Swim Deep

by BETH KERY

  At first, I didn’t register much of anything from the outside world: not the rain pounding on the windshield like it was being hurled in buckets by some giant above me, not the roar of the wind, nor the sound of Evan opening the car door and calling my name.

  I didn’t come back to any sense of reality until he touched my shoulder.

  Turning my head on the wheel, I met his stare. His palpable alarm cut through me. I started and straightened. The hand on my shoulder moved, kneading the muscle, doing that dance of reassurance with which I’d become so familiar.

  “Take it easy. Keep your foot on the brake.” He reached in front of me. I watched, as if from a distance, as he moved the gearshift to the Park position. I’d had the vehicle in Drive the entire time, my foot jammed on the brake.

  How long had I been sitting there, gripping that wheel?

  I turned to Evan, searching his face and body, as though they could give me clues for my own bizarre behavior. My strange thoughts. I learned nothing. He looked reassuringly solid standing there, bent over and staring at me, even if he was soaking wet, his dark hair plastered to his head, the fabric of his shirt clinging to his shoulders and chest.

  “I think I just saw Elizabeth,” I said.

  He glanced out the window where I pointed before giving me an odd glance. Then he touched my forehead. His brow furrowed. “You’ve hit your head, Anna. Are you hurt anywhere else? Are you in pain? Are you dizzy?”

  I shook my head.

  “Can you get out of the car all right? I’ll drive us back to the house.”

  “But… how did you get here?” I asked, my feet swinging to the side of the seat as he straightened and took my hands in his.

  “I ran,” he said simply. “Something told me I should.”

  He pulled me gently out of the car, and I joined him in the torrential downpour.

  I don’t remember much about returning to Les Jumeaux in that storm. I don’t think it was because I’d purposefully hit my head on the steering wheel during a fit of bewildered grief. Maybe my partial amnesia was emotional overload. All I recall is walking down the wood floor hallway upstairs, Evan’s arm around me. He guided me toward our bedroom, and my feet halted.

  “No. Not in there,” I stated flatly.

  Evan paused only for a second before we continued down the hallway. He opened the door to another room. I’d seen it before, when I was choosing a guest room for Valeria. It faced the pine forest at the back of the property. Like our bedroom had been before we arrived, it was devoid of personal photos or keepsakes: comfortably anonymous.

  I pushed on Evan’s forearm. His hold fell off me. I walked like a robot to the en suite bathroom and shut the door.

  The rain had chilled me to the bone. I turned on the shower, stripped, and got in, all without thinking. When I got out, I wasn’t surprised to see a towel and a robe laid out for me, obviously by Evan. I felt dull and heavy.

  He sat in a winged chair, waiting, when I plodded out of the bathroom. He stood and came toward me. I meant to step away, but I was caught by his stare. My feet wavered, undecided. He grabbed my elbow, as if to steady me.

  “I can’t stay here,” I said.

  “I know. But you can’t leave now, either. The storm is bad.” He paused, as if to make a point. I heard the sound of a hard rain and the eerie, creaking sound the tall pines made as they swayed in the wind. “And you’ve hit your head.”

  He urged with me his hand. I followed him over to the bed. He’d already pulled back the sheet and comforter. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and a bottle of aspirin. I sat on the edge of the mattress, undecided, but suddenly so tired. Exhaustion weighed down every muscle in my body. My cheek pressed against the soft, clean cotton of the pillowcase.

  “Do you need some aspirin? For your head?”

  “I did it myself.”

  “You did what?” Evan asked, covering my shoulder with the comforter.

  “I hit my head against the steering wheel on purpose.”

  His hand paused. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. To stop thinking, maybe,” I said hoarsely. My tongue felt thick and uncooperative. “To stop myself from seeing that car in my head. The red Ferrari. Elizabeth driving it.”

