Chapter 24
Our last full day is a stunner. Piercing blue sky and the sun shining through to the bedrock bottom of the lake.
We have a cannonball contest. We take turns straddling the other on the dock.
We go inside and artfully design a snack plate.
We make cocktails, screwdrivers. Tomorrow we will leave.
Why not get drunk and walk around naked and fuck like the nubile survivors of a shipwreck from that famous eighties movie, discovering what’s between our legs for the first time?
We do all that and we doze in the sun and we wake up and do all that again.
At some point Henry pries himself away from me to take the toolbox I always made fun of him for having into the cabin to fix the window I broke.
I offer to make us another round. From the freezer I remove a frosty bottle of vodka.
True WASPs know nothing of quiet luxury or the debatable metabolic merits of tequila.
They dress unfashionably, and their Grey Goose is always cold and half empty.
I walk the stone path between the main house and the cabin with soft feet, my face serene and my heart ramming my ears.
I mosey inside with a fresh screwdriver, finding Henry on his knees, blotting the edges of the window frame with a small spongey paintbrush.
I rap on the open door to get his attention.
“How’s it going?”
“Just waiting for the caulk to dry so I can repaint.”
“What does the caulk do?”
“Seals the window to the wall.”
“How long does it take to dry?”
Henry sits back on his heels, cranes his neck to check his phone.
It’s resting face up on the bed, and I see there are seven minutes left on the timer he’s set.
I don’t know how long it will take him to repaint, but once the caulk is set, he won’t be able to get back out the window.
Seven minutes. I have to keep this up for seven minutes.
I offer Henry the glass. He takes a long swig, stares at the pulpy surface a moment.
“I want to see you, after all this is over.” He looks up at me with his ink-blot eyes, terrified. “Do you want to see me too?”
I won’t ever recover from this, I decide. “Henry,” I say, like I can’t believe he had to ask, “Of course.”
Henry expels all the air from his lungs, wide shoulders sagging with relief. It winds me too, to watch someone so big act so small. “I can come to you. Or we can come here.”
“We’d need to be very careful.”
Henry nods. Then, “You don’t think you’d ever leave him?”
“I just don’t know… how we untangle things.”
“People do it all the time.”
“Yeah. And people lose everything.”
“You wouldn’t lose me,” Henry says with a sad smile.
“You say that now.”
Henry gives me a startled look.
“We’re living in a bubble here.” I gesture. Here. The cabin. The lake on all sides. No one but us and the crickets to tell us if we need a jacket before going outside. “I don’t know yet how this translates in the real world.”
“I’m just talking about trying. You want to try, don’t you?”
“I said I did.”
“You did?” Henry sets his drink down on the floor. Begins to get up. Shit. I glance at his phone on the bed. Six minutes.
“I do,” I say, correcting myself, but this does not diffuse the suspicion on Henry’s face.
“Did something happen?” Henry wants to know, edging close, worrying his hair with his hand. “Did something change?”
I shake my head vehemently. “It’s just hitting me that we’re leaving. That I should be scared. Really fucking scared.”
Henry reaches for me. He tugs me to him, cheek to chest. I let him. I don’t have a choice. He smells too good.
Henry burrows his face in the crook of my neck. “What aren’t you saying?” he whispers warmly into my skin. The room has a chemical, trippy odor. My mind feels jumbled, distorted. Something. I have to give him something to pass these next five minutes and thirty-four seconds.
“I’m different,” I attempt haltingly, “out there. I’m not like this. I’m not soft.”
Henry draws back, scrutinizes me all over.
He picks something out of my hair, shows it to me as though to assure me it’s not anything with legs.
Just a small, fleecy white bloom. “Faye, no offense”—he blows the bud from his fingertip—“but if you think this is you being soft, we’ve got some work to do. ”
I say to him, unsmiling, “I think you’ll still want me out there. I could be wrong, but I think you will. What I mean is that I don’t know what I’ll feel.”
Henry stares down at me, the tenderness in his eyes turning over into something else.
“There is something tempting,” I rush to explain, “about feeling small.” I look down at my feet, wishing I had thought to put on shoes before I came in here.
“I’ve gotten to be that again with you, here, but back home”—I glance out the window.
Who knows in what direction. East, south, Canada.
If my architecturally significant post and beam with a view of the observatory lies due west, it is only by luck.
“I am too big for that. I do not need you the way I once did.”
“Faye,” Henry says, my name smooth on his tongue, “there are ways I can give you what you need that have nothing to do with who has the bigger mortgage now.”
I look up at him, crinkle my nose in disgust. “You have a mortgage?”
