And so I nodded to her as I passed, saw her eyes dart away, then stepped out into the rain.
FOURTEEN
I WALKED OUT into the rain, moving resolutely toward my waiting car. I didn’t glance back toward Rebecca’s cottage to see if she lingered by the door or watched me leave from behind the short white curtains of her tiny living room.
I could feel an immense emptiness within me, a sense of having been filled for a time, then gutted absolutely. As I drove down the curving road which led from Rebecca’s cottage, I felt that some part of me had been blasted away by the same fire that had taken my mother, my brother, and my sister to their isolated graves.
It was still raining heavily when I pulled onto the main road, the leaden drops coming toward me like a hail of silver bullets, splattering onto the hood and windshield of the car, sending small bursts of water back into the dense, nocturnal air.
For a while, I drove on determinedly, biting down on my aching emptiness, trying to remove all the preceding days from my mind. I wanted to forget that I’d ever met Rebecca Soltero, heard her voice, or entertained a single one of her darkly probing questions. I wanted to forget all that she’d unearthed in me, the hunger and dissatisfaction along with the gnawing, nearly frenzied, urge to burst out of the life my own choices had created, as if in one, explosive act I could erase and then reconstitute an existence which, without explosion, offered no way out.
The lights of Old Salsbury glimmered hazily through the weaving veils of rain. I swept through its slick, deserted streets, past shop windows crowded with blank-faced mannequins and on toward its prim outer wall of white Colonial houses. I felt my head drift backward almost groggily, my mind reeling drunkenly in a fog of pain. I had never known so deep an anguish, or experienced so complete a sense of irredeemable collapse.
The house was dark when I pulled into the driveway. For a time I didn’t go in, but remained in the car, instead, poised motionlessly behind the wheel, staring hollow-eyed at the black, unblinking windows. For a moment I closed my eyes, as if in an effort to make it all disappear, the whole intransigent structure of my life. When I opened them again, I realized that they were moist, glistening, that I had, against the force of my will, begun to cry.
I waited for a long time after that, waited to regain a stony composure. Then I got out of the car and walked toward the short flight of cement steps that led to the side entrance of the house. I could feel the rain slapping ruthlessly against me, but I walked slowly anyway, so that by the time I entered the house, my hair hung in a wet tangle over my forehead.
Down the corridor I could see a light burning softly, and for an instant, I thought that Marie must still be working in her office. Then I realized that the light was coming from farther down the hallway, from my office, rather than Marie’s.
She was sitting very erectly in the black leather chair behind my desk, the surreal outlines of my mythical dream house spread out before her. When she spoke to me, only her mouth seemed to move; the rest of her body, her arms, her hair, the clean, classically drawn lines of her face, everything else appeared to hold itself firmly within a marble stillness.
“Where have you been, Steve?” she asked.
“At the office, you know that.”
She shook her head firmly. “You weren’t at the office.”
“What are you talking about, Marie?”
She looked at me as if this last, despicable lie was hardly worthy of attention. “I went to the office,” she said.
I started to speak, but found that I had no words. I felt my lips part, but no sound came. I knew that I was helpless, literally naked, before her. She was armored in the truth, and I was a worm wriggling beneath its dark, approaching shadow.
“Peter fell out by the pool,” she said. “He hit his head.”
“Is he all right?” I asked quickly.
“He’s fine,” Marie answered stiffly. “That’s not the point now.”
I knew what the point was. I could sense it hurling toward me like the head of a spear.
“I had to take him to the hospital,” Marie went on. “The doctor wanted him to stay there a little while, and I thought you’d want to come and be with him.”
“Well, of course I’d want to …”
She lifted her hand to stop me. “I drove to the office to get you, Steve, but you weren’t there. No one was there except the night watchman. He told me that no one had been in the office all night.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Not Wally or any of those other men you said were going to meet you there.”
I struggled to save what I could see sinking in the murky gray water, my wife, my son, sinking away from me forever.
“Marie, I was …”
“I know where you were,” Marie said coolly, though without to amputate the diseased and frightful limb.
“You were with her,” she said, lifting a small square of white paper toward me.
From my place in the doorway, I could see the large block letters Peter had printed so neatly across the page: REBECCA .
I shook my head. “Marie, it’s different, it’s …”
She rose gracefully, like an ancient woman warrior, beleaguered, betrayed, her forces wounded all around, but still in full command. “I guess I always expected that you’d have some little fling somewhere along the way,” she said, then added, “most men do.”
“Marie, I …”
Again her hand rose, palm out, silencing me.
“But I never expected you to forget us, Steve,” she said, “I never expected you to forget Peter and me.”
I said nothing.
“And you did that,” Marie said. “You forgot us. Maybe only for a little while, but an hour would have been enough.”
She stepped out from behind the desk and headed for the door. The force of her character pressed me out into the corridor as she swept by me, marched down the hallway, then ascended the stairs. As she disappeared up them, I would have died to hold her, died to kiss her, died to have been the man she had always expected me to be.
I was still standing, stunned and speechless, when she came down the stairs again, this time with Peter sleeping in her arms. I could see the white bandage with its single spot of blood wrapped around his delicate blond head. I knew that she was going to her parents’ home in the mountains. She would stay with them awhile, but only long enough to get her bearings. Then she would make her life over again, in some other place, perhaps even with some other man. Certainly, she would never come back to Old Salsbury or to me.
“Marie,” I said softly, calling to her.
She turned as she reached the door, glancing back toward me, her face framed by the dark window, the space between us completely silent except for the hollow patter of the rain.
“Marie,” I said again.
She looked at me almost mercifully, no longer as a husband, but only as another man who had lost his way. “Things weren’t perfect,” she said. “They never are.” She watched me for a moment longer, as if in grave regret that what had been so obvious to her could have been so lost to me. “Things were missing, I know that,” she added. “Things always are.” She paused, her two dark eyes upon me like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “But it was never love, Steve,” she said in her final words to me, “it was never love that was missing.”
She turned then, and headed out into the rain. I walked down the corridor, parted the curtains, and watched as she laid Peter down in the back seat, then drew herself in behind the wheel. As she let the car drift down the driveway, I saw her eyes lift toward our bedroom window, close slowly as the car continued backward, then open again as it swung to the left and out into the slick, rainswept street.