But the way the light hits the glass of the antique windows makes her stop: that slick ripple is much like water. That pond rises again in her mind. And she sees it now, more clearly than ever, the car up to its steering wheel in the mud, ice like broken glass, windshield a broken cobweb. Blood everywhere, from when she opened the door, caught her leg on a sharp branch. She wrapped her husband’s shirt, ripped from the dry-cleaning hanger in the backseat, against her wound. The rain was hard as needles on her scalp.
Now she touches her leg and it burns warmly. Did she do something terrible by that pond? She feels that she did, though she doesn’t know what.
Ha, crows the old woman in her head: but the woman goes swiftly through the house now, trying to find the kitchen, the voices, the girl.
Now she emerges into the kitchen. Grocery bags tumbleweed on the floor. Pile of fruit on the table, a melon split and dripping. And there, in front of the sink, standing before the window that looked into the dim stretch of the street, the fat woman holds the girl’s face in her hands. The girl weeps. The fat woman gives her a long kiss on the mouth.
Not motherly, indeed, chuckles the old voice in the woman’s head. When the girl backs away, her face looks slapped and childlike.
In her mind, another voice, a different voice, one that sounds like her own, says, Lily. It sounds like grieving. She doesn’t know a Lily, she doesn’t think. The pang in her chest says otherwise.
But she doesn’t have time to examine it, for beyond the bodies of the woman and the girl, down the hill, come cars like birds gliding to water. Two are black and white, their lights discreetly off. The last a green Jaguar, sleek.
She watches these cars pass all the abandoned hotels. They park in the street before the window. The police emerge. From the last car there comes a bronzed, thin man, his handsome face set in wrinkles of worry. She is certain she knows him. Her hands float toward her mouth, hover in the air there. They write wildly in the air as she watches him.
Oh, she says, and the two other women spring apart. They turn to her, then follow her look out the window, see the police cars, the third man. The gardener drops his tools and bounds toward them, grinning madly, already talking.
Oh, dear, says the woman, joining the other two at the window. She feels a broad smile spreading across her face. As the four men move together toward the door of the hotel, she gives a happy laugh. And just before the men enter, the woman says, watching the bronzed man with his thin hair, Oh, I believe my doctor is here.
YEARS LATER, WHEN JAIME THINKS of this day, she will only remember the kiss. Not the subtle sighing recognition when the police reveal that the woman is famous, a writer whose books even Jaime has read, whose picture she had seen many times on dust jackets. Nor that Jason ratted the woman out and her husband came and took her away. She will remember Bettina, enormous and beautiful, pressing her lips on Jaime’s own in the silvery light of the day. The kiss is what she will see every time she sees the writer’s name, every time she sees one of her books on a girlfriend’s shelf. She will remember the kiss when she finally finds the woman’s novel in a quarter bargain bin. It had been an instant best seller: everyone loves a scandal. Only when she reads the book will she learn of the woman’s amnesia, of the marriage certificate she ripped up and sent in flutters into the midnight water, the wedding band she sent skipping into the dark. She will learn of the troubled daughter, look up pictures of that lost girl, and feel a surge of sympathy, a strange recognition. But when she finishes the book and fingers the title, Sudden Pond, Jaime will forget all that she knew about Tabitha and only remember the kiss in the window, and a darkness will fill her and slow the world.
ON THAT DAY, as the three of them stand in the window, watching the woman carried off, Bettina squeezes Jaime’s hand under the cover of drapery. The last icicle in the window melts a ratatatat on the screen. Jaime feels ill. Jason is laughing, counting the reward money in his head. When the cars are gone, he goes back outside to the wrought-iron fence and chips at it again, whistling intricate contrapuntal melodies to the music on his transistor.
Alone together, Bettina’s warmth pushes Jaime’s breath from her. The hotel without the woman feels empty and a little sad.
At last, Bettina says, Sit down, and she lowers herself on one of the overstuffed settees. Jaime traces the lilies in the fabric with her hand, feeling as raw and tender as a newborn. Bettina says, You know, Jaime, you remind me of myself.
Jaime is shaky and says nothing.
Bettina says, That’s not a compliment, strictly. I mean that I look at you, Jaime, and see a girl chased by herself. Like me.
A silence: Jaime tries hard to understand. If you want, I can tell you my story now, says Bettina. How I got here, of all places I mean, she says, and Jaime nods.
Bettina’s story is stark, has a strange ring to it. Childhood in the country, doting parents, bicycles and gardens and brothers and cousins and tennis and Pimm’s; her aunt paying for public school; blazers and experiments in the dormitories under lights-out. A-levels, Oxbridge. Balls and visits in London; boys and cigarettes. She was beautiful. A wild girl.
One summer, home from school, she drank too much at a bonfire outside her grandparents’ estate. She woke with the wild music playing somewhere, her face pressed into the dirt, a mouth full of cinders.
She could have just waited it out, until the boy heaved off her, and then walked home, taken a shower. But she found a broken bottle under her hand, and without thinking speared it up. And then his weight was a different weight, and there was a hot wetness spreading down her back, a darkness pooling on the ground. The boy was dead. The bottle in his eye.
Bettina panicked, ran back to her grandparents’, stole cash from their safe, showered, and left. She bought a ticket to India, but in the terminal crept onto a plane to America. There she changed her body, name, hair color, age, became a nanny. She met Jason at Niagara and after one drunken night they awoke married.
She could have run away again, but she was too tired. He left the military, took her to Sharon Springs, his hometown, where they bought the hotel, in foreclosure, with his savings, a grand place almost rotted to its studs. Nobody looking for her could ever find her in this cold, dim town that smelled of sulfur.
I believed it, Bettina says, bitterness in her voice. I believed in the American dream.
Bettina’s eyes are closed, lashes moving against her cheeks like wings. In the empty silence afterward, there is a strange metallic ring.
It sounds fake to Jaime. She cannot breathe. She has listened to it all, love flying from her like scales from a fish. Bettina is too composed, her story too composed. Something bad did happen to Bettina, clearly: she probably is from England, probably was chased away. But whatever happened was not what she just told Jaime. And the story feels like one so often told it has the warp of fairy tale to it. Worse, she suspects Bettina has come to believe it herself. Jaime can’t look at Bettina, now, for pity.
So, Bettina says, to the scrape of Jason outside, the parlor cold and damp. There are goose bumps on Jaime’s arms. We can do two things now. One, you stay in town, in our little arrangement. Or, two, you know what you know about me and can’t forgive me for it. Go home and be a good girl and go back to school and become who you were before. You tell me what you want to do.
For a moment, Jaime becomes Bettina, sees her long days of work, her nights beside snoring Jason; she can feel Bettina’s boredom heavy as a rock in her own torso. Jaime understands with this that all she’d ever been to Bettina was a plaything to stave off the tedium, the kiss only a promise, a way to keep Jaime around.