There is a subtle darkening in the room. Cloud cover, though last time I noticed, the sky was an unblemished blue. My heart kicks my chest. This is our third rail. Who has the money. Who has the power. And I’ve just reached out, gloveless and death-wishing, to touch it.
“Your bravado,” Henry says, cool and remote, “is actually revolting.”
“Nothing I’ve said is untrue.”
“You don’t need to say everything that is true,” Henry says. “That you don’t know that yet, that’s the revolting part. Show some fucking humility.”
I glance at the timer on the bed, back at Henry. “Make me.”
Henry stares at me with livid calm. Lightly, he runs a hand up my back, gathers my hair in his fist. “Easy, Faye. It’s so easy with you.”
My head jerks back. I expel a guttural sound from my diaphragm, like a tennis player at Wimbledon returning a tough serve. Henry adjusts his stance, shifting his weight so that he can slide one of his considerably thick thighs between my legs. My pelvis is instantly flush and frantic with blood.
“I want you to fuck yourself on my leg,” he says. “Don’t be cute or sexy about it. You know what I want.”
It is what I want, actually, but what I want is what Henry wants and around and around we go.
I sink down on Henry’s thigh with a groan that will haunt me until the end of my days.
I can barely stand to hear myself so needful.
Henry watches me with something like curiosity, but as I squeeze my thighs around his thighs and seek my relief, I realize the look on his face is nearer to pity.
A warm panic squeezes my lungs. How can I leave Henry?
How can I leave this? And so instead I leave my body to watch what I am doing from the outside, the gruesome spectacle I am making of myself while Henry stands, unmoving and benevolent, scanning my face for signs I’m about to bust all over his J.Crew chinos.
“I could watch this all day,” he says fondly. “Are you going to come, sweetheart? I see it in your face. That’s fast, even for you.”
I grunt with my bottom lip in my top teeth.
Henry cups my chin in his hand and brings his face close to mine.
“The thing is, Faye? You can’t get away from me.
” Then, almost apologetically, “No matter where you go and what else you accomplish, I will always know you like this.” I gasp in his face, a disastrous admission.
Beneath all the other hollow and painted versions of myself, Henry has found the innermost doll in the nesting set, the smallest, most solid me.
On the bed, the timer counts down the final few seconds.
We notify Henry that we are done at the same time.
I stand there, in the shrill blare of the alarm, straddling Henry’s leg, spots swimming in front of my eyes, trying to find my footing again.
I am a bad, bad person, I have to be, for being able to do that, for doing what I do next.
I go over to the bed and stab the alarm silent. Then I lift Henry’s screwdriver to my lips to take a sip. The glass is slippery with condensation, and it falls from my fingers just as easily as it shatters on the floor. “Shit,” I say. “Sorry. I’ll get a towel.”
“Don’t move,” Henry says, as I hoped he would.
He turns and disappears into the bathroom, and I grab the toolbox—there are hammers in there, things he could use to break down the door—and I take wide, leaping steps to freedom, slam the door behind me quick, lock it with numb, shaking hands.
From the other side, Henry calls out my name in confusion.
I take a step back from the door in disbelief, and when I realize I did it, I locked Henry inside, I lunge forward furiously.
“You’re a fucking liar!” The words come roaring out of me. Something small and fast goes tearing through the woods.
“Liar?” Henry repeats, bewildered. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Why is PT’s heart medication in your safe?”
For a moment, only silence. Then the doorknob begins to rattle menacingly. “Open the door, Faye. I mean it. You should not have found that. You should not be out there alone. Please. Just open up and I’ll explain.”
“Explain to me now.”
Henry hits the door with the flat of his hand in frustration. “Campbell took it.”
I shake my head. Try to think straight. “When?”
“The night PT had us over. He went upstairs to use the bathroom, and Campbell pocketed it then. He had no way of knowing for sure that PT might need it, but he had a pretty good idea. A man with a heart condition who overexerted himself and found out his wife was murdered? Campbell took his shot.”
“Why? Why would he do that?” I am close to crying, thinking how little PT mattered to Campbell in the end, how little any of us did.
“Because PT was talking about going to the police and outing us. Why else?”
“Then why do you have it?”
Another pause. “Corrine found it.”
I take one big step back from the door, my shock necessitating a physical response. “Corrine?”
“Yes, Corrine.”
“But… what did she say? How did Campbell explain himself to her?”
“He didn’t have to, just. Open the fucking door, Faye.”
“No. Answer my question. Why wouldn’t he have to explain himself to her?”
In the silence that stretches, I’m sure Henry is about to tell me.
But then there is a vicious crack from the inside.
I hug myself in horror, realizing Henry is throwing himself at the door, that we did this once already the night he chased me down at the clubhouse and he managed to blow the hinges off the door then too. I turn. I run.