  His hand started, then slid along the top of the comforter, seemingly smoothing the fabric, but in fact, soothing me. I remembered I’d told him he’d lost the right to touch me. Maybe he’d recalled that, because he comforted me now only through the barrier of the thick blanket.

  “Go to sleep, Anna. Things will be better when you wake up.”

  “Don’t go,” I whispered.

  I shut my eyes. Shame swamped me at my pitiful request.

  Thankfully, the exhaustion was even more powerful.

  When I awoke, the first thing that struck me was the dead silence. The storm had run its course.

  I’m alone in this big house. It’ll swallow me whole.

  The thought was stupidly irrational and terrible at once. I thought of the ghost in my nightmare, and had the crazy idea she now had the power to pierce the veil… to step into my waking reality. A dim light shone behind me. I flipped over in a rising panic.

  Evan sat in a chair next to the bed, the soft lamplight shining on the opened book he held in his lap. He looked up at my abrupt movement. I saw that he’d changed out of his wet clothing. He wore a pair of jeans and a button-down white shirt that made his skin look dark by contrast, his light eyes yet another layer of juxtaposition. He still hadn’t shaved, his whiskers adding to the rugged angles and shadows of his face. Our stares locked: one second, two, three…

  I saw his concern, and something else in his grave gaze. A fragile, hesitant thread of hope. Distantly, I realized that hope might be coming from the way I was drinking in the vision of him like a parched woman.

  “What time is it?” I asked him, just for something to say.

  “A little after nine,” he said.

  I glanced uneasily at the windows, confirming there was no light peeking around the curtains. I’d slept for over four hours. Evan had been right, about things being better after sleeping. The memories of that day seemed clearer, but more distant, too.

  Safety barrier.

  Yes. That’s what my sleeping mind had done. It’d put up a safety barrier, of sorts. I could still see all the heart-shattering moments and revelations from that day, but I did so from behind a thick, mental insulation.

  Evan set aside his book on the bedside table. “Do you have a headache?”

  “No,” I murmured.

  Again, our stares held. And despite the newly installed safety barrier, I felt my throat swelling. I shut my eyes and swallowed away the discomfort.

  “Why did you say you were repulsed by Elizabeth at the end of your marriage… that you hated her, at times.”

  Had that been my voice asking that question in the oppressive silence? It must have been formulated in my unconscious mind, while I slept. I opened my eyes and saw that Evan, too, had been surprised to hear it.

  “You’re sure you want to talk about this again now?”

  I saw his gaze flicker up to my forehead. I silently cursed myself for impulsively admitting I’d hit my own head on the wheel. After several hours’ sleep, it seemed bizarre that I’d both purposefully injured myself and then confessed it.

  I nodded, my cheek brushing against the pillowcase.

  “It’s a complicated question to answer in a few sentences, when the reason built up over years, over tens of thousands of little encounters, small observations and a dozen or so big, scary experiences,” he began slowly. “If I were to choose one moment when my hatred of Elizabeth began, I’d probably say when I realized that she was unfaithful to me. I was completely sideswiped by that. I was about twenty-seven or so when it happened.”

  “You mean that you realized she
and her father—”

  “No, I didn’t understand about her and her father until about a year before she died. I’m talking about a more run of the mill infidelity. She slept with more men than I could count over the years. Guys we’d grown up with and gone to school with. My friends. Men her father knew. Men my father knew. Random men in bars. To say she was promiscuous doesn’t capture the reality. She needed sex. She needed the desire of men like an addict needs a drug.

  “But I didn’t understand the depth of her cheating immediately. When I first found out, I thought she’d been unfaithful to me one time. I confronted her about it, and she was remorseful. We reconciled, but it wasn’t easy. After a few years though, I was forced to admit the truth: she’d never stopped having affairs, even during that time period we went to counseling, and supposedly were working on our marriage after I’d discovered the one affair. She couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  “But as time passed, I couldn’t ignore the evidence anymore. My wife had slept with a good portion of men in the surrounding towns. Sometimes, she went through them two or three at one go.” I heard something in the gruff sound he made, and realized uneasily it was shame mixing with his misery. I thought of that discovered wooden box in the viewing room, with all of the sex-things inside it, and the discs with initials indicating several people’s involvement. Sex recordings. Elizabeth Madaster had taped herself having sex with men.

