Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
My husband has a voice he keeps for people who can end him. At half past seven the next evening I hear him put it on in the hallway before Helen Mercer is over the threshold.
"Helen. You found us.”
"Your gate is a fortress, David."
"That's the entire point of the place." He has her coat before she's finished offering it.
"One road in, one road out, and every house on it nestled in forty feet of cedar so you never have to look at the next one.
You can live here a decade and not know what your neighbor's front door looks like.
People pay a great deal of money for that, and then they stand at their windows complaining about how quiet it is. "
"It is beautiful, though. Coming up that road in the dark, with the trees closing over the top of you."
"We thought so," David agrees. "Try getting a phone signal under them, though. Nate can explain hospital ethics to you from anywhere on earth except our driveway."
She laughs. He laughs. Neither of them means it, and it's all completely pleasant. I stand at the end of the hall with a dish towel in my hands. I watch the man I have slept beside for two years turn into a smoother version of himself, one degree at a time, like a dimmer coming up.
Helen is somewhere in her fifties, with gray hair cut short. She wears a linen jacket. She listens without hurry, the patience of thirty years spent watching people explain themselves. Nate is behind her with a bottle of red and a smile like a handshake.
"Mallory." Helen takes my hand in both of hers. "I've heard so much."
"All of it's true," I say. "That's the trouble."
She likes that. I feel her file it.
Dinner goes well, which is the problem.
It goes so well that I keep waiting for the part that isn't going well.
It never arrives. By the second course I understand that this is the part I was waiting for.
David is charming and easy. He tells the story about the resident who fainted.
Helen tells one about a surgeon in Rochester.
Nate explains what a hospital ethics consultant does, at length, twice.
I laugh in the right places with my good ear turned toward the table.
The lights flicker.
Once, briefly, the whole room drops and comes back. Somewhere behind me, the fridge clicks and resets itself.
"There it is," David says, not missing a beat. "The wiring in this house is thirty years old. Half of Hunts Point still runs on wiring your grandfather would recognize. I keep saying we should put a generator in."
"You should," Nate says, coming alive. "With this heat? They're saying if that storm sits over us, we'll be dark for two days. Everyone on our street is putting them in."
"Everyone on our street is competing," Helen says. "It isn't the same thing."
"Oh, that reminds me." David sits back. "You want to know what this place is actually like?
A few years before we came, there was a man on this road who'd made an indecent amount of money in e-commerce.
Bought his house, then bought the two beside it so his staff could live in them.
Fine. Nobody minded. What they minded, what they have never gotten over, is that he missed Clean-Up Day. "
Helen puts her glass down. "Clean-Up Day?"
"Clean-Up Day," David says, with enormous gravity.
"It's real," I tell her. "It's been going since 1920.
The improvement committee started it and it has never once missed a year.
One Sunday in May, everybody on the point comes out at nine in the morning to weed the verges, prune the brush, mow the town right-of-way, and repaint the mailbox stands.
There's an ice cream truck that drives up and down handing out drinks to the workers.
The children race dinghies and get trophies.
And in the evening somebody hosts a party for the grown-ups so they can all congratulate each other. "
"You're inventing this," Helen says.
I shake my head.
"And he didn't take part,” David says. "That's it. That's the whole crime. More than a hundred years of cleaning, and this man never showed up.” He shakes his head slowly. "They talked about it for four years, Helen. Four years. People on this road will complain about anything.”
Nate leans in, delighted. "Who was he? The mogul."
"One very smart cookie," David says. "Honestly, if you build a billion-dollar company from nothing, are you really going to spend your Sunday picking up somebody else's trash?"
Helen laughs this time, tipping her head back. Nate wipes his eyes, and for about ninety seconds we're just four people in a warm house, pretending the world is ordinary.
I laugh too.
It's Helen who turns to me over the wine, her voice gentle enough that I know I'm not going to like what's coming.
"And what are you working on, Mallory? David tells me you write."
