Valley of Ashes (40 page)

“Yes. Please go ahead.”

“Don’t kill yourself, okay? This is going to be a tiny piece of your life. You are lovely, and I actually envy you quite a bit.”

She didn’t believe that.

The little table fountain was annoying. They always made me feel like I had to pee.

“
Everything
is ahead of you,” I said. “Your whole life. Everyone else you’re going to know, meet,
love
. This part is not important.”

“It feels important. To me.”

“Of course it does. I’m not trying to say you
don’t
feel this, and very deeply. I’m just sorry that you have to feel hurt. I
am
sorry about that, please believe me. I know what it feels like. And I’m very sad, too. We’re in love with the same man—how could I not understand what you’re feeling? He’s caused us both a great deal of pain. And he cares about us both. I know
that
.”

She didn’t say anything, mulling all of it over.

I sat there listening to the stupid fountain.

Oh, for chrissake.

“Setsuko, I’m embarrassed to ask you this, but may I please use your bathroom?”

“Of course,” she said, rising to her feet.

“Down the hallway,” she said, swaying gracefully in front of me. Small steps, long legs.

I followed her past the kitchenette, then she stepped aside and gestured down the hallway’s white-carpeted length.

“It’s the door on the right,” she said. “The light switch is outside.”

“Thank you,” I said, walking past her.

There was a samurai sword set hanging on the wall. I wondered if she was as tacky in her native decorative taste as in her sorry attempts at the expatriate version.

Probably
.

I admit I was expecting pink accessories in Setsuko’s powder room. I hated the term “powder room,” but for this it was fitting.

There wasn’t anything pink, though. She’d gone for lavender: toilet seat cover, bath rug, towels. Even her toothbrush in its silvery holder.

I turned the water on before sitting, not particularly keen on her hearing me piss.

Then stood up to wash my hands, after flushing.

And, okay, I spat on her candy-ass purple toothbrush, hoping I really
was
coming down with something. I swear that was my only petty moment.

I mean, hey, I could’ve wiped my ass with it, but I exercised restraint.

I also didn’t bother looking into the mirror above the sink, just opened the door softly and stepped back out into her thickly carpeted hallway.

You couldn’t see into the living room, really, from where I was now standing.

All I could hear was the tinkle of that fucking fountain.

I turned off the bathroom light, but didn’t move forward.

The door across from me was open. I hadn’t noticed that on my way into the bathroom.

Across the threshold I could see that her bed had an elaborate brass headboard, the soft light of a table lamp beside it playing along its golden curves.

I tried closing my eyes, but that didn’t get rid of the image of Dean and Setsuko rolling around on those sheets, in ecstasy.

God, Madeline, just leave already. She’s not going to off herself, your work here is done, so get in your fucking car and drive home.

I didn’t, though. I felt like I was being pulled into that bedroom by a tractor beam, half its magnetism composed of my self-loathing, half of morbid fascination.

Lots of pink in the room’s color scheme: pink rug, pink lamp shade, pink quilt folded at the foot of the bed. But the lavender had spilled across the hall from the bathroom, as well.

The white bureau’s drawers were lavender, as was the skirt hiding the legs of a mirrored dressing table.

There was even a lavender set of shelves, hung on the wall to the left of the mirror.

One of those little tree things on it, the kind that you hang earrings off of.

Hers were arranged by size. Next to that was a little lucky cat statuette with its paw up.

I walked toward the large oval mirror, dropping my gaze to all the perfume bottles arrayed on the dressing table’s surface so I didn’t have to look again at the photograph Setsuko had stuck in the mirror’s frame.

Dean held her aloft in his arms like a new bride. Setsuko’s toes were pointed and the two of them laughed at the camera.

There was snow on the ground and you could see the Flatirons. Three bikes, one of them Cary’s, leaned against a stone wall beside them.

No, Cary would never have told me about my husband and Setsuko. He’d tried to be a good friend to all three of us, keeping our various secrets.

Her perfume was all cheap drugstore crap. In the front row there was a bunch of Avon and then a bottle of White Diamonds, “body mist” aerosol knockoffs of Giorgio and Obsession, even some Love’s Baby Soft stuff I hadn’t seen since middle school.

Beside these was a wide, shallow bowl.

Pretty, thick-walled, and heavy, in a beautiful rich streaky green: malachite. The kind of catchall you might use for loose change, cufflinks, maybe a stray paper clip.

This one held three objects.

My grandmother’s string of pearls lay clumped in a heap on top. Setsuko must have stolen them from me when she babysat my daughters.

I picked them up carefully and put them on, making sure the clasp was solidly fastened before I slid it around to the back of my neck.

Now there were only two things lying in the bowl: the four-leaf clover charm I’d given Cary and Bittler’s Playboy Bunny key ring.

Those I didn’t touch.

I raised my eyes once more to the big dressing-table mirror.

Setsuko was now reflected in its surface, standing in the doorway behind me.

She was holding a rather large kitchen carving knife.

I guess the samurai sword on her hallway wall was papier-mâché.

I
stood there empty-handed, and Setsuko was still behind me with a big-ass knife.

“So,” I said, “you must’ve been fucking Bittler, too.”

