Chapter 28
I sit, slumped and hurting, at PT’s elaborate hickory table with thick logs for legs, watching Corrine bang around the kitchen, seeking anything with carbs.
Henry is across from me, monitoring me without expression.
I can’t look at him looking at me like that, and so I stare at the lines in the wood of the table until they swirl like I’ve microdosed too many times to have any business using the made-up word.
I am, at the moment, tripping all over my mutinous unconsciousness.
My feet catching on the corners of everything I refused to see before.
Henry has always been my captor, even when I thought I was free.
“Cereal.” Corrine retrieves a box from the cabinet next to the refrigerator, turns it over in her hands, looking for the best-by date. “I bet that’s a real treat for you, Faye.”
My vision throbs like a second pulse. “Will someone tell me what the fuck is going on?”
Corrine sighs. “See,” she says, “the problem is you’re an actress. So I don’t know what to make of this whole wide-eyed thing you’ve got going on.”
“Campbell’s dead and you seem pretty okay with it. I am unclear what to make of that as well.”
“Pretty okay?” Corrine repeats in a rage. “You think I’m pretty okay?”
“You don’t seem all that torn up.”
“I’m furious.”
“He attacked me first. I had no choice.”
“Jesus, Faye.” Corrine groans, exasperated. “We were planning on offing him anyway, is that what you need to hear me say?”
Outside, the frogs are shrieking incessantly. What is that? I asked, the first time I came here, and then they dulled to background noise that I stopped noticing until now.
“It’s Henry I’m furious with,” Corrine clarifies, “for thinking with his dick when he’s the one who needs this to work out more than anyone.”
I allow my eyes to drift to Henry at that.
There are freckles over the bridge of his nose that were not there when we arrived.
Did that happen when we were lying on the dock and he gave me his battered heart to hold?
My chest feels hot and cold, a strange menthol sensation, remembering the wounds we bared and then what we did to each other to anesthetize the pain.
Henry stares back at me with the indifferent gaze of a sunning house cat.
“I’d argue,” Henry says idly, “that you need me more than I need you. You’re the spouse. Everyone will be looking at you.”
“Which is why I’m covering all my tracks.
You should try it, Hen!” Corrine slams the cabinet door shut.
“See, Faye, when I called the caretaker to ask if he’d seen Campbell—I’m playing a part here, you know.
I have to look like I was worried I hadn’t heard from him—he said no, but that he did see Henry at the super Walmart, groping hothouse tomatoes with a woman who was not his wife. ”
“Fuck,” I say.
“Fuck,” Corrine agrees, opening and closing the cabinet drawers until she finds the one with the utensils.
“He didn’t recognize her,” Henry says to Corrine about me, as though I am not sitting right there. “And he’s promised not to say anything.”
“For a price,” Corrine reminds Henry furiously. She gets out a bowl, and into it she shakes a generous serving of stale cereal. I know it’s stale by the sound it makes when it hits the porcelain; like broken glass. “That’s coming off the top of yours, by the way.”
I gape at Henry. This is about something as cheap as money? “Is it a life-insurance thing?”
Corrine snorts. She has found a carton of shelf-stable milk in the pantry, and she’s sniffing from the spout, making a putrid face. “Henry? Would you like to be the one to elaborate?”
“I think,” Henry says in a clipped tone, “the less she knows, the better.”
“Guess not,” Corrine says, pouring what must be expired milk down the drain.
“I’d fill you in, Faye—I’m leaning toward believing you don’t know what’s going on; you’re not a very good actress, to be honest, smart of you to focus on the directing thing—but I really think it will be better coming from Henry. ”
“Do you know what’s going on?” I say, hoping to provoke her. “Do you know what they did to Sarah?”
Corrine fills a glass with water. She comes over and places my flavorless prison meal in front of me. “Faye,” she says with something approaching gentleness, “who do you think wrote the suicide note?”
The cereal is that brand that offers a diet plan on the back of the box.
Replace two meals with this cereal, it says, and you could lose up to ten pounds in two weeks.
I tried it once, and I am as lightheaded now as I was when I stepped on the scale after two weeks to discover that the back of the box wasn’t lying.
Corrine groans at the dazed look on my face, like she expected more from me.
“Faye, come on. You really thought that my dumbass husband, God rest his soul, turned to your dumbass boyfriend—take the hit, Hen—and said, ‘Hey you know what? Sarah can’t seem to get pregnant and seems a little devastated about that. She can hardly get out of bed. She can hardly face the world. She can hardly stand to look at anyone who could be so glib about having children, and we might be able to use that to throw everyone off the scent. We have a key to their place. PT is out of town. We could sneak in there. We could write something short but real-sounding. I mean, no, we’ve never experienced anything like this, but we have hearts and minds, so we can use those to at least imagine what someone going through what Sarah was going through might feel.
