“You knew that he arranged financial aid for Cheryl, didn’t you?” Janet Lanier said. “All those years we kept in touch, and he was so helpful. So ‘supportive,’ I believe the current term is. He sent me so many letters years ago. Do you know, I began to fantasize we’d get together when he finished college. We’d get married, we’d have nice lust instead of backseat lust. All these years later, suddenly there’s Jack, standing in my kitchen. The two of them, come to set me straight about what I didn’t know. And the worst thing is, I forgive her. She’s foolish, but I’m stupid. Do you know what I thought as they stood there, my Cheryl so brazen, trying to change the conversation by blaming me for having her baptized and naming her a godfather, as if those things were the same as arranging to have her raped? I thought: He’ll stop at nothing. A boy from summer camp, who once taught me to swim. He used to stand out there in the water, hollering instructions, blowing his whistle, and then before we got out of the water he’d always do the same thing: the dead man’s float. He could hold his breath so long, we’d all race for him in a panic. I can still see him in the pond, not moving a muscle. Then he comes to Buena Vista and takes my daughter’s hand, claiming to be in love with her. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, I know he’s still doing the dead man’s float. What does he think he’s going to do to support her? He’ll have to take her back to New Hampshire. Is that what’s going to happen? Is she going to live with him down the street from you?”
“I don’t live anywhere near him,” he said. He was grateful that there was finally something he could say.
“A thought like this doesn’t even cross your mind. It reminds me that most murder victims know their murderer. Or is that an old wives’ tale? I think they know them, that they’re lovers or aunts or uncles or whatever they are. The same way so many people get broken bones from accidents right in their own house. People walk fine when they’re outside, then they slip in the tub. Have you heard this, or am I imagining it?”
He said, “I have heard that.” He wanted to get off the phone. He had called someone who was drunk, whose life was a mess, who had been deceived all her life and then slapped in the face.
“And to think: I used to write her letters asking if she had dates. I thought she might be at dances, or going to parties and building snowmen — the pictures I’d seen in the Benson College catalog. Are you sure you don’t want to come by so we can cry on each other’s shoulders? You don’t exactly seem to be holding up your end of the conversation.”
“I’m eleven hundred miles away,” he said.
“You are? Where are you?”
“Islamorada,” he told her again. He wouldn’t blame her for not believing him; it sounded like an invented name for an invented place. Islamorada. How about Uranus? Just some strange point on the planet where he was standing in a parking lot, talking on the phone. Why? Why had he not learned that McCallum and everything associated with McCallum did nothing but cause him pain. He was a compulsive liar. Dangerous, probably. Set on a trajectory he sucked people into, tossing them aside at his convenience. He felt humiliated for both of them — for himself, and for Janet Lanier. To know McCallum was to be humiliated by your own vulnerabilities.
In the parking lot, a windblown couple got out of an old Olds-mobile convertible, the woman taking off her visor and running her fingers through her hair, the man in a tank top and white Bermuda shorts bending forward and backward to stretch himself. Though the lot was mostly empty, it held quite an assortment of cars: a blue Miata with New Mexico plates that read GOERNER; a Jeep; Toyotas; BMWs. There were window boxes filled with bright pink flowers and drips of dark green ivy. Over one of the window boxes a monarch butterfly hovered. Two monarch butterflies. He thought of a photograph he had once seen of Vladimir Nabokov running with his butterfly net. He thought of Lolita. What a second-rate Lolita Cheryl Lanier had been — not particularly pretty, but most of all, distinct from Lolita in that she had not been genuinely needy; she was just another person who wanted things.
“Do you believe me when I tell you I didn’t have the slightest idea that McCallum and your daughter—”
“That makes two of us,” she said. “I’m glad to know it doesn’t have something to do with my lack of sophistication.”
“Sophistication,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a lack of sophistication. It’s just not possible to keep up with him.”
“You get thrown off by people who go to great lengths to explain themselves,” she said. “What I mean is, you take what they say to be explanations. I kept his letters explaining himself from the end of that summer until about 1975. I got rid of most of them when we moved. While I was packing boxes I reread them, and you know what? I was a grown woman by then, and I didn’t believe any longer I’d been the great love of his life, but I believed he still missed me. That I was special.”
“I’m sorry,” Marshall said. It sounded lame, inconclusive. It was probably the last time he would speak to Janet Lanier.
The man in white Bermudas came out carrying a bag of takeout food. The woman in the visor held his hand. An ordinary couple, he thought. Then he immediately wondered if there was such a thing as an ordinary couple.
“Your husband,” he said to Janet Lanier. “Is it true he’s got a girlfriend in Michigan?”
“True,” she said.
Why had he asked? He stared after the couple, the woman giving a little skip as she leaned into him and appeared to be saying something joking. He could not remember the last time he and Sonja had seemed close — close and casual about the closeness. They had let too many things from outside influence their moods: the routine of their jobs; Evie’s illness. Then he had an image of Cheryl Lanier, appearing like an apparition in the snowstorm, his pulling over to give her a ride, the moment when he involved himself in something from which he felt he was still trying to retreat.
“Why do you ask?” she said.
“Because I can’t believe anything either of them has ever told me. I wondered — generally, I sort of wondered whether you’re going to be all right,” he said.
Were those awkward words really the ones that came out of his mouth: “generally, I sort of wondered”?
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sorry I’m so far from Buena Vista,” he said. “Right now, I think I’m probably the only person who could understand exactly what you’re saying, and you’re the only person who could understand—”
“That’ll change,” she said, a little abruptly. “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”
“We’ve had some trouble lately,” he said. “But you’re right, of course. She won’t believe the continuation of this story. Which I don’t think we’ve probably heard the end of, have we?”
“No. I can’t imagine we have.”
“Your husband,” he said. “You aren’t worried about being physically harmed, are you?”
“What would make you ask that?”
“Well, clearly not intuition,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any of that.”
“Men don’t have it the way women do,” she said. “That’s true. But don’t blame yourself for not understanding Jack. Jack has to have an audience. He always did. He always finds it, too. Even if it takes doing the dead man’s float.”