Chapter 5 #2
“I know it.” Scarlett pressed her hand against her chest. “I watched him for three days. I watched him dive until he couldn’t stand up.
I watched him hold that dress. That man is not pretending.
” She took a breath. “And if I’m wrong, I need to see it in his face when he sees me.
That’s the only way I’ll ever know for sure. Not from a lawyer. From his face.”
Jess stared at her.
Then she picked up her car keys.
“I’m driving you,” she said. “I’m parking outside the gate. If you’re not texting me from his phone in fifteen minutes, I’m calling 911 and then I’m coming over the wall.”
* * *
The house on Biscayne Bay was dark.
Jess parked on the street under a big banyan tree, just past the reach of the gate lights, and turned off the engine. Scarlett looked at the gate. Tall black iron between white stone pillars. Beyond it, the long drive and the pale shape of the house, and beyond that the black shine of the bay.
She had lived here for nine years. It looked like a stranger’s house.
“Fifteen minutes,” Jess said.
“Fifteen minutes.”
Scarlett got out of the car. She walked to the small keypad on the pedestrian gate beside the big one. She typed in the code without having to think about it. It was the date of their wedding. She had told Ryan to change it years ago, because everyone knew their wedding date. He never had.
The gate clicked.
* * *
She let herself in through the side door, the one by the laundry room that went into the kitchen. The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. The kitchen smelled like flowers.
There were flowers everywhere. Lilies. White roses.
Big arrangements on every counter and on the island and on the floor by the windows, with little white cards stuck in plastic forks.
With deepest sympathy. Thinking of you, Ryan.
She was a light. They were going brown at the edges.
The smell was sweet and heavy and rotten underneath.
Scarlett walked through her own kitchen past the flowers from people mourning her.
On the island, under a vase of lilies, there was a stack of printed pages. She knew what it was before she picked it up. A memorial program. A proof from a printer, with her pearl-earring photograph on the front and her name in a curly font she would never in her life have chosen.
Scarlett Walsh. Beloved wife.
She opened it. Inside there was an order of service. Two hymns she didn’t like. A reading. A list of speakers, and the first name on the list was Dr. Alexis Burke, family friend.
On the facing page was a short obituary. Someone had typed it neatly. Scarlett was a devoted wife and a tireless supporter of the Walsh Foundation. In recent months she had quietly struggled, and she is now at peace.
Someone else had attacked that page with a black pen.
The pen had gone through the paper in two places.
It had crossed out quietly struggled so hard the words were gone.
It had crossed out tireless supporter of the Walsh Foundation.
It had crossed out at peace. And in the margin, in handwriting Scarlett had known for nine years, big and slanted and furious, it said:
NO. She was not struggling. She was not “at peace.” She built SwimSafe with her own hands and she taught a thousand kids to swim and she was the strongest person in any room. Take Alexis off the list. Luke, if this goes to the printer like this I will fire you.
Scarlett read it three times.
She put the program down carefully under the lilies, exactly where it had been.
In the hallway, the guest room door stood half open. A small lamp was on inside.
She stopped.
Alexis was asleep on top of the covers. She lay on her side with one arm under the pillow, wearing a soft gray sweater and leggings.
Her dark hair was loose. Her shoes stood side by side under the chair.
Her leather medical bag sat on the chair seat, closed.
On the nightstand beside her there was a glass of water and a book and a small orange pill bottle.
She looked peaceful. She looked like a woman who slept well.
Scarlett stood in the doorway and felt something rise in her so hot and so huge that her vision went white at the edges. It came up from her stomach into her throat. She thought about walking to the bed. She thought about what her hands would do.
She held onto the door frame instead, the way she had held onto the doorframe in Cooper’s kitchen.
Not like this, the swimmer’s voice in her head said. Not in the dark. Not with no one watching. She wants you to be the crazy wife. Don’t give it to her.
Scarlett let go of the door frame and walked away down the hall.
* * *
The stairs were carpeted. She went up them without a sound.
Their bedroom door was open. The big bed was made, perfectly, the way the housekeeper made it, and it had not been slept in. The pillows were still stacked. On her side of the bed, on her nightstand, somebody had put a framed picture of her face down.
There was a light on in the closet.
It was a walk-in closet, bigger than Jess’s kitchen. Ryan’s suits on one side. Her dresses on the other. The door was open a few inches and yellow light spilled out across the carpet.
Scarlett pushed the door open.
Her clothes were on the floor.
Not all of them. But a lot. Her sweaters had been pulled off the shelves. Her old college swim parka lay in a heap. One of her work blazers. The blue dress she’d worn to the foundation gala. They were piled on the carpet in a kind of nest.
And in the middle of it, sitting with his back against the drawers and his legs stretched out, was her husband.
He was wearing the same shirt he’d worn on television that afternoon.
It was untucked and wrinkled. There was a bottle of whiskey on the carpet beside him, a third gone, with no glass.
He was holding one of her sweaters against his chest with both arms. It was the gray one.
The old, soft, stretched-out gray one she wore on cold mornings on the pool deck, the one he always teased her about and told her to throw away.
His face was pressed into it.
He was breathing in.
He was breathing in the smell of her, slowly, with his eyes shut, the way a man breathes in a thing he knows he will never smell again.
Scarlett stood in the doorway.
She could not move. She could not speak. Every word she had planned in Jess’s car, every cold, clear sentence, was gone. There was nothing inside her but the sight of him, and a pain so big it didn’t have edges, and under it, terrible and alive, a love she had been so sure was dead.
Ryan lifted his head.
He opened his eyes. He looked at the doorway, slow and unfocused, the way he had probably looked at that doorway a hundred times in the last two weeks, seeing her there because he wanted to.
Then his eyes focused.
And he saw her.