Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
The flowers are wrong, and I’m the only one who knows why.
They stand in tall glass vases down the middle of a long table on Overlake's west terrace. White hydrangeas spill over the rims with something green trailing between them. They’re beautiful, expensive, exactly the sort of arrangement Lil Crawford would choose.
Peggy would have hated them.
They came from a florist in Bellevue in a refrigerated van, along with a large invoice that Lil paid. She makes sure to tell me so twice, in case I missed the price the first time.
Peggy would have done the flowers herself, out of her garden. She would have stood over the caterers reciting the name of every stem, making sure we all understood it had cost her a Saturday.
Now Peggy is lying in the medical examiner's office in Seattle, and there are hydrangeas on my birthday table that no one fought over.
I stand at the end of the terrace with a glass of wine, looking at flowers, and I miss a woman I could barely stand.
"Thirty-nine," Yvette says, appearing at my elbow with her phone already lifted. "You don't look it. What's your secret?"
"A husband with a scalpel," I say, because it's the answer they want, and she laughs the professional laugh and takes a photograph she will never show me.
Above the lake, the sky has gone the color of a bruise beginning to bloom.
The heat has been building for three weeks, and now it is finally about to break.
The water lies still and metallic beneath a bank of cloud stacked so high it looks painted.
The air on the terrace is thick enough to lean on.
Everyone keeps saying, “Isn't it close?” and glancing up as if waiting for the clouds to break.
David wanted this.
That’s what I keep coming back to as the evening goes on, until it becomes clear that I never wanted it at all.
He wanted tonight to go the way all birthdays go, with the deposit paid and the caterers booked. Ordinary life carrying on as if there was no murder up our road and no break-in in our kitchen. The party itself is meant to prove that we're fine.
But we’re not.
No one is. Even if Lil and Yvette put on brave faces.
I take another sip of my drink.
David has been standing near the bar for an hour being the man everyone likes. Easy and warm, one hand on a shoulder, a story about the resident who fainted. Only I can see the thin wire of strain running beneath that charm. David’s holding the party together by sheer force of will.
I look around the terrace.
Henry came because I asked him and David let me, which is a small marriage negotiation I won't examine tonight.
I see him arrive late and alone, lifting a hand to me from the top of the terrace steps and to no one else.
He keeps to the edges. He has a way of being at a party without really being in it.
He stands near the rail with a drink, perfectly still.
Every so often I feel him not looking at me, which I know by now is something he does on purpose. I've stopped minding.
Julia is here with Chris.
I clock it the way I clock weather. She is bright and quick and lovely, in a dress the color of the lake before the cloud came. To everyone else, she looks like she's enjoying herself. But I know what she's really doing because I've watched her do it before.
She’s managing him.
She refills the plate he doesn't ask for.
She laughs half a second before his jokes land, giving the rest of the table permission to laugh too.
She keeps her body angled a few degrees toward him at all times, a compass needle that has learned where north is and never lets it out of sight.
When he goes for another drink, she watches the level in the glass, not his face.
When Chris excuses himself to use the bathroom, Julia crosses to me with her wine in hand and kisses my cheek.
"Happy birthday, my lovely."
"Thank you."
She glances around the terrace. "It's going well. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves."
"Or pretending to."
"I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed."
I look toward David. "He seems oblivious."
"That's the doctor in him. They have to stay stoic. Can't fall to pieces like the rest of us."
I nod. "I wouldn't mind if I knew where all the pieces were."
Julia laughs.
Chris reappears near the bar, scowling at someone as he makes his way back.
I tip my head toward him. Julia stiffens.
"Sorry about him," she says quietly. "He's in a foul mood. Something to do with money he lost day trading. I wouldn't mind, except it was my money."
"Oh, Julia."
"I know. I'm a fool. I shouldn't have brought him."
"You didn't have a choice."
"No." She squeezes my hand, quick, then lets go. "I'd better get back to it."
That is the whole of what passes between us.
