Chapter 29
The trail on the south side of the lake is wide and welcoming, glowing from within at golden hour.
Skinny white pines and sparsely needled evergreens replicate in a destabilizing pattern of sameness.
Some kind of bird beeps with the insistence of a morning alarm clock.
Underfoot the trail is soft and springy, weirdly waterbed-like.
We fan out, walk three across, bouncing like we are in a good mood.
I have no idea where we are going, but Henry is carrying the same shovel PT must have carried when he set out to find Sarah, and I am too smart to play dumb.
I go over everything I’ve told Henry about my life the last few days, the deranged and devoted things we’ve said to each other, the stupefaction on his face when he put his hand between my legs for the first time in a dozen years, and it feels like there is a foreign object lodged in my lungs.
It was real, it had to be, but stumbling alongside him, sweating from my scalp, I am forced to admit that it was not enough.
That the whole time, this other, more sinister plot was unfolding, one I am still trying to track.
Hard as it is to imagine Henry playing a part in PT’s death, I can at least understand the why of it—PT found out what they did to Sarah, and he had threatened to go to the police.
But at what point did Henry link up with Corrine to decide that Campbell had to go too?
What happened to make him turn against his oldest friend?
I turn over various scenarios as we walk and walk and walk.
We cross a brook that babbles all year long, not just the odd February, “springtime” on the dusty hiking trails in Southern California.
We hopscotch its moss-furred stones. We twist through gorges and karate chop wild grass through an open field, descend onto soggy ground where the trees crowd, wet and musky smelling, and the temperature drops precipitously.
I must shiver, because from his hiker’s backpack Henry tosses me a fleece he grabbed from the coatrack by PT’s back door.
I put it on and jam my fists into the pockets.
My fingers graze something worn and soft, and I remove my hand to find I am holding a receipt from Walmart for rechargeable marine batteries and a pack of Pall Malls, dated ten days ago, around the time PT would have learned the truth about Sarah’s death.
I feel like someone has touched an ice cube to the back of my neck.
I know he had finally, properly quit a few years ago, which means he wore this fleece on his drive up here, stopped for supplies, saw the cigarettes behind the counter, thought if ever there was a time to give in to temptation…
I curl my fingers around the feathery slip of paper, hold his secret close. I knew I’d bump into him again.
The woods have dimmed by the time we venture off trail, evade the evergreens’ spiny branches, and stop at a pair of split trees that share roots, red and waxy as overgrown radishes.
Dorothy Parker’s hand remains. “Scratch a lover” etched with a steel tool into the first of the twin trees.
“Find a foe” on its conjoined trunk, where Henry goes over to stand now and block the inscription with his back.
He walks toe to heel, heel to toe, arms held out like he’s on a tightwire stretched between the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings.
He stops just shy of two recent excavations.
PT was so close to finding all of her. Henry rakes back browning pine needles with the tip of his shovel, and then he and Corrine start to dig.
I sit on the trunk of a fallen tree, with the wet wood soaking through my pants, dragging a stick through the forest’s black goo like I am dipping a quill pen into an inkwell.
I don’t need to see myself to know my face is pale and moist. An old injury in my shoulder flares, not an injury actually, but tissue damage from carrying an overstuffed tote bag all those years I played a twentysomething with her nose to the corporate grindstone.
Wardrobe stuffed it with actual books and a laptop and a spare pair of shoes and makeup, and by the end of the show’s run, I was walking around with one shoulder hitched higher than the other.
With my fingertips I trace the ache to my jaw, tapping, massaging.
I must hit the operational center of the pain, because a sudden bright spot blasts my vision, and when the spots fade, I’m thinking about that doomed trip I took with my husband to Hawaii three years ago, the vacation that fell the week PT brought the film students to Los Angeles for a set visit.
An unseasonable cold front had moved through the Pacific Islands region that week, and a cloud cover clung stubbornly to the resort.
We holed up in our hotel room, drinking Miami Vices, dozing, watching movies.
