“I brought the certificates to a safety deposit box,” I lied through my teeth. I will take one stab at extricating myself from this, I thought, one outright denial.
“Charles . . . ,” she admonished me with my own name. As if that kind of blatant lying weren’t worthy of me. And I wanted to say, Yes, Deanna, it is. You don’t know what I’ve been up to — it is.
But I couldn’t say much of anything — not yet, not when it concerned the truth. I was dead in the water, and I knew it.
“Charles, why are you lying to me? What’s going on?”
I suppose I could’ve denied I was lying to her. I could’ve stuck to my ridiculous story about the safety deposit box—ridiculous not because it wasn’t possible, but because even if she had believed me, I would have had to produce the stock certificates on Monday, and that was impossible. I could’ve said this is my story and I’m sticking to it, no matter what. But in the end, I had too much respect for her. In the end, I loved her too much.
So even though I knew what I was about to do, knew that now that I was about to take a stab at the truth I was going to be stabbing her — I went ahead anyway.
I started with the train. That hurried morning, the lack of cash, the woman who’d helped me out.
When I mentioned Lucinda, I could see Deanna’s expression change — her features flattening, the way animals’ faces do at the first sign of danger.
“Then I had a bad day at the office,” I continued. “I was kicked off the credit card account.”
Deanna was obviously wondering what getting kicked off an account had to do with $110,000 missing from Anna’s Fund. And with the woman on the train.
I was wondering about that, too. I knew there was a connection, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Something about needing to talk to someone, maybe — or had it simply been a precursor to what followed? One step taken off the ledge before the other foot followed?
“I ran into the woman again,” I said. What I should’ve said was that I ran after, sought, meticulously looked for, this woman. But wasn’t I allowed to soft-pedal just a little?
“What are you talking about, Charles?” She wanted the Monarch Notes version now — she wasn’t interested in a prologue or an introduction, not when she could tell that her future with me was hanging in the balance.
“I’m talking about a mistake I made, Deanna. I’m so sorry.” A mistake. Was that all it was? People made mistakes all the time, and then they learned from them. I was hoping she might look at it that way, even though common sense and everything I knew about Deanna after eighteen years of marriage told me there was no chance of that. Still.
Now Deanna sat on the stoop. She pushed her hair back from her face and straightened her back like someone about to be shot who still wants desperately to keep her dignity. And me? I raised the gun in my hand and pulled the trigger.
“I had an affair, Deanna.”
P. Diddy was still seeping through the window. Curry was barking at a passing car. Still, the surrounding world was about as silent as I’d ever heard it. A silence even worse than the kind that had permeated the house ever since Anna got sick, silence so black and hopeless that I thought I might start crying.
But she did instead. Not loudly or hysterically, but the tears suddenly there, as if I’d slapped her hard in the face.
“Why?” she said.
I’d expected she would ask questions. I thought she might ask me if I loved her, this woman—or how long it had been going on, or how long it was over. But no—she’d asked me why instead. A question she was entitled to, absolutely, but a question I was unprepared to answer.
“I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know.”
She nodded. She looked away, down at her bare feet, which seemed strangely vulnerable on the green step of our back stoop, like naked newborn mammals. Then she looked up again, squinting, as if looking directly at me were hurting her eyes.
“I was going to say, How could you, can you believe it? I was. But I know how you could, Charles. Maybe I even know why you could.”
Why? I thought. Tell me. . . .
“Maybe I even understand it,” she continued. “Because of what’s happened with us lately. I think I can understand it, I do. I just don’t think I can forgive it. I’m sorry about that. I can’t.”
“Deanna,” I began, but she waved me off.
“It’s over now? This affair?”
At last a question I could more or less handle.
“Yes. Absolutely. It was once, just one time, really. . . .”
She sighed, cracked her knuckle, wiped her eyes. “Why is Anna's money missing, Charles?”
Okay. I’d told half of it, but there was still a whole other half, wasn’t there?
“You don’t have to tell me anything else about the affair — I don’t want to know anything else about it,” Deanna said. “But I want to know that.”
So I told her.
As sparingly as possible, as linearly as I could remember it—one thing leading to another leading to another—and I could tell that while it had all made sense to me, in a horrible, albeit panicked, way, it wasn’t making any sense to her. Even when I reached the part where we’d been attacked and beaten and I could see actual sympathy in her eyes. Even when I reached the part where Vasquez entered our home and put his hand on Anna’s head. Still it made no sense to her. Perhaps she could see what I hadn’t been able to—could spot the moments in this tortured tale when I could’ve done something different, when this different course of action was crying out to be tried. Or maybe it was because I’d left something out, something significant and necessary to any true understanding of events.
“So I paid him the money,” I finished. “To save her.”
“You never thought about going to the police? About going tome? ”
Yes, I wanted to say. I had thought about going to the police, or going to her, which was pretty much the same thing, really. But when I’d thought about it, I’d pictured the way she’d look—which was the way she looked now. So I hadn’t. And now I really couldn’t go to the police, even though it might not make much of a difference, since it was entirely probable the police were coming for me.
“That money,” she whispered. “Anna’s Fund . . .” saying it the way I’d heard investors mention one fund or another these past couple of years while perusing the stock pages on their way to work. That Dreyfus Fund . . . Morgan Fund . . . Alliance Fund . . . As if reciting the names of the dearly departed. Gone and never to return.
“You have to go to the police now, Charles. You have to tell them what happened and get our money back. It's Anna's. ”
I’d told her a story with a hole in it, a hole I’d hoped would be big enough to sneak through. But no. She was making a perfectly reasonable request, only I didn’t have a perfectly reasonable answer. Protecting Lucinda from her husband’s anger wouldn’t do now — not for Deanna, not when protecting her was costing our daughter over a hundred thousand dollars.
What she didn’t know was that I was protecting me.
“There’s more,” I said, and I could see Deanna deflate. Haven't you told me enough already? her expression seemed to say. What more can there possibly be?