Chapter 31
The three of us pile into the runabout and chug back to Henry’s side of the lake.
Between the fallen tree that looks like a Revolutionary War cannon and the one that rears out of the water like a mutant shrimp, Corrine puts the engine in neutral and upturns the knapsack over the side of the boat, hailing the surface of the lake with Sarah’s vertebrae and ribs.
The sound is utterly heinous, and I tip my face upward to override my sense of hearing with sight.
Darkness has fallen, and the night sky is strung loosely with stars, some brighter and stronger than others, like a wire of Christmas-tree lights plugged in for the first time after a cold year in storage.
Corrine puts the engine in gear and turns the wheel toward Henry’s shore.
I step out of the boat before anyone can tell me what to do, brushing past Henry tying up the bowline. Corrine marshals me down the dock with the pistol at my back. “No,” she barks from behind. I turn and see her flick the pistol away from the main house. “Cabin.” I veer left on the stone path.
I go inside and stand stoically by the edge of the bed with my arms folded across my chest. It is dark as a movie theater in here, and the picture outside the windows shows Henry’s incredible Viking form skulking down the dock.
He disappears from sight, and I hear his boots crunch close, then farther away, close and far.
When he appears in the doorframe, he is carrying an armful of kindling.
He steps around Corrine and kneels before the fireplace.
We wait wordlessly while he crosshatches a base, then strikes the long wooden match that startles his profile in an abrupt burst of flame.
He returns the screen and stands. Corrine holds out her hand like Henry owes her money, and he drops the key to the cabin into her palm.
She curls her fingers into a fist with an evil landlord’s smile.
“Well,” Corrine says cheerfully, “I’m going to make my way to the clubhouse so I can give my brother a call and see where we’re at with things. You kids have fun.”
She walks out, careful not to give us her back, and locks us inside.
We face each other, avoiding eye contact, and listen to her clomp down the dock and start the engine to the boat.
When the chug-chug-chugging fades, Henry takes a small inhalation, the kind you take before you say something big, and I pull my shoulders back and ready myself.
“Faye,” Henry starts. He looks at me with haunted eyes, his body silhouetted orange by the fire. “All of that, back there, was to protect you.”
I laugh in disbelief. Not what I was expecting him to say. I’ll give him that.
“I know how it sounds, but Corrine is convinced we are plotting against her and she hates you and she has a gun.”
“This has all been about protecting me, right?”
Henry is quiet a moment. “No,” he admits. “I need this money.”
I smirk. “Points for honesty,” I say. “But if you even think about touching me right now, I will really, properly, fight you. You will be raping me for real.” We are supposed to use Henry’s phone to film ourselves making love.
A lot of women my age are repulsed by that expression, but when I hear it, all I feel is a terrible two-year-old’s rage.
A sex tape, a making love tape, is the ultimate form of collateral.
I will not be able to use any of the excuses Corrine enumerated earlier.
That I was brought here against my will, traumatized and acting in self-defense.
It will look like I killed Campbell because he discovered I was having an affair.
Fuck worrying about casting my movie; I’ll be bleeding dry my bank account to afford hot power-lady lawyers to defend me in a murder trial that House in Habitat will cover in a vicious series for all her hippie, tin-fedora-wearing followers.
Henry lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, halving his hugeness in response to that. “I need to tell you something. Can you just hear me out?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes.” Henry glances up at me sharply. “You always have a choice with me.”
“I will throw up.”
Henry exhales hard through his nostrils. Roughs up the back of his hair. “You are exactly the same, you know.”
I stare down at him. “It takes extraordinary nerve to say that to me right now.”
“When it comes to how you are, when things get serious, when things get soft—”
“Please, I beg of you—”
“You are impenetrable.”
I shake my head tightly. Everything Henry is saying is an echo of everything my husband says of everything Henry said to me before that.
I screw my eyes shut, waver uneasily on my feet.
I can feel this thing, the answer to this question—what are we really doing here?
—filling out, solidifying, but I cannot yet get my arms around its shape.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were planning on killing Campbell?
