Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  The exclamation point on my keyboard was worn down, faded.

  I felt the same.

  The chipper bookseller introduced me while I shifted uncomfortably, trying to pretend she was speaking about someone else. I slapped on a smile and started reading:

  It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when your life becomes unmanageable . . .

  Six months ago I had a successful career in Montreal, and now I was nearly a fugitive, living anonymously in a beach town on the other side of the world.

  I wasn’t really happy before. My job was stressful. I slept badly. I weighed less than I should. I pushed away those who tried to get close to me.

  But at least I was living.

  Now, I’m in stasis. I sleep, but I wake early. I eat, but it’s out of habit. I run along the shore at dawn, but I can’t see the beauty that surrounds me.

  I need to go back. To my life. But also to the beginning. So I can know. So I can understand.

  How I got here. What we did. Why we did it.

  But really, what I most need to know is: Were we innocent?

  Were we guilty?

  You tell me . . .

  “I loved your book,” a woman said to me, handing me her copy.

  “Thanks so much!” My exclamation marks were back. “Who can I make this out to?”

  I asked, and wrote, and signed for an hour. The bookstore was thrilled, my guide told me, thrilled. I told her how much independent bookstores meant to me. How they’d been my salvation, the first to embrace The Book and lead it to what it had become.

  “Oh, here’s a latecomer,” she said.

  Hanna was standing there. She was wearing a blue tank top that accented her shoulder blades, and jeans that fit her just right. Her blonde hair was wavy and relaxed, but her face told a different story.

  I pushed my seat back, my arms rigid.

  “Don’t worry,” Hanna said. “I come in peace.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will you sign this for me?”

  She thrust a book at me. It looked read. Reread, even.

  I took it from her and opened it to the signature page. John’s name was written neatly in the corner with the date next to it. Two years earlier.

  I looked up at Hanna.

  “John’s a big fan, didn’t you know?”

  “I knew he’d read it.”

  That seemed like the safest answer.

  “Well, he is.”

  “Should I make it out to you?”

  “How about you make it out to both of us?”

  Was there a pointed note to her voice? Perhaps.

  I uncapped my pen and wrote: To Hannah and John,

  “There’s no h in Hanna.”

  “Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry. I usually ask! I’ve never seen it written down.”

  But that wasn’t true. It was on the letter she’d given me at the block party. We are the attorneys for John and Hanna Dunbar. We have been mandated to advise you that our client has reason to bring the following legal complaint against you . . . Someone in the firm she worked for had signed it, but that didn’t make it any less real, or any less of a threat.

  “You can scratch the h out,” she said.

  “But I wouldn’t want to ruin it. I can grab another copy . . .”

  “No, it’s fine.” She took the book and pen from me and put a line through the h. “See? All better now.”

  She put it back on the table. I pulled it toward me as I wondered what else to write. Thanks for being so welcoming! So great to know you! Thanks for coming out; it means so much to me! All the usual phrases seemed impossible, so I wrote: Hope you enjoy(ed) this, and signed my name.

  I handed it back to her.

  “You must get sick of being asked whether you’re Meredith.”

  Meredith. The narrator of The Murder Game. The person I wish I’d worked harder at differentiating from me. But would that have changed anything? I was conscious every day, now, as I tried to write, that no matter what I did, anything that seemed to resemble my life remotely would be thought a product of anything other than my imagination.

  “Did it show?” I said.

  I’d been asked that question in the talk, and I gave my stock answer: If I planned a murder, I’d never get away with it.

  It usually gets a laugh. It did that day, too.

  “Not obviously. So . . . someone in your law-school class died?”

  “Kathryn. She got pretty drunk at a law-school party and went to lie down. We found her dead a few hours later.”

  “How awful.”

  “It was.”

  “A close friend?”

  “Fairly close. I met her in law school. You know how it is. I hardly speak to anyone from my class anymore. But during school, we were close.”

  “Same. So, she wasn’t murdered?”

  My hands clenched under the table. “The autopsy said she’d stopped breathing. There were a lot of pillows on the bed, and she’d been drinking pretty heavily . . .”

  “They say you write what you know,” Hanna said.

  “That’s what they say.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I think people confuse that with writing about yourself. I took a real thing I went through and used the emotions I had from that to make the things I imagined feel real.”

  “They felt pretty real.”

  “Thank you.”

  If she was expecting me to say more, she was going to be disappointed. Others had tried and failed, and I was on my guard. Was she this obvious in court?

  “What made you stop by?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. I saw something about it in the paper, and I grabbed the book and came.”

  “I haven’t answered the letter. The lawyer’s letter.”

  “I know. Why is that?”

  It felt weird talking like this. With me sitting, and her holding my book to her chest like someone might steal it from her.

  I spoke impulsively. “Why don’t you guys come for dinner? Say, next Friday? Maybe we can talk this out and come to a solution?”

  “I . . .”

  “Or the two of us could go for a drink? Whatever’s easiest.”

  “Dinner’s fine.”

  “Great!” I said, using my last exclamation mark. “See you at seven?”

