Chapter Seven
She’s been awake for hours, her mind churning. Somewhere, maybe around midnight, her sadness over Tom’s letter transformed into a new emotion: anger. Fury throbs inside her, beating in time with her grief, red and pulsating. Her skin is hot to the touch, as if a fire has been lit inside her.
A memory comes to her, one she hasn’t thought of in years. One that, after Tom’s letter, now appears much different.
When she and Tom first lived together, before they were engaged but when they were talking around the subject, their home was an apartment in Brookline, a few streets away from chewy bagels, delicious Thai food, and a bookstore where they spent Sunday afternoons.
From every room in the apartment, they could hear the clanging of the subway cars rattling up and down Beacon Street.
The train stopped at crowded intersections, picking up passengers making their way into Boston in one direction, or out to the suburbs in the other.
The location, and the time, had been a crossroads in their lives.
What made their apartment extraordinary was the five-foot-tall Palladian window in the bathroom.
The arched window of stained glass was perfectly preserved.
Green ivy wove its way up and down the sides, and a delicate pink oval, lined by opalescent spheres, floated in the center.
During the day, the sun fell through the window and danced across the floor.
Thinking about that room, years later, fills Diana with peace, as if remembering the way the light reflected through the glass could bring her back to a time when everything good was still ahead of her.
A claw-foot tub, the other element that convinced them to hand over first and last months’ rent, as well as a security deposit of an equal amount, occupied the space under the window.
To its left was a dark-green velvet armchair Diana pilfered from her childhood bedroom.
It was here she would perch to read the newspaper aloud to Tom, as he rested in the tub after a fourteen-hour day filing motions and doing the grunt work of a junior lawyer in a big firm.
This was before he and Jonathan went into business together and back when he still smoked.
“Only occasionally, only one, and only when I really need it,” he explained, aware she hated the habit.
He stopped when she became pregnant with Duncan, but back then, he needed a cigarette more often than not, the stress of work eating at him.
In the bath, he would settle into the cooling water, his ashes falling onto a small saucer on the windowsill, as Diana’s voice filled the room, echoing off the solid surfaces.
One night, after Diana read Tom an article about autumn foliage, she asked about a trip north.
The leaves were especially spectacular in Vermont; why didn’t they go up to Hamilton that weekend?
Visit his family and check out the changing colors?
He immediately said no, citing the need to work on Saturday.
Hoping to change his mind, she stood up to show him the photo accompanying the article—a vibrant sugar maple, its leaves red and stunning.
As she bent over, Tom’s arms encircled her waist, pulling her into the tub.
She shrieked in delight, as water sloshed over the sides, drenching the bath mat and the newspaper she’d dropped on the floor.
Her champagne-colored nightgown stuck to her curves, her bottom resting against Tom’s stomach.
He nibbled at her ear, making her laugh, and turned her over.
His expression was serious, his eyes half closed, and she placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.
He tasted like cigarettes, acidic and ashy.
He peeled the nightgown down to her waist, kissing her as he went, nudging it off her body.
Diana still remembers that nightgown, wet and silky, against her skin.
He kissed her again, harder this time, and her neck pressed painfully against the side of the tub.
As if he understood her discomfort, he lifted her up and settled his arm under her head, cushioning her.
She relaxed against him and drew her legs across his back.
Tom slid into her and groaned, the sound filling the bathroom.
They moved together slowly at first, finding their rhythm, the water shifting with them.
Their cadence became more intense, and she remembers never wanting the moment to end, hoping they’d forever be connected like that.
At last, though, Diana, feeling as if she might dissolve into the water, gasped and grabbed Tom’s shoulders. He said her name, loud and rough, and was still.
They stayed in the tub afterward, wrapped around one another. They left only when their fingers and toes were shriveled and goose bumps dotted their skin. Naked, they cleaned up the room. He stuffed the wet newspaper in the trash can; she left the damp towels in the tub to deal with the next day.
Why this memory now? Diana flicks back through the past, like turning pages in a book, searching for what she’s overlooked. She wanted to go leaf peeping. She suggested they visit where Tom grew up. He hadn’t wanted to go, so he changed the subject, distracting her in the most obvious way.
How often had he done that? How many times had he directed her away from his past, away from what he had done?
She cries, her breath erratic. This grief is different: This is the loss of each memory of Tom. She no longer understands which ones are filled with love—or which ones are a manipulation.
Had there been clues he was hiding something? She tries to find evidence of this in her past, but her emotions make her memories indistinct, and she comes up empty.
Had she been too rigid in the way she saw Tom? Had she been too in love with the idea of the two of them together instead of creating a connection where they could be honest with one another?
What had she hidden from him?