Why didn’t you tell me Corrine has been involved since the start? Why give me half the story?”
“Because if I told you everything, the question you would be left with was why. Why sell?”
I open my eyes. Yes. The answer to that question is the shape of it.
The Henry I knew valued the family history of this land and the responsibility he inherited to protect and preserve it.
The Henry I knew would not siphon it off for money.
The Henry I knew did not need money. But sitting on the bed before me, his head lowered in shame, is not the Henry I knew.
This Henry begins to tell me the truth.
His wife is sick. Not dying sick, but chemically unwell.
Bipolar is what the family doctor suspects, but she refuses to submit to an evaluation or seek treatment, so he can only speculate.
She suffers from episodes of mania that culminate in obscene spending sprees.
Henry goes to bed with two cars in the driveway and wakes up to three.
She enrolled their children in a kindergarten that cost as much as the colleges.
She books Emirates flights to the Maldives that she misses, and she makes risky investments.
Once, Henry went up to summerize the cabin and when he came back a week later, she had installed painted Toto toilets in all the bathrooms, seven thousand dollars a pop.
“Henry,” I say, as aghast as he was to learn my husband and I do not fuck. “How have you allowed this to go on?”
Henry’s shoulder blades expand and expand wider with long, deep breaths, the kind your doctor tells you to take at your annual checkup to make sure there’s nothing rattling around where it shouldn’t be.
He tells me that it started small. Little things, like hiring a night nanny for the first six months of his daughter’s life when most people do three months, or one, or none at all, and definitely not for twenty-four hours a day.
But his wife would assure him that someone in her family was paying for it.
Some rich childless aunt who doted on her like she was her own.
But when the bill arrived in the mail, suddenly the aunt was reneging on the offer.
When Henry tracked her spending, when he pointed out that they didn’t need a third car or a fourth or toilets with a gold maple-leaf motif on them, he was told he was being controlling.
He was reminded that this was an issue for him. He was reminded of what he did to me.
You said your control issues got in the way of your last relationship, Henry’s wife would say. You said to tell you if history started to repeat itself, because you did not want to lose me too.
“After a while,” Henry says, “I was just… unable to discern if I was the problem or if she was. And then it didn’t matter anymore, because we were falling behind on our mortgage payments, and I thought it would be a wake-up call for her.
She promised it would be. And for a while I thought we were through it.
She cut back on her spending, and a part of me knew it was too good to be true, and of course, it was.
” Henry pauses. Takes a deep inhale. “She had opened a credit card, in my dead grandmother’s name.
And so we were on the hook for all of that, plus paying for a lawyer to keep her out of jail for identity theft, and eventually the house was foreclosed upon and we were evicted. ”
Evicted. It’s such a dirty, lowbrow word.
The sort of word that does not belong to Henry’s world, that would have made more sense in mine, at least back when we knew each other.
I feel my innards twist and revolt, imagining Henry destitute, vulnerable.
I don’t want to think of him like that. I don’t want to fuck someone like that.
“That finally snapped me out of it,” Henry says.
“I asked for a divorce. She moved in with her parents, and I came here. I had a lot of time on my hands. Quiet hours, to think. To step back and see things for what they were. I could make out my marriage for what it was. I could make out what happened with us, here.” He pauses, looks around the room like he’s watching the two of us deteriorate the past. “I was scared of losing you, and I treated you horribly, but also, in treating you so badly, I made it easy for you to leave.” His gaze lands on the wispy flames of the fire, the occasional flashes of blue.
“I could have supported you to the ends of the earth, Faye, but the problem was that I loved you, and that was intolerable for you.”
It’s like there is a second set of eyes inside of my head, blinking twice for help, warning me off. Intolerable. I can only tolerate seeing so much.
“Obviously,” Henry says with a miserable laugh.
“I still love you. So I kept up the facade that you like, that you need, to be able to tolerate me. That I have money. Stature. Influence over you. That I can still push you around.” He looks down at his hands on his lap, anguished.
“I wish you could just love me too, but I will take whatever I can get from you.”