Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Henry's text comes at eight in the morning. It’s kind, but there’s a hand in every word, steering me.
I read it at the window.
Outside, the rain has stopped, but the sky hasn't lifted. The first half of the storm blew through and left the whole morning gray and wet. Everyone on the road is saying the worst of it's over. No one believes it.
Mallory. I decided not to call. I've done enough by being in your life, so this is the last you'll hear from me.
I owe you the truth about the small things, since the whole road has had its say about the big ones.
I told you I was in security. I'm not, and you know that now.
It was a stupid lie for a grown man to tell, and I told it because the truth made me feel smaller in front of you.
I also had no right to act as if I owned that house, and I knew every day I didn't. I have no defense that doesn't sound like an excuse, so I won't offer one.
I know David thinks I'm behind everything that's gone wrong on your road.
The dog, the birds, all of it. I'm not. I don't have it in me to hurt a thing you love, and if you look back at every hour we spent you'll know that about me even if you can't prove it.
But a frightened man needs a face to put his fear on, and I'd rather be that face and gone than have you fighting in your kitchen because of me.
So I'm stepping away. I won't come to your door.
You get to decide whatever you've decided about me without me standing there making my case.
Be careful, Mallory. I know I have no right to ask that of you now. But be careful.
H.
I read it four times. It feels like it cost him something to say it, and he said it anyway.
And that's the part I can't put down. Henry told me he hadn’t been fully honest with me, and then he took himself out of my life over it. I’ve been lonely in a full house for two years, and he saw that when nobody else did. Now he's gone.
I read the last line again.
Be careful.
It doesn't say of whom. It doesn't have to.
The question opens in me, and the answer is already there before I can stop it.
I can't tell if Henry put it there or only gave it the last push.
It has been gathering for days, from pieces I didn't want to fit together.
The hidden gun. The green dot over the hospital.
The complaint to the board. The man who died in that hospital the night David was inside it.
The sedative in the blood. Lena's name through the study door.
Chris accusing David of an affair with Julia at my birthday party.
And for the first time, I'm not thinking of Henry.
I put the phone down. The part of me that is still a journalist wants to find an angle in it, but there isn't one. A man apologized and stepped back.
David has never really apologized for anything.
But Henry did.
I go and find my coat.
I head over to Julia's.
It's not far. Nothing on the point is far.
I go down the road in the gray light, with the cedars dripping water onto my shoulders.
I catch myself fiddling with the band at my wrist, rolling the bead under my thumb the way Julia taught me.
Feel it, breathe, come back. Stop picking at things you can't fix, Julia would tell me, and then she'd smile and change the subject before I could ask if she was all right.
5661 is the last house.
I've spent a hundred afternoons there, and there's always some kind of noise. Music, the television, or Julia's voice on the phone through an open window.
Chris's car isn't in the drive. Good, I tell myself. She said to come when he was out.
The front door is already open.
Not wide. It’s off the latch, standing a hand's width from the frame, as if someone meant to close it and the wind pushed it back open. I stand on the step, knock on the open door, and call her name into the gap. Nothing comes back.
Then I hear water.
It reaches me before I understand it. Water running upstairs, then the steady splash of it hitting water. A tap left fully on. It sounds like it’s been running for a long time.
"Julia?"
I push the door wide and head in.
I’ve never once walked into Julia's house uninvited, but I do it now with my pulse in my throat. I pass the coat rack and the bowl where she drops her keys. Her keys are still in it. Her handbag is on the chair.
One of her shoes lies on its side at the foot of the stairs.
I don't stop. The water is louder now, and it's the only thing in the house with anything to say.
"Julia, are you home?”
Still no answer.
I start up the stairs with one hand on the rail. That’s when I look down. The runner is soaked dark. When I look up, I see water flowing down the wall of the stairwell, a slow shining sheet over the paint.
My heart starts hammering in my chest.
I imagine what I'm about to find before I reach the top. I climb toward it anyway.
The bathroom door is open. The floor is a river, an inch of water, maybe more, running out over the sill and down toward the stairs.
The tub is overflowing on every side, the tap still thundering into it. The whole room roars.
And Julia isn't in it.
There's no one in the water, no one on the floor, no one behind the door. There is only the tub pouring itself out onto the tile in a room with the light left on.
I turn off the faucet before I check the other rooms.
"Julia?” I yell.
She’s nowhere to be found.
I take out my phone, pausing for a second to catch my breath.
My hands are shaking when I call 911.