“Did she say why, Marvin? Was Crystal sick?”
Marvin shook his head.
“She didn’t mention an illness. She just popped in one day, no appointment, and chatted with our secretary, Hollie, for a few minutes before coming back here and asking me to draw up a will. I did ask her why, and she just said she was trying to be more responsible. She didn’t offer more, and I didn’t ask. I wish now that I had.”
“Have you told the police?” Bette asked.
Marvin looked surprised.
“No. For starters, the police haven’t visited me. But you understand Bette, I’d be obligated to share that information. And she mentioned a life insurance policy as well.”
Bette felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her.
“Life insurance?” she asked.
“She’d set up a policy that morning. One hundred thousand payable to you.”
Bette left the office on paper legs. She collapsed inside her car and rested her head on the steering wheel.
She didn’t cry. Not yet, not in a public parking lot where people would see the red blotches on her cheeks and the snot rushing from her nose. And grief wasn’t there yet. Shock was.
Why had her sister visited the office?
Could it have been merely a coincidence?
Crystal wasn’t suicidal. Her sister had never been depressed a day in her life; well, save for the three days leading up to her period. She hadn’t looked sick.
The secrets were piling on, and Bette wasn’t sure how much more she could take.
Bette returned home to find her father on the phone.
She waited in the kitchen, the news still swirling in her mind, making the world feel off-kilter. Her own house looked alien.
Homer hung up.
“Lilith went to the grocery store,” he explained. He nodded at the phone. “That was Crystal’s friend, Jenny. They graduated together. Calling to offer her assistance. Lot of good any of it does.” He frowned, studying Bette’s face. “What? Did you hear something?”
“Crystal bought a life insurance policy. She created a will,” Bette told her father. “I just left Marvin Kissinger’s office.”
Homer’s mouth turned down.
“Crystal?” He shook his head as if he didn’t believe it. “A will? But why? What did Marvin say?”
“He didn’t know why, Dad. She walked into his office four weeks ago and asked him to draft a will.”
“That’s not like Crystal. She couldn’t have been ill. Right, Bette?”
Bette wanted to say no. She and Crystal shared everything, their deepest secrets, their most troubling thoughts, but Crystal had created a will, bought life insurance. Crystal had been pregnant.
Crystal had known something that Bette hadn’t, and she’d never said a word about it.
27
Then
Crystal sat in the wicker chair by her window, willing herself to be lulled by the gentle swaying. It didn’t work its usual magic. She stared out the window as the daughter of another tenant in the apartment building ran around the courtyard, pulling a wooden duck whose mouth opened and closed with the revolutions of its wheels.
“Long enough,” she whispered, standing and walking into the bathroom. Her hands tingled, and she rubbed them down her thighs as if that might calm them down.
She stopped in the doorway and looked toward the little plastic stick balanced on the edge of the sink. It was an inconsequential object, cheap and flimsy. She could crush it beneath a tennis shoe, and it would cease to exist.
Stepping into the bathroom, the tile cool against her bare feet, Crystal stared down at the pregnancy test.
Parallel pink lines met her eyes. A harmless symbol if encountered anywhere else in the world, but there, on that white plastic stem, they held a Godlike power. The power of life and death. The power of a magnificent shift that the receiver was hopeless to avoid.
Pregnant.
Crystal’s hands shook as she picked up the test and held it closer to her face. People suffered from double vision all the time. If she were Bette, she’d march back to the store and buy two more to confirm, but she wasn’t.
Her body had revealed its secret that morning when she’d risen slowly from the abyss of her dreams to find her hand resting on her belly and the unshakable sense that another being lived within it.
Crystal studied her face in the mirror. No shadow lingered behind her, no gaunt face transformed her rosy cheeks, but the truth of her imminent death still hovered somewhere, somewhere in the space between body and spirit, where knowledge that the mind couldn’t access slithered and slipped at the corner of one’s eye.
She grabbed her purse and tucked the pregnancy test inside, slid on her sandals, and left the apartment to meet Weston.
Crystal sat on the low brick wall at the Michigan State University campus and looked at the clock tower.
She’d loved the structure since girlhood, when she’d visited the university with her parents. She and Bette would play in the bowl of grass at the base of the clock tower. Crystal would imagine racing up the stairs all the way to the room at the top. It would be filled with gears and dials, a room always in movement, tiny constant shifting and clicking, reminding the world that a second, now a minute, had elapsed. That moment was gone, this one was here, and now this one too had passed.
Bette had been less interested in the clocks and much more interested in the library, which they were rarely allowed to enter. It was for students of the college and professors like their father. Like Homer, Bette could pass hours between the stacks. Crystal loved to read as well, but her tastes tended toward fiction and poetry.
“Crystal,” Wes jogged out of the library, smiling.
She stood and he grabbed her hand, pulling her into a dense bracket of trees. He wrapped his arms around her waist and picked her up, kissing her.
“Ugh, you feel so good. I thought this day would never end,” he told her.
She laughed and breathed deep, smelling gardenias and the sun-warmed grass.
“My place?” he whispered, kissing her closed eyes and then her cheeks and finally her mouth.
“I’ll meet you there,” she promised.
They’d gotten more relaxed about their affection for one another.
In the first month, Wes had been adamant they keep it a secret. They still hid their romance, showing no outright affection on campus, but they touched each other in little ways now. Anyone looking closely could have seen they were in love.
Wes owned a house in Lansing, outside the high real estate prices of East Lansing, not to mention the watchful eyes of the other professors, but Crystal seldom joined him there. They mostly stayed at her apartment.
She parked on the street, leaving room for him to pull into his driveway.
As she waited, she tapped her fingers on the wheel, which reminded her of Bette and her father. They were terrible fidgeters. On road trips, one of them would drum the wheel while the other clicked a pen open and closed, until Crystal insisted they turn up the radio to drown out the sound of their constant fiddling.
The little white stick poked from an interior pocket in her purse. She didn’t know why she’d brought it. Surely, Wes wouldn’t demand proof. It had been a combination of excitement and anxiety. The part of her that was unsure how he’d react compelled her to bring something concrete to show him.