"Wrote," David says.
He says it easily, over the top of me, buttering bread. It isn't cruel. It's a small correction, the sort of thing you make when you think the decision is yours.
"Writes," I say. "I was on the phone with my editor this week."
Helen's eyebrows go up. "Were you?"
I glance at David. It's the first he's heard of it.
"Cassandra. She's got a hole in October." I keep my voice light. "I might have something for her."
"That's marvelous."
"It's early," David says. His eyes come to me, wide for half a second, a question he isn't going to ask at the table. Then he turns back to Helen. "Nothing's settled yet."
"It's Oregon," I say, and I don't know why I do it, except that I've had two and a half glasses and I'm tired of sitting in this chair being spoken for. "Old unsolved cases. Nobody's ever looked at them together."
There's a small pause at the table. Nate is looking between us with polite interest.
David's hand tightens once against the tablecloth. He doesn't look at me. He turns to Helen and smiles.
"Of course she's not driving out there," he says. "Not after the accident. Obviously."
And there it is. Delivered like reassurance. The accident. Everybody at this table knows I don't drive, and now everybody knows why. He's said it like he's protecting me.
And I say nothing because tonight is David's night. I’m not going to be the reason it goes wrong.
"Of course not," Helen says, and to be fair to her, she says it gently. "It's mostly phone work these days, isn't it? My niece does something similar."
"Something like that," I say.
"And you're sleeping better?" she asks. "David said you'd come off the pills."
"He did," I say.
I look at him. He's refilling Nate's glass.
"Mostly," I say.
David's phone rings at ten past nine.
He's mid-sentence when it happens, and I watch him do a thing I've never seen him do at a table. He turns the phone over and angles it toward himself. For less than a second nothing about him moves at all.
Then he's up, dropping his napkin on the table, apologizing to the room.
"That's the hospital," he says. "I'm sorry. Two minutes."
And he goes, not to the kitchen, not to the hall, but all the way out through the open doors onto the terrace. He keeps walking until he's standing on the grass at the edge of the lamplight, his back to the house.
Helen watches him go with an expression I can't read, and then she turns back to me and asks me something about the garden.
I answer her. I have no memory of what I say.
Because out on the lawn my husband is standing still with the phone against his ear. He isn't saying much. Every so often, he lifts his free hand, puts it on the back of his neck and leaves it there.
He's out there eleven minutes. I know because I watch the clock over the range.
When he comes back he's fine. He's better than fine, warm and rueful. He says the thing surgeons say about the hospital never letting them eat a meal in peace. Nate says something about the on-call culture, and the evening closes over it like water over a stone.
They're gone by ten-thirty.
I load the dishwasher. David goes up.
The house does its ticking and settling, and I stand at the island with the last of the wine and think about the eleven minutes he was gone.
Two minutes. That's what he'd said.
I open my phone. I'm not looking for anything. I remember a bill I meant to pay, one of those things that surfaces the second my head hits the pillow. So I open the account to pay it. It's the sort of small ordinary thing you do at eleven when you're avoiding going upstairs.
In the joint account, my eyes move over the last few transactions.
I almost click away.
Then I stop.
There it is, four lines down, plain as a shopping list.
CASH WITHDRAWAL. $4,000.
Thursday. He was still in Portland on Thursday. He took Sophie for ramen on Thursday.
I stand there in my kitchen with my thumb on the screen. I scroll up, and I scroll down, and there's nothing else out of place. Nothing hidden. Nothing clever. Just four thousand dollars in cash, taken out on a Thursday by David, who pays for parking with his phone.
Had he given money to Sophie?
No. Not four thousand. And not in cash. She isn't hurting, anyway, at least not according to David.
Upstairs, the floor creaks. He's moving around the bedroom, the way he does, opening and shutting drawers.
I look at the number for a long time.
Then I close the app, put the glass in the sink, and go up to my husband. I don't say a word about it.