Chapter 23
You’re a witch.
But who was the real witch now?
When Di left, the house felt like a deflated balloon, a space that couldn’t quite retain its normal shape.
Denny pulled on pants and a sweatshirt and wandered around the rooms upstairs, inspecting things he had never finished.
Anna had wanted to replace a rug in Ben’s room.
It was frayed at the edges. The dog had peed on it.
It was old. Now Denny lifted his son’s bed at the edge, pulled the rug out and started to roll it toward him.
He should have done this a year ago. He had waited.
He had ignored it. The rug, like so much else, had just become background noise.
Beneath it, the oak flooring was a slightly darker color.
Hard to see the damage while it was happening.
Denny slung the rug over a shoulder and brought it downstairs, depositing it near the front door.
He had left Anna’s office a mess, piles of paper everywhere.
Di had been a distraction, and a purposeful one.
One minute they had been sifting through the detritus of his wife’s life, the next she had been smoothing the side of his face with a hand, then leading him upstairs, and he had not protested, had needed some kind of reassurance that he was still human, still a person with a true and beating heart.
Back in the mess that he had left behind, the moody blue room gave him new clarity.
They had been talking about the notebook and then they weren’t.
They had been looking through notes and then they were looking at each other.
Di had known about the office and had come over unannounced, but had she come over to comfort him, or had she come over to distract him?
Now Denny wasn’t sure. The notebook with Anna’s handwriting in it was gone, now in Di’s possession, but there were other books piled around the office.
Before Di showed up, Denny had been leafing through another notebook, the small black one, in someone else’s handwriting. He returned to it now. In it was a list of names, some of them familiar, others not. On the first page was Di’s name and then a name that he had heard a few times. Mary.
The book was full of to-do lists, divided by Mary, Di, and Anna.
Unconquerable tasks. Questions, it seemed, asked by local community members.
Notes written in red, black, blue, and purple.
Maybe a code for them to follow, or maybe just a way to keep things interesting: switch pens, switch colors, make it lively.
Mary’s handwriting, Denny learned, was looping and large, a happy cursive that filled the small notebook’s pages.
She had designated tasks to Di and to Anna, had bullet-pointed things to remember and to address, where they were meeting, what they needed to take care of, what was next on the agenda.
All three of their names were printed on the first page. Diane Maguire. Anna Plummer. Mary Langley. A trio, in ink, and the first proof of the friendship that Denny had ever seen.
Six months after they started dating, Denny and Anna planned a trip to Vietnam. Anna had gone to the consulate in New York to get them visas, which were necessary to enter the country. She met him for dinner that night with a pink laminated piece of paper with his face on it.
“The adventure of a lifetime is set to begin,” she said.
She wore a cowl-neck gray cashmere sweater and a smoky gray cocktail ring and tall black designer boots that were in desperate need of a polish, and her big eyes popped when she talked about all of her plans: the egg coffees in Hanoi and the Phong Nha caves near a farm stay she had booked and the War Museum in Saigon that a friend told her they needed to visit.
They would take sleeper trains and eat Bún cha and buy tailored clothing made from silk in H?i An.
Over dinner, they planned the whole thing out, leafing through copies of Lonely Planet and Frommer’s, highlighting restaurants and destinations of note. They had a whole month, all of his vacation time stacked together, the kind of adventure you can still take while young with no kids.
A week before they were scheduled to go, Denny got cold feet.
He couldn’t explain it, exactly. It was something about the hold Anna had always had over him, something about the way her eyes shone in the dim light of restaurants, the way her witchcraft had always worked on him.
He couldn’t just pick up and go to Vietnam, visa or no visa.
He had work to do. He had obligations. He wanted the best of it all—the ability to stay with her without the commitment.
“I have bad news,” he told her. They were at dinner again, this time at Little Park at the Smyth Hotel.
One of those restaurants that they used to go to all the time back when it was just the two of them, one of those restaurants that they would find insufferable once they had kids: Everything was small and expensive and kind of forgettable, beetroot everything, dry-aged duck when it would have been just fine without the aging.
She seemed to know before he told her. She was a witch; he wasn’t kidding. He could see her face fall before the words even came out, and she stopped him.
“You aren’t coming,” she said.
“It’s just work,” he lied. “I just can’t do the trip for that long.”
“I see,” she said. Beetroot tartare, that was what it was. He watched her push it around her plate, fumble for a bite, turn it up toward her mouth. No satisfaction in the bite, no payoff. What could you expect from a vegetable masquerading as something else, anyway?
“I expect you to keep me in the loop,” he said, reaching for her hand across the table.
She recoiled, as if stung. One thing he would come to learn about Anna, right from the beginning: You could only violate her trust once, and this was the only time he would push his luck.
On the street that night, he hailed her a cab, pushed the hair out of her damp face, and kissed her underneath a streetlamp and told her that he didn’t want this to ruin things, knowing that it would still leave a delicate scar.
Every day that she was in Vietnam, riding a train up the country’s spine with a friend who took his place at the last minute, he thought of how stupid he had been, and vowed never to make the same mistake again.
The longer she was away, the softer her tone became over text.
She sent photos of the things she saw at the markets: cobras and starfish tucked into glass bottles of so-called snake wine that she threatened to bring back with her, green-rinded oranges, parasols made from silk.
The karst cliffs in Phong Nha looked incredible, he had to admit.
We waded through mud today, a text read, in the middle of the night. At the farm stay, they served pizza. It’s a village of mostly locals.
She was supposed to come home to her own apartment in Astoria, but he drove all the way out to JFK to pick her up when the month was over; she came back in late January, just as Tet was about to begin.
Her absence had opened up a space in him, something large and unhealed, and he realized that he needed her, that she was a part of him, her fierceness, her assuredness.
She had known they were right from the beginning, and it had been him.
He was the one who had lacked the trust and foresight.
Always him making the wrong choices, failing to see what was right in front of him, in its sweetness, its simplicity, its perfection.
He had been so stupid. He opened his phone, searched for a photo of the caves.
There it was: a photo of Anna from a trip he had never taken, covered in mud, smiling like she had never experienced life so fully.
He was twisted by it now, doubled over with grief, racked by pain so acute that he thought for a moment that one of his organs was set to explode.
But no, he reminded himself. This is just what it feels like to lose a part of yourself.
This is what it feels like to die without dying.
Mary, Denny learned, lived in South Hamilton.
She was so easy to find, right beneath his nose the entire time.
He drove to her house in the afternoon, past the rolling equestrian farms, where the hedges were now winter-anemic; you could see right through to their sprawling estates.
Mary’s house was small and pretty. Denny could imagine Anna at the picket fence gates, taking stock of a summer garden, memorizing the things she would do to their own house: the lattice arch with the vines crawling up, the sunroom on the side that almost looked as if it was leaning into a snowbank, the brass whale above the portico on the front door.
He took a breath and walked up the path, which no one had cleared of the inch or two of snow that had recently fallen.
Blue snow, like the night that Sticks had come to his own house, crisp, crunchy, fresh, and also filled with omens.
Ophelia in a frozen river. Denny had never asked if her eyes were open or closed, but he had imagined her with a halo of flowers around her head, even though he knew that dead people never really looked, in real life, the way they did in the movies.
Denny took the skinny, aged bronze knocker in his hand. How many times, he wondered, had Anna stood at this exact same door without his knowledge? A thin woman with auburn hair, slightly gray at the temples, came to the door. She looked confused, as if she knew him, as if she had always known him.