Chapter 10 #2
In the inbox he found nothing unusual at first. A million unopened emails.
Pleas to donate from the Democratic Party.
Can’t you just spare five dollars today?
He could not. She could not. They could not.
Emails from websites she had once ordered holiday gifts from.
A completely impersonal list of impersonal correspondence to someone who would never again see this de facto proof of her own nonexistence.
Spam, it turns out, doesn’t just end when you die.
For a moment, he didn’t see the folder she had created—this Luddite wife of his—where all the other emails lived.
But then, one click and he was in there, in the nightmare that she must have lived in, emails reciting back the private details of her life, emails wishing her dead, emails about her children, emails stripping away her decency, so many emails, 187 of them, the folder said, all catalogued in her mysterious and meticulous way, perhaps without emotion, because she was good at that, at removing the feeling when she needed to.
They all came from the same two-day span, in February of 2022, just one year ago.
He couldn’t place it. What had they been doing that day?
Why then? And why had she done this, put these emails in a folder and not said a thing to him, her husband, about the torture and the harassment, and the words coming from these strangers on the Internet?
I hope you die
You deserve what you get
Dumb bitch
You moved to the wrong town
You’ll see
You’ll see
You’ll see
Anna had been the type of person who wasn’t particularly spooked by threats or accusations.
Self-sufficient, she always liked to say, and so maybe her secrecy had been just that: a form of taking care of herself without bothering anyone.
Except that this was definitely cause for alarm, all these emails, all this hatred flowing inside her personal email, bile she could not expel.
Except, except, except. She could have told him, and she hadn’t, and he was sand turning to glass, pressed down, molten, one element changing into another.
You aren’t supposed to be angry with the dead.
He knew this, of course, but it was impossible not to feel a white flame, a lick of anger, like all the trust they had between them was only an illusion.
What else had she been hiding? What other secrets lay in wait?
He went into the outbox and scrolled back to February of 2022.
He found work emails, messages to copywriting clients.
Nothing interesting there. And then, a series of emails caught his attention.
She had emailed Mimi Mar. A meeting at Honeycomb right before the harassment started.
She never told him about that. And before that was another email, this time to complain about the school dance.
That one, actually, he remembered.
He had come in from the shed late and found her red-faced and furious about tickets to a pasta dance.
“They’re charging parents a premium to be members of the PTO so that they get early access to the dances,” she practically spat. “This fucking town!”
He didn’t really know what she was talking about.
He had just finished—now he had to think about it—a set of Windsor chair reproductions for a friend of Diane’s that were meant to look like antiques, with a black stain that he sanded off in spots.
They were beautiful, period correct, and he had been so proud that he wanted to call Anna out to the back to see them, but she was so mad.
“Who? Who is charging parents?” He could see she wasn’t planning to see the chairs, which was a shame.
She had started dinner, pounded chicken filets fried with sage and deglazed with gin and chicken stock, and one of the filets had started to burn.
Also a shame. She was an excellent cook, when she was paying attention, but in the heat of her anger, she was only thinking about one thing, and that was the dance.
“The PTO! I said that!”
“You didn’t. You just said the dance. Something about a pasta dance.
” He realized, as soon as he said it, that it was a mistake, that what he had tried to say was not what she needed to hear, and that all of it was going haywire, the way conversations do when one person is more angry than the other one, so he turned his back to his wife and the billowing smoke coming off the range—as usual, she forgot to turn on the hood vent that had cost a fortune to install—and started to wash the stain from his hands, which was less of an actual attempt to remove the color than it was an attempt to avoid eye contact or any brewing explosion.
“Maybe you should try listening, Denny,” she said.
“Maybe just actually listen to what I am telling you for once!” More smoke.
More hissing from the pan. The chicken, he imagined, was done for at this point, and they would eat it anyway.
It was what they did, a concession, their family’s love story, what they did for her in their own bout of self-sufficiency, how they took care of her when she didn’t realize they were doing it.
That was love. That was marriage. That was his way, even if she didn’t see it.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” And he was, but not in the way that she thought he meant.
This memory, which had been unimportant, came back in a flash: hot steam on the window, acrid smell of burnt chicken and gin, a bitter dinner, Louisa’s pout over a dance.
Denny had been there, but also not, still preoccupied with the Windsor chairs, thinking about the stain and if the color was right, and the wear patterns created by the hand sanding and his labor and what project would come next, and so he had not been listening—she was right about that part.
He had been guilty of that plenty in their marriage, of paying attention to the wrong details, of no details at all.
Now, in the blue light of her computer screen, he felt as if he were completing an autopsy.
It was all here, all the cancerous cells that had been growing inside Anna this whole time, the lecherous threats perpetrated by foreign entities, and whatever else Anna had kept to herself: personal grievances, aches and pains, things she pinned to the inside because she believed that it was stronger and smarter not to reveal them to the person who was supposed to understand her the most.
He should have been listening all this time, and he hadn’t been listening, not about the PTO or the dance or any of the other things she had been talking about.
Not that night, not so many other nights.
Why did it sound so much clearer now on replay?
Why could he smell the chicken? Why could he see the outline of his wife’s body as she stood on the blue rolling library stool that she kept in the kitchen, fanning the kitchen hood to prevent the smoke detector from going off?
This memory was the kind of disposable moment that you don’t even think about—that is only the daily fabric of a day, of a marriage—but it lingered, every mortal moment of it, and Denny Plummer felt the heaviness of the memory.
Opening the email was like unlocking a box.
He felt feverish, anxious to head back in, a compulsive desire to sift through everything that had once belonged to his wife.
He wanted to know all the parts of her that had been concealed from him, wanted to read the emails, and the notes in her drawers, to have access to the pieces of the puzzle.
Denny closed the laptop for now, but he knew he would be back; he had started something, and now he would test the limits of his own obsession.
The blue light of the computer faded from the room.
Hague Blue looked black in the dark, and now, yes, it was dark inside, dark outside; the snow might as well have been mud outside the window—he couldn’t tell either way.
All these days that Anna spent at this very desk, writing ideas for other people, pushing her own creative impulses down while he was out in the shop inventing, doing, making.
She had stared at the snow, or the muddy soil getting ready to spring green, or the oak trees flush with new growth.
Whatever she had been thinking, he now knew, was a relative mystery. He had known her, but also, he had not—she had kept her own secrets and now they were buried down in that cold, hard space. Eternity. Forever.