“She died fifteen months ago. But ironically not from the cancer. She was in the final stages when she fell asleep reading in the bathtub and drowned.”
7
PHOEBE WOKE JUST after three with a jolt, her heartbeats tripping over each other. A sound, it seemed, had punctured her dream, but she could hear nothing now. She struggled up in bed, listening, straining to see with only the dim glow of the night-light.
Then she heard it again. Something was scampering over the roof. It’s just a squirrel, she told herself, one of the groups she sometimes saw in the tiny backyard. Just don’t let the damn things find their way into the attic, she prayed. She switched on her bedside lamp and let her eyes adjust. For some reason she felt unbearably thirsty. She threw off the covers and padded downstairs.
She flicked on the kitchen switch. Bright light burst into the room from the overhead fixture, like a flash going off. She poured a glass of water from the jug in the fridge and sat down at the small wooden table. Outside, the night pressed against the kitchen windows. She felt exposed suddenly, discomfited by all that darkness out there, so she took the water upstairs with her. As she settled herself in bed again, her back against the headboard, she replayed the evening in her mind.
The revelation Duncan had made toward the end of dinner had thrown her. She’d figured that he must have been married at some point and was now divorced, that he might even have older kids somewhere. The last thing she’d expected was a wife found dead in a bathtub.
“I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “These past couple of years must have been very hard.”
He pulled his mouth to one side. “Yes,” he said. “And yet not exactly in the way you’d expect. Allison and I had agreed to get a divorce just days before she was diagnosed with cancer. The marriage had become a disaster. But I wanted to stay with her during the last year of her life. Plus, I was the one with the health insurance.”
“That was good of you to do,” Phoebe said.
“Part of me actually thought that things might get better between us given the new set of circumstances, but I’m afraid that never happened.” He offered a small smile. “And as you can imagine, my experience as a widower has been pretty strange. People look at me with pity because they think I lost the woman I loved. That’s not to say I didn’t grieve, but my experience hasn’t been what people assume.”
“How much . . . sooner did she die than she would have from the cancer?”
The question was probably going farther than she should have, but Phoebe felt compelled to know. And he’d opened the door.
“A couple of months, maybe a bit longer,” he said. “Ordinarily someone might wake if they were taking in water while sleeping, but because she was so ill, her systems weren’t functioning right. I had warned her about falling asleep in the tub, but sometimes I wonder if she almost let it happen that night. I’d gone out to a school event—and remembered she’d seemed very down. When I came home two hours later, she was dead.”
He set down his espresso cup and leaned back. “So is this what always happens with you? People confess things they generally never tell a soul?”
Later, at the door, as he was leaving, Duncan let his brown eyes roam over Phoebe’s face, discombobulating her slightly; she wondered if he was going to kiss her.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said instead. “You’ll have to let me return the favor at some point.”
Now in bed, Phoebe thought about what it would have been like if Duncan had kissed her. She imagined that soft, full mouth on hers, his hand on the back of her neck. This is crazy, she thought. During the past seven nightmarish months, her libido had left the building, and she couldn’t believe it was finally showing its face here in little old Lyle, Pennsylvania. And yet she couldn’t deny her attraction to Duncan. She’d liked his inquisitiveness, his easy laugh, the slight air of mystery. And she liked that face and body.
She tried to shake Duncan from her mind in time for her eight o’clock class the next day. It didn’t help that her students seemed so glum. She was sure it had to do with Lily’s death. Last week she had sent the twenty students jpegs of several articles from magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and today they were to discuss what made each story compelling. But Phoebe ended up doing most of the talking.
She then had an hour before her eleven o’clock class, the one with Jen Imbibio, and she decided to use the time to stop by Blair’s apartment again.
The house on Ash Street seemed even more dejected than the day before. The dark, junk-strewn foyer was absolutely silent, and this time no one answered the door to the upstairs apartment. It was going to take forever to connect with Blair if Phoebe resorted to just popping in now and then. She scrolled through her e-mail for the information Glenda had sent about the girl. A cell phone number had been included. Phoebe would have preferred her first conversation with Blair be face-to-face, but she needed to speed the process along. While walking back down Ash Street, she punched in Blair’s number on her phone.
“Hi Blair, this is Phoebe Hall,” she said, after being greeted by an automated message. “I stopped by yesterday to see you. Would you give me a call? I’d like to arrange a time to talk.”
Her eleven o’clock class turned out to be like the first. Students were listless and morose. As Phoebe offered her own comments on the articles she’d sent the class, she studied Jen closely for the first time. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, with long, slightly curly brunette hair and blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. She looked like someone out of a fairy tale, Phoebe thought, the kind of girl you’d expect to find riding a deer in the Romanian forest. Yet she also had a very modern air of entitlement about her. Interestingly, Jen had less to say than anyone else today.
At the end of class, Phoebe announced that she’d be passing graded papers back on Wednesday. Students filed out of the room quietly, with no one stopping at Phoebe’s desk to ask a question as they normally did. Before Jen could reach the door, Phoebe called out her name.
“Me?” the girl said, surprised.
“Yes. Do you have a minute?”
“Um, okay,” she said, looking slightly put out.
“Why don’t we go to my office? It’ll be easier to talk there.”
They made their way to the second floor of the building. One of the hall lights was out and the corridor was gloomy, like everything else that day. After slipping into her office, with Jen following without enthusiasm behind her, Phoebe switched on two lamps and scooped the papers off the guest chair facing her desk.
“Here, have a seat,” she told Jen. Phoebe wondered if she should close the door but decided against it; Jen already looked ready to jump out of her skin.
“Okay,” Jen said, sitting down with her backpack still on. “Just so you know, though, I’m supposed to meet someone in a few minutes.”
“This will only take a sec,” Phoebe said, smiling. “I wanted to talk about the assignment I’m handing back on Wednesday.”
Jen twitched in her seat. Her expression morphed into mild alarm.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” Phoebe said quickly. “I just wanted to tell you that I liked your blog. It’s really terrific.”
“Oh, wow,” the girl said, breaking into a smile. “I—wow.”
“You’re doing something much stronger in your blog than in your regular magazine pieces, and I think we should figure out how to bring that quality to your other stuff. I see your next magazine assignment is going to be on childhood obesity. But how about picking a topic that allows you to use the same sassy voice that you used in your blog writing?”