While I Was Gone (34 page)

And with everything else, there was, of course, the shock, pure and horrible, of having to revisit Dana’s death with this new understanding, this new way of envisioning it. Something I could not, of course, ask Daniel to help me with, though I wanted his help. I wanted him.

As one does when threatened with loss, I fell in love with him again, with the tender note in his voice as he spoke in the morning to one of the dogs, with the white oval of his face turning up at me as though I might be someone else coming into the room—or another version of myself. With the mysterious, private quality to his expression as he talked gently on the phone of someone else’s sorrow, with his long, narrow feet and the delicate tick in his toe bones when he descended the stairs from one of the girls’ rooms in the morning.

thought of us, silently together in the boat the day before it all began.

T want{1 him hack. I wanted eversthing back.

out in the late afternoons—growing longer, twilight an event now.

returned after dark to the dark house. This was how it would feel, thought, if Daniel died. I thought, He is dead to me. We are dead to each other Once, in the night, Daniel stumbled into the kitchen when I was there and, turning on the light, started at seeing me. There we stood, X blinking at each other in the sudden harsh light. Each of us had raised a hand toward the other. I wanted, more than anything, to go to him, to touch him. I wanted his touch. When I thought of this moment later, I saw us as actors depicting yearning across a stage set, the black windows painted into the backdrop, the strewn table and angled chairs the props, the main characters stage left and stage right, stopped in the act of moving toward each other. It seemed for an instant he might make some gesture to come toward me or that gave me permission to go to him. It seemed so, but he didn’t. His body slackened, his hand fell. He smiled, an ironic smile, a sad smile.

“It’s no fun at all, is it?” he said.

DURING THESE WEEKS, WE STAYED AWAY FROM EACH OTHER

when we could. For Daniel, this was easier. He could let his job expand to be as big as he needed it to be. Instead of being home for dinner before an evening meeting, he went to a restaurant with Mortie, or the head of the committee on renovations, or the church musical director. He let the meetings themselves proliferate. I knew his strategy. He delegated nothing, he participated everywhere. And the church, hydra-headed, many-mouthe , was all too eager to devour him. He was hardly ever home.

Since it seemed to me that I could speak to no one of what I’d done, of what I knew, of what I was so pressingly thinking about, I had fewer options. Daniel’s absence unburdened me, of course. But when he was home, usually in his study, I almost always left. And even when he wasn’t there I sometimes went out, running from the emptiness of the house. I drove aimlessly down the country roads, through the dead and dying mill towns, the expensive reconstructed communities. I parked across from working farms and watched the cows. I sat for hours next to unused fields, grown over with juniper and pines, filling in with thin maple saplings and choke cherries I became an expert on where to find small coffee shops, the kind that featured square Formica-topped tables with plastic mustard and ketchup bottles placed on them like decorations. Or on the locations of ladies’ rooms on my routes—in the basements of old town halls, around the back of wood-frame gas stations. I came home after work and drove

ON A SLOW SATURDAY IN EARLY FEBRUARY, I LEFT WORK EARLY,

at Mary Ellen’s suggestion. She’d stay, she said, her wide, flat face frowning in concern. I looked like I could use some time off.

Daniel s car was in the driveway, though he wasn’t in the house. Probably in his study, then, working on a sermon. I couldn’t bear the empty silence. I decided I would walk down to the town library.

The library was a strange, octagonal brick structure, built in the late nineteenth century—one of only two brick buildings in town, the other being the post off fice It had been endowed by the last of the Adamses, whose unfriendly portrait loomed behind the main desk as you entered the central hallway. I greeted the librarian, a starchy, skinny woman with dyed black hair, who’d been there as long as we’d lived in town, and went to the nonfiction shelves. I strolled aimlessly through them for a while, pulling out a book here and there, pretending to read. I actually got absorbed briefly by an account of the ebola virus.

When I’d put that away, it occurred to me I could use the computer to locate an article Mary Ellen had mentioned to me, an article in the Globe about the reasons for the increase in the numbers of women going into veterinary medicine.

The computer room was in an alcove off the main reading room.

