“No, I don’t understand. You first.”
A shadow crept into his eyes as they narrowed across from her. “You made that deposit to my account, then told me you didn’t. It’s not that I don’t appreciate your doing it, even though I don’t know where the money would have come from. But why lie? Why say you didn’t? Why wouldn’t you want me to know?”
Her mind raced ahead of itself. “He told you?” Words intended to draw information, without giving the intention away.
“He looked up the deposit slip. Signed by Susanne Enright. Cash.”
In a flash she understood, hearing a cry fly from her throat. Gil looked at her with an expression of quizzical concern. The fact that he hadn’t figured it out for himself made her feel not angry, as it might have before Joy died, but protective—another emotion she had not experienced since then.
But she didn’t want to tell him before she was sure, so instead she said, “Rob gave me the money, to help us out. He gave it outright—he said he didn’t need it to be a loan. I knew how you’d feel about that. I figured you wouldn’t accept it if you knew.”
She watched him take this in; she could tell she’d done a good job of selling it. Then he asked a question she hadn’t anticipated, in the fleet concoction of the lie. “You asked your brother for money?”
“No. Not exactly. But he must have guessed the business was in trouble when he offered you that job.”
Gil’s eyes remained focused on her, as if he were trying to determine whether she might be lying again, or still. The recognition that her marriage had come to this—that her husband now questioned or challenged so many of the things she told him—caused her lips to go dry suddenly, and though she ran her tongue over them, it brought no relief. “Well,” he said. “I’m not accepting it. As a gift. I’ll pay him back, with interest. I want you to tell him that.”
She agreed. After he left for a plastering job, she went to the bank and stood at the door of Mark Feinbloom’s office, not sure whether to knock or not, because his back was turned to her as he worked at his computer. When she cleared her throat, he glanced over and stood, looking surprised but turning it into the pitying smile she’d become accustomed to from everyone during the past few months.
She told him she’d come because of what Gil had told her about the deposit last fall—that the slip had been signed with her name—but she hadn’t been the one to put the money in. The deposit had been made not in this branch, the central and most convenient one, but at a satellite in Canandaigua. When she asked Mark if he would look at surveillance video from that bank’s cameras, to find out who had actually added the money to Gil’s account, he regarded her in silence for a moment. She could almost feel him thinking what she herself had thought: What difference does it make now?
“We just need to know,” she told him, and he nodded before saying he’d find out what he could. A few hours later he called to say—as Susanne had known he would—that it was Joy on the video, depositing money to Odd Men Out.
“I’m not sure why, if she wanted to keep it secret, she wouldn’t have just used an ATM,” he added, but Susanne understood immediately, with a stabbing sensation that made her fold over: because of the robberies at ATMs during the past months, her daughter had gone out of her way to be careful.
She was certain neither she nor Gil had ever referred to the bank’s foreclosure threats when Joy could have heard. And yet: how careful had she been? If she hadn’t been sleeping with Martin, wouldn’t she have picked up on the fact that Joy was worried, and why? And if Joy had trusted her mother—if she hadn’t suspected her of cheating on her father, and felt afraid to bring it up—wouldn’t she have just come out and asked her parents how much trouble they were in?
It was her own fault—all of it—Susanne saw now, thinking for a moment that she might actually choke on the mass that rose swiftly to her throat. Before this she’d managed, somehow, to keep it down. Now she had no choice but to recognize that though she had not strangled her daughter, she was responsible for Joy’s death nonetheless.
The next day she forced herself to tell Gil, knowing how he would feel once he understood that Joy’s actions appeared to have been triggered at least in part by his financial failures. But she only managed a single sentence before Gil interrupted her and said, “Wait. Wait. You told me you put that money in, from your brother. The bank told me it was you.”
“Well, that’s what they thought. She signed my name to the slip.”
“So how do they know it was Joy?”
“I asked Mark to look at the video.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“And you’re only telling me now?”
She hesitated. “I was trying to spare you.”
“Spare me? From what?”
