The Guilty One (20 page)

But Maris wouldn't have recognized her. Shame wilted her pleasant buzz as she remembered: that she couldn't tell the kids apart most of the time, with their braids and missing teeth and hand-me-downs; that she'd never gone back to explain to Lita why she couldn't tutor anymore.

And then she realized something else. The girl had called her by her name.

Pet was pocketing her change and looking from the girl to Maris in confusion.

“I—I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean,” Maris said.

“Miz Va
can
ti,” the girl insisted, poking out one skinny hip and shifting the big bottle of soda in her arms. “From
school
, from last year. It's
me
, Dakota. Where you been at, anyway?”

“I'm sorry, sweetie, I think you have the wrong person,” Maris said faintly, backing toward the exit. The clerk was staring at her too. “Thank you,” she said to him, feeling ridiculous. Then she made her escape.

“That was strange,” she said, not looking at Pet.

“She thought she knew you.” Pet unlocked the car and Maris got in gratefully. Away, they needed to get away. Maris wasn't ready for her fragile cover to be broken.

In the car, as she turned the key in the ignition, Pet watched her.

“I don't know, middle-aged white women probably all look alike to her,” Maris said. A terrible thing to say.

Pet didn't respond. She drove home fast, catching the lights.

“So let me buy you lunch tomorrow,” Maris said when they pulled up in front of the house, but the momentum had drained from the evening. Already she was sobering up, the lovely lush feeling curling at the edges. A faint headache was beginning behind her eyes.

“Maybe. I need to get to the gym. I haven't been for a few days.” Pet paused next to the steps leading to her door.

“Well, okay. Whenever you're free, though. You've done so much for me. And you can see the place.”

“That really was weird. She totally seemed to know you, Mary.”

It wasn't suspicion, exactly, in her voice, but it was more than an invitation to talk. Maris wasn't accustomed to people being so direct. It didn't give you a lot of time to dodge, to finesse your answers.

“She's a kid.” She shrugged. “What she was doing out this late—I mean, it's a shame. Okay. Well. Good night, Pet.”

She stood for a moment, awkwardly. The closeness, the good light feeling, was gone. She wasn't the hugger some of her friends were—Adrian hugged her babysitter, the gardener—but still, she'd been feeling so
fond
, that was the word. Fond of Pet. But Pet saw through her. Pet saw that she had lied. And to a child too—Dakota had enough to deal with without another adult showing that she couldn't be trusted. Although Maris wasn't anyone to Dakota, just another volunteer at the school where 90 percent of the volunteers were white and only 10 percent of the kids were. If Maris had betrayed anyone, it was Lita, but she couldn't do anything about that right now, either.

Pet turned and went into her house and a light came on, glowing behind the bright-colored drapes. Maris walked around the back of the house. A cat streaked across the graveled drive, under the fence, and disappeared. The motion-sensor light bathed the back porch in sickly yellow light.

Inside, she wished she had an option between the bright light of the kitchen and darkness. She would buy a lamp. A cheap one. Even if she was only here for two weeks, a small lamp that she could take from the sofa to the bedroom, for reading, that would be worth it. Maybe she'd go to Ikea. Or back to Target.

She took off the makeup she'd applied earlier, got into her new nightgown. It smelled like the store; the fabric was crisp. What now? The remnants of the alcohol had left her fuzzy and disoriented. She should sleep, but suddenly she didn't feel like it.

On the bed, she sat with her back against the headboard, her knees pulled to her chest. Through the top of the window, she stared into her neighbor's house. The light was on again. A shadow passed through the room. Man? Woman? Maybe a couple lived there. The man asleep, tired from work; the woman tired too, but folding the laundry, tidying up from dinner. In two weeks, she might never see these people come and go. They probably weren't interested in her, were too busy with their own lives to care who had moved into the house whose back windows faced theirs.

Maris remembered that she should charge her phone, and padded into the kitchen to get it from her purse. There was a text from Alana:

Just thinking about you. Call if you want to talk.

