* * *
Despite her dread of a second encounter, Jane knew she couldn’t leave until Felicia got back. Sigelman seemed to have fallen asleep in his chair. Jane sat across from him on the couch with a Slavics journal from one of the stacks on the floor in her lap, but she wasn’t reading it. She was listening for the sound of the car and to the ragged noises of Sigelman’s breathing, making sure it didn’t stop. She thought of Maisie in the hospital, wires snaking out from under her paper gown, all the lines on the monitors going flat. She thought of Sigelman as a child, so long ago in Hungary, his older brother dying of pneumonia. Had Sigelman watched his brother die? Had he seen the blue skin and heard the rattling breath and vowed that he would get away from there—away from the old world of disease, ignorance, and death? But now those three horsemen had hunted him down at last.
What a life Sigelman had lived! Sitting here in this dusty, suffocating house with its books and secrets and beautiful silk rug, Jane marveled at it, and at the same time she knew it wasn’t the life she wanted. They all died, Billy had said, and one day Jane would die, too. But not like this.
At last the Saab pulled into the driveway. Jane went out to the stoop where Felicia stood, her arms laden with grocery bags and pharmacy bags.
“He’s dying,” Jane said.
Felicia’s eyes slipped away from Jane’s to the house with its handsome shape and shabby clapboards. “Maybe,” she said.
“You can’t take care of him,” Jane said, hating everything about this—that Sigelman was dying and that she was trying to keep him from getting what he wanted and that she was going to have to deal with Felicia—possibly even be grateful to her. “We’re going to have to figure something out.”
Felicia shrugged her macramé handbag farther up onto her freckled shoulder. Her strong arms held the grocery bags, and Sigelman’s keys jingled in her hand. Behind her a gnarled crab apple tree was in full bloom, pink petals sifting delicately down to the grass when the wind touched them. “How do you know what I can do?” she said.
What did she mean by that? “Is he paying you?” Jane asked. Her glance involuntarily followed Felicia’s back to the house. Was Sigelman perhaps going to leave it to her in exchange for nursing him—was that the implication? Did she think he could will her his reputation, his role as arbiter of everything Karkov? It wasn’t possible that she was going to take care of him out of affection or the goodness of her heart—was it?
“If I can do anything,” Jane said at last, “call me.”
Felicia walked past her and let herself into the house. “Okay,” she said. “I know the number.”
Jane drove away from Sigelman’s house on a wave of sadness and relief, but if she thought she was leaving death behind her there, she was wrong.
* * *
That afternoon she tried Greg Olen again, and this time the phone was picked up after barely half a ring. Right then, as Olen’s voice said a sharp “hello” into her ear, she might have guessed that something was wrong. But her mind was so much on Sigelman and the letters that all she registered was relief that she had gotten hold of him so easily.
“Greg?” she said. “This is Jane Levitsky. How are you?”
He didn’t say anything, and in the silence Jane could hear the baby crying in the background, reminding her of the way she had heard it nursing the first time she talked to Susannah.
“I thought only your wife answered the phone,” Jane went on lightly, though she was beginning to be aware that lightness wasn’t the right tone.
“Susannah’s dead,” Olen said, in the voice of someone trying out the words without quite believing them. “There was a car accident.”
For a moment Jane didn’t believe the words, either.
“Greg?” she repeated in confusion, and at the same moment another voice, coming distantly through the telephone line, said, “Greg? Greg?” It sounded like an older woman, standing behind him, perhaps, in the cramped house.
“Greg?” Jane said again. “Are you there?”
But Olen must have let the phone drop.
“Oh god,” she heard him say, very faintly, and then again more faintly still, while the baby’s crying grew louder and louder like an approaching train, drowning him out. On his end someone hung the telephone up.
Jane put down the receiver in confusion and dismay. The room with its big, cluttered desk and brown rug and overstuffed bookshelves was exactly the same as it had been the minute before, but it looked slanted, askew. Only a week ago she had met Susannah Olen—had sat in her living room, had held her baby—and now Susannah was dead. A chasm had yawned in the middle of a straight road. It could happen to any of them, any moment. It had happened to Masha’s family, and now, like a curse borne down the generations, it was happening again. Her eye caught on a Post-it on her desk where she had written the number at Vince Steadman’s house, and without thinking she picked up the phone again and dialed. When Billy rather than Vince answered, she wasn’t even surprised. It seemed necessary and inevitable that he would.
“Billy?” she said in a cracked, frightened tone.
“What’s wrong?” Billy said.
“Oh, Billy—something terrible’s happened!”
Billy’s voice took on the calm, panicked intonation of a man expecting the worst. “What?” he asked. “What happened?”
“Susannah Olen died!” Jane said, and she began to cry.
“Jane,” Billy said after a moment. “Who’s Susannah Olen?”
The fact that he didn’t even know made Jane cry harder. “Billy!” she choked out. “Do you think you could come over?”
Half an hour later, he was at the door.
“Where’s Maisie?” Jane asked as she let him in. It was strange letting him into the house as though he were a guest when he still had the key on his key ring.
