her bags and left him.

There was a note.

Will, I don’t know why expected you to be happy about the baby, but I did. What I didn’t expect was your sulky silence, and then your paranoid-sounding questions, and then this morning your baseless accusations. How can I let my child be raised in an atmosphere of constant suspicion? The answer is—I can’t.

Since you refuse to listen, maybe this will explain things? Remember our worst fight ever? Just the two of us in the car on the highway in the pouring rain last fall? The wipers didn’t work, and the icy rain was almost blinding, and you could barely see out the windshield, and we couldn’t stop screaming at each other.

“Is this it?” I said.

“Do you want it to be?” you shouted.

“I don’t know! Do you?”

“So it’s over?”

“Do you want it to be over?”

We stared at each other.

It felt like the end of everything.

We pulled into a gas station and sat in the pouring rain, numb and miserable. Then the conversation turned deadly cold.

“Should I find a lawyer?”

“Go ahead,” you said.

I waited for the longest time for you to say something else. Meet me halfway.

But you didn’t.

I remember the sound of the rain enveloping us, and the wind shaking the car. I remember being cold and shivering, the kind of cold that burrowed deep and got into your bones. Our creation, our marriage was dead. It was unbelievable. Jaw-dropping.

We made up later on, but that fight left me with one question. Can you ever truly love somebody after you’ve hated them so much? Do these wounds ever heal? Is it possible? We were once so unbelievably close. My entire world revolved around you. And now, what’s left of us? Can you tell me that?

Charlotte

He remembered the fight. It was awful. How had they gotten to such a low point in their marriage—talk of divorce? But they’d managed to survive a succession of quarrels and arguments during the eight years of their marriage, primarily because they loved one another and didn’t want to split up. He couldn’t imagine ever fighting that viciously with her again. He wouldn’t allow it. But now it was too late. He sat rubbing the back of his head with his hands, nursing imagined wounds.

In a state of shock, he went upstairs to the master bedroom and rummaged through his wife’s bureau drawers. She had packed in a hurry and had left a few things behind—all gifts from him. Sexy sweaters, a lacy red bra-and-panties set, a pair of gold earrings and several expensive necklaces. Most hurtful of all was her wedding ring on the bedside table.

On the wall above the bed was an expensively framed photograph of the two of them on their wedding day, looking crazy-in-love. Had he ever been that young? Had she ever looked more beautiful?

He began a methodical room-by-room search, his heart ticking at the base of his throat. The living room was full of walnut furniture, legs and back rails covered in ornate scrollwork featuring vines and acorns. There were a lot of throw pillows and colorful fabrics. Charlotte had picked out the drapes herself, made of a thick rich fabric. She didn’t like the sun. She preferred rainy days. Gloomy overcast days. “It diffuses the light,” she once told him. But that was just an excuse.

She liked curling up with a good book. She liked wrapping herself in a blanket. She liked the cold and the gloom, because it made her feel cozy and happy. She wanted to nest—he could see that now. It was evident in the cushiony armchairs and the pastel hues and the sunny kitchen full of brand new appliances. She had tried to create a nest for them to have a family in, but he’d ruined it with his outbursts. He’d blown it all to pieces.

Will sat on the Haitian-cotton sofa and gazed out the wide windows, feeling desperate and alienated, suddenly understanding why his wife preferred the dark. Dusk created a dark blue velvet backdrop for the diamond stars and opal moon. He sat on the sofa and rubbed his hands back and forth over the fabric. He didn’t know what to do. He glanced around and noticed that the door to her office was open. He went inside and tossed her things around until he found what he was looking for.

*

The following morning, Will drove to the university and sat in the back of Owen Landry’s art history class. The professor had thick glasses and stringy brown hair that hung down over his narrow face. There was a stale weariness to the lecture, a gray gravity that put everyone to sleep.

When class was over, Will waited in back of the lecture hall while the students filed out. He recognized the boy—tall, athletic, good-looking. He wore a jacket with the hood drawn tightly around his face, and there were dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. As soon as he saw Will, he bolted.

Will chased the kid out of the building and down the sidewalk past the other students. He grabbed the boy and flung him around, and they both tumbled hard onto the snowy ground.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” the boy shouted.

Will gave him a tormented look. “You fucked my wife, didn’t you? Admit it.”

“Are you sick?” he cried defiantly.

Will dug his hands into his coat pockets, pulled out dozens of crumpled pieces of paper and dropped them in the snow. He wondered once again if Charlotte had left them there on purpose. Did she want to hurt him? Did she want him to find them? “Did you write these?” he asked.

The boy nodded, his face a lacework of conflicting emotions.

“Are you in love with her?”

Again, the boy nodded.

“Were the two of you…?” He couldn’t say it.

“No,” the boy croaked.

Will’s pulse was running slower now. He looked around wildly. He couldn’t seem to swallow.

“She told me she was leaving you,” the boy said defensively.

Will plopped down beside him on the campus lawn. A single thought looped through his head—this boy had meant something to her. Something significant. He felt a pressure on his chest. “Well, congratulations. She did leave me,” he said.

The boy nodded. “Me, too.” He began to cry. “I’m tired of feeling shitty all the time.”

Will grabbed him in a bear hug. “It’s okay,” he said softly. The boy’s hair smelled like wet wool.

“Every day I wake up and she’s not there, it sucks.”

“I know.” Will felt like a wild animal. Not a human being. More like a primitive beast. He felt nothing for this boy, and yet he understood what had driven him. He grabbed a handful of snow and rubbed it in Owen Landry’s face.

“Hey!” The student lashed out, spitting and flailing.

Will punched him again and again in the face and on the side of the head and in the gut. Then he bolted to his feet and ran away.

*

It was one in the morning and the lab was empty. Rules were posted on the walls—
Keep Your Shoes Off the Tables, No Unauthorized Postings, No Food or Drink in the Lab
. The bulletin boards were clogged with take-out menus, the workstations were littered with pizza boxes and soda cans, and there were unofficial postings everywhere you turned. So much for lab rules.

Will took one last look around, making sure nobody was there in the lab, before he went downstairs to the basement. The basement of Lon-Gen was primarily used for storage now, and the cold space was cluttered and musty. He walked past the furnace and water heater and boxes of accumulated junk, until he came to the cobwebby back of the building, where he unlocked a wooden door. The old maintenance closet wasn’t a closet exactly. It was a small, unused room, which they’d turned into a makeshift lab—workbench, tools, batteries, beakers, tweezers, volt meters, hot plate, barometer. It had taken them almost a year to construct the prototype, and three months since the plane crash to make it operational.

Now Will pushed his feelings aside. He needed to stay focused. He closed the door behind him and inserted his earplugs—the machine was loud. He took off his watch. The exam table was surrounded by a large cylinder-shaped tube, which enclosed a circular magnet. Radio waves were used to redirect the spinning photons.

Will removed his belt with its metal buckle and emptied his pockets. He filled a syringe with radioactive serum. He patted his forearm, found a vein and injected the serum. He put the needle down, slipped out of his shoes and felt a slight lurch in his stomach as he stepped up onto the exam table, checked the relays and gauges, and then lay down on the cold table. He grabbed the controls and carefully lowered the orange plastic lid. He used a toggle switch connected by wires to power up the machine.

Quantum theorists had discovered that two particles behaving identically could exist very far away in space. But no one had considered the fact that two identical particles could exist at different times in history. He hated lying there in the dark, waiting for the machine to power up. He had gone through the procedure 12 times so far, and it had left scars on his body. This would be the thirteenth time.