There's no signal in it. She doesn't pull me aside or lower her voice to tell me there's something I have to hear. On the night of my thirty-ninth birthday, Julia is exactly what she appears to be. A woman spending the evening keeping a dangerous man level among a crowd of people.
As the night unfolds, the cake comes out.
That’s followed by the singing, the awful stretched horror of it, and Yvette filming every second. I blow out a single candle because Lil decided one was elegant. David finds me through the crowd, puts his arm around me, and kisses my temple. "Happy birthday, Mal," he says into my hair.
For one second, it’s real.
He’s my husband. I’m glad. I lean into the size of him and let it be true.
Then Chris says, from too close and too loud, "Go on. Kiss her properly. Show us how it's done. Julia knows you can do better than that."
And the evening tips over.
It happens fast. With Chris on my right and my good ear turned toward the terrace, the first thing I catch is David going still against me, the same way he did when I questioned him about the gun.
Then his arm comes off my shoulders.
"Looks like you've had enough to drink, Chris," David says. "How about you get an Uber home."
“Oh, yeah, you would love that." Chris is swaying and grinning.
His good looks have gone slack with drink, and wine slops over his knuckles.
"I see how it is. You want me off the property.
Out of the way." He turns to everyone, opening his arms to make sure they’re listening.
“You all know. Don't you? You've all seen it.
Doctor Grant and his little runs down to my place when I'm out of town.
" He points the glass at Julia and the wine goes over the rim.
"Ask her. Go on. Ask Julia where the good doctor's been. "
The terrace falls into the silence of forty people deciding at once not to have heard.
“Enough, Chris," Julia says, sharply. It's the careful voice I recognize, the one I've used in my own kitchen. "We're going home."
"Nonsense. Tell the truth. He's been in our house.
" Chris isn't looking at her. He's looking at David, and something has curdled in his face.
The drink, the humiliation, whatever else lives in him, all of it turning into something dangerous.
"Haven't you, Doc? While I'm gone, you've been cozying up to my gal.
Of course, if anyone asked, you were just walking the dog, isn't that right? "
“How dare you.” David steps forward, jabbing a finger at Chris.
He doesn't raise his voice, and that's somehow worse.
I can hear what it costs him to stay calm.
But it's too late. Everyone has heard the accusation.
"You don't get to stand here at my wife's birthday and make accusations like that.
Especially after what you've done to Julia. "
My stomach sinks.
It’s the wrong thing to say, and yet the truest thing anyone has said all night. That’s why it lands the way it does. It's David's way of throwing a punch without getting physical. Not that he would have any trouble with Chris. Angry confrontations are nothing new to him at the hospital.
But that kind of confrontation requires de-escalation, and David has just thrown fuel on the fire.
“What did you say?” Chris asks.
Julia tries to intervene, but he brushes her off like she’s nothing more than a fly. He starts toward David.
“You heard me.”
I watch the reactions go around the terrace like a wave. I see Yvette's phone come up. Lil's mouth tucks into a small satisfied line. Whatever Chris means to start, David thinks he’s already ended it.
Again, Julia tries to pull Chris away, but he pulls his arm back.
“No. No. I want to hear this.” Chris laughs. It’s not a good sound. He gets louder as he approaches. "After what I've done? And what would that be, David?”
David braces as Chris closes the distance.
Chris stops in front of him and plants a hand on David's chest, giving him a little shove.
“Huh?”
“Back off!” David says.
“No, I want to hear what Julia’s been telling you.”
Chris reaches to prod David again, but this time David slaps his hand away.
That’s when Chris attacks.
He shoves David so hard that he falls back into the cake table, and the whole thing goes with him.
The vases, the hydrangeas, the cake with its one elegant candle, all down onto the flagstones in a wreck of glass and cream.
David comes back up covered in cake, his hand already raised.
He’s not fast enough. Chris hits him once, clean, across the mouth, and blood spatters bright across the white of his shirt.
