“Isabel,” he whispered from the doorway.
I didn’t answer, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I was so tired. I was relieved when I heard him go back downstairs and turn on the television. I made a point to leave early for the gym in the morning before he awoke and stayed away until after he’d gone for the day.
That night, he came home early from work with a gigantic teddy bear. He apologized and we pretended that everything was okay, normal. I wanted so badly to believe that he’d come around, I almost convinced myself. I tried not to notice that his smiles were forced, that his attentiveness just didn’t seem sincere.
Then, of course, a few weeks later there was the miscarriage. Soon after, the affair. And yet on the night before he disappeared we made love and shared croissants in the morning. Tragedy, betrayal mingling with the mundane of everyday life, a love that manages temporary amnesia masquerading as forgiveness to survive-is that the stuff of enduring marriages? Maybe just mine.
All these buried memories exposed to the light by his disappearance. I had fooled myself, thinking I was the one who saw more than others. I saw what I wanted to see, edited and rewrote the rest. I got off the train at East Eighty-sixth Street and emerged on Fifth Avenue. I was directly across town from my own apartment, separated by the expanse of Central Park. With a dead woman’s purse over my shoulder, weighted down by the first gun I’d ever touched, I felt so far away from my life that I might as well have been on the moon.
I passed the inverted ziggurat of the Guggenheim, its white expanse as vast and peaceful as a moonscape. I felt a twinge of longing to be meandering its downward spiral carefree and overwarm, gazing at the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the early Moderns. Artists gone but art remaining, peaceful and still, even if the creator’s spirit was anything but.
The neighborhood was quiet at night, the proximity of Central Park making it seem an airier neighborhood than other parts of the city. I would have felt perfectly safe on any other night. But that night I found myself looking over my shoulder at the sound of approaching footsteps, gazing at others on the street with suspicion. I dug my hand inside that strange tacky purse and rested it on the gun, feeling quite able to use it if necessary.
As I walked, all the events of the last-was it only twenty-four hours?-played in my mind: that horrible screaming on the phone, Fred’s blood pooling on the marble floor, the lovely Camilla, her throat cut. I had the cold realization that I was, as Trevor suspected, terribly out of my league. I thought about my sister, how worried she must be, how furious she’d be when she learned I pulled a gun on Erik. She’d know then how desperate and stupid all of this had made me. I had a moment of clarity, my footfalls sounding loud on the concrete in the quiet night; I should call Detective Crowe and tell him everything I’d learned, then call that lawyer, get in a cab and turn myself in. I should take all the good advice and help that had been offered and stop being an ass-for the sake of my family, if for not for myself. I stopped in my tracks and took Camilla’s phone from my right pocket, Detective Crowe’s card from my left. I could have dialed, ended it right then and there.
I thought of S, her mean, dead eyes and perfect body. Again, the rise of bile in my throat. Pure rage had a taste and texture that I was starting to recognize. I tucked the phone and the card away. I couldn’t let anyone else write the end to this story. I had to do it myself.
Don’t try to find me or to answer the questions you’ll have. I can’t protect you-or your family-if you do.
I could hear the sound of his voice in my head, as clearly as if he were beside me.
Protect me from whom? From your other self, this shadow that was living with me, sleeping in my bed for five years? Detective Breslow asked me if he’d had a history of mental illness. Maybe he did. How could I know? The man I saw in Camilla Novak’s apartment was my husband, the man I knew. Not some deranged madman who’d finally gone off the edge, not someone unrecognizable in insanity. It was him, perhaps merely, finally, unveiled.
I KEPT WALKING, turning left onto Eighty-eighth Street and moving past stately town houses until I reached the one I knew well. As I rang the bell, I thought, not for the first time: How in the world does he afford to live here? A three-story town home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? The Gold Coast. Unaffordable to any but the super-rich. Even the merely rich were just riffraff in this rarefied world. I’d been crass enough to ask once before.
“You made me rich,” he said. I laughed. Without Marcus’s income, I certainly wouldn’t have been living in an Upper West Side duplex. I’d still be in my apartment in the East Village.
“I haven’t even made myself this rich.”
“You do all right.”
“Seriously.”
I didn’t recall the answer now. It’s true that when he’d moved in that it was a skeleton of what it would become, with exposed rafters and wires, sagging staircases, water stains on the ceilings. He’d spent years restoring it, doing most of the work himself. Five years after closing, it was a showplace. Every time I came to see him, he was in the middle of some element of the restoration. It always reminded me of Fred, how he spent years fixing everything that was broken in our old house.
“They say a man who feels the need to build a house believes that he hasn’t accomplished enough with his life,” Jack told me. He was laying a hardwood floor in the upstairs hallway. I was sitting in the threshold to the bedroom, my feet up on the door frame and a beer in my hand-very helpful. I’d been married a year; Marcus was away on business. Or so I believed at the time. Who knows where he really was?
“Is that how you feel?” I asked him.
He brought the hammer down hard a couple of times, the sound echoing through still mostly empty rooms.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. I remembered our night together then. It came back in a vivid flash and I felt heat rise to my cheeks. I remembered his breath in my ear, I’ve always loved you, Isabel. What had I said to him in return? I didn’t remember.
“What about that woman you were seeing? An editor, right?”
“She thought I needed too much revision.”
My chuckle turned into a belly laugh and then we were both doubled over, tearing and clutching our middles.
Jack answered the door as quickly as if he’d been standing right behind it. He looked worried to the point of frantic.
“Christ,” he said by way of greeting, throwing his hands up in relief. “It’s almost eleven. I’ve been freaking out. Your sister’s been calling and calling.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked, stepping inside.
“That I hadn’t heard from you. She knew I was lying.”
He grabbed me by the arms and looked me up and down.
“You look awful,” he went on. “That bandage is bleeding through.”
I put my hand to it and realized it was wet. He dragged me down the narrow hallway to the large bathroom past the gourmet kitchen-all granite and stainless steel as if it lived in a showroom, gleamingly clean as is only possible for a man who eats takeout seven nights a week. I’d watched delivery men carry the granite in, helped Jack unwrap the appliances.
In the bathroom mirror, I saw what he saw and I almost wept. Awful wasn’t the word-wrecked, defeated, that same pasty-ill look that Ivan had. I remembered the wound on his chest, how his bandage was bleeding through, too. I felt a bizarre camaraderie for the big, unstable man.
“This is infected,” Jack said with a grimace as he removed the bandage. “Stay here.”