"And you still say the letter that Claire found… was to your therapist, not the man you got pregnant by."
She looked at me askance. "Now I get it," she said. "You don't believe me anymore. About anything."
I didn't respond.
"Because I didn't tell you everything about my sex life?” she half-shouted.
"Quiet," I said. "The boys."
"Because I didn't tell you," she said, barely keeping her voice down, "that my husband was so soured on the world and so controlling that he wouldn't give me children? I didn't spill my guts and tell you how it feels being treated like a pretty thing that's fun to fuck, knowing you'll never be a mother?" She shook her head. "This may come as a news flash, Frank, but I've been lonely. And scared. It hasn't been easy living with Darwin. So when I met someone a couple years ago who seemed to care about me, I reached out to him. I thought there was a chance we could have a life together. I got pregnant, and he couldn't handle it. We stopped seeing each other."
"Who was he?" I asked.
"I can't say," Julia said. "He's an acquaintance of Darwin's. He's very well known." She paused. "He was at Brooke's funeral. We didn't even speak."
"I'm supposed to believe you had a sexual relationship with an acquaintance of your husband's, bore his children, and have no contact with him now?"
"You know what I can't believe?" she said. "Where do you get off thinking that everything that happened to me before you arrived on the scene is your business? Have I asked you for a list of every woman you've fucked?" She looked away. "Leave me alone," she said.
"Julia…"
"Get out," she said. "Just get out."
23
Garret was standing in his doorway when I stepped into the hall. "Rough night?" he said. He was dressed in blue jeans, no top. He had every bit of the muscular definition Billy did, including a chest like a welterweight fighter and a washboard abdomen. He seemed jumpy-maybe worried, maybe excited.
I wasn't happy that the heat I had generated with Julia had reached him. "Looks like that's how it's ending up," I said. "Sorry we woke you."
"I wasn't that tired," he said.
I nodded toward his room. "Want to talk?"
"You're probably all talked out," he said.
I wanted to reassure Garret that things weren't falling completely apart, even though I was worried they were- first with Billy, now with Julia. Both within about twenty-four hours. "Actually, I wouldn't mind a little company," I said. "I won't take much of your time."
"Cool," he said. He backed into his room.
I followed him. He hadn't gotten around to organizing his things; boxes overflowed with clothes, photo albums, a few long-lensed cameras, hundreds of film canisters. I took a seat at his desk.
"It's a total mess in here," he said. "Embarrassing." He started picking up, piling everything into his closet. "This is a hard time for my mother," he said, glancing at me.
"I would think so," I said.
"Not just recovering from the beating and all that," he said. He grabbed another overflowing box. "The changes. Darwin not being here, first and foremost. Even though it's a good thing, it's a big thing, you know?"
That was true. Bishop had occupied a lot of physical and emotional space in the household. His absence opened up a void. Even the loss of negative energy can be dizzying. "I guess it's a little like coming home from a war," I said. "The demons stay with you a while."
Garret jammed the box into the closet, forced the door closed, then turned and looked at me. "For instance," he said, "without getting shrinky with the shrink, she wanted you to hit her in there."
"What?" I said.
"She yelled," Garret said. "Darwin would have gone ballistic. She was testing you to see if you would hit her."
Garret's insight made some sense. I had asked Julia to trust me, to fully disclose her past. One way to interpret her extreme response was as a way of probing how far she could push me without me pushing back. "You know your mother pretty well," I said.
He shrugged. "I've noticed the same kind of thing about myself since you've been living with us," he said. "Like this room. I could never have left it this way with Darwin around. Not unless I wanted the strap. I think I've let it get this messy to see if you'd cut me slack."
"It's really not my place to tell you how to keep your room," I said.
"You're pretty much the man of the house," he said.
I wasn't feeling much like the man of the house. I nodded at his desk. "So what are you reading, anyhow?"
"Poetry," he said.
"Who?" I asked, looking at the title, The Land of Heart's Desire.
"Yeats," he said.
"Is he your favorite?"
"I don't really have a favorite," he said, easing himself into a beanbag chair in the corner of the room. "I like Emerson and Poe just as much. Maybe better."
I glanced up at the bookshelves, the only space in the room that was neat and clean. The volumes were arranged alphabetically, by author. I scanned the names. Auden, Beckett, Emerson, Hegel, Hemingway, Locke, Paz, Poe, Shakespeare. Yeats was at the end of the shelf-seven, eight volumes strong by himself. "What do you like about poetry?" I asked.
"Saying more with less," he said. "People use too many words. They become meaningless."
"Agreed," I said. "You like to write poetry, too?"
"Some," he said. "Just for myself."
That seemed to say I shouldn't expect to read any of Garret's work any time soon. "You're the most important audience," I said.
"Darwin would get pissed if he caught me writing," Garret said. "He said it was for girls. That's one of the reasons he wouldn't let me stay too long in my room."
"That's ridiculous," I said. "Nobody thought of Hemingway as a girl."
"His mother did," Garret said.
I smiled. Hemingway's mother had dressed the budding author in girl's clothes from time to time, one reason he might have become almost hyperbolically male as an adult. "Except her," I said.
"Maybe I will show you some of my stuff, someday," Garret said tentatively.
"I'd love to see anything you write," I said.
He looked out his window, then back at me. "She just needs time-and some space. Maybe it's good you're taking Billy to that Riggs place."
"I want to thank you for helping him with the decision to go there," I said. "It's the right one. You think you can hold the fort down a couple weeks by yourself?"
"No problem," he said.
"I'm sorry to worry you-about your mom and me," I said.
"Don't be," he said. "I'll never have to worry the way I used to."
I left Garret's room just before 1:00 a.m. As I walked by Billy's room, his light went out. Had he been eavesdropping, I wondered, or had Garret and I simply been keeping him up by talking too loudly?
On my way out of the house I paused to look at the toys Candace had arranged in the curio cabinet. A little windup bear with brass cymbals caught my eye. It was the kind of thing that had probably kept Julia entertained for hours as a child. I smiled, thinking how delighted she must have been the first time she wound it up and watched it perform, how simple her pleasures were back then.
A chill blanketed me. Because in my heart I knew, without knowing exactly why, that everything really had started to unravel, and that she would never be mine.
My sleep that night was broken into naps. Each time I awakened, it was with another memory of Julia, Darwin, or the boys. I pictured the first time I had met Julia outside the Bishop estate, remembered our lunch at Bomboa Restaurant in Boston. I thought back to my visit with Billy on the locked unit at Payne Whitney, to my verbal altercation with Darwin at Brooke's funeral, to Anderson and me searching Garret's locker at the Brant Point Racket Club. I thought again of Claire Buckley's demeanor when she had turned the mystery letter over to North Anderson and me. And I reviewed what Anderson and I had each said to Julia at Mass General after she had been assaulted, what she had said to us. The sleep between memories became shorter and shorter, the images more and more vivid. It was as if my mind was replaying the last three weeks, looking for a window onto the Bishop family's secret.