She never deceived him about who she was. However, when they were first dating, she may have embellished a story or two to put herself in the best possible light. Even if these exaggerations weren’t criminal, they’re a sign she wasn’t always truthful.
She quiets, exhausted by all the ways this letter has upset her life.
Still, sleep eludes her, and after too long staring into the dark and rehashing her life, Diana begins to wonder whether she might find the key to Tom’s letter in her house.
One of the places she hasn’t touched since his death is his bedside table.
Inspired, she climbs out from under the covers and turns on the bedside lamp.
As the room floods with light, an engine revs outside, an unexpected sound at this time of night.
Diana moves to the window and peeks out from the curtain in time to see a car speed away from the curb in front of her house.
Startled, she jumps back. Strange cars in front of her house in the middle of the night are not regular occurrences.
“Nothing about my life is regular these days,” she mutters, pressing a palm against her racing heart.
Concerned about what the car was doing outside her house, Diana inches down her creaky stairs into the darkened living room.
In the front hall, she grabs Duncan’s baseball bat from the closet.
She makes a fast yet thorough sweep of the first floor and basement, checking that the doors and windows are locked.
She finds nothing amiss, nothing broken, no evidence that the driver of that car, or anyone else, tried to enter her home.
She even braves an opening of the front door to see if anything was left for her in the mailbox, but it’s empty.
The lid clanks shut as she returns inside and locks the front door.
“You’re overreacting,” she whispers, as she climbs back upstairs. “A good night’s sleep will fix this.”
Returning to her bedroom, she remembers her earlier idea to go through Tom’s bedside table.
She slides the bat under the bed—as a precaution, she tells herself—and dumps the contents of his top drawer onto the duvet.
All she finds are the items he left behind: a pair of sunglasses, cuff links shaped like basketballs, and eye drops.
His cell phone and charger are in the second drawer; she placed them there after closing his account.
She didn’t even download his photos or read his texts. It was all too distressing.
In the bottom drawer is an unlined journal she’s never seen before, drawings filling the pages.
Tom had been a doodler, adding M.C. Escher–like geometric shapes to the corners of his legal briefs while in meetings and braiding together whorls and loops along the margins of their daily newspapers while he drank his morning coffee.
The images in the journal, however, are new to Diana.
She finds sketches of Phoebe as a baby and Duncan on the basketball court.
She even finds herself in one picture, standing in profile in a doorway.
Turning to the last pages, she finds a drawing of a woman she doesn’t recognize, outlined in pencil, and dozens of horses, standing still, galloping, jumping.
Who is the woman? Why did Tom draw horses? He hadn’t liked them. Once, after Diana’s mother read Phoebe Black Beauty, the girl asked for horseback riding lessons, and Tom refused to discuss it. Absolutely not, he said, and immediately changed the subject.
“Tom, you have to help me,” Diana says, as if he is only around the corner.
She’s never spoken out loud to him like this.
She read about people who carry on conversations with their dead loved ones, keeping them alive and present, but thought it would be confusing to Duncan and Phoebe if they witnessed her conversing with Tom, so she’s never tried.
She needs help, and maybe her husband, wherever he is, could send her a sign. “Now would be good, Tom.”
She waits, looking around the silent room.
There’s no answer, of course. Diana throws the notebook back into the drawer and grabs her laptop. “Let’s try this again.”
Thanks to her employee access to Alcott Memorial’s interlibrary database system, she loses herself in back issues of Tom’s college newspaper. She uncovers nothing scandalous in its pages, and a review of North Carolina news for the early 1980s also is unsuccessful in providing any clarity.
She discovers that the Vermonter, the largest newspaper in the state, has back issues online, but she needs more time to scan the headlines from June 1982 through June 1983, the year Tom was eighteen.
She drills down to news in Hamilton and learns the Hamilton Star is the local news outlet.
The Star comes out on Thursdays, and its web presence is minimal—she can find only issues since 2000 on its site.
The paper covers local politics and prints a bare-bones police log centered on arrests for DUIs and wild animals trapped in garages.
The clock clicks by 4:00 a.m., then 4:30. Diana’s eyes burn, and the battery life on the laptop whirls down to 2 percent. Looking for ways to cope with a brain that won’t stop, she starts a list: What Don’t I Miss about Tom?
He left his shoes on the stairs.
He never cleaned up the sink after he shaved.
He always forgot to pick up the dry cleaning.
He was stubborn.
No, she thinks, wrapping her arms around her chest, the laptop forgotten. She’s disgusted with herself for giving any consideration to these meaningless pet peeves.
The truth is, Diana thinks, squeezing her eyes shut, I miss everything about him. Every single thing.