“I left her with Vince,” he said. “You sounded so upset.”
Jane looked at the shirt Billy was wearing, an old purple oxford cloth one, and her fingers prickled with the remembered texture of the thick cotton. She knew exactly what Billy would smell like if she were close enough to smell him; she knew where her cheek would rest on his chest. She felt cold, and she was worried about the advantage she had given him by calling him and begging him to come, and so she began immediately to apologize, pushing him further away from her with every phrase. “I’m so sorry!” she said. “I shouldn’t have dropped this on you. You don’t even know the woman! I hardly knew her myself. I’m sorry to be such a wreck.”
“Well,” Billy said uncertainly, putting his keys and his wallet down on the end table the way he always had when he lived there. “Who was she?”
“A young woman I met,” Jane said. “A young mother. Twenty years old with a newborn baby. It was a car accident.”
“Awful,” Billy said. He sat down, uninvited, on the couch. “Was she a student of yours?”
Jane shook her head and sat down on the other end of the couch. She felt so sad again that her self-consciousness evaporated. “She was an artist,” she said. “A painter. She had been, I mean, before the baby, and I told her she would get back to it when the baby was older. But she didn’t think so. And she turned out to be right.”
Billy leaned forward and rested his chin in his hands. His long back curved and his shirt seemed to glow in the clear afternoon light.
“She should have had all the time in the world!” Jane said. “I could be hit by a car crossing the street tomorrow, and what would—” She was going to say, What would Maisie do? but instead she finished, “What would I have done with my life?” She was aware that she had shifted away from sorrow for Susannah to self-pity, but Billy didn’t seem to hold it against her.
“You’ve done a lot already,” he said.
“I feel as though I’ve been living in a cave. I’m thirty and I’ve spent my whole life in a cave!”
Billy shifted on the sofa. His jeans rustled against the rough wool of the upholstery. Jane was intensely aware of his bod
y a couple of feet away from hers, of his thighs on the cushion and the way his damp hair curled at his neck. Her own body pulsed stupidly with desire. Was this the life force asserting itself in the face of death?
“I’m sorry you’re so sad, Janie,” Billy said simply.
Again her mind, following the lead of her body, switched gears, and she said as steadily as she could, “I don’t know if I can forgive you for sleeping with Felicia! I know you thought that thing, that I had—And I do think that matters, and I think you deserve to be forgiven! I would like to forgive you, but I just don’t know whether I can.”
Billy was silent. Jane sat waiting as the refrigerator cycled off and the sprinkler watered the lawn next door and a dog barked somewhere close by.
“If there were anything I could do to take it back,” Billy said at last, his voice low and tired, as though he’d said these things to himself a hundred times without it making any difference. “To make it not have happened. Janie, I’m so sorry. I know it doesn’t change anything, saying that. I look at myself—think about myself—and I don’t know how I could have let it happen!” He looked up at her, his eyes wet and his face so open, she felt that if she touched him, her fingers would pass right through. ”In spite of what I thought. How could it have?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “How?”
“I was lonely,” Billy said. “And she did all the work.”
A long silence followed. Billy looked so alarmed that Jane could see he hadn’t meant to say it, that the words had just tumbled out. Still, they had the authority—and the consolation—of truth. Jane could see it now, as she hadn’t been able to before: Billy’s loneliness. Since Maisie was born, wasn’t that what he’d said the other day? Not her fault—not anybody’s fault—but there it was. Love multiplied, but the hours of the day did not.
Jane couldn’t speak.
At last Billy did.
“I love you, Jane,” he said. “I would like us to go on together, you and me and Maisie. Especially now.” Now that she was pregnant, he meant. He asked, “What do you want to do? About the baby.”
Jane wished he hadn’t called it a baby. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I wish you could forgive me,” Billy said, not fiercely but sadly. She knew it wasn’t fair of her to wish he would be fierce, but she did anyway.
“Don’t you see that I would if I could?” she said. “Or that I would pretend to, even, if I thought it would work? But it wouldn’t, because I’m still angry, and I know it would come out in all kinds of ways, whether I wanted it to or not!” She tried to think what to say next. The truth was, at that very instant, she didn’t feel angry. It seemed to her that both of them were drowning in a puddle of fear and indecision, but she couldn’t think of anything to do about it.
Billy looked at her anxiously. He looked exactly the way Maisie looked when she was worried—big eyes, tight jaw, thick lashes blinking. She reached out her hand and touched his arm very lightly. “Maybe eventually that feeling just subsides, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe eventually you get used to it, the way you get used to hot foods.” She could feel the heat coming off him through the warm, worn cotton of his shirt. “Of course it’s not all your fault,” she said. “I mean, I know it’s been a bad year. I know things weren’t great, that there were problems, even before . . .”
“Listen, Jane,” Billy said, and he seemed to sit up a little straighter now, as though her words had given him a small jolt of energy, “I know I’m the one who broke the rules. Listen—this is hard to say. But if you do manage to forgive me for what I did, and if we try to go on together as a family, I need you to find a way to be less—prickly.”