She took the phone back to bed. Sure, she could call Alana. And tell her what? That she'd gone to a bar, flirted with a man, been recognized in a bodega, lied to a child? That she was a Judas, denying the innocent to protect herself?

Loathing crept through the buzz. Funny how that worked—a few drinks made you feel confident on the way up, but on the way down, in the aftermath, they left you pummeled and acutely aware of your every shortcoming, everything you'd done wrong. That alone should be enough to make people keep those next-day promises they always made—I'll stick to wine, I'll quit drinking during the week, I'll never drink around my family—but the lure of the numb was always too great.

Maris's mood was sinking fast. Funny how Alana—never the most self-aware, never that solicitous, even in the terrible days following Calla's death—had made the time to check on her, and Maris kept putting her off. Then there was Jeff, the guilty party, the betrayer; he'd called and called, and when she finally spoke to him it was just to tell her she was on her own, cut loose, broke. He didn't care about her, and hadn't for a lot longer than she'd ever suspected. And look at her—what a joke, she still cared. He still had the power to hurt her.

Why was that? Why couldn't she shake him free, turn her anger into indifference? She clicked through her messages, read through the last dozen from him, going back over a month.

Call if you get a sec

OK if I stop by—how is 10 Sat
(that was the time he came for his contact lens prescription, which she had filed under
V
for vision but he swore he couldn't find, showing up with his hair wet and his jeans pressed, so she knew he'd taken them to the cleaners; he couldn't even manage laundry on his own).

Can u send Dr. Michelson's contact info
(the dermatologist, which meant he needed a refill on the Azelex, which meant he was thinking about how he looked, which, you would think maybe he would be courteous enough to shield her from? But no, and he couldn't even bother to Google the doctor, probably couldn't remember where his office was, since Maris was the one who always picked up his prescriptions).

How are you doing?

That one—a week after he moved out. That one infuriated her.

Jeff didn't get to act solicitous. He didn't get to pretend to be generous or caring. Anger welled inside Maris all over again. How could he?

Her thumb brushed against the phone, scrolling back through the messages. Back, and back. Through June, May. The end of April. He'd still been in the house then. Pretending.

Now, of course, she knew that he had been lying all along. And she had fallen for it, over and over. Not because she was stupid. But because she chose ignorance.

April 18, two days before her birthday:

Are you up for Bay Leaf?

As if! As if she could ever go back there again, with its solicitous staff, old school. Linen towels over the arm of the sommelier, an attendant in the bathroom, they used to joke that it was the only place on the West Coast that knew how to make a dinner roll. Every year on her birthday, Jeff would help her into her chair, would order for her. Most years there was a small beribboned box: sapphire studs, a silver bracelet, nothing too grand. They weren't ostentatious; they were proud of that. In the early years, they had a sitter for Calla, Maris came home a little drunk on champagne and kissed her forehead while Jeff took the sitter home.

And he had honestly thought she could go back there again.

The rage multiplied, thick like fog rolling over the bay.

Now he'd not only shown his true colors, the snarling lips pulled over his teeth underneath the smile he showed the rest of the world, but he'd managed to bankrupt them. It wasn't enough that he'd lost job after job (okay, that wasn't entirely fair; the economy had taken plenty of husbands down, but in Jeff's case it was multiple times, which seemed just . . . careless), but he'd been dipping into their money, their safety nest egg, without telling her. Stealing, really, from their shared security.

She should get a lawyer. A divorce lawyer, a good one—a
great
one. Line up an offense, build a case so strong he'd never fight his way out of it, make him pay and pay and pay. She knew women who'd done it, been awed by the power of their revenge.

Only, he'd said there wasn't even enough for the mortgage. She might once have doubted him, but not now. He'd been stripped of his defenses too. He'd lost the ability to lie, after his biggest lies had been laid bare. Or maybe he'd just given up, decided it wasn't worth it anymore.

She thought about calling him. Telling him what she thought of him, the words she'd been too circumspect, too proud, to say. Even Alana didn't know everything, not the whole truth. Wasn't this what late nights were for? Late nights and drinking, the genesis of desperate pleas and accusations.

