“Here.” He thrust a manila envelope into my hand, a medium-sized mailer sealed up and folded over twice.
“What’s this?”
“When she takes her tea,” he said, going on as if he hadn’t heard me, “she’s very particular about getting the sugar loose from a bowl, and never in lumps or cubes. I couldn’t get anything in the form of a powder because it would’ve looked too odd, but you can crack these open, I think, and just mix it in.” A green look crept in around the edges of his face. “God, just make it seem like you don’t ever take sugar in your tea, or coffee. Just to be safe, so you don’t eat any by accident.”
“I don’t take sugar.”
“Well,” he said. “All the better.”
A child laughed on a nearby lawn, jumping through a sprinkler in an orange and yellow swimsuit. School was out. I hefted the envelope in my hand, trying to count the pills through the paper. Six, seven, eight—at least nine, and I had no idea what they were, though I supposed it didn’t really matter.
“I thought the idea was for me to convince her to do it herself?”
Lev twitched his shoulder, almost imperceptibly.
“I thought about it. That would never work. Can you imagine her swallowing a handful of pills, downing a glass of something stiff? How could she ever get so hopeless, so fast?” His face was pained, almost as if his question was sincere, his wife suicidal. As if I had the answers he needed to pull her back from the brink. “It’ll still look that way on the blood work. And no one will ask too many questions. I kissed that girl Daphne behind the library before she left for the summer. There will be rumors.”
The world, a pinpoint. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, don’t be difficult. You know we’re in this together. It’s all for us.”
We kept on with our frenetic stroll, and Lev began to calm down, take deeper breaths; I stuffed the envelope out of sight in my pocket and he cheered further. Now he held my hand lightly, rubbing my forefinger with his thumb. “I’ve thought about it,” he said again. “I thought about it a lot. An awful lot.” That was probably true. He thought a great deal about everything, from the rotation of planets around different types of sun to the question of whether all self-aware creatures (hypothetical ones; he had no great affection for cats and dogs and wouldn’t have given them that much credit) counted as human and deserved the same societal place. (Mostly this was an issue of robots.) His wife, well. Certainly she weighed on his mind. I had seen it: how in the middle of a sentence his jaw might drop as she swept in and settled down. Her fingers tightening invisibly on his wrist. But I couldn’t help feeling that the weight of this particular situation had just been transferred onto me. A yellow envelope, creasing in my pocket. Lev was hours from boarding an airplane that would take him far away.
We made our way onto campus, and though I assumed we’d head to his office, Lev pointed me towards the greenhouse instead.
“People will be able to see.”
“There’s no one here,” he pointed out. “It’s summer. And anyway, this is where we first met.”
Reluctantly, I let myself be drawn inside. It was Saturday, so John was unlikely to come by, and the only real danger was from townspeople using the campus as a shortcut now that the students were gone for the year. It was, I told myself, romantic that he remembered. Lev brought me to a table at the back of the greenhouse, one covered in orchids. The plants steamed and fogged. He embraced me from behind and began to kiss my neck, placing one hand on my shoulder and snaking the other around to the front of my body. I sighed into his touch, trying not to look out the window. In a couple of hours he would be gone.
“Vera,” he whispered into my ear, pressing himself against me and reaching around to undo my trousers. “Remember, Vera.” I couldn’t quite tell if he was instructing me or mistaking me, but now I could feel his skin against my skin. Hot, needful. He pushed inside of me, grabbing my hair in one fist. “Vera,” he said again, and then he didn’t say anything more. Pressed his forehead into my neck, gasped and sighed. There will always be a Vera, I remember thinking. One way or another.
As we cleaned ourselves up with a packet of tissues, a rock hit the window of the greenhouse right near my head. I jumped.
“What the hell?” Lev said. He ran outside to see if he could catch whoever’d thrown it, but I was more concerned with the glass. Even a hairline fracture could affect the greenhouse’s temperature, and though I could cover it up with paper and beg Facilities to rush in a replacement, we’d risk losing several of the more delicate plants. I ran my hands all over the pane: nothing. Maybe a scratch. I slid down to the floor and rested my head on my knees. It’s ok, I told myself. Nothing happened. But I was still rattled. Who would do such a thing? It seemed too providential to ignore.
Lev puffed back through the door. “I didn’t see anyone,” he said. “Probably just boys.” In his exerted state he looked a bit ridiculous, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief and straightening his collar as if getting ready for another round of polo at an afternoon fairground. I tried to smile, but couldn’t muster anything very convincing, and Lev offered a hand to help me up and pulled me into a tight squeeze. He wiped some dust from my rump. “Don’t worry about it, darling. Come give me a kiss good-bye.”
A sob broke from between my lips, surprising me. I’d known for weeks that he was leaving, but now it was real; now it was now. I clutched him to me and pressed my nose to the front of his shirt, mindful not to grab his jacket with enough force to leave wrinkles. I tried to inhale him in short, inelegant gasps. He’s going to rescue the novel, I told myself. And you’re going to rescue him. Lev laughed and tilted my face up to his, and kissed me. I felt like I would never see him again. Or he would never see me.
“Good-bye, little working girl,” he said. “Little hero. You’ll just have to bear the silence. You have a job to do, after all.” By silence he meant: he would not write me. Too much of a risk, and too unlikely to find a reliable postman.
I refused to watch him walk away, as I knew he would be whistling, a spring to his step. Man on an adventure. The sky was a painful blue, and there were fledglings swooping round the lawns. Everyone believes themselves to be the exception to unflattering natural laws, but I knew then I was not immune to envy, self-pity, fear in the face of certain danger. Forcing myself to breathe, four seconds in, four seconds out, I took the pills from my pocket and rattled them in their envelope. Each full of poison and bound for the gullet of a woman I’d seen a hundred times in my dreams, and often enough through her own front window. As I listened to the shift of capsules against paper, I began to calm down.
I was a peasant girl, after all, hardy and strong. I had lived through worse trials than this: there was work ahead, but at the end the future would belong to me. And now it was time to get started.
The day I went to visit Vera I woke up early and drew a hot bath, sipping tea while it filled and then lowering myself in slowly, savoring the light burn. For half an hour I scrubbed and soaked, shampooing my hair and taking a pumice stone to my heels until I was clean and smooth and red as a tomato. After drying off with a fluffy white towel (one of my first indulgences after winning my raise; growing up our towels were threadbare and rough, holes nibbling away at the edges, and the one I’d been using since my arrival in Maple Hill wasn’t much better) I painted my nails red and sat still for half an hour to let them dry, hazarding the lacquer just enough to turn the pages of a magazine. My hair was set in curlers, and with my nails done I blew it dry into a cumulus halo.