Amy was back in position on the sofa, sitting Indian style and surrounded once more by paper. She was absorbed and didn’t even sense me enter until I was a couple of yards away. I noticed that the paperwork seemed more text-dense than usual, bereft of bullet points and draft sketches, looking more like the product of a typewriter than a word processor. Also that the sheets didn’t sport the relentless logo-branding characteristic of KC&H documentation.
“What are you working on?”
She looked up. “Deep background,” she said, reaching out to gather some of the debris toward her. “And, frankly, bordering on the dull.”
“Going to let me know how it went, later?”
“Yes, sorry. Got a headful right now. Need to get it straight. And sorry it’s such a mess in here.”
“No problem. Going to try to do a little work.”
“How’s it going, scrivener man?”
“Very slowly.”
“Slowly as in…‘backward’?”
I smiled. “Maybe a little to the side.”
“Well, the journey of a thousand miles…”
“Starts with me staring out the window. Right.”
“I have faith. You’ll get where you’re going,” she said. “You always do.”
I went into my study, half closing the door behind me. I spent a while opening my research boxes and getting stuff out, making enough noise that it should be obvious what I was doing. Every book, magazine, or clipping made me want to grunt with boredom, but nonetheless I arranged them in piles on the counter. As I get older, I find I have a desire to have things in rows. Books, magazines, DVDs. I want them neat. I want them consecutive. I am coming to suspect that having the row may be more important than any specific issue or volume. It’s the order I seek, rather than the contents.
When this task was completed, I moved my chair to the far side of the desk, so the screen wasn’t facing the door. If need be, I could tell Amy I’d moved around to remove the distraction of the view, which was now behind my back, but she never entered the room when I was working. I was just being…what? Cautious? Sneaky? Weird, most probably. I opened the laptop, and the screen revealed itself once more, the same document with the same “Chapter 3” heading at the top. There were no chapters two or one. There was nothing written underneath “Chapter 3.” But then I wasn’t here to write.
I hesitated a moment. When I heard the distant shuffling of papers, confirming that Amy was still on the other side of the room, I got my cell phone out and put the laptop into “Bluetooth Receive” mode. When it was ready, I navigated through my phone to the relevant sections.
Then I sent to my laptop the things I had copied off Amy’s phone before I left Seattle.
I didn’t expect to be able to divine anything more from the text messages now that I was home, and I hadn’t bothered to take them off my phone. All I’d transferred were the pieces of music, the sound file, and the three photographs. I plugged earphones into the side of the laptop and loaded up the first sound file. Hearing it louder and without background noise just confirmed what I’d heard in the bar. It was a man laughing. I turned up the volume until the sound stopped meaning anything, in the hope of spotting some kind of texture behind it, an indication of where the recording had been made. I couldn’t hear anything. It was just a man laughing, somewhere neither unusually silent nor noisy. It had an unpleasant quality, but that could be because I didn’t like hearing another man’s laughter on my wife’s phone. She could have been messing with it in an idle moment and recorded a sound from another table in a restaurant.
The pictures didn’t do much for me either. They were bigger on my laptop screen than on the phone but remained dark and hazy, and I doubted I could recognize the guy if I saw him on the street. At first the other two pictures didn’t seem to be of anything at all. Darkness with some lighter patches. Gradually I made out that one seemed to have been shot across a convenience-store parking lot and showed a man entering the store. I couldn’t make out the second environment—a dark bar, perhaps?—but again there seemed to be a figure in it.
I put the files in a folder and lost it a couple of levels deep on my hard disk. Transferring them off Amy’s phone had felt like stealing, and I was pissed off that nothing more had come of it. I still had Blanchard’s words running around in my head, and I felt foolish. There was only one thing preventing me from feeling completely and utterly dumb, and I couldn’t check it right now.
I heard a sound and looked up to see Amy standing a couple of feet into the room.
“Hi,” I said, startled.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t want to disturb you. You looked deep in thought.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Bored, bored, bored,” she said. “Heading up to the village for a couple things. I don’t know what yet. You need anything while I’m finding out?”
For a moment I wondered why she hadn’t asked if I wanted to go with her. Then I remembered I was supposed to be working in here and that she was being considerate by not leading me into temptation. This, even more than the tableau I’d discovered her in on my return, was the essence of my wife. Subtle by nature, blunt when required, the kind of woman who would breeze into the bathroom while I was shaving and say, “Yo, shithead—you going to fix that shelf like you said, or do I have to take you back to Husbands-R-Us?” I brought this up with a yard-yelling couple one time, suggested they try a more direct approach to managing their nebulous resentments. I got a Christmas card at the precinct from them every year after that, signed “The Shitheads—still together.” I count it as one of my bigger successes on the force.
“I’m okay,” I said, smiling, heart beating a little harder, feeling love toward her and thus all the more guilty for what I had to do, which she was about to make easier for me. “I got everything I need right here.”
“Cheap date,” she said, and left. She clanked around in the kitchen for a while and then called good-bye.
I gave it three minutes, then left the study and went quickly up the stairs. I made it to the window by the side of the front door in time to see our car pulling out of the driveway. I stood for a few more minutes, until I was sure it wasn’t going to come back. Then I walked down to the lower level of the house and into Amy’s study.
An hour later I was a couple of miles from the house, running a hiking trail in the forest. I have never liked running. It’s grim in prospect, arduous in actuality, and it makes no basic sense. The human body isn’t designed to run for long periods. My mind isn’t designed for it either. But, though I hate to concede the fact, it does seem to meet the body’s need to sometimes be taken seriously. The first stretch made my head ache badly, and I had to pause to cough up a lung a couple of times, but now I was moving smoothly and consistently through the trees. I was running in penitent mode, trying to overlay what had happened the night before. I am the kind of man who runs, you will observe, not the type who wakes up in parks.
I was running also in the hope of achieving some kind of clarity. Amy’s computer screen had been blank when I’d gotten into her study. I’d considered switching it on, but with an unpredictable boot/shutdown time I didn’t like the idea of her suddenly reappearing and finding me in there doing that. She’d consider it an intrusion, and she’d be right. I picked up the personal organizer instead. Looked at what it told me for a while, then turned it off, put it back on charge, and got changed to go running.
It was getting colder. I could feel the temperature dropping as I ran, and moisture was clouding more and more thickly up out of my mouth. When I could see the sky through the canopy of trees, it had a leaden quality, and muted light was turning the pines and firs a bluer shade of green. I decided to turn and head back toward the house. The light would be gone before too long anyhow.