I nodded my head as he started the car.
“Mrs. Leverton would have been a witness,” I said after we merged onto the highway. “She saw the two of us last night out on the side porch. I sat there with Mom before I used the towel.”
Jake was quiet. I felt the breeze from the night before. I saw the tops of the trees bending in the wind, the light outside Carl Fletcher’s back door, the muted sounds of his radio. Had his daughter, Madeline, been there last night? Had she seen anything?
“There, that’s the park I saw,” Jake said.
We pulled off the highway and took the access road until we came to a sad little park of picnic tables and trash. The wrought-iron barbecue grills set in cement looked like they hadn’t been used in years. We parked in the slanted spaces and got out.
“Pennsylvania depresses me,” said Jake.
“I may spend the rest of my life in Pennsylvania,” I said.
Jake stood in a scrubby patch of weeds and grass, and tore the cellophane off his pack of Camels.
“Do you want one?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll have plenty of time to pick up the habit in Graterford or the women’s equivalent.”
“Christ.” He took a long drag off the cigarette, almost as if it were a joint, and let it stream through his nostrils instead of his mouth. “I think they know, Helen. We need to figure out what to say.”
“Will you marry Phin?” I asked.
“Helen, we’re talking about our future incarceration.”
“Mine.”
“The window, my apparent collusion. Hello?”
“You’ll tell them why if you have to,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”
“No.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “I’m the one who killed her. You just broke in to make sure I was okay.”
“They asked me about your mental state,” he said, absentmindedly looking at the cigarette as if someone else had put it in his hand.
“And you said?”
“That you were fearlessly sane.”
He moved closer to me and put his arm around me. He drew me over to him so I stood snugly against the side of his body, my shoulder fitting into his armpit as it always had.
“You are,” he said.
“What?”
“Incredible. Always have been.”
In front of us, between two disused grills, stood one small sapling that the township had recently planted. I remembered reading about a fight, pro and con-beautifying through trees versus more money for the schools. A wire support surrounded the sapling’s trunk, and I wondered if anyone would remember to cut it off before the tree slowly strangled.
“Poor fucker,” Jake said.
“Me or the tree?”
“Your father, actually. Did you think you were marrying him when you married me?”
“I wanted your attention.”
“You had it,” he said.
“For a little while.”
“That was my work. It had nothing to do with you.”
He leaned his head down, and our lips met. We kissed in a way that lifted me, however briefly, out of the world where discipline and temper, grit and resolve, carried me through my weeks and years. Afterward he looked at me for a long time.
“I’ll have to tell them what I know.”
“I think you should,” I said.
“What about the girls?”
“I’ll tell Sarah,” I said. “And Emily.”
“Emily won’t understand, you know.”
“Do you think it matters that she was so old?”
“To Emily?”
“To the police.”
“There’s no special dispensation I’m aware of. I’m sure it depends on how a lawyer frames it.”
“I don’t even know any lawyers.”
“Let’s try not to think about it, okay?”
“I should have stayed in therapy,” I said.
“Why didn’t you?”
“His shelves were full of I. B. Singer, and the statues on his tables were that lost-wax Holocaust style. Lots of dismembered trunks of tortured people wrapped in barbed wire and mounted on poles. I would be talking about my mother, only to look up and see a legless, armless torso reaching out for me.”
Jake laughed. The two of us moved toward the sapling and sat down in the scrubby grass surrounding it. He lit another cigarette.
“Plus, he loved wordplay. I told him about my father’s town, the drowning of it, and he just looked at me, bugged out his eyes like he was a cat with a mouse, and said, ‘Swoosh!’ ”
“Swoosh?” Jake said.
“Exactly. What was I supposed to do with that? He cost me thousands of dollars and did nothing but put me off Philip Roth.”
“There are other therapists.”
I started to pull up the grass beneath me, as I’d once told Sarah she should never do.
“I saw someone for a while,” Jake said. “Here’s a hint: she wore Pippi Longstocking tights.”
“Frances Ryan? You went to Frances Ryan?” I stared at him in disbelief.
“She helped me after you left.”
Frances Ryan had been a graduate student at U-Mad when we were there. Everyone knew her by her trademark hose.
“Does she still wear them?”
“It’s been ten years, at least, since I saw her. I don’t think those hose work over forty.”
“I don’t think they ever worked.”
“Better than martyred torsos,” Jake said, passing his cigarette to me.
Other than murder and seduction, I’d limited my vices to such an extent recently that from just one inhale, I felt an immediate rush. I had worked in therapy on my issues of control, until one weekend I was in the grocery, thumping melons. I held a cantaloupe in my hands and felt as if I were holding my head. The therapist had been poking about inside of me, turning my brain into so much mush.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We pick Sarah up. We put one foot in front of the other. I think that’s all we can do until they contact us.”
“Or show up.”
Behind us, we heard a car pull in. Both of us turned around. It was a panel truck with sheets of mirrored glass strapped to either side. The man inside shut off the engine but kept the radio on. It was a talk station. Rancor poured forth from his open windows.
“Lunchtime,” Jake said.
I watched Jake smoke until he had finished the cigarette. He had always, I thought, looked silly with a cigarette, somehow too feminine, as if he were declaiming from a divan.
“So will you marry Phin?”
Jake took a moment to consider.
“Probably not,” he said.
“Why?”
“She’s efficient.”
“Meaning?”
“She’s very good at organizing dinner parties and trips.”
“And feeding dogs?”
“I transferred my affections to them a long time ago.”
“Milo and Grace?”
“Animals in general.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It’s where I ended up.” He smiled. “Besides, I’m too attracted to struggle. You know that.”
“Poor fucker,” I said.
He looked toward me. His eyes were as I had never seen them, as if they’d been crushed somehow, flattened by my existence in the world. “I loved you, Helen.”
What I had done, not just to my mother but to everyone, seemed suddenly bottomless.
It was out before I could stop it. A loud, broken caw close to the sound of retching, and then out of nowhere I was flooded with tears. My sinuses let go, and saliva and phlegm flooded my mouth and nose. There was nowhere to hide, and so I put my head into my hands and leaned to the side to bury my face in the ground.
“It’s okay, Helen,” Jake said. “It’s okay.”
I could feel him kneeling over me, his hand lightly touching my back and then my shoulder. I did everything I could not to respond to his grip. I felt like I could barely breathe, but I took huge drafts of air. I was crying and coughing and grinding my fist into the dirt.
“Helen, please.”
He took hold of my wrist, and I stared at him.
“I ruined everything!” I said. “Everything!”
The man in the panel truck had turned up his radio. Calls for the ban of illegal immigrants issued forth.
“You have to control yourself,” Jake said. “For the girls’ sake, for mine. Who knows, nothing might happen.”