Louis could hear Frances in the kitchen. He had to go in there. He just hoped she wouldn’t ask something he couldn’t answer.
The kitchen was bright after the gloom of the dining room. He went to the sink, poured out the bourbon, and rinsed the glass. He could feel Frances’s eyes on him as he went to the refrigerator and got a Heineken.
“Do you have plans for tomorrow?” Frances asked.
Louis heard the slight edge in her voice. Suddenly he was getting tired of playing word games that skipped along the edges of the truth.
“Not really,” he said, leaning against the counter.
Frances opened the oven and pulled out a pie. The kitchen was filled with the smell of pumpkin. “Will you be here for dinner?” she asked, without looking up.
Louis hesitated. He and Phillip had barely talked on the ride back from the Irish Hills. Phillip had pulled inward and had just sat there, head back, eyes closed. Louis had wanted to ask him questions, questions he needed answers to if he was going to figure out where to go next. But Phillip had deflected all his attempts to talk.
Frances set the pie down on the counter and turned toward Louis, clasping her arms across her chest, holding herself like she was cold.
“Louis, what’s going on?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“With Phillip. What’s wrong?”
Louis struggled to keep his eyes on hers. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Don’t tell me that. Is Phillip sick?”
“What?”
“That’s it, isn’t it? Is it something awful that he can’t tell me? Is that why he asked you to come home?”
Louis almost let out a breath of relief. “No, he’s fine. Please don’t worry about that.”
“Then what is it?”
Louis gave her a shake of his head. “It’s not my place, Frances.”
She turned away, toward the sink, head bowed. Louis heard the sound of running water and when he looked up, Frances was rinsing bowls, her arms pumping. Louis left the kitchen, going out to the den. He paused to switch on a lamp and when he looked up he saw Phillip outside on the back patio.
Louis opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the cold. Phillip was smoking a cigarette, dressed in a clean shirt and an old sweater, his hair wet from his shower.
“Frances thinks you’re sick,” Louis said.
“What?”
“She knows something is bothering you and she told me she thinks you are sick and afraid to tell her.”
“Good God,” Phillip said softly.
Louis looked off into the bare trees of the backyard. He let out a long slow breath that spiraled up into the cold air. “Look, Phil, I appreciate what you’re going through here, but please don’t ask me to lie for you.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Phillip said. “I apologize.”
They were quiet. Phillip took a long drag on his cigarette, then bent down to snuff it out in the pail of sand that Frances always had kept on the patio as her one concession to his habit.
Phillip’s eyes went to the sliding glass door. They could just see Frances’s back in the kitchen from where they stood outside. Phillip reached into his pants pocket and pulled out another cigarette, and Louis knew it was just a ploy to buy them more time outside to talk.
“Tell me more about Claudia. How’d you meet her?” Louis asked, thinking that maybe if Phillip started with the good memories, it would be easier.
Phillip’s Zippo gave his face a sharpness as he lit the cigarette. He stuffed the lighter back in his pocket and drew on the cigarette.
“It was the summer of fifty-one, at a beach party, one of those things with a bonfire and kids passing around a bottle,” Phillip said. “I had a job at this country club over in Saugatuck to make enough to go back to Western. I had never seen her around town before that night on the beach. She was just there, sitting by herself, this little thing wrapped up in this big blue sweater. She had blond hair that smelled like lilacs. She was seventeen. Maybe that should have scared me off, but it didn’t.”
He paused to pick a bit of tobacco off his lip. “When she had to leave that night, I walked her home. Her family had one of those big stone fortress houses on Lake Michigan. We only had a week together. I went back to Western and she went home.”
“That’s the last time you saw her?” Louis asked.
“Oh no, no.” Phillip let out a low, sad laugh. “Turned out we were neighbors of sorts. The DeFoes lived in Grosse Pointe Farms. My folks lived in the less desirable part of the Pointes, a place everybody called the Cabbage Patch. We grew up less than ten miles from each other and a galaxy apart.”
Phillip had gone quiet again. Louis could see the glowing tip of his cigarette as he took another drag. It was a moment before Phillip spoke again.
“We saw each other on weekends,” he said. “She’d sneak out and her brother Rodney would drive her to the park by the lake and I’d pick her up on my motorcycle.”
“What happened?” Louis asked.
Phillip let out a long breath. “Her mother found out and threatened to send Claudia away to school.” He paused. “We decided to elope. It was nuts, crazy. . she was so young. But I didn’t care. I wanted her.”
Louis was surprised, but he remained quiet.
“We made plans to leave late at night, after her mother was asleep. Rodney was going to bring her.” Phillip took a hard breath. “I waited at the park, but she never showed up.”
Louis waited, shivering in the cold. Phillip didn’t seem to notice.
“The next day I went to her house,” Phillip went on.
“I stood out there, banging on that door, and finally this maid lets me in and tells me to wait.” He paused. “I’ll never forget standing in that goddamn library thinking Claudia was in that house somewhere that very minute and I couldn’t get to her. So I starting yelling out her name. I was standing in that big foyer at the bottom of that staircase yelling her name and hearing it come back to me in that big empty house.” He took a breath. “The butler or whatever the hell he was came back, then some security guy showed up and threw me out. He followed me down the road until I was past the guardhouse.”
Phillip paused. Louis waited. The words were coming, but like slivers of glass painfully pulled through the prism of Phillip’s memories.
“I kept calling,” Phillip said. “But no one would talk to me. Then, a few months later, Rodney showed up at my door. He told me he was there for my own good, to help me get over her.”
Another pause. It went on so long Louis feared Phillip had shut down. The ash from his cigarette fell to the patio.
“Then Rodney told me Claudia tried to kill herself,” Phillip said. “That’s why I couldn’t see her. She had slit her wrists.”
Phillip looked down at the cigarette butt in his fingers as if suddenly aware of it. He reached down and put it in the sand pail. When he straightened, he went on, his voice steady.
“He said Claudia was sick, that she had always been mentally fragile. He told me-he begged me-to just let her go.”
A light went on inside the house. From the corner of his eye, Louis could see Frances in the dining room, setting the table for dinner.
“What did you do?” Louis asked.
Phillip was silent.
“Phillip? What did you do?”
“I tried to forget her. And I did. I met Frances. And for a long time, I didn’t think about Claudia. Then, a week before Frances and I were going to be married, I drove to Hidden Lake. I wasn’t even sure she was still there. But she was. A nurse took pity on me and let me in to see her.”
Louis glanced toward the dining room. Frances had disappeared. He hoped she wouldn’t come out before Phillip finished.
“It was cold but sunny,” Phillip said. “She was sitting on a sunporch. She was just sitting there, holding this blanket around herself, and she looked up at me. She looked up at me and she didn’t see me.”