There were six stations, all donated, hardware and elaborate software, by the same anonymous person who’d put the local elemenury school on line. I looked up my article and read it with mild interest.

Then I wondered suddenly, how far back could I go?

To exactly where I wanted to go, it turned out. It was a shock to see the photo of Dana, probably a high-school graduation shot, with her hair carefully flipped up, just so, at the ends, her lipstick dark, her face childishly fat. The stories were as I’d recollected them, but there were more of them than I’d thought. It had loomed large, this murder in working-class neighborhood. It had scared people. What you could read under the surface as you went through the articles was that an attempt was being made to account for it. To be reassuring about st by offering details of the irregularity of the victim’s life. It could not happen to you, the articles were saying, because you lock your doors at night, you sleep with just your husband, you live with just your family, you are responsibly employed.

There was a photo of us, too, the house members, caught in someone’s flash as we moved in a group together, maybe leaving the police station? I couldn’t tell. I had raised my hands slightly—they resembled two large mittens—and my face was partially obscured by my hair.

Larry was next to me, looking thuggish and angry. Sara peered directly at the camera, the light glinting in her glasses, her mouth slightly open, her face stupid. Eli and Duncan and John were just figures behind us, boys with hair that was too long, too sloppy, too unkempt I lifted my eyes then, looking away from this. And what I saw was Eli, the real, grown-up Eli, sun ding in the main reading room.

Seeming to survey it, really, with his air of ease and assurance.

He wore a parka. His long, expensive scarf was looped around his neck. There was a shaft of sunlight between us—like a lens, an angled particled brightness I had to look through. It created a strange sense of distance of unreality.

He was slluling at someone. Now he spoke, and Jean stepped into my line of vision and stood next to him. Together they looked around the room with a civic, proprietary air, and then they turned as one apparently to leave.

As they turned, he saw me. She had already disappeared from the frame that the doorway had made for my view of them, but he stopped now, just inside it, at its edge. It seemed for a moment he might come over to me, he might have something to say. My legs stiffened almost involuntarily to rise, my chair slid back with a hard noise that made the other occupant of the computer room look over in irritation.

And then he thought better of it. His hand lifted just a little in greeting, and he smiled at me, a sheepish smile, as though we shared a slightly embarrassing secret—and he was gone. Off, perhaps, to survey other properties in town that he, as a taxpayer, owned a share of I sat there, tensed, shocked, and then, in a palpable wash of emotion, abruptly rageful. His very being—his health, his evident prosperity, his smile, his lifted hand—all of this was an offense to me. It seemed unbearable that he should exist in the same world as I did.

In a world where Dana was dead. It was all I could do to turn the machine off, my hands were trembling so. I slid my coat on and went outside.

It was mild that day. The roads and parking lot were wet, the snow on the fields and lawns flattened and crusted on top with its own melting There was the sound of dripping everywhere, and the smell, every -|7 now and then, of pine, or of earth. I walked slowly home, trying to calm || myself. My coat flapped open in the gentle air, my boots struck the I gravel road edge with a cheerful sibilance. A few cars passed me. The air they stirred pressed my coat to my side and lifted my hair slightly.

I In the house, I shed my coat. I went and sat down in the living I room. It was silent but for the steady whir of the humidifier—which, I X noted now, was empty. I took the water chamber to the kitchen to fill it. Its opening felt vaguely slimy when I lifted the cap off, so I scoured it with soapy hot water before refilling it. When I’d replaced the chamber and turned the machine on again, I came back into the kitchen and looked around me. Everywhere, I saw the signs of our sorrow, of our carelessness about our life together.

It had to stop. It had to stop now, I thought.

I put on an apron. I unloaded the dishwasher and then reloaded it with crusted plates and pans. I wiped the counters and the table. I scrubbed the sink and bagged the trash, hauled it outside to the storage bin. I went into our bedroom next and stripped the bed. I took the sheets and the dirty clothes to the basement and started a load of wash.

When I came back up, I moved along our row of hooks, gathering the clothes we’d thoughtlessly worn over and over through the past weeks.

