Chapter 21
ALL THROUGH THE wrenching fall, Denny struggled to make sense of the pieces.
Anna would have said that there were no true coincidences.
Sticks and Ellen. Ellen and Mimi. The knotting together of these Hamilton friends and family members.
If at first Denny had suspected that this was merely the convergence of people who happened to find themselves in the same place at the same time, he had shifted his perspective.
Something about that push at the pool and about Mimi’s web of connections had forced his mind into an uncomfortable space.
He couldn’t explain it, but he knew she was responsible somehow.
Was it possible that she had looped in a cadre of like-minded conspirators?
The crazier and more outlandish the story sounded, the more Denny began to believe that it was possible.
He had opened a fake Instagram account. Finsta, Anna used to call it, even though he never even would have understood how to operate the social media part of his life if it hadn’t been for her.
Through the account, he could see Mimi’s stories, charting the end of summer and the start of fall.
Mimi was at Crane Beach, in August, head tilted back into the sun, arms up as if in prayer.
When fall breezed through, her photos displayed a storybook New England landscape: crimson maple leaves, her rosy-faced daughter in a pumpkin patch, a reel of a nighttime walk through Long Hill, in Beverly, where pathways had been converted into glowing coils of jack-o’-lanterns, and a photo of her cheering on the Pats (fair-weather fan as Denny imagined she was) in a box at Gillette, with a caption designed to make people jealous.
Thanks to our friend @sama for the epic seats!
She had tagged Sam Altman. Speaking of making people jealous, there was Easter, too, a pastel-perfect Mimi Mar standing alongside her family in front of the White House at the iconic Easter Egg Hunt.
Her outward-facing life was perfect.
Ellen Wilson did not have an Instagram account.
Denny had wasted plenty of hours on the computer looking for information about her, but he’d come up short.
She had married right out of college and moved from Rowley to Hamilton, according to a local announcement in the paper—and, of course, according to Sticks.
That was about all Denny knew. What she did for a living, who she was friends with, how deep her allegiance to Mimi lay: all this remained a mystery, and he wasn’t sure how to begin to solve it.
There was another mystery that lay right in front of him—his wife’s office.
Nearly a year had passed now since her death, and Anna’s belongings were still where they’d been, as if they were awaiting her return.
Denny had slowly started to throw away some of the things that he could bear to part with: shampoos, toothbrush, and other items in the medicine cabinet.
But he had yet to deal with Anna’s office; it still haunted him.
Walking past it at night, he could almost see her shadow in the dark, hunched over a chair, working, thinking, leaning into the present as if it were not the past.
The kids asked for waffles for breakfast. Afterward, Denny dressed them up for the cold, reminded them not to lose their mittens, packed their lunches, and stood at the end of the driveway waiting for the bus to chug by, always at least five minutes off schedule.
Normally, he would head back in through the side door, refill his coffee, and duck back out to the shed, but today he walked back in through the kitchen and around to Anna’s office.
The gray January light made the room look particularly flat and empty, despite the fact that it was full of Anna’s stuff.
Bookshelves of thumbed-through texts, tiny crystal vases, Wedgwood China in various sizes and shapes—all robin’s-egg blue—that she had collected, and papers heaped on a green antique chair.
He could take everything from the shelves—no harm in that, really—and decide what to keep and what to donate.
The books that had been Anna’s favorites could get passed on to the kids.
He’d make space in this room for something else.
Maybe an office of his own. Let the air circulate in this brain of his.
Let the air circulate in this room, where nothing but old and dusty memories lived.
But he decided to tackle all the papers first. Now that he was in the office, this moody room where his wife had spent so many afternoons, he could see that there was actually paper everywhere.
On the chair, of course, but also on her desk, and atop the filing cabinet, to say nothing of the inside of the cabinet itself, a whole world of documents that Denny had never even bothered to think about.
This was her domain, not his. When he was making things and losing himself in the art of production, she was here, surrounded by a different brand of work.
In the bottom drawers of her desk he found more unfiled papers and, beneath those, a few notebooks, all of them full.
Removing them, Denny came across a stack of card stock placards with his wife’s face on them.
ANNA PLUMMER FOR PRESIDENT, they read. She was smiling, hair brushed back behind one ear, diamond earrings sparkling in perfect, soft sunlight.
The photo was one he had never seen before.
All of this was entirely new to him: His wife was a stranger to him.
Anna for President? Living in the house with her, he had not known. Had they known one another at all?
The notebooks were full of different people’s handwriting, but he found one that belonged to Anna.
He recognized her small, tight cursive, the way it looped along, like she didn’t even have time to get the words onto paper fast enough.
Inside, it read almost like a diary. May 2022.
Anna described seeing Mimi at Life Time.
The pool. Louisa. That was old territory.
Denny knew the story so well by now he felt as if he had been there himself.
But there were other stories, too. A garden party in South Hamilton in August. Mimi with a threat—a karate chop to the wrist. The writing was a journal entry, a simple accounting of what had happened, none of it particularly threatened or scared.
She thinks I am winning. September 2022. Mary and Di say that there’s an actual chance that I could be elected.
Around fall, the writing turned to other people. Anna had written a few entries on Ellen Wilson, notes that expanded Denny’s understanding.
I found out from Di that Ellen was an outstanding field hockey player in high school.
They competed against each other: Triton and Newburyport.
I don’t remember her at all. Di says she tore her ACL senior year and had to quit and all of the players knew about it.
I guess she had always assumed she was going to be a college athlete of one sort or another.
Her brother was an athlete. Makes sense that she would gravitate toward someone like Mimi after that.
How else do you rise to the top after high school?
The brother, of course, was Sticks, another athlete who didn’t make it to the pros.
Living in small towns with high expectations had set these kids up for failure, Denny could see.
Sticks and his hockey career, turned to dust. Ellen, once a field hockey star, now just the third wheel of the Queen Bee of the PTO.
And Mimi, of course, joined at the hip with her best friend Karen, stewing in discontent from the age of fifteen.
But then, a more potent discovery. It came only a week before her death.
The entry was specifically dated, unlike some of them: December 28, 2022.
It had not been written out in full paragraph form but was instead a series of notes.
PTO. Cover operation. Secret society. College admission.
And then, in all caps: PAY TO PLAY!!! Whatever it was that the PTO was secretly up to—was secretly covering for—his wife had started to uncover it.
Her proximity to it would have put her in danger from the start, Denny now realized, and her success in nearly unseating Mimi Mar would have made her a target.
It broke him apart, to think that Anna had gone through this alone, excavating some hidden world of secret societies and Hamilton demons.
But Denny also remembered the feelings he had experienced when he unearthed his wife’s private email cache a few months earlier.
Perhaps it wasn’t fair, but he felt it again, that white-hot rage, anger at having been left behind, with this mess, so much of it foreign, so much of it a mystery.
He had shared a life with a stranger, he was coming to realize, a woman who had her own world entirely separate from him.
True, as far as he knew, she had never been unfaithful, but wasn’t this equally duplicitous, this life of hers, secreted away, unshared?
And now, what made him the most angry, if he was honest, was that he couldn’t even ask her why—why she had felt the need to keep these things from him, when he would have supported her through all of it; why she had embraced values she had told him she loathed; and why she had gone to such lengths to conceal parts of herself that were soft and tender and in pain.
He could have helped. He would have helped.
Here, in the dusty mess of her office, he could do nothing.