Chloe and Dale had been married a year at the time, and her skiing ambitions had been thwarted almost a decade earlier. And it wasn’t as if she had blown out a knee or suffered some other catastrophic injury on the eve of achieving greatness. She just hadn’t been good enough, as she had admitted readily. When Dale met her, she was a hostess at a high-end steak house, talking a good game about graduate school and sports medicine but essentially searching for someone who had the means, or the potential means, to bail her out. Dale had been a city planner then, with no intention of ever working for his father, but Chloe had either seen through his own lack of resolve or known she could nag him into doing what she wanted as soon as they had a child. And what she wanted, it turned out, was life in Glendale. To be married, to be a mom.
This was fine with Dale, better than fine. If only Chloe had really channeled her energy into being a wife and a mother. But those things, once achieved, no longer interested her. She dressed Kat nicely enough, chauffeured her to the endless activities, went through the motions of motherhood with nary a complaint. But that was when Dale knew something was wrong, when he found himself thinking that way: Chloe is going through the motions. She moved with a slow, lazy grace and always seemed to need a beat or two to answer the simplest questions, as if she were under a spell, or suffering from some strange kind of stroke. Oh, she loved Kat completely, he never doubted that. She would have laid down her life for Kat without hesitation. It was in the day-to-day, the quotidian tasks of motherhood and parenthood, that Chloe failed to engage. Cooking, for example. She was simply god-awful, producing meals so bland and tasteless that it seemed a little passive-aggressive. A woman had to try to make food as bad as Chloe did. Even the ready-made stuff she picked up at the nicer markets somehow tasted blah by the time she got it home. And the house was never truly neat, much less clean. What did she do all day? Dale felt as if she were daring him to pick a fight with her, but he wouldn’t. Kat did, though, especially after Dale moved out. She zeroed in on the very things that had so annoyed Dale and blamed her mother for the end of the marriage. Then Chloe would cry and say she wanted to be married, it was Dale who had moved out, going off to work one day and then calling from the office, as if Chloe were just another person to be fired by the Hartigan Group and its subsidiaries.
This was an out-and-out lie, but Dale never challenged it, because the truth was even harder to explain to one’s teenage daughter. Chloe had packed his bags and left them on the porch, announcing she was tired of his “mooning.” She told him to get out and call a lawyer. He did the former but not the latter, and it was less than a week before one of the biggest jackals in Maryland ’s domestic-law bar tried to subpoena his credit card bills. It was all a bluff, a test, but how was Dale to know that? He made the mistake of thinking Chloe was serious, that his marriage really was over. Distraught, threatened with the loss of access to his daughter, he had allowed Susannah to comfort him. After that, there was literally no going back. In front of the marriage counselor, caught up in the promised spirit of honesty and openness, he told Chloe everything that had transpired between him and Susannah-and she had told him their marriage was over, that this was the one transgression that could never be forgiven. “But it’s my only transgression,” he protested. “That’s all you get,” Chloe said.
When Dale looked back on the rest of his marriage, all he saw were petty grudges, the things that couples were supposed to work through. He longed, sometimes, for big problems, for the kind of reasons that made the end of a marriage comprehensible and acceptable. He wished that Chloe drank or had affairs. Or that they had become undone by the fertility problems that had plagued them after Kat’s birth. (Kat had come so easily, and then they couldn’t conceive at all. A mystery, especially given the fact that Chloe was not quite thirty when they started trying to make a sibling for Kat, who yearned for a little brother or sister.) He had loved her once, truly, and she had loved him. And then he didn’t. Some-his brother, for example-had suggested that Dale would have been better off to have an affair, get it out of his system, then go home to Chloe and keep his damn mouth shut. As if everything happened in bed. But it wasn’t just about sex. There was also the intense loneliness Dale felt sitting with Chloe, in their rare quiet moments. Outside of Kat he had nothing to say to her, and she had nothing to say to him. Maybe they never had.
When he saw her today, waiting for him at this middle school-he already knew, of course, had barked at the principal to stop her stuttering nonexplanations and just tell him, precisely, what had happened-it occurred to her that they were now two members of a tiny tribe, the only people who could ever understand each other.
But later, under the gentle questioning of the detectives, she had been cruel again, blurting out, “I wanted to send her to private school.”
“Chloe-”
“I wanted to send her to private school, and you insisted on public school, and now she’s dead.”
“I can’t believe you would bust my balls over that now.”
“But it’s true.”
It wasn’t. Chloe had squawked about private school after the marriage broke up, interested in finding another way to spend Dale’s money. But Kat had been the one to end the discussion, saying she didn’t want to be separated from her friends. Friends-that was good. According to preliminary information, the girl who had shot Kat was her oldest and dearest friend, Perri Kahn. Shot Kat, shot Josie Patel, then shot herself.
“Chloe, that’s not fair.”
She narrowed her eyes, ready to fight, as always, then realized there were witnesses. That was when she had taken his hand, pretended such concern for him, but it was too late. He left her to the detectives, finding a tiny crumb of comfort in having them on his side. Surely they understood now why Kat’s parents had divorced, even if Kat never did.
The drive to Charlestowne was usually torturous, a battle through the worst spots on the Beltway, but the trip went swiftly today, and Dale arrived at his father’s apartment a few minutes past three. A well-meaning resident, a woman with hair only a shade lighter than her lilac dress, held the door open for Dale so he didn’t have to be buzzed through the foyer doors. He wanted to chide her-what good was a security system if the residents let anyone in the building?-but it was probably for the best, as his father would demand to know the purpose of Dale’s mission if he called from the lobby, refusing to grant entry until Dale explained why he was here. (“It’s Dale, Dad. I’m in the lobby, Dad.” “Why?” “Because I have something to tell you.” “What?” “I’d rather do it upstairs.” “I don’t want to spend five minutes waiting to find out what you have to say. Just say it and I’ll digest it, and then we’ll talk about it.” “Kat’s dead, Dad!” “What?” “KAT IS DEAD.” And the women wandering through the lobby would murmur to one another, “Poor boy, his cat is dead.”) No, better to avoid the intercom altogether.
To his surprise, his father’s door was ajar, the usually roaring television muted. And next to his father on the old plaid sofa, a relic from the family’s earliest years, was Glen, his eyes red-rimmed. Sad or stoned? Dale wanted to ask his brother.