“I knew how you’d feel if you found out she did all that to help save your business.” All that—selling drugs, blackmail. No need for her to spell it out; they were both more aware of the details than they wanted to be.
“Why would she think it needed saving?”
“Gil. Come on. Because it does.”
He slumped back, the knockout complete, and she was tempted to make the spontaneous decision not to tell him the rest of what she’d planned to: that contrary to what she’d led herself and him to believe at the time, Joy had been aware of the affair between her and Martin.
But of course Gil deserved to know that this, and not only the stress of hearing her parents fight about money, was what caused Joy to distance herself from them in the weeks before she died. She also told him she’d slept with Martin six times, not once. Getting rid of that piece of deception made her feel hollow in a good way, as if she were making room for something she could not have accommodated otherwise.
She forced herself to meet his eyes as she admitted everything, and waited for him to pull away, too. It was what she deserved, and she was prepared for it to hurt all the more because now that they were alone again she felt closer to him than ever, including the earliest days of their marriage.
When instead of retreating he reached for her hand, brought it to his face, and held it there, she convulsed in grief and relief against his arm. He murmured, “I know. I know,” over and over, until it grew dark out and she let go of his arm so he could stand and turn on a light.
Now, as they dressed for the graduation ceremony, she said, “I’ve been wondering something. Would you do it over again, if we had the choice?” When he didn’t respond right away, she thought maybe she hadn’t been clear. “I mean—try for Joy? Have her?”
The confusion erased itself, replaced by the tender expression she remembered from the times she’d most loved watching her husband and daughter together. “In a heartbeat,” Gil said, and the further relief of this—of knowing they felt the same way—brought a hot sting to her eyes. For the first time since they’d lost Joy, she felt something she couldn’t call hope yet, but that she wouldn’t have called the opposite of hope, either.
The first recipient of the Joy Enright Memorial Scholarship was Felicity Cross, a ceramicist going into her second year of the MFA. During the committee’s discussions about how the money should be awarded, Bart Richlieu had worried aloud that it might look funny, to use his word, if they chose the program’s only remaining student of color. “Won’t it seem like we’re overcompensating for what happened to Willett?” he asked.
“No,” Jonatha Hurley said. “It’ll seem like we’re giving an award to the student we think deserves it the most.”
“But—”
“Bart,” Jonatha told him, “shut up.”
After the ceremony, which had been moved to an indoor hall because of rain, Susanne felt exhausted; normal life still exhausted her, though she could at least imagine the time now when this might not be the case. She wanted to go home, but Gil convinced her to stop at the reception under the tent behind the Campus Center. When they stepped outside, she saw that the rain had stopped and the clouds appeared to be movi
ng on. They took seats at a table bordering the wet grass to watch the students play an outsized game of Jenga, using a high stack of two-by-fours they’d painted in primary colors and spent hours setting up in the center of the quad. Some of the students balked at destroying it once they’d constructed the tower, but others persuaded them after it had been photographed from every conceivable angle to preserve their handiwork for posterity. They took turns cautiously pulling planks from the bottom, nobody wanting to be the one to send the boards tumbling. Each time one had been removed safely, a cheer went up among the crowd.
The students invited their teachers to play and wheedled Susanne into taking a turn. She pulled the board someone pointed to, assuming she would be the one to make the whole structure fall. When it didn’t, she gasped and everyone laughed, including her, though the sound of her own laughter was foreign to her.
Watching the new graduates, Susanne murmured, “Martin would have been one of them,” testing whether she could speak his name safely. When Gil nodded and reached to cover her hand with his own, she knew she could say this and much more. But for now, she just sat and watched the game, waiting like everyone else for the sun to emerge and finally warm everything, after a winter too long for them all.
During
All Other Cases Are True
Stumbling over a hard vine sticking up from the cold ground, she looked back, but no one was following her. What had she thought—that Delaney Stowell gave enough of a shit to start chasing her through the woods, in her new UGGs and with her long, laser-smooth legs bare between her skirt and boots? What did Delaney care what Joy did with the pad of prescription sheets? She didn’t seem afraid of getting caught. She didn’t seem afraid of anything, although Joy knew this was partly an act because Delaney had sweated plenty the day of the SATs, until Joy got home and called her to say No problem, they barely checked the ID.