  The Dinner

  John

  Four months ago

  When Hanna told me that she’d agreed to go to dinner at Daniel and Julie’s, I thought she was joking. Even though it wasn’t like Hanna to joke. But, no. It was true. She’d inexplicably gone to Julie’s book signing. She had the inscribed book to prove it.

  “I don’t understand,” I said as we worked through our Sunday list of chores together. Laundry. Changing the sheets on our bed. Getting a week’s worth of clothes ready. I had a couple interviews for contract work. I couldn’t show up to them in the old Ohio University sweatpants I’d taken to wearing most days. I was adding shirts to the pile to get pressed. “You said you were going to do the grocery shopping.”

  “I did. But I also went to Joseph-Beth.”

  “Did you know she was going to be there?”

  “Yes. How else would I have known to take your book?”

  “So you deliberately took my book to get her to sign it?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Hanna. You’re not making any sense.”

  She finished stripping the sheets and tossed them into the laundry basket. She pulled fresh ones from our closet.

  “Will you help me with this?”

  I took the other end of the fitted sheet and walked to my side of the bed. I snapped a corner in place.

  “I’m having second thoughts, okay? I woke up this morning thinking: What if I misread this situation? What if there’s an explanation for everything? And I thought . . . that if I went to see her, maybe I’d be able to figure that out.”

  “An
d did you?”

  “I listened to her speak about how she came up with the idea for her book. Did you know about that?”

  “Not really,” I said. “No.”

  “This woman in her law-school class died in this kind of horrible way, and then she wrote a book about it.”

  “Is that what she said? That’s not even the plot of the book.”

  “She didn’t write about it literally. It’s what gave her the idea.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  She tossed the top sheet to me. I spread it out, making a hospital corner the way my mother taught me.

  “Nothing, I guess. It just seems parasitic.”

  I crushed my instinct to stand up for Julie. “How did that end up with us going over there for dinner?”

  “I felt kind of sorry for her when she was speaking. She was very polished, very good, but she seemed . . . vulnerable. And she’s talented.”

  “She is.”

  She stuffed a pillow into a case and tossed it at the headboard.

  “That must be a lot of pressure, having to write a book after a massive success like that.”

  “Do you feel that way after a big win in court?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” Hanna said. “I guess so. I feel pressure with every case; you know that.”

  “You told me once that was because you cared.”

  “I do.”

  “Maybe it’s like that for her? Imagine spending all that time on one thing. And then it goes out into the world, and people write all kinds of horrible things about you. Plus, the stalker.”

  “Yeah, that occurred to me. It’s part of why I felt for her. Plus, then, all the stuff with us . . . anyway, I said we’d do dinner on Friday.”

  I watched her, trying to figure out what she was really thinking. “Because you felt sorry for her?”

  “Because she asked me. And because it’s always better to settle than to sue. You in?”

  “I’m game if you are.”

  She finished the pillows. We adjusted the blanket together. I thought about how, when we climbed into bed later, the sheets would feel cool against my skin. A feeling that wouldn’t survive the night. By the time dinner rolled around on Friday, the sheets would be a tangled mess.

  But for that moment, the bed looked so pristine and inviting.

  If only a few nips and tucks could make life feel like that.

  We stood in the entranceway to Julie and Daniel’s house, shrugging off the raincoats we’d worn for the ten-second walk across the street in the heat-relieving rain. I didn’t know if Hanna had been in the house since Julie and Daniel had moved in. She was certainly acting as if she hadn’t. Absorbing every detail, her eyes roving around like the cameras that made her so mad.

  What did she see? A cool palette of paint on the walls. Family photographs. The same scatter of toys and small shoes that used to litter our house.

  Daniel greeted us warmly and beckoned us to follow him. We took a seat in the living room. Two dark-brown leather couches faced each other. A blue-and-gray oriental rug covered the floor. The mantel was cluttered with more photos in mismatched frames. Daniel offered us each a drink from the old-fashioned bar cart that took up the corner near the front windows. I had a fleeting thought that maybe this should be a sober evening, but Hanna asked for white wine, and the beer Daniel offered sounded good.

  It tasted good, too. Cold and clean after a long day locked in front of my computer.

  “Where are the kids?” Hanna asked when Daniel took a seat on the couch across from us.

  “You’ve noticed the quiet?” he said.

  Hanna smiled. “I did, actually.”

  “They have a sleepover tonight. At the Hendersons’? Brave people. Eight six-year-olds!” He shuddered. “Do you know them? Nice couple.”

  “Their oldest is in Becky’s class.”

  “Great, great.”

  He played with the label on his beer. His hands were rough. Chapped. They’d been that way in Mexico, too. I made some crack about our crazy car ride back from the bar, which broke the tension. We talked about our favorite restaurants on the resort, and whether we’d go back. Then Hanna asked after Julie. She was in the kitchen, seeing to the dinner preparations. That surprised me, for some reason. Although I knew she and Daniel traded off meals—one of the many subjects covered on our runs—there was something undomestic about her. Hanna would probably beat me about the head if I said that out loud.

  “Whatever’s cooking smells delicious,” Hanna said.

