Chapter 8 #2
The table at Christmas. The chair at Maureen’s right hand. You’ll sit by me, dear. That had been the bet itself.
The only thing she could think of was the scar on her thumb. The broken pane. Thirteen years ago, on a night shift, before she’d ever heard his name.
That was hers. That was all.
* * *
“Who else knows?” she said to the window.
Silence behind her.
She turned around. He was standing where she’d left him. His face was gray.
“About the money,” she said. “Patrice doesn’t know. I know she doesn’t. So who? Who did you tell, Lucas?”
He didn’t say anything.
It was on his face before he said a word, the same as in the kitchen in August. The same thing. The same woman.
“Heather,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
“When?”
“In the summer,” he said. His voice was low.
“In the car. We were talking about—I was talking about you. About how proud I was. About the program. And I told her.” He opened his eyes.
“I don’t know why I told her. I’ve never told anyone.
I just—she was easy to tell things to. She already knew the worst thing about me, so it didn’t—”
He stopped. He heard what he was saying.
Amelia stood still.
At carrying a life someone else paid for. You make it look like it was yours all along.
That was what Heather meant. In the car line, under the white columns, with her soft fond smile.
Heather hadn’t been talking about the forty million.
She’d been talking about this. She’d known.
She had known for months. She had known the truth about Amelia’s own life, about the one thing Amelia thought was hers, and she had stood there and handed it to her in a sentence Amelia couldn’t understand, and walked away smiling.
Another woman had known her own life better than she did.
He had driven that woman to meetings in his own car and told her the secret he had kept from his wife for three years. Told her the thing he’d done for his wife, the thing he was proudest of. He’d given her that. He’d given Heather Stiles the one good secret he had.
“Get out,” Amelia said.
“Amelia—”
“Take your boxes and get out. Please.” She heard her voice. It was quiet and flat. It didn’t sound like her. “I’m asking you nicely. I won’t ask you nicely again.”
He stood there one more second. Then he picked up the two file boxes from the end of the table, and he went. He didn’t say anything else. He closed the door behind him gently, the way Walt closed car doors.
She sat back down at the long table. She sat there with her hands folded in front of her.
At some point Tasha knocked softly and said, through the door, “Amelia? You okay?” and Amelia said, “I’m fine, Tasha. Thank you,” in a perfectly normal voice. Tasha went away.
She was not fine. She was so angry she could feel her pulse in her teeth. But it was a new kind of angry. It wasn’t hot anymore. It had gone past hot to something else, something clear and cold and still on top. Underneath, where nobody could see, it was still burning.
* * *
Roxanne came to the apartment at seven that night because Amelia called her and said, “Can you come,” and nothing else.
She came up the outside stairs fast and let herself in with the key Amelia had given her. She stopped in the doorway of the front room.
Amelia was sitting at the card table in the green chair. The lights were off except the one lamp. She had changed out of her work clothes into the gray hoodie. There was a cup of tea in front of her that she hadn’t touched.
“Okay,” Roxanne said. “Tell me.”
Amelia told her.
She told it the same way she had told the first time, in Roxanne’s kitchen, in August. In order, like a report.
The name. The kitchen floor at four in the morning.
The board, and the twelve days, and the old woman in Druid Hills with her glasses on.
It was me. Every year. I read your letters too. And then Heather.
This time, though, she didn’t cry. She didn’t get loud. Her voice didn’t crack once.
Roxanne listened to all of it standing up. When it was done, she pulled out the other chair and sat down across from her, and looked at her over the tops of her reading glasses.
“Okay,” Roxanne said slowly. “Okay. That’s a lot.”
“I’m done, Rox.”
Roxanne didn’t say anything.
“I’m done,” Amelia said again. “Not like August. In August I was hurt. In August I was so hurt I couldn’t breathe, and I kept thinking, maybe if he explains it, maybe if I understand it.
That’s over. I understand it now. I understand him.
” She looked at the lamp. “He’s never going to stop.
That’s what I understand. He’s never going to stop arranging me.
The bet, the money, the fund with his name on it.
He can’t help it. He’ll do it out of cruelty or he’ll do it out of love, and there’s no difference, because either way I don’t get a vote.
I’m never going to get a vote. Not with him. Not ever.”
Her voice was even. Quiet. It sounded like someone reading a weather report.
Roxanne was watching her face, and Amelia watched her decide not to argue.
“Okay,” Roxanne said. “Okay, honey.”
Amelia looked down at her left hand on the card table.
The ring was still there. Five years. She had tried to take it off the night she left the Buckhead house, standing at the dresser, and her hand wouldn’t do it. She had tried again a few times since, in the bathroom, at night. It never came off. It wasn’t stuck. Her hand just wouldn’t.
She took hold of it now with her right hand.
It came off easily. It slid over the knuckle and over the scar and it was off, and her finger felt strange and naked and cool where it had been, a thin band of paler skin that hadn’t seen the sun in five years.
She held it out across the table.
Roxanne looked at it. She didn’t take it right away.
“Keep it for me,” Amelia said. “Please. Somewhere I won’t have to see it. I don’t want it in this apartment. I don’t want to throw it in a river. I just don’t want to see it.”
Roxanne looked at her for one more long moment. Then she held out her small rough hand, palm up, and Amelia put the ring in it.
Roxanne closed her fingers over it. She put it in the zippered pocket of her work jacket, the inside one, over her heart. She zipped the pocket shut.
“It’s put away,” Roxanne said. “It’s gone. You won’t see it.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” Roxanne reached across the card table and put her hand over Amelia’s bare one, and held it. “Just don’t sit here all night in the dark. You hear me?”
Amelia nodded.
But after Roxanne left, she did. She sat in the green chair with the lamp on and the tea gone cold, and she looked at the pale band on her finger. Her face was calm. Under it, out of sight, it hurt worse than anything had in her life.