Chapter 21 #2
Because sitting in this office around his dead wife’s things made him feel particularly useless and impotent, he texted Di.
He needed reassurance that he was useful to someone, and maybe help spotting some of the outliers in his wife’s group of friends.
Hey, did I ever ask you about Ellen Wilson?
he asked Di. It was an entrée, he figured, a way into a larger question about the PTO, about who they really were and how they operated, about what secrets they held.
Di had been a little quiet these past months.
A little less inclined to take his calls.
He understood. They were grieving in their own ways, and Di and Anna had been practically conjoined, two faces of the same coin.
For all the things he didn’t know about his wife, Di held them for keeps, her confidante, the lockbox.
I’m not sure. Anna did. Last year, she texted back.
Thinking back on it, he hadn’t seen Di in, what, three months? Not since before the holidays, he was sure, and maybe not even since Louisa’s birthday, in September.
I feel like Anna was about to come to some conclusion about her, he wrote.
White bubbles appeared in the text field, and then disappeared.
Di writing. Erasing. Trying again. As was her style.
He put down the phone and picked up the notebook again, leafing through months of his wife’s life, a catalogue of what people wore and what things they said, her observations of the members of the town.
Maybe she had been using the book as a tool to remember faces.
She must have seen a lot of them. From her notes: appointments each Wednesday with Di and a woman named Mary, an open invitation for anyone from Hamilton to come and chat about the state of the schools and the PTO.
He had known about none of this, either, of course.
Denny’s phone vibrated. She wasn’t anyone specific. She was just a field hockey star who had a very unlucky break and got married to a rich guy to make up for it.
That story, though, seemed a lot like Di’s story, too. Di, who had played varsity field hockey through high school, who had gone on to play Division 1 at UMass Amherst until she, too, suffered a game-ending injury, moved back to the area, and, yes, married rich.
It happens to the best of us, he said, knowing she would understand what he meant.
And also the rest of us.
Denny wondered if there really was a distinction.
The Triton field hockey records were largely available through a basic Internet search.
How absurd. All this time, he could have been looking at photos of Ellen Wilson from his own computer.
She was the same age as Anna, and, in the ’90s, beautiful, too, with long legs and hair that slid all the way down to the center of her back.
In old photos, Denny saw her leaning down to chip away at a ball, long hair flying loose in the wind, topped only with a light blue ribbon.
That didn’t answer any questions about Anna’s last entry. Pay to play and cover operation stuck in his brain as he thought of Ellen Wilson, field hockey stick in hand, her face mutating from adolescence into adulthood. Who had she been? Who had she become?
Ellen had gone to UMass, too. Di hadn’t mentioned that, but a Daily News piece on the archive mentioned a scholarship—a scholarship Ellen lost because of the injury.
But an interview said she was going anyway.
He was halfway down into a rabbit hole on his bedroom computer when he heard a knock at the front door. It startled the dog.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he yelled.
He opened the door and there was a familiar face, Di, staring back at him.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t expect you.”
“Can I come in?” She wore a cropped puffer coat, a fleece headband around her hairline, and a large pair of black sunglasses. She rubbed her hands together. They were red from the cold. “I forgot my gloves,” she said. “A New Englander who will never get used to winter.”
“Warm up, then,” Denny said. It was as if she had read his mind. He had just been thinking about how absent she had been, but now here she was, instantly conjured.
“I just thought maybe you needed some help,” she said. “It sounded like you were trying to piece something together.”
“Yes. No. Well, maybe,” he admitted. “Actually, I was just cleaning out Anna’s office and I was going through some of her things.”
“Show me what you’ve got,” she said. She took her glasses off and put them in a bowl in the hall, the same bowl where Anna had kept her own glasses. Those Denny had moved to a closet upstairs, but he paused for a moment, to take stock. The glasses didn’t take up nearly enough space.
Di hooked her arm into Denny’s and he walked her into the office, now a bona fide disaster. Halfway through, he had abandoned the task and had gone upstairs to search on his computer, and now the room was just an explosion: papers, books, pieces of art he had taken down from the walls.
“I was thinking maybe I’d paint it another color,” he said. “I always hated this.”
“The name was something horrific, wasn’t it?”
“Hague Blue. Like the Hague.” He laughed. “I was thinking maybe just a bright white office. Start over again.”
“Of course you were,” she said.
They sat down on the floor amid the paper and the books. The room had folded in on itself, far smaller now than it had been before. Di spread her hands out and made a seat for herself among a sea of stuff.
“I didn’t realize . . . about the PTO . . . the president stuff,” Denny said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Di looked up at him. Her eyes were soft.
