“If it’s not Hayes extorting you, then we need to know who it is. That’s where we start, and we don’t get ahead of ourselves. No one has asked you to do anything. Not yet. By the time they do, maybe we know who they are. You’d be surprised how things can turn around, even in something like this. The challenge for you and me is to stay above it. Our feelings, our emotions, work against us. They’re probably counting on that. They’re probably counting on it dividing us. We can’t let that happen.”
He sounded so detached, as if he’d already let go of the pain associated with her sordid past.
“I hear the detective speaking, but I’m wondering about the husband.”
“He’s out of the office,” Lou said.
“Can you compartmentalize so easily?”
“Who said it was easy?”
“There’s more,” she said, bringing herself to a place she’d been unable to face alone.
“More.” It came out of him as a gasp, a blow to the chest.
“You’ll find out anyway,” she said. “Better we discuss it now. But please, please remember that this never had anything to do with inadequacy. Don’t jump to that conclusion, okay? It was revenge, I think, for all the time I never got. We’ve talked about this before. It was my shortcomings, not yours.”
“Takes two,” he said.
“I know it does. And that’s generous of you to say. No… what I have to tell you involves the date.”
“The date.”
“Yes.” Here she was, about to explain something even she didn’t fully understand. Dangerous territory. She took a deep breath. “When all this happened… back then… We talked through it. I agreed to call it off.”
“I remember.”
He clearly didn’t want memories forced on him, but she didn’t know how else to approach this.
He said, “We picked up, and we started again.”
“It wasn’t over,” she blurted out. “There was one more time-only one-about three months after our agreement. He called, and… I don’t know. One of those mistakes for all time. I know by the date that this was the time he videoed. I don’t know why he did it. Why I did it.”
“You’re better off if you let it go,” he advised, and now she understood just how angry he was, knew he was boiling inside. She couldn’t broach this issue with him feeling this way.
“I can’t do this right now,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.
She’d dreaded this moment ever since committing the act-and she’d known all along this moment would someday come, as it now had. She’d wounded him; she’d invalidated the sense of trust that had taken so many years to rebuild. She felt awful, and yet she felt a selfish relief that she feared he sensed and would only make matters worse.
The truth, like a razor, could cut painlessly at first. She feared what would happen between them as he started to bleed.
It rained all of a sudden. One minute a fine mist and then torrential. The two of them on that bench, unable to move and run for shelter.
The rain on his face looked like tears to her. Maybe a combination, she thought, paralyzed by the pain she’d inflicted. She understood now that she would continue to suffer for her actions, as she had for nearly six years. But suffer together, not alone. A part of her had hoped sharing this might mitigate some of that internal pain, but she’d lied to herself about that as well. Pain couldn’t be shared. Pain was a very private thing.
They drove in the dead of night, two people uncomfortable with the silence as well as the expectation to fill it. She wore the evidence of an impossibly long day in the form of bloodshot eyes and redistributed makeup. He carried the deadened countenance of a man poisoned by grief. The steady sloshing of the wipers worked like background music. She wanted to be home in bed, the victim of a temporary, eight-hour suicide, her brain all but used up.
“I miss them already,” she said. They had left the kids off an hour ago.
“They’re safer there.”
“I know that, but it doesn’t make me miss them any less.”
He said, “After what happened to Beth and Tony, we don’t have a choice.”
He kept telling her things she already knew. She let it go. “Did you see their faces?” she asked. Tears and confusion, a hopeful pleading that Mama and Daddy were not going to drive away and leave them.
“They were laughing and playing by the time we were out of the drive. Count on it. They love Kathy. And knowing my sister, she’ll spoil them rotten. It’s a match made in heaven.” Lou’s sister, unable to have children of her own, doted on Sarah and Miles as if they were royalty. Liz didn’t think it the best for anyone.
“We need to think about getting him tested,” he said. “His music aptitude. It’s something we need to think about. When to do it, what it means to him, to us, in terms of some home schooling. And there’s the cost, of course.”
“I can’t do this now,” she said honestly. “I can’t pretend all’s well like this. Between us, I mean.”
“What would you rather talk about? Broken promises? If we don’t pretend it’s normal, it’s never going to be.”
She turned toward the car’s rain-streaked side window studying the bars of silver and black, like a cage. “This is coming apart on us, Lou.”
“Uh-huh.”
They worked through another few minutes of silence. Lou reached for the radio at one point but apparently thought better of it. He pulled the car off the highway into a service station close to the on-ramp to buy himself a cup of tea and her a bottle of water.
“I didn’t mean to go back to him and I should have told you right away. I know that.” She waited to say this until he was closing his door to head inside.
“Uh-huh,” he said after the door was shut.
Back on the highway, he told her, “I’m ready when you’re ready.”
“I know that,” she said.
“Doesn’t have to be now.”
“It can’t be now. Not when I’m this tired. And you… you look sick with grief.”
He didn’t respond.
“Please don’t give up, okay? Don’t shut me out. So much has changed. So much good has come into our lives. That’s worth fighting for.” She waited for him to say something. Anything. When he did not, she said, “I think I’d like it better if you yelled at me or something, got angry, if you let out whatever’s inside of you. How can you be so calm?”
“I am not calm.”
“Then show it. Do something. Say something.”
“I need to hear it from you,” he said. “Whatever excuses you have, I need to hear them. Just confessing it isn’t enough. I have to understand it.”
“He tricked me. He used sympathy. He probably did it just to make the tape. He played me-that’s how you would put it-and I gave in. I regretted it at the time, and I regret it now.”
She saw anger pass across his face with the oncoming headlights.
“So you got drunk rather than tell me.”
The bars of the cage bent with the speed of the car. She cried privately, not allowing him to see. He dug out a handkerchief, offered it across the seat to her and she rejected it, angry that he would attempt such a gesture.
He said, “You came home and made love with me and pretended it hadn’t happened? How could you have done that?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. Slap, slap, went the wipers. “For what it’s worth, with him it was never ‘making love.’ It was sex. An escape. Nothing more.”
“That’s not worth anything. Not to me,” Lou said, “though I’m certainly glad you made that important distinction.”
Mile markers slipped past, the distance between them growing.
“I miss them already,” she said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
TWELVE
BOLDT’S DASHBOARD CLOCK REGISTERED 7:04, the colon between the numbers flashing as it counted off the seconds in the evening darkness that enveloped the car’s interior. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he and Liz had dropped off the kids, and now the events of this day occupied him as he navigated around the streets clogged with traffic, inventing a route that might speed his arrival to what he had been told was a bloodied cabin and possible crime scene.