“Coach Miller suggested there was some violence in the home,” Dave says.
“Then he was lying, because there was a lot of violence. A lot. But even so, it didn’t take long for the fire department to rule it arson. Whoever set the fire used accelerant.”
Still.
“It could have been anybody,” I say.
My head aches, and I suddenly wish I was back home, letting Mom fuss over me. Why did I have to come out here and kick up this dramatic shit storm? I want to go back in time, unhear everything this man and Coach Miller have told me. It’s too much. I no longer want to know.
“True. But the fire occurred at around 2:00 a.m., after a particularly loud and vicious argument between Kat and Lewis ended in them both drinking themselves into a stupor. I’ll never forget the screaming and shouting from those two. Anyhow, a container of gasoline was found in the abandoned apartment next door. And Billy, who swore he was asleep in his bed at that time, somehow made it out without a scratch.”
I stare at Dave, who’s been taking in the news in a way that makes his face shut down. He swipes a palm over his chin and swallows. He doesn’t want to believe, but he might.
And even though the psychologist in me knows an abused, neglected kid is sixty percent more likely to get into trouble, I’m not convinced. This is my Will we’re talking about. He could have woken up from the noise, or maybe he smelled the smoke. Anybody could have put the gasoline in an abandoned apartment. My Will would never have done such a thing.
“So far the only evidence I’ve heard has been circumstantial,” I say.
“I already told you he was smart. But I’ll tell you right now exactly what I told the detectives at the time. What I saw on your husband’s face when those firemen carried his unconscious father out of that burning building was disappointment.” Mr. Butler slaps his fork to the table and spears me with a hard gaze. “Do you understand what I’m telling you? He wanted that fire to take them both.”
15
I jerk awake when Dave shoves open the curtains with a loud screech. “Rise and shine, princess. It’s a brand-new day, and it’s raining. Again. Make that still. It’s raining still.” He turns, his body silhouetted in front of the window like a shadow. “How do people live here?”
I groan, rolling away from the window and the light, and pull the pillow over my throbbing head. After we dropped Mr. Butler back at Rainier Vista, Dave drove us straight to the nearest bar, where he told the bartender to keep the vodka martinis coming until I was good and drunk. With not much more than a couple bites of Chex Mix lining my stomach, it didn’t take him long. By the time I reached the bottom of the first glass, the room was already spinning. Things started to get fuzzy somewhere halfway through the second one. I have no memory of the third or how I got from there, a slightly seedy cocktail lounge with bad music and a sticky bar top, to here, wrapped in soft Egyptian cotton.
I push myself up on an elbow and look around the hotel room. Hip and generically modern with a great wall of windows looking out over the water. In the distance is a mountainous horizon, jagged peaks of terrain jutting up into the steel sky. “Where are we?”
He gives me a funny look. “Honey, we’re in Seattle, remember? Birthplace of Starbucks and flannel capital of the world, where everybody drives a Subaru. I always thought that last one was an exaggeration, by the way, but it’s not. For a city so focused on clean living, you’d think there’d be fewer cars.”
“I know Seattle. I meant, what hotel? I hope you didn’t have to carry me.”
“Hey, that’s what brothers are for.” He grins.
“I’m sorry we missed last night’s dinner reservation.”
He plops into an armchair by the window, waving off my apology. “The bar food was actually okay. I mean, it wasn’t foie gras, but it was a hell of a lot better than that fast-food curry, which, by the way, was definitely not lamb. But just so we’re clear, you’re not getting out of feeding me a sit-down breakfast this morning before we go.”
“Go where?”
“We can hammer out the agenda at breakfast. We’ve got places to go and people to talk to, so let’s go.”
I fall back onto the bed, pulling the covers up to under my chin. “You go. I’m not up to doing anything today.”
“This isn’t a vacation, Iris. We’re on a mission here, remember? Your mission.”
“I know, but tomorrow, maybe. Today let’s stay in our pajamas, order room service and have a movie marathon.”
“I’m already dressed.”
I reach one arm out, pluck the hotel TV directory from the nightstand. “I bet they have Beaches.”
“Come on. I’m not that much of a stereotype.”
“Sorry to break it to you, bro, but you are.”
He rolls his eyes but doesn’t argue the point. “Would you please get out of bed and in the shower? I called around to some old-folks’ homes near Rainier Vista, and guess who I found? Your father-in-law. Will’s father. I thought we’d start by paying him a visit.”
Father-in-law. I roll the word around on my tongue, and a fresh round of yesterday’s hurt throbs in my chest, a hot white pulse that crushes my already trampled heart. And my brand-new father-in-law is not the worst of it. I push up onto an elbow.
“I maybe have had a few too many martinis last night, but I happen to remember every single word that old man said. A woman and two children died in a fire that he’s convinced Will set. Maybe Will did it and maybe he didn’t, but you know what they say, where there’s smoke and all that...”
“Well, while you were sleeping off the booze, I did a bit of digging into that fire. I checked the newspapers and read the redacted police report online, and the old man’s story was pretty accurate, except he forgot to mention one thing. The police traced the gasoline jug to a store in Portland, which begs the question. How does a seventeen-year-old kid with no car and no money buy gas in a city almost two-hundred miles down the road?”