But Maris refused to be
that
cliché.

She thought about flinging the phone across the room. Making it shatter into a thousand little tiny electronic parts. But even that was too good for him.

She plugged the phone into the charger and laid it carefully on the floor along the wall, where she wouldn't step on it if she had to get out of bed in the middle of the night. She lay down and adjusted the pillow, pulled the covers up. Looked up at the window. The little piece of glass on the windowsill sparkled in the light shining down from her neighbor's house.

Maris mentally wished her fellow sleepless night warrior a peaceful vigil.

THE DAY BEFORE
she'd driven to CVS and bought a spiral notebook, two pens, narrow Post-it note strips, zippered plastic bags, packing tape, and Scotch tape, feeling surprisingly giddy with anticipation as she filled her basket.

The key Norris had given her was attached to a yellow measuring tape, a miniature version of the kind carpenters carry. He'd left her a note next to a mug from the Café du Monde: “Mary, please help yourself.” The mug was printed with a not-very-good line drawing of the café, which Maris had visited twice: once with her mother and sister after her freshman year of college, and once when Calla was still a toddler. She remembered that Calla had slept, sweaty and pouting, in her stroller while Maris sipped the bitter chicory and Jeff repeated for the second time that he couldn't imagine why people drank coffee at all in New Orleans's climate.

Maris poured a cup and checked the refrigerator for milk. Inside were neatly labeled Tupperware containers in addition to orange juice and eggs and the usual staples: Tomato Sauce, Chicken Parmesan. The handwriting was feminine and looping and Maris thought of Duchess, her long nails, her lip liner slightly darker than her lipstick, the way she'd laughed along with Bria like they shared a private joke.

So she had already assembled a number of clues before she even began to work. She approached the spare bedroom with her coffee cup in hand.

The room was as it had been when she first saw it, other than the missing box spring and mattress. The walls were painted a creamy yellow; new miniblinds were installed in the window. But now that she was looking at it in the daylight, Maris saw that the windowsills and the plastic covering the remaining mattress were dusty; there were dust bunnies skittering along the floor. The rest of the apartment was spotless, so Maris concluded that Norris did not come into this room often.

She pushed the two beds against the wall to give herself more room to work, and then opened her notebook and wrote her first note:
bathroom rug
. She was going to need something to sit on while she sorted, and the rug she'd bought at Target would do the trick.

She lifted the top box from the stack that overflowed the closet and lined the edge of the room: Mom Kitchen. After resorting to peeling the tape with a fingernail, she wrote her second note:
sharp knife
. Then she decided Norris wouldn't mind if she borrowed one, and went through his kitchen drawers until she found a cheap-looking serrated-edge knife that she didn't think he'd miss.

By now it was already nine thirty, and the day was growing hotter. Fan—she'd need to bring up the fan, but she didn't need to write that down because odds were that she'd be desperate enough before long to halt work and go retrieve it.

So far, she was buoyed by the unaccustomed excitement of having a job to do. It had been so long, and the sense of purpose to which she had woken had yet to flag. The items in the first box were wrapped in paper towels, and she took them out carefully and laid them, one by one, in a line on the floor.

Two mismatched porcelain teacups painted with roses, one chipped, one pristine. A metal box containing dozens of handwritten recipes on index cards, some so worn that the pencil was faded nearly completely. A small notebook covered in fake leather, embossed in gold with the words Address Book, and entries made over the course of time, in many colors of pen, some with addresses carefully marked through, new ones written in cramped letters underneath. Half a dozen stainless-steel dessert forks bound with a brittle rubber band that snapped in her hands. A metal trivet shaped like praying hands. Three tea towels, stained and much washed, embroidered in faded thread with daisies. A small wooden rack with grooves to hold souvenir spoons, of which she found three in the bottom of the box: Hawaii, with a little hula dancer; Reno, with a tarnished nugget of “gold”; and Maine, with a lobster. Also a fluted pastry wheel, a plate with a child's handprint, and a cloudy plastic bag containing a hodgepodge of refrigerator magnets.