Then it was just the two of them and Louisa turned to William, gave him the full of her eyes. “The phone battery should have lasted longer than it did. I was sitting in one of the chairs where I would have sat at the party. You think you’re building toward something, but it’s just an illusion. You put things on top of other things, but then everything can come apart just like that. Poor Blondie.” She had the rhythm of a ranter but everything she said was thuddingly lucid.
“Wallace says we’re covered,” William said. At this, finally, Louisa began to weep. “We can start over. It’ll be okay.”
“I’m sure it won’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be the villain but I don’t see any other way to tell this story.” She closed her eyes again and would not open them. By degrees, sleep drew a curtain of relief across her face.
William backed out quickly, careful not to hit Stevie and Emma’s car, and hurried home. Louisa had said the fire was an accident, and it had to be. She had been smoking a cigarette, which had fallen. A cigarette was more earth than fire. It had dropped into the space below the deck, where chemicals were stored. Chemicals became fire if only given the opportunity. But then the black butterfly passed close enough to him that he could feel the beat of its wings on his face. Maybe Louisa knew about Emma. Maybe she had found the letter. Maybe she hadn’t been out there thinking of Jim but rather cursing William. Business, even immoral business, was distinguished from casual deception by the presence of records. His legs were matchsticks that could hardly hold his weight.
He went into the house, into the bedroom. He was moving slower than he had at the lot, but his mind was moving faster. He sat on his side of the too-high bed and opened the drawer of the bedside table. The picture of him and Christopher at Lareaux’s arraignment was flat on top where he’d left it, and he drilled down into the drawer, down through the old postcards, through the dirty magazines. But the letter was still there, just as he had left it, untouched and undetected. The fire was an accident. His wife had been in an accident. He put the letter back in the bottom of the drawer, closed up the table, and went to the deck. The tubs were in the yard. The lanterns were on the rails. He thought he heard the boy in the adjoining yard admonishing his parents, proving their unfitness by exhaustion. He took a seat in one of the large wooden chairs, lit one of the lanterns, the cactus, and everything that had been waiting for him, like a policeman around the corner, now appeared to make its arrest, and he touched his elbows to his knees, and he did not dare to breathe.
When the phone rang, it was Tom, returning a call William didn’t remember making. “How could something like this have happened?” he said. “Where are you?” His voice was sharp with worry.
“I’m home,” William said. “Getting her some clothes.”
“Where is she? I tried to call but it went straight through to voice mail.”
“She’s in the hospital. For observation, mostly. She seems to be okay. Are you going to visit her?”
“First thing in the morning,” Tom said. “I’m upstate. I’ve been here all week. This is crazy, though. I can’t imagine how she must feel.”
“She feels terrible,” William said. “She’s been pretty clear about that.”
“It’s a shock,” Tom said. “It’s nothing anyone would have thought. What a terrible accident. We’re thinking of you.” William heard a woman’s voice in the background, Jesse’s voice, and he understood that the clarity in Tom’s voice was not from worry alone. It was from happiness. “And tell her I’ll see her soon.” Tom left the line open long enough for William to hear him tell Jesse they’d have to leave at dawn.
At the hospital, Louisa’s clothes balled up in his backpack, he took the elevator up to six, where he squared up in front of the water fountain and pressed the button. He stayed with his head down and let the water run over his lips and chin for a long time. He traversed the hall, glancing left and right, until he found Emma’s room, which was the first beyond a second elevator bank. He heard Stevie asking how far apart they were. “My legs or the contractions?” Emma said. “Tilt the TV so I can see it better.” William took a brochure about vaccination from the wall rack and tried to look busy. “Sir?” a nurse said with polite hostility. “You can’t be in the hall here, sir.” He let her see him press the elevator button, but when she was gone he slipped into a side room, bought a soda he didn’t want from the vending machine, and clasped it between his hands until his palms were cold from the metal. He found a niche near the elevator area where no one could see him and pretended to talk on the phone. He heard Stevie’s voice again, this time saying something he couldn’t make out, and then a doctor came up the hall, striding purposefully, and went into the room. Sometime before three, a baby was born, not his, never his, a capital expenditure, someone else’s miracle.
Part VII. THE LAUNCH PARTY
Six months later, a lifetime, William’s car was in the shop, and he was driving Louisa’s car home from Tom’s book party, and Louisa was saying how surprised she was that Tom had gotten back together with Annika, and wasn’t it strange that he didn’t look happier, and William was murmuring vaguely, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, careful not to reveal what he knew about the situation, which was that Tom and Jesse had quickly settled on a wedding date, and just as quickly fallen to fighting, and that a bitter month had ended with her decision to leave him for good, and that she was now pregnant by another man upstate. Instead, William said that Annika looked as though she had aged five years in the year since she and Tom had last been together, and that was when Louisa put both her hands on the dashboard in front of her in a gesture of conspicuous steadying and told William that, during a particularly bad stretch in the spring and summer, she had been sleeping with a man who worked at her office.
They were on Loomis Street, near Harrow, only blocks from the empty lot where their new house would have been. There was a pond to their left and a small park to their right. The windows were down because the temperature was mild, and crickets called out through the perfect night.
William turned into the park’s paved lot. There was one other car there, an old VW Beetle with two teenage girls in it, smoking. A third girl was in the back seat; William glimpsed a strip of bare shoulder. He pulled past the Bug and into an empty space at the far end of the lot.
“So,” he said. The word was like a hole in the air.
Things had been going well since the house burned down, more smoothly than William had any reason to expect. He had celebrated a birthday, and then Louisa had, and in both cases they had taken quiet dinners at new restaurants downtown and talked frankly about how, despite all that had happened, they were lucky. William had found work at a large bank, a job that was a natural continuation of what he had done at Hollister. He described investment opportunities and nudged customers toward those that seemed to best suit their needs. His new boss saw him as a quick study, was always saying so, had already moved William into a bigger office and after only six months had already given him a substantial bonus. Louisa’s boss, the museum’s top administrator, had retired for health reasons, and the board had asked Louisa if she would consider taking the position on an acting basis, and she had, and though they were still negotiating whether they could come to permanent terms, Louisa felt that even if it all fell apart she’d be assured of a position at least that good at another museum. They had buried the dog in their yard, in the corner near the little girls who liked to sing, and they had stood on the deck afterward, afraid to sit for fear that might make it seem more real, and he had folded her against his chest.