The bedside clock said it was nearly one in the morning. Deirdre turned over, bunched the pillow under her head, and closed her eyes. Maybe it had been at about this time Arthur had gone for a swim. She could see him walking to the pool, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. Diving in.
Was that when it had gone wrong? He’d taken a running leap from the board, hit the water, and gotten the air knocked out of him. Struggled to reach the surface, flailing in darkness, propelling himself toward what he thought was sky and smashing headlong into the cement at the bottom of the pool.
Sweat broke out across Deirdre’s neck and back and she sat up, gasping for breath. She imagined Arthur hanging there, a dark shadow under the water, life seeping out of him. Her fingertips tingled and her heart beat a tattoo in her chest. She smelled chlorine and death and gagged.
Breathe, she told herself as she tried to relax, counting a slow in and out, until finally the tension eased and her lungs filled completely. Shivering, she sat there for a few moments longer before sinking back into the pillow and pulling the blanket around her. The handlebars of the exercise bike looked like shadows outlined against the window. The open closet was a dark rectangle. She started to close her eyes but that feeling, like someone was chasing her and she couldn’t get away, started to take hold.
Deirdre had long known that the truly scary stuff was in her own head. Doped up on Demerol after her car accident, she’d dreamed that her limbs were scattered down a hillside and she had to convince the EMTs to collect them for her. Or that she was on the table in an operating theater, a light beating down on her from above as doctors sawed off her leg, the surrounding stadium seats filled with onlookers. Or that her father was driving her home but she had to get back to the hospital because she’d left behind her hands. Even when she knew she was dreaming, she couldn’t wake herself from those dreams. The memory of that paralyzing panic was far more vivid than any memory of the accident or of anything the doctors had done to her after.
She’d learned, over time, to avoid Demerol and redirect her mind. Anchor her attention on a sensation. Like the heavy sweet smell that was in the air, maybe a gardenia or night-blooming jasmine in the yard? The scent reminded her of hairspray. Aqua Net. Connect the dots and up popped Joelen Nichol, standing in front of her bathroom mirror years ago, spraying Deirdre’s hair. Deirdre remembered the feel of that cool mist drying to a tight coating like a skim of egg white on every skin surface it touched.
Joelen. Who had stood at the front door hours ago and offered Deirdre a business card before bolting out to her car. Then called to offer any help she could. So she was a Realtor, not the movie star she’d dreamed of becoming.
There was a flash. A roll of distant thunder. Then the hiss of a light rain. The rain grew steadier, and the temperature dropped a few degrees. Deirdre pulled the blanket more tightly around her and let her mind drift back to a safer place, to the morning before school in sixth grade when Joelen Nichol had walked into her life.
Chapter 9
The sixth-grade girls at El Rodeo set their hair in pin curls and wore blouses with Peter Pan collars and circle pins. When Joelen Nichol appeared in their midst with her reddish-brown hair poufed out around her head like spun sugar, her eyes outlined in black, and mascara clumped on her stubby eyelashes, she seemed like a seismic anomaly. Her lipstick wasn’t Cherries in the Snow or Coral Bells, but instead the color of a politically incorrect “flesh tone” crayon. In a world filled with Carols and Barbaras, Pattys and Nancys, even Joelen’s name was exotic.
The first day Joelen came to school, Deirdre had been waiting outside for the bell to ring, her books pressed to her chest, feeling like a tree stump growing out of the concrete. As usual, the popular girls camped out at the picnic tables, their backs to outsiders, their books on the spaces between them, sending the clear message that there was no room for anyone else to squeeze in.
Deirdre didn’t see Joelen walk in from the street. What she noticed was how, one by one, like a herd of prairie dogs picking up a scent, the boys shooting hoops on the other side of the fence had paused. She noticed how oblivious Joelen seemed to the stir she was creating, leaning nonchalantly against the chain-link fence that separated the picnic tables from the playground, adjusting her cinch belt, smoothing her blouse.
Maybe because they were both outsiders, doomed to perpetual orbit around Marianne Wasserman and her circle (or coven, as Joelen liked to call them), Deirdre and Joelen became fast friends. When the bell rang and the other girls gathered up their books, Deirdre fell in beside Joelen. They walked home from school together that afternoon. From that day on, they shared their lunches and talked on the phone before bed. On weekends they had sleepovers—until the Saturday night when both their lives flew off the rails.
Deirdre turned over. It had taken her two years after the car accident before she could do that simple thing: turn over onto her injured side without aching. She’d always be uncertain on her feet without her crutch.
She closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye she could walk unaided. She saw herself moving up the stairs and into the school where her friendship with Joelen had begun. She drifted through her memory of the building, down hallways and up staircases, remembering the smell of the cafeteria on fried fish day and the art room’s peppermint smell of paste.
Deirdre didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until a thump yanked her awake. What time was it? Her wristwatch glowed: ten past two. She heard a shuffling sound, then a grunt. That was a person. The dogs would be growling and snarling if it were an intruder. It had to be Henry.
She tried to go back to sleep but was jarred awake by a louder thump and the sound of something being dragged. Annoyed, she grabbed her crutch and got out of bed. Paused for a moment behind the closed door and listened. She turned the knob and opened it a crack.
Henry, looking like a ninja in a black T-shirt and black pants tucked into motorcycle boots, was carrying the plastic garbage bag, which now looked to be full, from the bedroom hallway into the living room.
He disappeared into the front hall. Deirdre waited to hear the front door open and close but it didn’t. Baby padded over and sniffed at Deirdre. She gave the dog a peremptory pat.
Henry reappeared. He yawned. Stretched. Turned around and scratched his head. Then he sank down on the couch and leaned back. Moments later she heard what sounded like a cow’s rhythmic lowing. He was snoring.
She crept over to him. “Henry?” she said, and touched his shoulder. He collapsed a little farther onto his side, out cold.
Deirdre pulled off his boots, tilted him over onto his back, and put his feet up. Then she covered him with a plaid flannel stadium blanket that Arthur kept over the back of the couch. Warren Beatty—that was who Joelen used to say Henry resembled, and Deirdre had always been sure that Henry knew it. She’d once caught him practicing in the bathroom mirror, a Beatty-esque puckish grin morphing into a sleepy-eyed, seductive gaze. Back then he was forever pulling at his hair to get that forelock to come down over his eyes. It seemed utterly goofy and contrived to her, but girls ate it up.
These days, with his hollow cheeks and hooded eyes, his looks had sloped off into cool, sardonic Robert Mitchum territory. She pushed his dark hair off his face and brushed his forehead with a kiss.
She’d started back to bed when she noticed that Henry had left the garbage bag sitting on the floor by the front door. She went over and poked at it with her crutch. It was folded over, not tied shut. She steadied herself against the wall and leaned over to open it. Out wafted a rich, earthy smell like patchouli. Weed, packed up but not disposed of. If the police arrived early in the morning to search the house, it would be the first thing they’d trip over.