So, Caroline’s husband had been a Hater. His name was Dickie. As for Gretchen, plenty of people saved artifacts of war, especially those tied to family. A SoHo artist I knew framed the photograph of a child that her father stole out of the wallet of a Korean soldier after he shot him to death. To me, swiping that picture was almost the equivalent of taking his life again. But to his daughter, the artist, it was somehow a reminder that we were all the same. She silk-screened the child onto one of her canvases and someone paid the $25,000 price tag without blinking.
Ironic. Hadn’t Misty called Caroline a little Hitler?
The phone shrilled on the counter. I jumped guiltily, and Caroline’s cat skittered around the corner. I let five rings go by before walking over to check the caller ID. Mrs. Drury’s red dial-up was no more. Mike had installed a top-of-the-line Sony with three lines, an answering machine, and a lot of other buttons I planned not to touch.
The small window read PRIVATE CALLER, which annoyed me even more than call waiting. “Private” callers were people angrily clinging to the crazy idea that there was still such a thing as privacy. In this case, the call was either from my elderly aunt in an assisted-living center in Minnesota who never talked less than forty-five minutes or from the anonymous person set on driving me out of my mind.
Neither was good, but I picked up the phone.
“Hello?” A slight sound. In old movies, that meant the line was tapped. Now it probably meant my caller was clicking a pen. Audible breathing.
I slammed the phone down.
Leave. Me. Alone.
My house had barely recovered from yesterday’s assault. Evil had found a way back in again, traveling through the phone line like lazy electricity. The yellow morning light was suddenly dimmer, my coffee colder, the daisies on the wallpaper no longer cheerful. He was invisible but there, a presence in the kitchen, my kitchen, trickling his fingers down the back of my neck, so real that I reached out behind me to grab them in the air. I wondered if he was preparing another surprise for me. I wondered why I was so sure, for the first time, that my tormentor was a he.
The phone rang again. I was pissing him off. My eyes raced to the kitchen door, the deadbolt still secure from last night, although what I feared was already inside. I walked as calmly as I could to the front door. Twice more, the phone rang.
The front door was locked, of course.
The clock on the mantel read 9:32. Only thirty minutes until men began turning my house into a prison. I checked on the cop car and drew the shades in the living room.
I walked back to the kitchen.
I picked up the phone on the sixth ring.
“Don’t hang up.”
I swallowed a gasp. Not the voice of a man, but of a woman.
“Lucinda?” My voice was shaking, but the snake squeezing my gut had loosened its grip. Lucinda. The woman at Caroline’s little gathering with the tortured voice and the tortured last name. Not my tormentor.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no problem at all,” I lied.
“I just wanted to talk to you about… the other day. The secret that Misty read. I just wanted to know whether that was really your secret. About the baby. Whether it’s your husband’s.”
The snake wriggled under my ribs, to the center of my chest. I tried to picture Lucinda’s face, but it was a pale blur. All I could remember was her lisp. We had never been closer than five feet apart. We’d never spoken to each other directly before this phone call. I’m not sure our eyes even met, because she mostly kept hers cast on Caroline’s floor except when offering advice on dressing potatoes like dictators. Maybe this is how life sucked for her. Her voice defined her.
“Don’t hang up again,” she pleaded. “Please.” I could hear soft sobs.
I didn’t like situations like this, where the person on the other end is apparently hurting, yet is simultaneously throwing a knife at my heart. Which one of us would I sacrifice?
I took a breath. “What’s wrong, Lucinda?”
“That was my secret.” Thecret. Her lisp took the edge off the word. For a second.
“What?” It registered. Shock. And, yes, judgment. Her secret, not mine. She could have rescued me in that room.
“It was two months ago,” Lucinda said. “The last night at my sister’s. She lives in Maine. I go see her sometimes to get away from… things. He walked in the guest room. It was so hot and I couldn’t sleep, and I’d thrown off all the covers.”
He walked in.
“I thought it was my imagination. But he crawled in with me. I could feel the heat pouring off of him. And his skin. I could feel that. He wasn’t wearing anything.”
Please don’t tell me this.
“For a second, he just hugged me, kind of. Pulled me real close. Then he lifted my nightgown. It was such a shock. I didn’t want my sister to hear.”
“I’m so sorry.” She didn’t scream, I thought.
“He made fun of my lisp in high school.”
“Who, Lucinda?” But now I had a pretty good idea.
“Wilkie. My brother-in-law. Stupid name, isn’t it?”
My head began to pound.
“He never said a single word. He made a baby inside me without a word. It couldn’t have been more than three minutes. It wasn’t rough at all. Then he kissed me on my cheek and left.”
It wasn’t rough at all.
“I’m scared that Caroline will tell,” she said. “My husband has a very bad temper.”
I found my voice. “He raped you, Lucinda.”
“Oh, no,” she said. For the first time her words were clear, like she’d drunk from a cool stream. “I wanted it.”
Buck up, Emily.
Take a shower.
These women are crazy, but that doesn’t mean you are.
The new person who had taken up residence in my head was calm and insistent and bugging the hell out of me. I pushed her away and twisted the cranky knob in the bathtub to the right until the water shooting from the showerhead was almost too hot to stand. I stepped into it.
Maybe Lucinda wasn’t raped, but you were.
I dug my nails into my scalp painfully while I washed my hair. Why was everybody in this godforsaken town reminding me of what I should have been able to let go of years ago? My past and present were like two silvery necklaces in a drawer whose chains were now inexplicably, impossibly knotted together.
I wondered whether Lucinda would keep her baby. Why I always assumed that people with a handicap of some kind were somehow more pure. About the hundreds of moments between Lucinda and Wilkie that led to that night, about whether she’d been lying in that guest bed for years, waiting for him to show up. About the sometimes shaky line between rape and seduction that no one ever wants to talk about. About whether a psychiatrist would say Lucinda could even understand what rape was.
And Caroline. It was like a gong resonating. Caroline had gathered up the most confused, spiteful, vulnerable, damaged human beings she could find for her little club. To fix them? Or prey on them? Had Caroline really known about Lucinda’s baby? Or did she just sling her random arrows, knowing she needed only one dead-on hit to wield power over every person in the room? Had Caroline stirred the cauldron in this town to the boiling point and been forced to run because of it? Had she already secretly put that monstrosity of a house on the market? I should tell Mike to check.
Ten minutes later, hair dripping, mind still whirring, I dug through various unpacked boxes in the bedroom. I reluctantly tugged an olive-green maternity shirt over my head that reminded me of a miniature Lands’ End tent. Just as quickly, I ripped it off. The clock said that I had three minutes before Mike’s security goons arrived. I wrestled deeper into the box for my favorite sweatshirt, one of Mike’s, big and cozy enough to take care of the low-60s nip that some bow-tied TV weatherman said was “an unexpected cold front down from the Yankees.”