"Keep coming back," he said as I pressed my way through the sand.
"Stupid little prick," I said, way under my breath.
I had not had a drop, but I could already feel I was in danger. I was not sure where I was headed, but I knew I had to stop myself from getting there too fast. I slogged over the dunes and along the dirt road that wound around the Winstons' property, looking for Evan's car. I was nearly trembling with desire for the beer I took out of my bag and popped open, desire not for the taste but for the numbness it would give me, numbness against the dreadful steel plunged into the breast and the dreadful death of my husband, which I felt in the same place and felt as hard.
I was astonished by how yeasty it was, after all these years away from it. Dumb, dumb girl. Amazing how fast it made my tongue tingle. My tongue, the only part of me that wasn't in pain, that didn't need anesthetizing. I didn't know where I was going, but when I got into the car and maneuvered along the badly pocked road, I told myself I was not going to drink the other beer in my bag. I would throw it into the Dumpster in the lot of Nelson's Supermarket. I took South Road toward Cummington and drove the speed limit, because I knew how easy it would be to go above it. The road was narrow and loopy and passed rolling farmland, meadows, a handpainted sign nailed to an oak tree that said SWEET SWEET CORN. Not thinking about it, I took the left fork where the road divided, and when the landscape changed, the sudden forest, the back woods, when I found myself beneath a canopy of thick green leaves, I remembered that the turn-off for Cynthia Knox's was somewhere around here.
But I was wrong. There was no turn-off. Her house was the gray-shingled gambrel up ahead, KNOX was painted on mailbox number eight.
I saw her old Volvo sedan, with a nicked Harvard decal in the rear window, in the driveway. Her office door was around back, but this was nowhere near an office hour, so I walked along the flagstones and onto the porch and rang the bell.
A moment later, she opened the door and peered at me through the screen. "Yes?"
"It's Sophy Chase, Will O'Rourke's wife."
"Oh, my God-" She pushed open the screen and came out. "I heard this afternoon. I'm so sorry. The receptionist in Nancy Goldsmith's office told me when I ran into her at Nelson's." She took my hand firmly in hers, and her smile oozed sympathy. I was struck as always by her aquamarine eyes, her city attire. She was fifty-something, lovely in a natural way, wearing the sort of women's clothes you find in Cambridge, what academics wear when they dress up: the baggy batik vest over the knit cotton top, handmade silver jewelry, silk scarf. She took a lot of trouble with her appearance for a year-rounder. I used to kid Will about his having a crush on her. "Maybe a little one," he'd say sweetly.
"I was wondering when you last saw Will."
"You know, I was thinking about that today, after I heard. A month ago? Island Hardware? I was buying a trellis for the garden, and he-"
"I mean, as a patient."
"I don't have my book here."
"Roughly?"
"Three months ago?"
"What did he say about the divorce?"
"You know, I really cant say, Sophy."
"Did he talk about killing himself?"
"I cant discuss that, even if-"
"You mean he did, and you didn't do anything?"
"Sophy, I know this is upsetting, but I can't talk about these matters with you. It wouldn't be ethical to-"
"Do you know that he may have killed himself?"
"I was told there's going to be an autopsy, so I'm withholding-"
"Were you prescribing medication for him?"
"That's a confidential matter."
"I was hoping you might tell me something I don't already know, but obviously that's not-"
"It might be helpful for you to talk to someone on the island. If you need a referral, I'd be happy-"
"What are you hiding from me?"
"Only the usual confidences of the doctor-patient relationship."
"Were you sleeping with him? Is that it?"
"This line of questioning is not appropriate." She turned and slipped into the house, giving me the back of her subdued and politically correct Cambridge vest, whose red tendrils no doubt came from organic raspberries and cotton from politically correct cotton pickers. She glared at me through the screen and added, "I'm sorry about Will, sorry you're left alone. But I'm in the middle of dinner. Excuse me." After she closed the door in my face, I kicked the flimsy wood frame of the screen and remembered Daniel asking me last night if Swansea wasn't a pastoral playground where everyone was filled with the milk of human kindness. Everyone except me.
I did not throw away the second can of beer. I drank half of it as I drove through the tunnel of trees on my way to the main road and decided I would return to the awful Winstons' awful party. I could keep drinking there and not worry about driving, the hell with the pious bartender. I bloody well will keep coming back. I didn't know what made me think she'd been sleeping with my husband. I'm not even sure I thought so; maybe it was the bluntest weapon I could find, an attack on her prissy reticence. All I wanted from her was a solid piece of information, anything other than a phone bill or an overdue video or a missing dog. Or was there something twitchy and suspect in her reluctance to speak to me?
I didn't know, but when I came to the intersection, I did not turn right, toward Evan's house and the Winstons' and the setting sun. I turned left, toward Cummington, toward Will's place. He had a diary, I remembered, and in it might be the answers to all my questions. Unless I got it out of the house tonight, I would lose it tomorrow to Ginny and Susanna and Clare.
8. Diving into the Wreck
THE LIGHTS were on in Will's house. All the windows were open. There was a van parked in the driveway, black with white letters stenciled on the side, but when I saw the words, I could not put my foot to the brake, could not bring myself to stop.
AAA Disaster & Restoration Specialists
EMERGENCY CLEANING REPAIRS CONSTRUCTION
WATER FIRE SMOKE WIND
24-HOUR SERVICE
But I drove only to the end of the block, where I made a wide U and turned back, because I knew the men working in the house could do what I had come to do, and what I dreaded. I would not even have to go in. I could tell them where it was, where it might be.
I thought they might object, since I was asking them to give me not a composition book but a laptop computer, bright orange, what the company called tangerine. It made a trilly, musical sound when you lifted the top. But I guess they felt sorry for me, because I said I was the wife, because they didn't know the whole story. All I know is that they ended up replacing a section of the floor beside the bed, four feet by eight feet, the floorboards, the insulation, everything.
Five minutes later, I drove away with Will's diary on the seat next to me.
Five minutes after that, I stopped at a place I had not seen inside for many years, Oysterman's Package Store, and bought a half pint of Jack Daniels, because it fit easily into my purse, and because I could not face reading Will's diary without it. Those were the excuses I recited to myself instead of the slogans I could have recited, without irony, cynicism, or muttering. And now, what I tell myself about that night is that it could not have happened any differently, though of course I wish it had.
I wish, for instance, that I had had the patience to drive out to Evan's house, about forty minutes from Oysterman's, and retreat to his study with the computer before anyone came back from the clambake. Or I wish I had taken it to my friends Sally and Tim Baylor's house, outside Cummington, and plugged it in at their kitchen table, instead of going where I went. I wish, I wish-wishes as pretty and insubstantial as soap bubbles. The truth is that I wanted to do what I did all alone, without having to explain to anyone what I had just done. The computer was not mine to take or borrow-I knew that-and I had no idea what I would do with it once I finished the diary. There was also the small matter of the Tennessee sour mash, which I did not know what I would do with either, once I was done reading. And the notion, the probability, that the bottle might be empty by then-I did not know where in my gallery of terrors that stood. Or maybe I knew exactly.