I threw them down the basement stairs and they landed, arms and legs spread awkwardly. I picked up the old newspapers Lying around and bagged them for recycling. I stacked the scattered books. I gathered the pens and pencils, the glasses cases, the odd dishes left here and there. I was aware suddenly, above the slosh of water, the hum of motors, of my own panting, angry breath, it was as though I were doing all this instead of hurting someone, breaking something.

I had to talk about it, I realized. I thought I knew what I was going to do, but I still wasn’t sure if it was right. I needed to talk to Daniel.

Without giving myself time for second thoughts, I left the house and crossed the yard through the melted, melting snow.

The barn smelled richly of humus. I knocked on Daniel’s door, and as though he’d been expecting me, his voice called out instantly and without surprise, “Come in.”

I opened the door and took a step in. He’d pulled his glasses off.

He was holding them a few inches away from his face.

U ,

l l M-“I need to talk to you, Daniel,” I said.

He made a gesture of consent and set his glasses on his desk, on top of a yellow pad filled with writing in his neat, vertical hand.

I shut the door behind me and came over to the chair that faced him.

“Please. Sit,” he said when I hesitated, and I did. The room seemed dim after the bright sunlight outside. Daniel was working just by the ghostly light from the windows.

“I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do,” I said.

He shifted quickly sideways in his chair, as though bracing himself.

“About Eli,” I said.

“Ah,” he answered. A little smile flickered at his lips and then was gone. I understood it. He’d thought I was speaking of something else—of us—and he was amused, bitterly amused, at his mistake.

“I feel it’s step one, getting that done,” I apologized.

He shrugged.

“Daniel,” I said.

“I have to begin somewhere ” “Yes,” he conceded. And after a moment, “Well, what’s your decision?”

“Well, I haven’t absolutely decided. I just think I have. I need your opinion.” His face tightened.

“I want it, anyway.”

“What do you think your decision is, then,” “I want to turn him in.”

He gestured. So?

“But it feels like revenge, or anger, to me. And I’m not sure I have the right to that. Or I’m not sure that’s right.”

“Why shouldn’t you be angry? He killed someone. He killed someone you cared for deeply.” Daniel spoke dispassionately, minister to parlshioner. For once, I was grateful for the tone “But I’m not sure that’s entirely the source of my anger.”

He nodded. Go on.

“He shamed me too. He exposed my foolishness. He embarrassed me. He wrecked things between us.”

“Jo. He didn’t wreck them.”

“This is how I feel, Daniel. This is what it feels like I’m doing, to me. I know I’m to blame. I know that. But what I worry about is that doing this, turning him in, is a way to—I don’t know—deflect that.

Find a way to blame him. For all of it.”

Daniel looked at me, steadily, coolly, over his desk.

Then he was done with that, and he stood up and went to his window. In the summer, all you could see out there were woods. But now, with the leaves gone, there was a flickering view through the pines to our neighbors house—the battlers. The shitheads.

After a long moment, he turned back to me. His face was shadowed by the light entering the room from behind him. His voice was dry but gentle. He said, “I may not be without mixed motives here, too, you realize.”

I hadn’t thought of it. I hadn’t thought of all I might be asking of him, though I’d thought of some of it. In any case, I said, “Yes,” now.

And after a few seconds, “Yes, but I trust you, more than I trust myself, to sort that out.”

He breathe heavily, once. Then he said, “Thank you.” I couldn’t get his tone. I waited.

“I can’t think…” His voice was burred, and he cleared his throat.

“I can’t think that presenting the truth to the authorities is exactly revenge. Revenge will be theirs, if they exact it. You’ll just open Eli up to those processes, whatever they are. You will, in effect, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—this crime against Dana. Against us all.

And Caesar will do with it what he may.”

“But it’s likely to be very… involving. Very prolonged. If there’s an investigation and a trial and all that. It’s likely to be

.. .

costly. To me. To us. Not just to him.”

“It’s the least of it, Jo,” he said dryly.

“But what I worry is… I worry, too, that somehow I’m seeing this as my penance, my way out. Because it will be painful for me. And part of me wants that. Some public pain. But it’s so unfair, it’s so unconnected to me and you together, and it will involve you. You understand that. It will involve you. It’ll make it go on and on.”