The Uninnocent (23 page)

Now, she had long since lost touch with many people and so her confessions to them would have to be made in the abstract. This was one of those moments when being religious would be useful. She could pray, as she had tentatively tried in times past, that the Lord pardon her for the whole lot of them, her torts and transgressions, and have done with it. But what redress, what satisfaction was there in whispering to some deity she wasn't convinced sat on high listening, judging, and portioning out forgiveness? What was prayer, as her stepfather stubbornly said so often when she was growing up, if not pitiful murmurings into the unsentimental void? Even if there were a God, it wasn't His place to absolve her any more than it was hers to absolve herself. Still, some dozen names in her ledger fell into this awkward category of the alive but unreachable. If she had a computer—he had usurped their laptop—she might be able to search them out on the Internet. Had she any money, she supposed she could have hired someone to track them down. But she hadn't, especially now that Matthew had abandoned her, leaving little more than a couple of months' rent in their shared account.

The dead presented a similar problem but were, ironically, more immediately accessible. Knowing that she had no conceivable alternative, she did mete out her responsibility with these people, these gone souls, by quietly addressing each one. Verbalized words for virtual ears. She knew she was only talking to herself and that there was no chance they heard her, but any and all catharsis was valuable. Besides, apologizing to ghosts was good practice for what she faced with the living, though she did have to wonder whether this wasn't a form of prayer.

One person in particular occupied her thoughts. Her confession to her birth father was short and simple. She was sorry she never met him. She had always hoped she had nothing to do with his having joined the military when he found out her mother was pregnant, but she knew it was a false hope. She was sorry her mere existence had frightened him away from her mother and from herself before she even took her first breath of air. She also hoped he hadn't put himself in harm's way on purpose when he was killed in a noncombat accident, slipping under the wheels of a cargo truck in Wiesbaden, Germany, only a week before the furlough that would have brought him home to join his wife, who was about to give birth to Ellie. The few photographs of him that her mother possessed showed Pvt. Jimmy Tremblay to be a sum of paradoxes, cocky yet scared, strong yet somehow vague, disciplined but with a chaotic glint in his tardy, honest eyes. She was remorseful she didn't understand him and never would. She hoped he would realize that she never had a choice in the matter. She told him she knew he wasn't listening, or couldn't, and for this, as well, she made her amends for being such a doubter.

Others among the dead also needed addressing, and she spoke to them in turn. Her best childhood friend, Denise Bye, as diabetic and obese as Ellie was bulimic and skinny, whom she tripped on the school playground, causing the girl to come crashing down face-first into macadam that scarred her cheek and broke off her left front tooth. Ellie still despised herself for that. She also hated herself for the time she persuaded classmates to finger-write the unclever quatrain

Mary Purcell

Go to hell!

Why choose her

The lousy loser!

on the dirty windows of the school bus, revenge for her having edged out Ellie for a role in some Thornton Wilder play, never noticing at the time the keen irony in the wording of her insult. Who was the loser then? Not Mary Purcell, nor, for that matter, Jonathan Saunders or Cheryl Lane or Slug Moore or the nice math teacher whose name she could not remember, a short, kind, sweating man who wore a different bow tie every day of the week—all gone to dust now, and while they presumably couldn't hear a word of Ellie's amends, she hoped there was some invisible mechanism in the universe that would convey her contrition to what spirit or soul was left of them.

The lost and the dead. At the end of the day, much the same difference. She knew they were, in essence, a detour, a means to delay, a way away from the more difficult work at hand. “I feel nothing but regret toward all of you,” she said, as the mice scratched away. “I didn't treat you as any respectable person would. When I'm dead, if we're all gathered together like they say in the fairy tales and religious myths, I will tell you each I'm sorry face-to-face if we have faces, heart-to-heart if we have hearts.”