  “It’s nine-minute pasta,” Julie said, coming into the room. She was holding a glass of red wine and wearing a pair of cream-colored pants. She was wearing an apron, too, which made my previous thought ridiculous. She looked entirely domestic. At ease. At home in a way I hadn’t seen before.

  “Oh,” Hanna said, “I read about that! You put everything in the same pot, right? Water and pasta and everything?”

  “That’s right. It sounds completely wrong, but it’s fantastic.”

  “Changed our life, really,” Daniel said.

  “Stop teasing me,” Julie said, swatting at his arm. “He forgot to set the timer one night, and it ended up as a great gloppy thing. That wasn’t the recipe’s fault.”

  “You can make other things that way, too, can’t you?” Hanna asked. “Other pastas, and ramen soup, I think.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Our kids love pasta, so it’s great. With both of them usually running around like banshees . . .” She trailed off and looked around, as if she’d just realized the children weren’t there. “Should we call the Hendersons and check on them, you think?” she asked Daniel.

  “Absolutely not. They have our numbers.”

  “But they can be a handful . . .”

  “You were so worried when Chris had his first sleepover. Remember, honey?” I said, giving Hanna an affectionate pat on the knee.

  “Yet, you were the one who drove over there to make sure everything was okay, if I remember correctly.”

  “Did I do that?”

  “Don’t blame you, man,” Daniel said. “I think it’s worse for us because we’re supposed to be all nonchalant, but really all we want to do is check on them,” Daniel said. “Can I get you another beer?”

  I looked down at my empty bottle. How had that happened so fast?

  “Sure. That’d be great.”

  He took my bottle along with his into the kitchen.

  “Four minutes!” he called.

  Julie took a sip of her wine. “Do you like it?” she asked Hanna, who hadn’t made much of a dent in her glass. “We have something else if it’s not to your taste.”

  “It’s fine, thank you.”

  We fell into silence. I racked my brain for something to say, but every subject felt like a minefield.

  “How’s the next book going?” Hanna asked. “Do you have a deadline?”

  Daniel returned with two beers swinging from his fingers.

  “That’s two minutes.”

  “Yes, it’s due in a couple of months. I’m at about sixty thousand words.”

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “It’s not enough, unfortunately.”

  “What’s this one about, if you can say? Another murder?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Julie’s cagey about her writing,” Daniel said. “I didn’t even know she’d finished writing The Murder Game until she’d gotten an agent.”

  “Really?” Hanna said. “You weren’t even a bit suspicious? She must’ve been spending a lot of time on the computer.”

  A beeper sounded.

  “That’ll be the pasta,” Julie said, draining her glass. “Why don’t you all go sit down and I’ll bring it out?”

  We followed her instructions, bringing our drinks with us to the dining room. Hanna’s glass was suddenly empty. She had a hard glint in her eye: a look she sometimes got when she’d been drinking.

  “She wrote in coffee shop
s,” Daniel said. “We’d hired a babysitter for the afternoons to give Julie a break.”

  We sat down at the dark wood table. There were four chairs around it covered in white suede fabric. The room was lit by a glass chandelier. Several candles glimmered on the table.

  “How old were the twins?” I asked.

  “Two, two and a half. She survived two years home alone with them all day. Enough to drive anyone mad, I say.” A look of guilt shot across his face. “Not that Julie didn’t love being home with the kids . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Hanna said. “I would’ve needed to be heavily medicated if I’d had to stay home any longer than I did.”

  “I was heavily medicated,” Julie said, walking in with a large bowl full of steaming pasta. “I highly recommend it.”

  I laughed. It seemed like the only appropriate response.

  “I wasn’t joking,” Julie said, taking a seat at the head of the table. “Pass your plates up.”

  We obeyed her while Daniel filled fresh glasses with red wine. A generous pour.

  “I had a bit of the baby blahs,” Hanna said. “After Becky was born.”

  That was news to me.

  “This was a bit more than that,” Julie said. “But it’s fine. I’m not ashamed. Besides, who knows why things happen. Maybe, if I hadn’t been depressed, I never would have written The Book.”

  “That’s Julie’s name for it,” I said, instantly regretting it. “I mean . . .”

  “It’s this silly affectation I have,” Julie said as she passed plates along the table. The pasta, in some kind of red sauce with sausage and fresh basil, really did smell wonderful. “Capitalizing the things that seem outsized in my life. The Book. The Deadline. The Lawsuit.”

  I nearly choked on my drink.

  “I thought we were here to bury the hatchet?” Hanna said carefully.

  “We are,” Daniel said. “Please don’t take that the wrong way.”

  “Yes, please,” Julie said. “I blurt things out sometimes. No filter. It’s my greatest fault. Right, Daniel?”

  Daniel tilted his wineglass at her. “It’s what keeps you interesting.”

  “I have a horror of not being interesting.”

  Hanna was watching Julie carefully, her pasta steaming on her plate. If Hanna was flinty, Julie had a kind of manic quality about her. I’d never seen her like this. Was she mixing pills with alcohol? Or did Hanna bring it out in her?