While I Was Gone (39 page)

For forcing, I supposed. Or perhaps she was just pruning. In any case, thought of it as such an enviable occupation, and she was so absorbed in it, so engaged, that I felt a rush of odd elation. It seemed to me possible that I could peacefully come to be that old, that I would have my everyday chores to do, that I might do them in the pale sunlight of early spring. I was released to this, I thought. I was back in ordinary time.

What did it matter what Eli had accused me of? The people who believed it—Detective Lewis, Detective Ryan, even Jean—were people I didn’t care about. Of course, I cared about Sadie. But Sadie hadn’t heard every ugly twist, she hadn’t heard the worst of it.

And she and I had time, all the time in the world, I thought. I started the car, I drove on again.

stopped in the big supermarket on the highway between Adams Mills and Shirley, and did a thorough shopping for what seemed like the first time in months. In every wide aisle there was something could use, and it was with a sense of nearly physical pleasure that pushed my cart up and down the sections and slowly filled it. The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it.

At home, I went in and out many times, hauling all the bags. The dogs were happy to follow me, each trip an adventure, the more the better. They nosed at the bags, they chased each other off, barking wildly in pleasure—their life returning to them too. They continued to argue and chase each other around the kitchen as I put things away, as if they could sense the change in the air, the change in me.

I’d bought ingredients for ri sotto for dinner, and when I was through putting the food away, I chopped the shallots and mushrooms, I set the broth out in a pan, measured the rice, poured olive oil into the heavy enamel skillet. I set the table. I washed lettuce and made a dressing for salad. I imagined us sitting at the table, talking.

But if things were still stiff with Daniel, if he didn’t want to talk, that was all right too. I had time there also. Time and Daniel’s nature, which was forgiving, which was generous. I remembered that when I’d been so overwhelmed by my feelings for Eric, our clinic assistant, Daniel had wept with me and held me, as though my being tempted were a thing, an event, that had happened to us both, was causing us both pain.

Which we would suffer through together.

There was still a faint light hovering in the yard when he drove in, though I’d turned the lights on inside a while earlier. The dogs whined and ran to the back hall to wait for him. I could hear his voice as he spoke to them in greeting—light, loving. I felt the cold air drifting in.

And then he stood in the doorway and nodded, a half smile, polite and obligatory, on his face.

“Hi,” I said. I’d tossed the shallots into the olive oil when I saw him pull in, and now I was stirring them. They hissed.

“Hi,” he answered. He stepped toward me and stopped partway across the room. I had turned sideways to greet him as I worked, and now he noticed what I was doing.

“Hey, what’s for dinner?” he asked, and he was unable to keep the lift from his voice.

“Risotto.”

“Risotto! ” And it was only then that I remembered the first time I’d made ri sotto for him—just after news of its culinary chic had reached our corner of the universe. It was a weekend night, and Sadie was out, or I never would have tried it. Daniel was dubious.

“You can call it ri sotto but it sure looks like rice to me,” he said, putting on a tough guy voice.

“Ahh,” he had said with the first bite.

“Very soothing.”

And with the second, “Wonderful. Like baby food for adults. Thank you for making it.” He’d been in and out of the kitchen as I cooked, he’d seen how long it took. Now he leaned over the table and kissed me, a kiss that expanded slightly and startled us both. We sat back, and he looked at me with the slightly stupid gaze of someone in the throes of a sexual impulse.

“In fact,” he had said, “I think what I would like here is for you to feed me.” I laughed, but then I picked up his spoon and lifted it to his opening mouth.

Surely I must have been thinking of that when I bought the rice, must have been recollecting some part of it, the half-eaten dinner, the eager stumbling across the living room, the dogs whining outside the bedroom door at the noises we made, at this inexplicable interruption in the meal, their favorite human activity of the day.

Now he started toward the living room.

“Well, let me freshen up, as they say.” He went out the door. And then reappeared. He’d remembered.

“Hey. What happened with the police?”

“Well, there’s some good news and some bad news,” I said, stirring the pan.

“I’ll tell you when you come back.”