Curious, how the idea of an afterlife left her not hopeful but bereft. She was surprised to find herself sitting at that table, staring at her trembling hands, tears welling not from joy or consternation or even sadness but some vague and growing dread. She wiped her dampened eyes on the sleeve of Matthew's shirt. Press ahead, she advised herself. The idea will protect you from the part of yourself that should always have been restrained from hurting others. The sun was strong through the windows and cast a checkerboard of shadows on the counter, the floor, the table, her hands, the list.

Three years had passed since the wedding—her first, his second—and aside from two frustrating miscarriages and the fact that his job kept him away from home more than either of them liked, Ellie believed their marriage was working. At least working as well as marriage—a touch-and-go institution at best, she had always been told, and now knew firsthand—could be said to work. She'd even made a point of asking him from time to time, We have a good marriage, don't we? You're happy with me, Matthew? I'm a good wife, aren't I?

He always answered her with an encouraging, Sure. Or, What are you talking about, of course we're doing fine. Or, Please don't do this to me, Eleanor.

His farewell note was riddlesome if succinct.
Sorry to do this but my life hurts and I need clear space to sort stuff out. Don't hold it against yourself like I know you will. Need to breathe so please don't follow me and don't worry. I love you
.

To telephone him at work would be to ignore his request. Even so, he was at the top of the column of people she had to contact today. Although he might fairly be categorized as among the lost, she needed to reach Matthew and make every apology necessary to persuade him to come home. After all, her shortcomings surely contributed to his abandoning their house and marriage. If he could just lay out for her how she could do better, she would try harder to live up to his expectations. Maybe she was missing something. Did he know she was willing to get treatment now? Had he figured out why she was, in the way she was, who she was? He did complain sometimes that he hadn't married Stick Woman. And now look. What happened to your tits, he'd asked her a month ago at the Savages' house, but he was pretty inebriated, actually very drunk and abusive like he sometimes got, when he offered that one up. Not that he was wrong. For a few years before the marriage she had been doing better, but not so much for the past couple. She dialed, looking at the serrated edges of her fingernails.

No answer. Maybe he had taken an early lunch, not that he wanted to hear from the likes of her anyway. Matthew had been pretty disgusted by her for months now. Nothing she did was right. When she tried again a quarter hour later, a man picked up the phone. “Who, may I ask, is calling?”

“Ellie, Matthew's wife. And you are?”

“Randall McGibben, Ellie.” Scandal McGibben, Matthew called him for reasons she never quite understood. Matthew's supervisor at the savings and loan. “I'm very sorry about your parents.”

“Thank you. I need to speak with Matthew. When will he be back?”

“Back from what?”

She paused before saying, “Well.”

“You mean he's not with you upstate, something about your folks being in a car wreck, took the week off to help out? Maybe I misunderstood.”

Ellie waited, knowing whatever answer she gave might work against her husband and therefore against the idea. Nothing was more important than the idea. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I, I've made a mistake, really sorry—”

Poor woman must be distraught, he told himself. Maybe one of the parents was worse off than they had thought, or didn't make it. “Not a problem. Look, if he's available, you might let him know—”

“—and also, Mr. McGibben? I have been meaning to apologize to you.”

Boy, did she sound frazzled, he thought, but then the few times he had met her, Christmas parties and a funeral, or a wedding, she had struck him as sweet but quirky, wound a little tight. Pretty, though, with her Annie Hall clothes and ragamuffin gold-blonde hair that looked like it was cut by a blind man who liked the sound of his scissors. All spiky and flying in different directions. Striking pale blue eyes. And thin as dental floss, wouldn't even touch a canapé. He had never been able to figure out whether Mead was the luckiest guy in the world or very much otherwise. She was talking now in a voice that was different, graver, more frayed than he remembered. If voices could look over shoulders.

“Last April, when Matthew had to take off a few days during your regional conference because he was really sick, you remember that?”

“He had laryngitis.”