She pressed the center of his forehead with her thumb.
“That was your business with Anna,” she said.
“I felt like there was a reason she didn’t tell you, and I really did not want to get in the middle of it, life and death notwithstanding.
” When she finished talking she left her thumb there for just a second longer, and he could feel it, the warmth of her hand.
She drew it down across the bridge of his nose and held her whole hand to his cheek for a second and looked him squarely in the eye before breaking away.
“I guess I get it,” he said, distracting himself, distracting her.
“There was a lot we didn’t understand about each other, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t the right fit.
I just wish I hadn’t found out about it this way.
” He picked up one of the cards featuring his wife’s smiling face.
“Mostly, I just wish she had known that I would have supported all of this. I wish I had been better at expressing that to her. It’s my fault. I missed too much.”
“It’s not. You couldn’t have prevented it.”
“What if I could have?”
“They call it the conditional tense for a reason,” Di said. “There are conditions attached. You can’t go back in time, so why try?”
“Fair, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to,” he said.
“I know,” Di said, leaning in again. Now the hand was on his arm, just a light touch, feather-light.
Soft. Friendly, he thought, although, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t.
It was hard to read these gestures in a room like this, in a house like this.
“I should have told you.” Some of the notebooks were stacked before Denny.
Di grabbed one and began palming through it. “I haven’t seen this before,” she said.
“Those are just some notes, I think. That Anna had been taking.”
Di stopped to read more closely. “More like weird personality profiles if you ask me. I love Anna to death, but she could really overdo it with the psycho pop.”
“Loved,” he corrected.
“Right.” She sighed. “You understand what I meant.” Di squeezed his shoulder in commiseration.
“To me, it read like she was just making notes about everyone for the PTO. And that some people maybe caught her attention more than others,” Denny said.
“I wouldn’t mind taking a peek?” Di said, with a look that asked his permission.
“Sure, but just leave it here. And keep it between us.”
“Between us,” she said. She flattened her palm and placed it on his knee. “Just between us.”
Denny couldn’t understand exactly what happened next.
Di, with her cropped hair and long eyelashes and hand on his knee.
Di, leaning in, breath on his cheek. For a second, his instinct was to push away, but he also wanted something else, to be embraced, to have someone look at him or hold him or make the spaces in the house that had felt wide and barren since Anna disappeared go away.
He had not realized how much he had missed in being alone, every morning, a space in the bed, every night, a hollow. Every moment, carved out by grief.
And Di, too, hadn’t she been carved out, made skeletal with this loss?
Later, lying in bed, her head notched into his arm the same way Anna’s once was, he would think about it. Was it betrayal or healing? Di was married, of course. That was her own cross to bear.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Di said, but Denny missed the silence, the way Anna always curled up after, like morning glory at night.
“I’m not thinking of much, really,” he said.
He was thinking of the ocean, of the way Anna used to look at it, and of the stranger in his bed and of how it had felt nice until it hadn’t, of how easy it was to make a mistake, something you could not take back.
He was thinking about how trust was the kind of thing you could misread and about how he had misread something important, something right in front of him: He could feel it in the room, a haziness descending.
“I know it’s strange, me being here,” Di said. “But I think she would have wanted us to find comfort in one another.”
The truth existed somewhere in between, though.
Denny wasn’t sure he knew what Anna wanted anymore, and he was even less sure that Di really knew.
A confidante. A best friend. A stranger.
A foe. A new and darker realization began to swirl around.
The afternoon light filtered in through the bedroom.
Anna had always wanted blinds to block the lights from the neighboring house.
He hadn’t even been able to dignify that simple request, and he could see now that he had failed her, Anna. Dust swirled in the air.
“It’s very hard to know what she would have wanted,” he said, but that was a lie, too. What Anna would have wanted was the entire universe, he sometimes thought, but it was simpler than that. She wanted decency, fairness, and other things he could never deliver to her. Or not in life.
“If you want, I can go,” Di said. She was sitting up now, shielding herself with the top sheet. Her features were sharper. She had a crease along the top of her brow that he hadn’t noticed before. “I’m sorry.” She reached for his hand. Instinctively, he retracted. “I’ll go.”
She turned her back to him and rooted around on the floor for clothing.
He looked over at her one more time, studied the foreign shape in his bed, watched as she collected herself, and saw her pick up his wife’s notebook that included those last words.
He was surprised to learn, upon touching his own face, that it was wet, that the sadness had leaked out.
It had been all wrong, allowing Di here, into his house, into his bed, into the space that had belonged only to Anna.
But what could he say now? It was done. It was all done.