Chapter 25 #2
“One other thing,” Denny said, leaning into the frame of the squad car.
He could feel his size compared to the boy’s.
He felt sorry for the kid, who had been caught in between a bad boss and an angry widower, but what choice was there now?
They were all in too deep. “Let Officer Malkin know that I’d like my wife’s laptop back.
He’s had plenty of time to analyze its contents, or whatever he’s been doing with it over there.
He can bring it over here or I can come get it.
Private property and all that. I sure wouldn’t want to have to file a police report against the police.
” Denny laughed a little, but the young officer didn’t seem to find the joke funny.
“I’ll relay the message.”
“Much obliged.”
Denny gave the car a loud pat with his flat, open palm and then turned to walk in to the house.
Whatever was in the office was of interest to Sticks, and to whoever was in Sticks’s circle.
Denny imagined a dinner party: Ellen, Di, Mimi, and Karen, with Sticks at the head.
Spouses in attendance, candles burning down to pretty little beeswax nubs.
Glasses of red wine; tiny filets mignon, rare; pommes purée; and the skinny little asparagus that used to make his wife insane.
Who buys these stupid little things, anyway?
They are insulting to actual asparagus. A demi-glace and, for dessert, tarte tatin, one perfect white tablecloth, maybe everyone at Di’s midcentury oval table, the one with the Kardiel Milla dining chairs, which he had always coveted, even though he made things out of wood, not leather.
He could picture this imaginary (or was it real?) dining scene, a bottle of Opus One opening up in Di’s Riedel swan decanter, everyone a little drunk, a conversation unfurling about Anna, nuisance that she was, and about how to fix a problem without creating a different one.
Husbands off to the family room to watch football and nap, the unspooling of an idea, of a plan, a joke at first and then more serious. They could do it, couldn’t they?
At first, it was just an idea, and then it was an idea that became the seed that was planted, something growing, developing roots.
Stopping a cancer like Anna had purpose.
Hamilton was a place worth preserving. She was messy and they were tidy, clean people who believed in their tidy, clean town.
Believing in the same things kept them together.
Believing in the same things kept them whole.
A dinnertime conversation. A joke, even.
The kind of story told among friends that gradually took on a distinct shape.
When had their eyes become little pinpricks, when had the wine turned their tongues the color of blood, when had the color drained from the room, when had everything turned cold, when had someone stood up to draw the thick velvet curtains in the dining room, when had the loud voices in the room turned hushed, when had they realized that they had started to develop a plan?
Mimi. The kind of woman who would push a little girl into a pool.
Oh, come on, they all knew it. Ruthless to a fault.
She would do anything to maintain her social status, and no one doubted how far she would really go.
It was true. She had come from nothing—few knew it, but she had grown up dirt-poor in some Podunk town in Maryland—and look at her now, look at everything she had become, clawing for freedom, clawing, clawing, clawing, unwilling to give up everything she had fought so hard to achieve.
Ellen. Just a second-rate field hockey star who had only made it as far as UMass.
Not as pretty as the other girls, and sure, she had gotten out of Rowley, but who even looked twice at Ellen Wilson?
Well, Mimi Mar did. Mimi put trust in Ellen, took her under her wing, fluffed her up and made her feel important, and that was enough.
It was enough to be part of something, to be part of the PTO, and it was enough to want to defend that something if it was under attack.
Karen. A blank canvas. Denny could barely even remember what Karen looked like when he wasn’t standing directly in front of her. Mimi’s careful stooge. She would do anything for the Queen Bee, Denny knew that and so did everyone else: Mimi and Ellen and probably even Anna.
Sticks. A has-been high school athlete willing to protect his sister at all costs. Denny hadn’t seen it before, but he saw it now, that desperation, that common bond, these two locals who had never really made it out of Rowley after all.
And that left Di. Smart-as-a-whip Di, who always existed in Anna’s shadow.
She could have gone to Haverford, like her father, but she settled for Division 1 UMass instead, and for what?
For a sport that failed her. She came back to town just like everybody else, while Anna was off living a life, all that exciting shit she had done in her twenties and thirties.
More than once, Anna had stumbled into bed—in the city, in Montauk that first summer, and in Hamilton, long after they moved—loose-lipped about Di.
Di had always wanted to write books, she had always wanted to see the world, she had once hoped to travel after college.
Di had these aspirations, but she had gotten stuck, and the bottles of rosé seemed to pile up on the countertop.
It wasn’t really all that shiny and happy being the tallest and most alive and most centered person at the party after all.
Denny had shaken all this off the way he had shaken every bit of Hamilton gossip off.
Upper-middle-class ennui. The chatter of the town.
The sound of his wife’s voice was so far off now, like the sound of crackling radio when you were losing a station, back when that was a thing.
If he had only been listening, he thought now.
If he had been paying attention. Then what?
Could he have stopped the force of nature that was Anna Plummer, pulled her back from an inevitable edge?
Could he have stopped Anna’s fate, if he had been listening to the sounds of the radio, if he had turned the dial to make it clearer?
Sticks would be back. Denny was sure that he had not seen the last of the officer, that whatever treasures his wife’s Hague Blue office held were now of interest to a crowd.
The bus would be back soon, returning his children to him.
He was a different man than he was in the morning, when he had bundled them in hats and gloves and warm winter coats and shuttled them on, kissing them goodbye, telling them to have a good day, wondering how much of this they would remember when they were older.
He knew so much more now. Every single moment that followed that first moment—a frozen Ophelia in a river—had led him here, to the driveway outside his house, where he finally knew.
He knew. He knew it all now, memories come back to haunt him like a curse.