“Did they mention any other suspects?”
“Only Will’s father.”
My eyes go wide. “Will’s father was a suspect?”
“Of course. The husband is always the first one the police question. Don’t you watch CSI? Especially when he’s got loose hands like Will’s father did. He was too drunk to remember his alibi, but he had one. A neighbor said he was passed out on their couch when the building went up in flames.”
Flames. The word gives me a full-body shiver.
“And the kids?”
“Two siblings, three and five. Fast asleep in the apartment across the hall. Their mother was working the night shift.”
My stomach twists with horror for that poor woman. I think of her tucking her babies in that night before heading off to work, telling them she’d be home by the time they awoke, telling herself they’d be safe in their own beds. Their tragedy is every mother’s worst nightmare.
I curl around my pillow, burrowing deeper under the comforter. “You know, everything I’ve learned since the crash is so confusing. Him getting on the wrong plane to the wrong destination. Making up a conference. Meeting this friend Corban he never told me about. All these lies about where he came from and what his childhood was like. I don’t understand any of it. Except for the house.”
“Your house?”
I nod. “We must have seen a hundred. There was something wrong with every one of them. The kitchen was too dated or the yard was too small or the street was too busy. Nothing was ever perfect enough for Will. Our broker showed us that house more to prove a point than anything else. Like, see what you can get if you cough up another hundred grand? But you should have seen his face when we walked in the door.” I smile at the memory of how everything about him went completely still but the color in his cheeks, which got more and more flushed with each room we walked through. �
��By the time we got upstairs, it was a done deal. He had to have it.”
A sudden gust of rain machine-gun patters against the window. Dave swings his feet up onto an ottoman, folding his arms across his chest and settling in. “It is a gorgeous house.”
I think about the first time we walked up the steps, his face when we pushed through the stained-glass door, how I knew before we walked through, it was a done deal. “We made an offer that same day. Even though it meant mostly empty rooms and a mortgage we could afford only by the skin of our teeth. But now I understand why owning it was so important to him.”
“Because the house was a symbol of how far he’d come.”
“Exactly.” As I say the word, a familiar anger rises inside me all over again, and I lurch upright in bed. “If he had just told me why he wanted it so badly, I wouldn’t have fought him so much. I wouldn’t have complained about giving up my Starbucks habit or how we never got to go on vacation so we could buy our dream house. There’s not a soul on the planet who would have understood more than me. But he wasn’t ever planning to tell me, was he?”
Dave sighs, lifting both hands into the air. “Not this again,” he mutters.
“Not what again?”
“We already had this discussion, at length, last night at the bar. You even took a poll. An overwhelming eighty-seven percent of half-drunk hipsters agree that, no, Will was never planning to tell you.”
Normally, I’d be mortified by the thought of a hammered me asking people I don’t know to weigh in on my marriage. I’m not exactly an uninhibited type, and I don’t go around talking to strangers about my business. But I’m too focused on the bigger picture—the fact that my husband not only kept such essential parts of himself from me, his very favorite person on the planet, when we first met, but that he didn’t trust me, didn’t trust our love, enough to come clean.
“Not about his parents, not about the fire, nothing about his scary, sketchy past. He fed me all that bullshit about growing up with a loving single mother in Memphis, and I swallowed it whole. Did he even go to UT? Does he even have a degree? I have no idea, because I’m the most gullible person in the world!”
“You aren’t gullible, honey. You were deceived by the man you loved. There’s a big difference.”
“I’m a trained psychologist, Dave. I’m supposed to see through people like Will.”
“I don’t see how any of this is your fault.”
“Whatever.” I fall back onto the bed, covering my face with the pillow, new tears pricking at my eyes. Up until seven days ago, I was 100 percent convinced I knew my husband. I thought Will told me everything about himself. I thought we told each other everything. And now, I keep unraveling bits and pieces of the former him that lead me back to the same thought: I never really knew the man I married.
And now, looking back, I have to question everything. That time we went to San Francisco, a city he swore he’d never visited, and he knew the way with barely a glance at the map. Was it because he’d been there before? When he admitted in a game of Cards Against Humanity that he didn’t go to senior prom but refused to tell me why. And when we would go to La Fonda and Will would order chile rellenos and quesadillas con camarones with perfect pronunciation. Since when did he speak Spanish?
And then it occurs to me that I’ve lost Will twice now. The first time was when he got on that plane, the second when he posthumously morphed into a stranger. One was swift and shocking, the other more gradual but no less painful. Both wounds are fresh and jagged and deep.
“Tomorrow’s a week,” I say, my voice muffled. “I will have survived seven whole days without Will.”
“I know.” Dave is silent for a long moment, and I hear him push out of the chair, moving closer. “Listen, can I ask you something?”
“I’m pretty sure I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”
“I realize that finding out all this stuff about Will is gutting you.”
“It is.” A sob pushes up my throat, but I catch it before it escapes.
“But have you considered the obvious?”
“Which is?” I push aside my pillow, and there he is, my twin brother, staring down at me.