What do we come up with? How about—It’s too much.
Because that’s what it is even though it doesn’t make sense.
It’s nothing when you should have something, and it’s nothing over and over again, and it’s simply too much nothing.
Then, after we’ve gone outside and pushed her scull into the lake, we have to go in the bathroom to throw up, because again, hearts and minds, we have those, and this is all just so awful and sad, but it’s also the way it has to be because this was an accident and at least one of us has been accepted into the investment trading program at J.P.
Morgan, and God forbid we jeopardize that.
And while we have our heads in the toilet, we happen to notice a negative pregnancy test in the trash can, and we’re just like, holy shit.
Holy shit. And so we fish that out and we leave it next to the laptop before we go.
’ Truly, Faye, think for one fucking second.
” Corrine jams her index finger into the side of her head forcefully. Think, you fucking idiot. Think.
“I don’t think like you do,” I say to her.
Corrine screws up her face to make a mockery of my face, my voice. “You’re so cool, Faye, because you don’t want kids.”
I shake my head. No. You misunderstand. “PT meant something to me that someone like you does not have the capacity to understand.”
Corrine’s body jerks, like she’s woken from one of those falling nightmares in the moment before she hits the ground.
It’s that word, capacity. Something about it shames her.
The tips of her ears turn a virulent red.
“Campbell meant something to me, and when he called me in a blind fucking panic, I agreed to help him because I loved him and I didn’t want this to ruin his life.
And then”—Corrine erupts with hideous laughter—“I got what was coming to me.” She takes that sweatshirt that’s thrown over her shoulders like a cardigan, and she wraps the arms tighter around herself with a shudder.
“I had to use an egg donor with Tookie, did you know that? I did seven rounds of IVF. Seven. I’m definitely getting cancer from that, and in the end I still had to turn to a binder full of women who are so flush with fertility they have eggs to go around.
I did my best to choose someone who looked like me, who was built like me, but nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.
So sick that six months ago I missed my period for the first time since I was thirteen, despite having what the doctors call very low ovarian reserve.
I made it all the way to the twenty-week ultrasound.
That’s a significant milestone, in case you don’t know.
It’s when you find out the sex. I was having a boy.
I had decided on a name. I got shit monogrammed.
I was showing, and I continued to show even after I walked in on Campbell fucking my little brother’s girlfriend and no longer needed the embroidered crib sheet.
Anything after twenty-four weeks is not considered a miscarriage but a stillbirth.
He looked like a baby.” Corrine’s cheeks are hot and streaked with tears, real tears, and she turns away from me to wipe them off with the sleeves of her sweatshirt.
I want to tell her that she doesn’t need a menthol stick to pull off the grieving widow act.
She just needs to relive the agony of this experience and she will be fine.
“I am sorry,” I tell her.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
“No,” Corrine spits, her eyes red and wild, “you might think you mean it, but ultimately, you are the one who is incapable. Until you have someone in your life you love so much that you would take a bullet for them, even on the days you wish they were never born, there are limits to what you can feel.”
“I’ll just have to take your word for it,” I say, and I make sure to direct this straight at Henry.
He is staring at me with his hard eyes, and I suddenly understand that expression in the literal sense.
If our eyes fell out of our heads at the same time and hit the floor, mine would squish and seep. Henry’s would dent the wood.
“You need to eat something,” Henry says to me, but his concern is only a practical one. “It’s not close, and we’re going on foot.”
I stare at my cereal bowl. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Corrine comes over and presses the pistol into my temple.
Fear drop-kicks my stomach. I’ve held a gun before, but I’ve never felt the metal of a muzzle against my skin.
This one is rough and scratchy, revealing its age.
It is obviously an antique; Corrine wouldn’t hold anything as base as a Glock.
I bet it belonged to someone’s grandfather, passed down like a Patek, and it keeps knocking against the bone in my temple because Corrine is trembling with the restraint of not blowing my brains onto the kitchen table. “Eat your fucking Wheaties, Faye.”
I look to Henry for something. Something. And for a moment I think he will save me not because I am more of a liability dead than alive but because it is me.
“Eat, Faye,” Henry says, almost kindly. “This is the last thing you have to do. And then we can all go home. We never have to see each other again.”