  “I know you must be wondering why I stayed with her,” Evan said, voicing my exact thought. “I wondered the same thing hundreds of times a day during that time period. The sexual part of our relationship had ended.”

  “Then why did you stay?” I whispered.

  He grimaced. “Sexual promiscuity, sex addiction, and risky sexual behavior aren’t uncommon with people who have been abused. It’s a symptom, just as classic as mood instability or suicidal ideation.”

  “But I thought you said you didn’t find out about Noah until later.”

  “I didn’t. But sexual promiscuity can be symptomatic of mental illness, as well—depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders. She was so fragile. I stayed because I was the only thing standing between her and almost certain destruction. I may have come to hate her at times for making a complete farce of our marriage, but I could see she was spinning out of control with her drinking and drug use, her affairs, her sheer franticness. I’d loved her since I was a kid. There was so much history between us. When you’ve loved someone so much, for so long, it’s hard to just not care, to let go when you see her suffering. Because that’s what I saw when I looked at Elizabeth, no matter how much she partied and drank and screwed every man she saw.

  “I worried she’d destroy herself, eventually, no matter what I did. Her illness was cyclical. It escalated gradually, until she became increasingly out of control, drinking more heavily, having affairs while I was working in San Francisco. As her mania escalated, she wouldn’t bother waiting for me to leave town. She’d bring her men here, entertaining them in the viewing room even while I was in the house. She drank and took prescription drugs to excess, drove intoxicated, swam drunk—once she nearly drowned. Noah and she went scuba diving once at night for some inexplicable reason no one could ever really explain to me. She passed out when they surfaced. Drug overdose. Thankfully, they were near enough to the coast that I heard Noah’s shouts. We were able to get her to shore. I did CPR, and she revived before the ambulance arrived. For a while, I thought for sure she was dead, lying there on that beach. It was terrifying.

  “She had a psychiatric hospitalization after that. She was hospitalized four times during our marriage, in addition to having one substance abuse rehab stay.”

  “If she was that out of control, didn’t you, or the police, consider the possibility that she’d committed suicide when she disappeared?” I asked.

  “It was a consideration for the police, yes. I believe that because of Noah’s stature in the community, they never seriously followed up with that possibility. Best not to go down that path, if it would only bring more grief to the family. That’s what I imagine the police were thinking.”

  “But you never seriously considered she’d committed suicide that night?” He shook his head. “Why?”

  “For several reasons. For one thing, I was familiar with her cycles. Too familiar. Her behavior would escalate until it came to a climax, for lack of a better word.” He winced and shut his eyes before rubbing his bunched forehead.

  Despite my uncertainty about Evan in that moment, I pitied him. The pain of what he’d endured all those years was fully exposed now. I sensed the cold, relentless fear he must have lived with, given his wife’s condition. She might self-destruct at any given moment. Every day when he woke up, he must have wondered if today would be the day. I couldn’t imagine the hell he’d been through, being married to such a damaged, fragile woman.

  And yet he’d stayed.

  “She was diagnosed as bipolar,” he said. “I’d take her to psychiatrists and counselors, but she’d eventually stop her medications, and I couldn’t force her to stay in therapy. As a neurologist, Noah was no help in that. He had a strong distrust of psychiatrists and psychologists, spouting all kinds of nonsense about how unscientific mental health treatment was. I was constantly fighting against his influence on her, against its effect on her non-compliance with her treatment.”

  “He was the cause of her dysfunction, in large part.”

