Chapter 23 #2
“You’re Denny?” she said, opening the door wide.
It was a question, or it wasn’t a question.
“Come in, of course, come in.” She swung the door wide, but he didn’t really know why he had come, or who she was.
The house was disorienting. He could smell reed diffusers, like the ones that Anna put out from Farm + Sea.
“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself at the funeral,” she was saying. “Everything was just so . . .”
He remembered almost nothing from those days.
Wearing a black suit, he had stumbled into the funeral home and made decisions as a woman with pursed lips and a tight-clipped bun asked him questions about his wife’s preferences.
Did she prefer roses to calla lilies? (Yes, he said, this he knew; she hated the smell of lilies.) Did he know how many people would be in attendance?
Would he be driving in the processional, or would someone else be assisting?
Who would be speaking on his wife’s behalf?
During those soft and blurry first days, when he felt like the air had been sucked out of every room he walked into, the funeral home was another dark corner where his mind would wander, another place where ghosts followed him.
Even if Mary had come up to him at the receiving line, he probably wouldn’t have remembered her.
He was, himself, a corpse, leaning against the fabric wallpaper just to survive.
Di brought him ceramic mugs filled with lukewarm water, which he sipped until he could feel his cheeks come back to life.
He was crepuscular, an animal alive only at the edges of dawn and dusk.
All other times, he was in a trance, skirting the mortal world and looking for the spaces where the dead and the living danced.
He couldn’t find it. No one ever could, not even in those first days when death and life were at their nearest.
“I wouldn’t have been in a position to talk then anyway,” he told Mary. It was a miracle that he had survived, that he had been able to get through the year. “Sometimes, I’m not sure I can talk now. I go up to people sometimes and say crazy things, you know.”
“That’s an interesting quality,” she said.
“Is it?”
“I think so. I like people who say crazy things.”
“So did Anna,” he said. “She always enjoyed it when I broke loose, even though it didn’t happen very often.”
Mary’s house was a jumble of things: an old credenza overflowing with books, vases of flowers that had dried and were long overdue for the trash, various antiques in different stages of disrepair.
“This way,” she called, already a step or two ahead. Before he knew it, he was following her into the bright sunroom, where she had somehow grabbed two teacups and an electric kettle. How had she gotten them so fast? She pointed at the cup, asking a question without saying anything at all.
“Why not?” he said. Without asking, he took a seat on a Barcelona chair. It sank disproportionately low to the ground, forcing his knees up toward his chin.
He could hear noise from the other room. “One of my kids is home today,” Mary said, by way of explanation. “I thought it was strep, but the test was negative.” Something from the kitchen crashed.
“Fuck! Excuse me just a sec?” Mary disappeared back into the hall, leaving Denny in a stranger’s sunroom, admiring the snow from the Barcelona chair.
What he wanted was to look around. A secretary in the corner could hide secrets, he figured, but whatever had crashed would likely only take a few minutes to resolve—not enough time to leaf through a stranger’s belongings and sink back into the deepest chair on planet earth.
Instead, he concentrated on the items on the table before him.
The table was actually a trunk: red leather with brass buckles, topped with a few crystal pieces, Murano perhaps.
One was curved and blue, an ashtray from the 1960s, he thought.
In it was something he thought he recognized—a small brass button, the size of a pinkie nail.
Anna had worn a cardigan with buttons like that, he remembered now, black cashmere, five buttons down the center.
Mary was soon back. She held a rag against her hand, where, Denny guessed, she had cut it in the kitchen.
“Kids,” she said, and rolled her eyes a little. Denny nodded.
“Well, I don’t have to tell you,” she said. She lowered herself onto a settee across from him but didn’t make eye contact. Instead, she looked out the window at the snowy yard.
“I live in a jungle gym,” he said, trying to keep the conversation going. “Anna was the person who kept my life together.”
“I assume you came to ask me about her,” Mary said absently. “There isn’t much I can tell you. Well, maybe a few things that would be helpful. Honestly, I thought you’d come sooner.”
“Why is that?”
“I did try,” she said. “I have to be very careful about what I say.” She leaned over and picked up the button. “Do you ever feel like people are watching you, Denny?”
He thought about Mary’s words. Watching. The scrawled word Killer that had appeared on his door. Di showing up unannounced. Sticks always being just a step ahead. Denny didn’t answer.
“I can tell from that look that you do,” Mary said.
“I’ve never really thought about it quite like that,” he said.
“Hamilton,” she said. “Always someone sticking their nose in your business, right? Even when I met Anna, that was something that irritated her about this place. She was always talking about how when she was growing up, people knew plenty about each other but still kept to themselves.”
“That was something that definitely bothered her, yes,” Denny said. “She never told me about you. I don’t even know how you met. That’s been gnawing at me, actually. That there were things about my wife that I didn’t know. That I still don’t know.”
“Veterans Pool. I’m from here originally. I think she needed an ally.”
“She always had Di.”
Mary went quiet for a moment, ran a hand through her hair. Denny now noticed that she was younger than he had originally thought, maybe even a decade younger than he and Anna. “Some people put all their cards on the table. Anna was like that. I loved her for it.”
“And you?” He wanted to know how she viewed herself, this mysterious friend of Anna’s whom he had never met, the woman holding her button.
“I’m like her. See something, say something. I’d say that’s why we got on so well. Until we didn’t.”
“Something happened with the two of you?” Denny asked.
“Right at the end. A few weeks before she died.” She leaned over, holding the button between her index finger and thumb. “I had this feeling. Anna was running for the president of the PTO. I assume you know that.”
“A recent discovery,” he said. “But I’m learning. I think Anna was afraid I wouldn’t approve, but the funny thing is that I would have supported anything she did.”
“She was going to win.”
“There are a lot of people who wouldn’t have liked that,” Denny said.
Mary thought about that for a second. “Yes. But she knew that. We knew that. And we knew that Mimi knew it. Every week, we met at Honeycomb, and it’s not as if Mimi didn’t know about the whole strategy.”
Denny sat silent a minute. He had no reason to trust this woman—this friend of his wife’s whom he had just met—but he was out of reasonable choices. “I found a notebook of hers,” he said. “There was something else.”
Mary said nothing, just looked straight ahead, hands folded neatly in her lap.
He cleared his throat. “She wrote that the PTO was a cover operation. There were a few notes. Cover operation. Secret society. Things like that,” Denny said.
Those words were met with more silence. Mary did not move, but there was a nearly imperceptible twitch. Denny saw it. Something had caught her off guard. “Well, I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“Why would she have written it? It seems like a strange thing to write. And only days before . . .”
“I really don’t know,” Mary said abruptly. “Who knows why people do the things they do?”
Now Denny was interested. He tried to prop himself up on the sinking chair. Mary was still holding the button up in the air like a magical charm. “When you met with my wife,” he said, “what was it you had the feeling about? You didn’t say.”
“It was Di,” Mary said. “All along. It was always Di.”