He’d pulled on a sweater when he returned. He asked if I wanted some wine, and I said yes. He opened a bottle and poured us each a glass. As he held mine out to me, our eyes met, and there seemed to me for the first time in weeks to be an openness in his gaze, a willingness to see me, to see who I was.

“Well,” he said, “here’s to the good news, whatever it may be. We need it.”

“Indeed,” I said, and lifted my glass to him, too, before I drank. I set it down. I added more broth to the ri sotto Daniel went to the table, pulled a chair out, and sat down. Allie came and sat between his opened legs, resting her muzzle on his thigh. He stroked her head.

He looked up at me, watching him.

“Tell me,” he said.

Tell me! My heart leapt. It was like being touched. I smiled at him.

“Well, it’s over, ejssentially,” I said.

He looked confused for a few seconds, and then he said, “They’re not going to pursue it?”

I shook my head.

“Nope.”

“But how come?”

” Cause he denied it. I guess I knew he would, especially after Sadie called. But anyway, he did. Never happened.”

“So that’s it.”

I nodded.

“God, that’s a relief.” He drank and set his glass down.

One hand rested gripping the stem, and he twirled it for a moment. He looked at me and frowned.

“Still, I would have thought they’d somehow at least investigate it anyway.”

I shrugged, stirring.

“There wasn’t really anything to investigate.

No new evidence or anything like that. And there’s still stuff that’s not explained by what he told me. I mean, as they pointed out, I didn’t come in there and solve it for them. So.”

“So in effect they said there was nothing they could do.”

“More or less.”

“Well, that surprises me somehow, I guess.”

“Well, it ended up being my word against his, pretty much.”

“So?” He sipped his wine again, and I stopped stirring to sip mine.

“I mean, he’s the one with the reason to lie. Doesn’t that give it a little weight? Your account?”

“One might have thought so. One would have been wrong, I guess.”

“I’m insulted on your behalf, madam.” He was almost smiling. It was like the dawn breaking for me.

I smiled back and curtsied quickly.

“Thank you,” I said.

“But it is the insult that sets us free of it.”

“I suppose. So how did they present it. Just Very sorry, we can’t proceed on this basis’?”

I turned away to add more broth to the ri sotto After a moment, I said, “Well, they weren’t quite that pleasant about it.”

“What do you mean?”

I adjusted the temperature down a bit.

“Jo?” he said.

“Well, Eli had offered them a reason why I might not be truthful.”

“Which was?” There was impatience, the beginning of indignation, in his voice.

,

“Which was…” I looked at him.

“This, by the way, is the bad news, Daniel.” I tried to keep my voice light.

“Which was that I had been angry at him, at Eli, because he disappointed me.” I tried to make the word sound comical. I made a face.

“He disappointed you.”

“Yes.”

He looked quizzically at me, the one sharp frown line between his brows.

“Sexually,” I explained.

“Because he didn’t want an affair and I did.

This is what he told them.”

“So you accuse him of murder? I mean, people get disappointed all the time without that happening.”

“Well, he made me seem very… aggressive, I think.

Maybe he said I’d been in love with him in the past too. I don’t know, I’m sure he elaborated.” I set the spoon down and turned to face him, to tell him everything.

“And they knew that I’d called him, that I’d chosen the Ritz. The point there being that it’s a hotel, not just a bar.

Convenient.

You see.”

“I see.” He looked down at Allie’s head, still resting on his leg. He scratched her ears contemplatively. I went back to work, but I watched him too. He looked up, finally.

“You were the one who called him, then,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you did choose the Ritz.”

“Yes.”

“Because it was a hotel?”

“I think I thought of that, yes.”

“And were you disappointed, then?” His eyes were so dark, suddenly—can the pupil expand in pain? in anger?—that I couldn’t read his face.

“What I was disappointed about, Daniel, was who he turned out to be. What he’d done. That… superseded everything, once he’d told me.”

He looked down again. His hand was motionless on the dog’s head.

Now he removed it. He sat frozen for some long seconds.

“Daniel,” I said. He didn’t look at me. I’d stopped stirring.

“I told you this. I told you all of it, Daniel. We don’t have to do it all again.

