Chapter 19
I wake alone, the room infused with harsh, high-noon light. I feel melty and warm, my mind untangled and clear. You killed Campbell yesterday, I am reminding myself when Henry comes out of the bathroom, patting his face dry with a hand towel.
“Hi,” he says, almost shyly.
I sit up in bed slowly. “Hi,” I say.
“Did you sleep okay?”
I nod. “You?”
Henry nods too. We are being careful with each other, polite and distant.
“I was going to make some breakfast,” Henry says, and starts for the kitchen.
I catch his hand as he passes, tug him back to me.
I get on my knees and tilt my face up to his.
Henry is backlit and precisely rendered, his shadow falling to the side and broken by the wall, too long to fit the floor.
He looks down at me with his deep-water-blue eyes, his face twisted in pain.
I put my hands on places where he is furrowed, frowning, try to smooth him into what it is I am feeling.
Alive doesn’t begin to capture it. I feel younger than I am, more beautiful, my wits sharp as knives.
I awoke a completely idealized version of myself.
“I’m sorry,” he says, burying his face in my hands.
“Sorry?” I repeat.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding patronizing, but I’m just so fucking proud of you, Faye.
Sometimes I’m so proud it turns into envy.
Sometimes panic. I think about that day in the car and what would have happened if you hadn’t gotten away from me, and it makes it hard to breathe.
And I’m like…” Henry is having trouble breathing now.
“Should I just let you go? Am I going to ruin you? I don’t want to ruin you, Faye. ”
My heart is flipping around like a fish on land.
Henry is giving me an out, but the crevices of my fingers are collecting his tears like rainwater, and my body is aching from the briefest of use.
I put my mouth on his and shake my head.
No, no, no. I am not being ruined. I am being reminded of what I am capable of.
“I want to do this for you,” I say, and I kiss his neck, his collarbone, the backs of his hands and the fronts.
Henry grasps my hands in his own. I can see the question shaping his lips into a small O. Why? Why would I want to do this? How can I be so willing to risk everything? I give a small shake of my head. Please don’t ask. Not yet, anyway.
Where the inlet narrows with tall granite rocks on either side, the current curls around us like a fist. Henry does something to the gears that throws our heads back then snaps them forward on our necks.
My hair is sticky with the spray of lake water by the time we reach the cabin where Campbell and Corrine spend the smallest fraction of their summers possible.
Corrine much prefers her parents’ shingled estate that clings to the cliffs of Newport, though Campbell did what he could to make the property on Lake Wanika more appealing to her, going so far as to install a tankless water heater that caused such an uproar an addendum had to be added to the community guidelines regarding property permits.
It confirmed for the members a bias they’d harbored against Corrine before they had any evidence to support it: she wasn’t all in on this place.
She didn’t want to see flabby old bodies bathing in the lake, and when something needed repair, she hired people to fix it.
Inside, I track Emma’s silhouette moving away from the window and disappearing into the back of the house.
She was watching, waiting for us, and I think she ducked into the bathroom to reapply a coat of her emotional-support lip gloss, because when she lets us in the side door, her lips are once again that cheap shade of pearly pink that makes her appear tanner than she already is.
I can smell the dry shampoo on her, and she is wearing black slacks and a button-down, like we have a scheduled job interview.
“Come in,” she says with an expansive sweep of her arm.
I stomp my feet on the braided jute doormat and step inside Corrine’s version of Connecticut in the burly mountains.
Beige rugs and beige couches. Those woven navy-and-white barstools at the countertop.
Matching light-oak coffee and farm table. Bland on ever more bland.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Emma says to me with relief, then directs a chiding glance at Henry. “You had me worried the other night.”
“Oh God.” I laugh like I am embarrassed and tuck myself into Henry’s side. “We were just messing around. I had no idea anyone else was here.”
Emma eyes me, then Henry, like she is a social worker assessing for signs that I am protecting my abuser. But I am snug under Henry’s arm, fitted into his firm torso, and I do not have to perform my content.
Emma gestures for us to sit down on the linen couch, having no choice but to find us genuine. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
“I am dying for a seltzer if you have.” I hate seltzer but I just know Emma’s got a whole case of it in the fridge, that it is as much a part of her personality as her winter tan.