He gives me an encouraging smile. “That maybe he did change. Maybe that’s why he never told you. Maybe he was looking to start fresh, to press control-alt-delete on his shitty life and start all over with you.”
“Okay, then tell me, why did he get on a plane to Seattle?”
The smile drops from his face. My question has stumped him, and even worse, it’s stumped me. Why did Will get on that plane to Seattle? Suddenly, the idea of hiding out in a hotel room is no longer so appealing. Sighing, I throw back the sheets and haul myself out of bed.
“Thank God,” he says as I head off into the bathroom, “because I’ve seen Beaches a million times.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, as I’m getting out of the shower, a text from the blocked number pings my phone. Why are you still in Seattle? I mean it, Iris. Go. Home. There’s nothing for you there.
I wrap a towel around my torso, shove it under my arms and type out a reply as quickly as my shaking hands will allow. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are. And you were wrong, btw. So far Seattle has been very enlightening.
Two seconds later, another lights up my screen. Don’t believe everything you hear.
My pulse ratchets up, and my stomach tightens with something that feels like excitement. Then what should I believe?
I wait, watching the screen until it goes dark, then black.
* * *
We find Lewis Griffith at Providence House, a memory care facility for the indigent and the most depressing place on the planet. The floors are grungy, the air is smelly, and the ceilings are low and stained. We find a grim-faced nurse on the second floor, and she points us down a dark hallway. “Room 238, but don’t expect him to say much. He’s got Alzheimer’s, you know.”
I thank her, trying to decide if Alzheimer’s is the worst or the best way to cap off six decades of a hard life. It’s a slow and unpleasant way to go, but at least this way he’s not aware of it.
We find him in a closet-sized room that reminds me of a cheap roadside hotel I once stayed at in Guatemala, barely bigger than the bed Mr. Griffith is confined to. There’s nowhere for me and Dave to sit, so we stand, shoulder to shoulder and pressed between two flimsy walls, at the foot end of the bed.
I look down at my father-in-law, and a thunderclap rolls through my head. I search his face for pieces of my husband and find only a few. The broad forehead, the square jawline, the slight upward tilt to the eyes. I might find more, if Mr. Griffith didn’t look so wrecked, if his skin weren’t so waxy and wan, more Madame Tussaud than human, and smothered in brown spots like lunch meat.
I reach for Dave with a shaking hand, and he gives my fingers a squeeze.
“Mr. Griffith, my name is Iris, and I’m your daughter-in-law. I was married to your son, Will. Or Billy. Do you remember him?”
Nothing. Mr. Griffith doesn’t seem to hear me. He takes us in with empty eyes.
I pull up a picture on my phone and hold it in Mr. Griffith’s line of vision. “This was taken about a month ago.”
His forehead creases. A frown?
“Do you remember him?”
Nothing.
“This isn’t getting us very far,” Dave whispers behind a hand.
I give a subtle shake of my head, slipping the phone in my back pocket. “Mr. Griffith, about fifteen years ago, there was a fire in the apartment where you lived, in Rainier Vista. Three people were killed. Does that ring any bells?”
Mr. Griffith doesn’t nod, but the way his gaze wanders to mine straightens my spine.
“Your wife, Kat, was one of the victims, as were two small children. You and Billy sur
vived unharmed.”
His sandpaper lips flap around for a few seconds, like he’s trying to speak. Or maybe he is speaking, I don’t know. Either way, nothing but air comes out.
“Do you remember anything about that night? The fire? Your wife and son?”
His face curls into a grimace, and his mouth moves around some more. Dave and I grip the metal bed frame and lean in closer, straining to hear.
“Did he just say Billy?” Dave says, looking at me with wide eyes.
My heart rate spikes, and the blood roars in my ears. I’m pretty sure he did. “Mr. Griffith, do you remember Billy?”
For the longest moment, there’s nothing but the sound of his wheezing, a breathy whistle sung by rattly lungs. And then he lifts an arm high and slaps the mattress, once, twice, again. His skinny body begins flailing about, limbs writhing, both palms pounding the mattress. Dave and I exchange a worried look.
“Is he okay?” I say.
As if in answer, Mr. Griffith hauls a breath, opens his mouth wide and makes a long, creepy sound somewhere between a moan and a scream.
“Oh, jeez,” Dave says, pulling at his collar.
The moaning stops but not the writhing, and only for a second or two, long enough for Mr. Griffith to suck another rattling breath and begin again.
Dave backs away from the bed, moving closer to the door. “Maybe I should go get a nurse.”
“You stay here. I’ll go.” I’ll be damned if he’s leaving me here alone.
His eyes go wide, and he shakes his head. “No way.”
I latch onto his arm and drag him to the door. “Fine. We’ll both go.”
Mr. Griffith is gearing up for his third round of eerie oms when we stumble into the hall and right into a nurse in pale pink scrubs.
“Oh, thank God,” I say. “There’s something wrong with Mr. Griffith.”
“He’s fine. He’s just agitated again.” She pushes past us and continues down the hall, her crocs squeaking on the dingy linoleum. “Happens all the time.”
The Marriage Lie Page 13