This is nothing new.” My voice was pleading.

At last he said, “No.” He sounded as he’d sounded for weeks until tonight—until his ease earlier tonight, exhausted. He seemed smaller, abruptly. Caved in.

“Though I didn’t know,” and I heard him trying for a dry tone, a rueful distance.

“I didn’t quite know—did I?—that you were the aggressor, the arranger. The one who chose the Ritz.”

His voice italicized it.

I thought briefly, rejecting it nearly as fast as the thought came, of defending myself on the tiny bit of territory left to defend, Eli had called first, had asked me out first, had invited and was waiting for my call. Rejecting it because it made no difference, really.

Because it wasn’t an important distinction in the end.

Because I’d seen move across Daniel’s face, when he realized why the police didn’t believe me, the shadow of doubt about it, too, the momentary possibility that he didn’t know me at all. That I was the person they thought I was, the person Eli had said I was—who invented it all, who lashed out, who lied. Who lied because she was disappointed.

And in spite of my horror at seeing it, I felt such hungry, pa the ic gratitude when it passed that there was no struggle, no pride left in me. And so I answered him, finally. I said, “No. No, you didn’t.”

THERE WAS, OF COURSE, THE REST OF LIFE GOING ON AT

the same time—things to do, things to respond to.

Nora won a grant to finish her film, and in celebration, she cut her hair off.

“I can’t imagine it,” I said on the phone.

“What do you look like?”

“Well, here’s the thing.” She gave a snorting laugh, the joke was on her.

“Of course, I look like Cass.”

After a pause, visualizing it—a fuller, rounder Cass—I said, “Well, isn’t that what we all want to look like, a rock-and-roll star?”

Now she laughed fully.

“Yeah, I suppose. Except, get with it, Mother, they don’t call it rock and roll anymore.”

And one day in early March I was putting some things away in the attic, when I found an envelope I’d left there in the fall. I recognized it immediately, it held a copy of a picture Beattie had taken of me at work, a picture of me that was, for a change, very good. I’d had it blown up, planning to give it to Daniel for Christmas.

But I’d forgotten. In my distraction about Eli, I’d forgotten it was here. I sat on a trunk now and opened it. Beattie had spoken to me as I was putting a file away. I’d just lifted my head to her, my hair still falling slightly forward, and I was beginning to laugh at the animal snout she wore on her face—a pig’s—when she snapped me. Looking at it now, at my happy smiling face in another world—the gift I would have given to Daniel—I could have wept.

Spring arrived once, for two days. I left the back door open, and the dogs trailed freely in and out, tracking mud into the kitchen.

I sat in the thin sunlight on the back stoop and watched them, imagining an end to winter, an end to our terrible time.

The next day, of course, there was a freezing rain. I couldn’t unlock my car door and had to call Beattie, whose car spent its nights in garage, to come pick me up.

Sadie wrote us a postcard saying she wouldn’t be home for spring break, that she was going to New York, “to be with my sisters,” as though these were people with no connection to us.

Daniel went away to Philadelphia for four days for church meetings. In his absence I felt such a lifting off of sorrow, of my oppressive sense of guilt, that I began to wonder if perhaps it might not be better for both of us to live without this strain—to separate. To divorce. It made my heart pound unevenly to think of it, but I forced myself to.

For surely he, too, was more himself at work, or out in his study.

Surely he, too, was happier in those moments when he’d forgotten my existence. I imagined a life alone, in some small apartment, I’d leave Daniel the house, of course. I imagined the ease of solitude, of meals eaten standing up or while I lay on a couch, reading. Of not having to notice, always, what I was saying, how he was reacting, what he was saying, how I was reacting.

But then he returned and our life went on. Three days gone. A week. I measured the time in the faint waning of my consciousness of my misery, and wondered if this would one day be enough, simply not to be consciously miserable anymore.

IN EARLY APRIL, ABOUT TEN DAYS AFTER DANIEL CAME BACK,

my mother fell. What she broke was her foot, not the dreaded hip, but she’d be on crutches for at least a month. I took a week off from work to go to Maine and help her.