  Evan’s eyes flashed. “Yes. He certainly didn’t want that coming out in her therapy. Plus, it suited him best to keep her vulnerable. Desperate. He hated outsiders interfering with her life. Interfering with his influence over her. He was even jealous of Lorraine, Elizabeth’s mother. He’d poisoned their mother-daughter relationship from the cradle. Maybe Lorraine does have Alzheimer’s, but I’ve always thought she would have eventually gone mad in some fashion, regardless, just from being exposed to that man, day in and day out.”

  His bitterness and anger seemed to hang like a mist in the air between us. I knew by now there was nothing I could do or say to make it better, so I just watched him, waiting for him to continue.

  “When Elizabeth’s manic cycles would fizzle out, she would become regretful. Depressed. She would come to me and break down. Confess all her affairs, all the sordidness and depravity in which she’d drowned herself. She’d be filled with self-hatred. It was nearly unbearable to witness, given what a confident, strong, and dynamic person she typically was.

  “It became our cycle. Just like when we were kids, she seemed to find comfort and some kind of redemption in our relationship. For a period of time—for at least a few months, sometimes for up to four months—she’d stabilize. She’d become the generous, hard-working, charismatic woman that I remembered. It was just enough for me to hope that things could be better for her. For us. Then she’d slowly start to spin out of control again.”

  “And at the time of her disappearance, what part of her cycle was she in?” I asked.

  “She was in an unprecedented period of stability and health. She’d just undergone an extended hospitalization, and then a substance abuse rehab stay.” He exhaled heavily.

  “Of course, I began to see the destructiveness of our cycle, as well,” Evan said. “I was enabling her, acting like some kind of catharsis for her shame. I started to see a therapist myself, in order to help me establish some limits with her. It was during my own therapy that I started to realize the sheer depth of Elizabeth’s pain and agony. I began to wonder and have my suspicions about the source of her dysfunction.”

  I sat up in bed, propping myself up on my elbow. “You began to suspect Noah of abusing her?”

  “Yes. At first, I thought it’d all taken place in the past. I didn’t realize it was ongoing,” he said, sounding weary. Looking weary. I had a fleeting thought that I should tell him to stop, to keep the rest of his explanation until tomorrow. He needed to sleep, too. But he k
ept talking, sounding tired but determined to tell this story, ugly as it was.

  “Maybe four months or so before she disappeared, I was having a bout of insomnia. It happened a lot, the years before Elizabeth died. So I got up, planning to go down to the kitchen to have a drink or some warm milk… anything to help me sleep. I hadn’t even turned on the light yet in the kitchen when I saw Elizabeth… saw the paleness of her nightgown moving in the darkness.”

  “Didn’t you notice she wasn’t in bed with you before you came downstairs?”

  “We weren’t sleeping together in those last years. That part of our relationship was finished. It’d been killed by some of the things Elizabeth had done. I stayed because I wanted to see her reasonably healthy and stable before we separated. But you can’t go back. Not after some things.”

  We stared at one another. In the silence, I heard my heartbeat thrum in my ears. Is that what’s happening to us now? Surely what Evan had done to me was one of those unforgiveable things.

  Evan blinked and swallowed thickly. I found myself wondering if he’d had a similar thought.

  “While Elizabeth and I still shared a bed at the beginning of our marriage,” he continued gruffly, “I would often wake up and find her gone. A few times, I looked all over the house for her. I checked the garage. The boat slip. But all the cars and boats would always be there. At some point upon returning, I’d find her, either back in bed or going up the stairs. Of course, she always made an excuse as to where she’d been. ‘We must have just missed each other,’ she’d say, and laugh it off. I’d let it pass, but it always struck me as odd.

  “But on this particular night when I saw her up out of bed, I knew more. I knew about her mental illness, and her infidelities. I knew how she’d used that viewing room in the past, for her little drug and sex parties. Orgies, to put it bluntly.”

  His mouth went very hard at that. I sensed his outrage. It couldn’t have been easy for any man, no matter how compassionate he might be, to endure something like that.