“I know it created a bit of hardship for you not having him there. Well, that was my fault. It was my thirtieth birthday and I—well, I talked him into taking those days off so we could go to Costa Rica. I'd always wanted to visit there and I guess he didn't have any more vacation time left in your fiscal year?”

He was listening.

“Because of our trip to Oaxaca. Anyway, that was not his fault, it was mine, and I'm very sorry for any inconvenience it may have caused you.”

She thanked him for hearing her out and believed that he seemed to accept her apology, in a reticent sort of way. Before they hung up, he reiterated that he would appreciate hearing from Matthew as soon as he found a free moment, and Ellie agreed, her mood buoyed by this, her first confession and apology to a living, breathing person. Aware it was a facile, even childish thing to do, she drew a line through McGibben's name before making her next call.

Their best friends, Peter and Ava Savage, whom she hadn't heard from since she got back from Ithaca, would probably know where Matthew was. He had most likely spent the last week in their guest bedroom, a room in which Peter the month before, drunk and disoriented, had tried to convince Ellie that sleeping with him would resolve all the tensions between them and smooth the way toward a more complete and whatever-it-was-he-said relationship.

Ava answered with a cascade of outpouring sympathy that caught Ellie by surprise. “How could he leave you like that? I just don't understand. How are you holding up, baby?”

“Ava, have you seen him?”

“Of course, yes, sure. He was here earlier this week and you would have thought he'd killed you, the way he was going on about how guilty he feels.”

“Is he there now? Could I speak to him?”

“Afraid not. When Peter got home, he and Matt had quite an argument, and they both stormed off in different directions. Neither one of them is here at the moment.”

“Argument about what?”

A lull descended, not a long one but rather like a slow blink instead of a normal quick blink, and with all the import such a difference signifies. Ellie heard, as it were, the blink, but decided not to address it, and so—informed by the idea—moved forward, her chest tightening. That Ava knew where he was needed to be set aside.

“Avy, I have something important to tell you and I need for you to listen to me. I woke up this morning with this idea—”

“I hope it's a good idea.”

“—and nothing's more important to me, so I hope you're in a forgiving mood.”

Ellie was always such a naïf, Ava thought. Good intentions, good heart, virtuous as all get-out. But she had grown up in some kind of whacked idealistic family situation that kept her sidelined from reality and left her in a woeful state of utter innocence, an innocence that now and then seemed like stupidity. She never in a hundred lifetimes could have guessed what was really happening around her, poor thing. On the other hand, wasn't she enviable for that? Enviable because she wasn't so much ignorant—if ignorance was bliss, ignorance was not getting the job done when it came to Ellie—as she was one of life's pure and simple perpetual amateurs. Who could say it wasn't admirable, even, her consummate amateurism? The word means you do something only for the love of it. Few, thought Ava, are left with that graceful deficiency by her age.

“And I'm really sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“We never did, you know, anything. I think he's held it against me.”

Ava asked Ellie what she'd just said—had been distracted—and learned that Peter had cornered her when Ava and Matt drove to the store to get another bottle of wine after they ran out during one of their weekly dinner parties.

“But my point here, Avy, is to apologize to you. Because I thought about it, kissing him. I did think about it, and, well, okay, I, we did, a little.”

“Ellie—”

“It should never have happened and I swear it will never happen ever again. Do you think you can see your way to forgiving me?”

“Of course I forgive you, honey. Things happen like that in life.”

“Please have Matthew call me?”

“I'll tell him if I see him.”

This confession was quite a lot harder to make than Ellie would have supposed. The buoyancy she'd felt before was gone. Even as she drew a line through the name Ava Savage, she took pause at the fact that her friend wasn't a little more upset by her admission. The meaning of the blink and of Avy's ready forgiveness could only have a very few explanations. But rather than attending to dawning suspicion, she thought it best to move ahead with the idea. Nothing much to be gained right now by contemplating people's responses. Avy had accepted the apology and that was that.