Then it's just a tangle of men. Nate has Chris from behind. A waiter grabs his other arm. The club manager appears out of nowhere, murmuring and steering and trying to turn violence into an incident.
Chris keeps shouting over all of it as he’s pulled away.
“You’ll hear from my lawyer. I’m pressing charges. Everyone saw it. Everyone saw you hit me first.”
“Get him out of here,” I say.
David stands in the wreck of my cake with one hand pressed to his mouth and blood coming through his fingers. He looks stunned, like he can't quite believe what just happened.
I go to him. Of course I go to him. But in the few steps it takes, I see the other thing.
I see Julia go.
She goes to Chris, not away from him. When Nate lets him go, Julia slips under his arm, takes his weight, and turns him toward the doors. Her chin is up, her face composed. Just a woman leaving a party with the man she came with.
As they leave, she meets my eyes for one second and mouths, “Sorry.”
Then she’s gone, through the club and into the dark.
I exhale hard and turn back to David.
David won't go to the hospital, which is a joke none of us make.
He sits in the club office with a bag of ice from the bar against his mouth. The manager talks low and fast, going over the damage and what happens next. David says all the right things.
“No police. We won’t be pursuing anything. Please give my apologies to the members.”
I stand behind his chair with my hand on his shoulder and feel him vibrating under it. Still, some part of tonight is going to cost him something, even if I can't see the edges of it yet.
He turns in his chair.
"Go home, Mal," he says finally, the ice still pressed to his mouth. His lip has split at the corner and it makes his voice thick. "I have to handle this. The club, the members, all of it. There's no reason for you to stay.”
"I'm not leaving you."
"You're not helping me either." He softens it with his good half of a smile. "Please. It's your birthday. Let one of us salvage something of it."
Henry appears at the door.
I get the feeling he’s been outside the whole time.
That’s the thing about him. He’s always just outside the door of the thing that's happening to me. He has my arm wrap in his hand, the one I left on the back of my chair out on the terrace.
I didn’t ask him to fetch it. I didn’t see him fetch it.
He says, to David, “I can run her home, if you like. I’m about to leave, anyway.”
David looks at him, then at me. For a breath, I think he’s going to say no. But he is tired, bleeding, and probably feels cornered.
“Sure. Thank you, Henry.”
The first fat drops hit the windshield as we come off the club road. Three of them, then nothing, then three more. The storm is still making up its mind.
Henry drives carefully, both hands on the wheel, taking his time. The club falls away behind us. The dark closes in on the cedars, the water and the long road as he takes me home. For a while neither of us says anything, and the silence is a relief, the first quiet moment of the whole night.
“That’s a birthday you won’t forget,” Henry says.
I almost laugh.
"He'll be all right," Henry says. "David. It's a split lip and a bad story. Both will heal."
"The story doesn't." I watch the wipers clear drops and wait for more. "You saw them all. You saw their faces. By tomorrow it's a thing that happened. By the weekend, it's the story everybody is telling, and it doesn't matter what's true."
"No," Henry agrees. "It rarely does."
He's quiet a while. Then he asks it lightly, his eyes never leaving the road. “Do you think there is anything to what Chris said tonight? You know… about David and Julia?”
"No." It comes out fast. "Not a chance. Julia and David are complete opposites. She's always making underhanded remarks about him."
"Maybe so." He lets it sit. "But people put on a front sometimes to steer you away from the truth."
"Not David. You don't know him like I do." I don't look at him when I say it.
He doesn't argue. I’m grateful for that. The last thing I need is to defend my marriage.
We turn onto the point. Houses glow behind the cedars on either side of the road, with the lake black beyond them. I close my eyes for a second and let the car carry me.
"Can I ask you something?" Henry says. "You can tell me it's none of my business."
“Sure.”
"Your husband." He says it carefully, his eyes on the road. "I know what he said about your diagnosis. But do you ever wonder if that's the only reason he doesn't want you looking into Oregon?"