Jane started to tremble, whether with recognition or anger she wasn’t sure. “What?” she said.
“Like, dinnertime sometimes,” Billy said softly. He sat very still, as though she were an animal he didn’t want to frighten away. “Sometimes it’s like you’re a—dark cloud—sitting at the table.”
Jane blinked and two tears fell onto the couch. “Dinnertime,” she repeated. She could see the table hastily set, the stained place mats and the cheap paper napkins, Maisie overturning her cup. Just the thought of it exhausted her.
She let herself fall sideways onto the couch, the top of her head not quite touching his leg, and she began to cry. Even though she had said it wasn’t all his fault—even though she knew it to be true—it was surprisingly painful to think about.
“Not all the time,” Billy said. “I don’t mean it’s like that all the time.”
Jane reached up and laid her hand on his thigh. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Really,” he said, “it’s a little thing.”
Jane wiped her tears away with her other hand. “I wish we had a time machine!” she said. “I wish we could go back and start again!”
“Worse things always happen when you go back in time to try to fix things,” Billy said. He covered her hand with his, and at the touch of it all the oxygen seemed to vanish from her body, leaving her breathless. ”Cities in flames, species destroyed, rodents raging out of control.”
Jane breathed in deeply. She felt her chest expand, felt a warmth moving down through her limbs with her breath. “I would take rodents raging out of control, if we could start again,” she said.
“But not the other two?”
“Which cities?” Jane asked. “Which species?” Bravely, she pulled herself up so her head rested on his leg, and he began to stroke her hair. Her whole body was electric again. They stayed like that for a while, both of them motionless except for his fingers moving back and forth across her hair. Then she sat up, touched his face lightly, and kissed him. His arms went around her and his mouth pressed back against hers, and she remembered again when he’d come back from Japan and she’d thought she’d never want anything in the world except his arms around her. And even though she knew, before very long, there’d be lots of things she wanted again besides this, it made her heart light that, for right now, it seemed like enough.
* * *
Later, after Billy had gone back to Vince’s, Jane remembered Susannah Olen, still as dead now as she had been this afternoon. No second chances, no starting over again for her, or for her husband, either. She went into her study, cleared off a space on the desk, found a piece of stationery, and began to write.
Dear Greg,
I was so sorry to hear about the death of your wife. Though I met her only that once, I could see what a vibrant and talented person she was. I particularly noticed her paintings, with their careful, almost quiet elegance and beauty. It makes me sad to think that the person who made them will never have a chance to pursue the evident passion she had for her art. I hope, as your daughter grows up, the paintings will help her to know, a little bit, the mother who was taken from her.
Please accept my deepest condolences.
Sincerely,
Jane Levitsky
When she reread the note, Jane wanted to tear it up. Such paltry words and conventional sentiments! It struck her as sickeningly facile, superficial, and at the same time awkward and labored.
Nevertheless, she folded the paper and put it into an envelope. What else was there to say, after all? There was nothing anyone could write or do that would make Greg Olen feel the slightest bit better. And surely some contact—some human contact—was better than none.
Chapter Nineteen
ABOUT TWO WEEKS after Billy moved back into the house, Jane received the following response to her letter.
Dear Jane,
Thank you for your note. You barely knew Susannah, and yet you recognized her gifts as so few did. Your words have meant a great deal to me over the past terrible weeks. Thank you for taking the time to write.
It strikes me, as well, that there is something you and I should talk over. I hesitate to ask you to drive all the way out here, but it does not seem to me like something to be discussed over the telephone, and I’m rather tied down. So, if you ever find you
rself in the neighborhood . . .
Sincerely yours,
Greg Olen
That night when Billy got home from work, Jane showed him the note.
“Are you going to go?” he asked.
They were in the living room, where Maisie was playing with Stripy, who they kept well fed on a diet of crickets. At first Jane had been squeamish about holding the snake, but now she was used to it. It was, after all, only a very small snake—a garter snake, it turned out—a tame shadow of Masha’s vipers or Felicia’s python. She liked the way it slithered and wriggled in her hands.
Now it squiggled across the rug as Maisie erected a ring of wooden blocks to barricade it in. There were gaps, though, and Maisie had to keep grabbing it and bringing it back into the middle as she reinforced the structure with more blocks, small stuffed animals, books, and plastic trucks.
“Maisie,” Billy said, “don’t hold Stripy by the tail, please.”
“Why?” Maisie asked as the snake dangled from her fingers, trying to loop itself up onto her palm.
“I think I have to,” Jane said in answer to Billy’s question.
“Because it’s a living thing,” Billy told Maisie. “Not a toy.”
Maisie started to cry. “You made me cry, Daddy,” she accused, big tears running down her face and falling onto the carpet.
Maisie had been especially volatile since Billy moved back, more prone than usual to tantrums and tears, which seemed wrong. Maybe she felt safe enough now to let her feelings out. Or maybe it was because she got less attention, Jane and Billy were concentrating so much on each other. Or maybe it was a stage that would have happened anyway. Whatever the reason, Jane hoped it would pass soon.
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