Well, okay,
that
pissed her off.

But she didn’t answer. More important, she didn’t move. Which was why I’d said it.

I needed a little time to consider my options.

I didn’t turn around, but I kept talking.

“I mean, no point killing Cary just because he was going to tell me you were screwing my
husband
, right?”

Not that I was seeing anything on the dressing table worth a shit for self-defense, but still.

“You would’ve
liked
that,” I said. “Get me all pissed off, make Dean step up to the plate once and for all—because you still think he’d choose you over me and our kids.”

“He loves me.”

“He thinks you’re boring,” I said.

Bittler knew she’d been fucking Dean, of course. That’s why he’d asked me if she was inside my house, the day he wrecked his bike on the Creek Path.

Fine piece of tail, that Setsuko.

In the end, Cary must have taken my side.

Maybe he hadn’t liked the idea of Setsuko alone with my children,
maybe he didn’t like the way Dean treated me that day in the restaurant. I doubted I’d ever find out.

Cary planned to come clean with Dean about Setsuko and Bittler, though, and he must have told her so. That’s why she killed him.

But she still believed Dean would abandon me, just as long as he never found out about that particular detail.

Too bad I’d quit smoking. If I’d had a lighter on me, I could’ve gone all
Live and Let Die
Roger Moore on her ass and made an aerosol-can flamethrower out of her fakey-fake “Obsession.”

Because she sure as shit didn’t want me leaving here alive.

Too bad she hadn’t left, say, a shotgun leaning conveniently against the end of her bed. I could’ve used one, right about then.

Think, Madeline.

Okay, so there was also a round box of dusting powder on the table. Which was perfectly useless unless of course I suddenly remembered some secret recipe for making tear gas out of it. Or pulled a magic wand out of my ass and bibbety-bobbety-booed myself up a sparkly fairy-godmother grenade.

Although it did cheer me up to think that after Setsuko hacked me to death, Dean would
probably
figure out she’d done it, and not be in any hurry to propose to her afterward.

My husband was a philandering asshole, but he wasn’t particularly slow on the uptake—despite his patently execrable taste in side-pussy.

Fuck it, I was going to have to try
talking
my way out of this.

And that seemed like the dumbest plan ever. But it was all I had.

I would’ve tried it, too, if she hadn’t charged me with the knife instead.

So instead of chatting I grabbed the malachite bowl and whipped around fast, pitching it at her face with everything I had.

I’ve always had a mean arm, for a chick, and I at least grazed the side of her head.

She was off balance now, but she was still coming toward me.

I waited until she was close and then ducked, which was a good thing, because she missed me with the fucking carving knife on her first swing.

Not, unfortunately, the second.

O
n the bright side, Setsuko only got a light slice in, across my left forearm. Not enough to disable me or anything, but plenty to wake me the fuck up.

Unfortunately for her, I dove past her and toward the bedroom door while she was slashing me.

I was now looking down the hallway with my eye on her entry foyer. From which I really, really hoped to escape into the parking lot.

Setsuko was right on my heels but I did my level best to follow the advice of Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.”

Like, say, a knife-wielding psycho. Who was screaming all kinds of crazy shit while she chased me, by the way.

Not that I had any idea what she was saying.

Probably a good thing: It didn’t sound like she was shrieking anything very complimentary.

And then she must have taken another swing at me, because I felt this nasty sting in the middle of my left shoulder blade.

Not deep, again—lucky me. I was still moving fast, still pumping my arms just as hard, but she’d gotten a taste. And it fucking
hurt
, too.

It also meant she was close enough that if I stopped to open the front door, she’d take me out before I turned the handle.

So when I was almost there, I faked left away from the door and launched myself airborne over Setsuko’s appallingly ugly love seat.

Hadn’t hurdled since I ran track in sixth grade, but I’d been damn good at it back then and the instinct hadn’t deserted me.

Didn’t think, just kicked my right leg straight out in front of me, snapped my trailing knee up high and sideways, and cleared that mofo like a goddamn springbok, I shit you not.

Thank you, Title Nine.

Okay, so I almost did a face-plant into the brick fireplace mantel, but I got my hands up in time and bounced myself into a 180 turn—in time to watch Setsuko hip-check the love seat, hard.

Probably good she didn’t try to jump it, what with the big-ass bloody knife in her hand and everything.

Maybe not good for
me
, exactly—because, hey, I would’ve been more than happy to see her go splat and impale herself—but she might just as easily have cartwheeled over the damn thing all akimbo and shanked me, flailing, on her way down.

And that love seat sure as shit slowed her down for a few precious seconds. Caught her right at the pelvis, and the momentum snapped her torso forward.

Too much to hope, that a stop that sudden would break her grip on the damn knife and bring it clattering perfectly to rest at my feet.

But it did wrench a big “
oof
” out of her, and she sliced open a leather cushion as she fought to regain her balance.

Better it than me.

She was up again now, and even more pissed off.

But I’d used the downtime to equip myself with a brass fire poker and matching long-handled ash shovel from the andiron set she’d put conveniently next to the fireplace.

Purely decorative objects, since it was a gas fire, but awfully handy for me. And way more lethal than talcum powder, too, if I played my cards right.