“Yes!” Emma cries. “Grapefruit or lime?”
“Grapefruit.” Gross. “You are a godsend.”
“Henry?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Emma sweeps into the kitchen, reaches for two highball glasses, presses each into the ice maker (an ice maker!—the Wanikans must love that), then pours our drinks at the angle that kids pump beer from the keg into their party cups. She presents mine to me with a small bronze coaster underneath.
“Thank you.”
Emma sits down next to us in an oatmeal-colored boucle chair and watches me sip my seltzer like she has cooked an extravagant meal for me and now she has the pleasure of watching me savor my first bites.
“Crisp,” I say to her, and Emma beams with pride.
Last night, while I was tied up and probably bleeding from my brain, Henry came to see Emma to let her know that Campbell’s son, the quiet red-haired boy I met outside the chapel, had a severe asthma attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
Corrine had called the caretaker, who lives a mile from the parking lot, and he rushed over and spotted Campbell’s boat docked outside the clubhouse.
He’d gone inside and found Campbell and chauffeured him straight to the Yale New Haven emergency room.
Campbell had left his car for Emma so she could drive herself to the train station in Albany and catch a ride back to the colleges.
He’d told Corrine he was low on gas and he hadn’t wanted to waste any time stopping.
“Is Tookie okay?” Emma asks, her tone turned mothering and grave.
“I stopped by the clubhouse this morning to call Campbell and check in,” Henry says. “Tookie is going to be released later today.”
“Thank God,” Emma says. She puts her hand over her heart, exhales hard.
She waits just long enough to ask, “Did Campbell say anything else?” She slurps from her drink, her eyes trained eagerly on Henry.
She’s wearing winged eyeliner, and one side is drawn longer than the other, like a lopsided Cleopatra.
“He said he loves you and thank you for understanding,” Henry says.
There is a blast of color to Emma’s cheeks. “Of course,” she emphasizes. “I just feel so bad for him. And for Tookie. Corrine is, ugh, well…” Emma looks to me as though I might have the word for what Corrine is.
“He’s lucky to have Campbell for a father,” I say, and in that moment I remember how Tookie had slipped his hand into Campbell’s the day I met him outside the chapel and leaned into him shyly, hiding half his face behind Campbell’s leg.
My heart beats slower, lower, thinking about his freckled face falling when he learns his father is gone.
“So lucky,” Emma agrees, but I can tell she’s bored of speaking about Campbell’s kid and ready to return to the subject of herself.
She sets her glass on a coaster and crosses her legs, clasping her hands around her knees with a patient, expectant look.
Last night Henry also told Emma to hang tight, that we’d come by to ferry her to the parking lot in the morning, and that I had something I wanted to talk to her about, writer to writer, a vomitous lie that Emma looks ready to lick up on her hands and knees.
“This is awkward,” I say to her, shrinking into myself and grimacing like I am embarrassed. “Because it’s going to come across like a quid pro quo, but you should know that quid pro quos happen all the time in my industry and you only make them with people whose contributions you value.”
Emma stares at me hungrily with her uneven eyes.
“I’m obviously mortified that you found out I was here with Henry—”
“I would never judge you,” Emma insists magnanimously.
“Unfortunately, you would be the only one, should this get out.”
Henry reaches for my hand in a show of support. I glance at him with gratitude, face Emma bravely, as though I have called a press conference to share some harrowing health update with the public.
“Women cannot win.”
“Mmmm,” I agree, though this is one of those sayings I detest coming from women like Emma, someone who has not yet lost anything, who does not understand it is this very consensus that has made it possible for me to win sometimes.
If the world were fair to us, what would I have to write about?
“I would like to offer you a role as a production assistant on my next project. We are in conversation with someone very exciting to star, and if she attaches, preproduction would begin this summer, likely in Los Angeles, though it could be Atlanta. In addition to your salary, I would cover your travel and living expenses for the entirety of the forty-seven-day shoot, which will shake out to about four months.”
Emma doesn’t say anything, and after a long moment, when it becomes clear that’s the offer, she releases her knees and eases back into the chair. “Oh,” she says, surprised and ever so slightly insulted.