We did spa treatments one day, and after our massages as we soaked naked in the private Jacuzzi, I put my hand on my husband’s soft cock underwater.
He had laughed, uncomfortably, then pushed my hand away.
We had an outdoor shower attached to our villa that we used separately.
My husband and I have never showered together.
On the last morning of the last day, he reached for me in bed.
I had gotten high the night before and eaten two dinners—one at the restaurant and another at midnight from room service.
All week I had ordered fish and smiled benevolently at the waiter when he asked if I had left room for dessert.
Just a peppermint tea, please. I was holding out hope that back in our hotel room my husband would look at my flat stomach in my delicate lingerie and smell my peppermint breath and have to have me.
Every day that passed and this did not happen, I slumped deeper into despair, and by the last night I was desperate for some form of carnal pleasure.
I ate pasta and cheesecake in the hotel’s formal dining room.
Back in our room, chicken tenders and a warm brownie with vanilla ice cream off the children’s menu.
In the morning, I was sluggish and gassy, and when he reached for me, I initially patted his hand good-naturedly and murmured something about having to get ready to go, but on my way into the bathroom I’d stopped, turned around, and taken in my husband in the bed.
He was returning emails with a smile on his face; I could hear the swoop of the messages.
My husband claims to hate work, to find it unrewarding and stressful, but the way his face gets whenever he clocks in begs to differ.
He’d had a good vacation, and now he was ready to get back to what made him smile.
The words flew out of me raw. No sanitized I feel like statements so that the other person does not get their back up against the wall.
I had lost all hope, all will, for resolution.
“You knew we didn’t have enough time.”
My husband had turned his head on the pillow, blinking at me innocently. “Enough time for what?”
“To fuck.” I let that hang there; I knew he hated the word.
He hated all words related to sex as far as I could tell.
His shoulders tensed, and he would get a queasy expression on his face, like he was being forced to watch a woman give birth.
“You initiated, just now, because you knew I’d say we have to get ready to go.
That way you get to leave here and say, ‘Hey, I tried. She was the one who turned me down.’ ”
“Um,” my husband said, setting his phone down on the bed, preciously, like it was a valuable made of crystal.
He pulled himself into a seated position and stacked two pillows behind him so he could sit up comfortably while we had this conversation.
God forbid the man ever be without neck support.
I waited for him to say something, but he just stared at me patiently, waiting for me to explain why I was ruining the last five minutes of our vacation.
“We’ve been locked in this room together all week. Why didn’t you want to fuck me the first night? Or the first morning? Or the second or the third or the fourth?”
“Jesus Christ, Faye.” My husband ran his hands down his face and then back through his dark hair, making it stand up on end. His hazel eyes were wide with exasperation. “We don’t have to. It’s fine. Just please. Stop yelling at me.”
“I’m upset, okay? I’m upset and I’m trying to talk to you.”
“I didn’t do anything!” my husband cried, and I tensed.
This was always where our fights led. To my husband proclaiming his innocence in a shrill voice, and that day he even crossed his arms over his bare chest like women do when someone accidentally walks in on them changing.
I could not believe I was standing here fighting to fuck this man.
“You are acting like you’re the one who wants to do it,” I said, mustering every ounce of patience I had, “and I’m the one who doesn’t, and that’s not what’s happening here.
I don’t want to do it like this, okay? When I feel like shit and the clock is counting down.
I wanted to do it the first night, wearing what I was wearing when I came out of the bathroom.
” It was a little Kiki set that I had ordered online and that my assistant accidentally unboxed.
When she handed it to me, she said, Have fun on vacation, while wriggling her eyebrows, and my heart felt heavier than a human head.
“Faye, you looked great. It’s just.”
I waited him out a moment. “What? It’s just what—”
“You. You! It’s like your stress, just… like… radiates off you. It’s, like, a thing on your to-do list. That’s what it feels like.”
All bets were off then. “Fucking is a thing on my to-do list at this point. Do you think I actually want to have sex with you anymore?”
“Right back at you,” my husband snipped.