But sometimes an act was enough, if you could convince yourself as much as you convinced other people.
She was afraid—had been afraid for months now, ever since Jason took her aside at BM to ask if she could ever use some extra cash, because he’d heard her say she wanted to go to a college her parents couldn’t afford—but that would end after today. She knew Delaney meant it when she said this was the last time, but Joy had already decided that for herself. One last set of proceeds (she refused to use words like “score,” at least in her own mind, knowing it was ridiculous to think that this meant she was not a real drug dealer but clinging to the delusion anyway) and she’d hang it up. Thirty thousand dollars, Jason had said, this new customer would give her for the whole pad. She’d have to split it with Jason, but it’d still be a big pot. When she added it to what she’d saved already, she’d be able to go to Decker at least for a year or two, if she got in. She’d have to pretend she’d won the big scholarship, but that would be her last piece of deception, and maybe her parents would be able to hire a nurse so that her grandmother could move out of BM and into Joy’s own bedroom.
“Don’t leave me here,” Emilia had begged the last time Joy visited her. She knew her parents believed that her grandmother didn’t know what she was saying; that she no longer made sense. And it seemed to be true, when her parents were around. But Emilia was perfectly coherent when she spoke to Joy. “Don’t just leave me. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
As much as she loved her grandmother, as much as she wanted to go to New York to study art, she wouldn’t take any more chances after today. This was the last time; her nerves couldn’t handle it anymore.
Not to mention the guilt, the guilt, the guilt, which came over her so hard and fast now she felt as if she were drowning. This was what it was like to drown, she knew: you lost sight of the world above your head as it receded farther and farther, even as you reached and grasped and fumbled to seize it back. How had she thought she might avoid this? By justifying everything she’d done, telling herself her parents had betrayed her; by making that random deposit into her father’s account? A lame gesture if there ever was one.
Too late, she wished she’d gone back to her mother’s car and home, instead of taking this crazy, slippery, freezing jog through the woods. Delaney and Tessa and Lin would have just ignored her and gone on their own way. But she would still have had Harper to deal with, she remembered, swatting at a branch she almost missed as she pitched forward through the thick brush. Harper, whose faithfulness made Joy feel equally sad and guilty.
What was it that had caused Harper to blurt what she did, at the Halloween party, about Joy’s mother and her affair? Right before that Delaney had said something and Joy laughed, without even hearing what it was. She laughed because it was easier that way, and because she wanted Delaney to keep providing her with scrips. Whatever it had been, it made Harper mad, but by the next day she was over it. Though this made things easier for Joy (who justified the theft of Mrs. Grove’s pills by reminding herself how much Harper hated it when her mother was on them), she found herself wishing that Harper would hold it against her, for once. She didn’t deserve for Harper to love her, not now, but when all this was over, she would do whatever it took to earn her best friend back.
She ducked a low-hanging branch at the last minute, just before it would have whacked her in the eye. This place, she knew as she pitched through it, was called the Undead Forest. Of course, most people didn’t really believe the story about ghosts rising out of the ground. But she still felt relieved when she came out on the other side.
At the edge of the lot her father had once been excited to call his job, his “big break,” she stood for a moment and blinked. Everything looked so ordinary—the gray sky, the curve of the lake at its elbow, the row of half-finished condos with its broken, pathetic sign—and yet she felt, suddenly, like someone she’d never been before now. How had this become her life, running through the woods to escape people she didn’t want to spend time with, in search of someone she didn’t even know? She couldn’t wait to get home and make up with her mother. Tonight she would sit both her parents down and confess everything: the business she let Jason cut her in on, the pills she stole from Harper’s mother, taking the SATs as Delaney Stowell. The idea of telling them felt so good that for a moment she thought about turning around instead of even meeting this guy. But she’d have to return through the same woods, too soon after emerging, and besides that, she’d be giving up all that cash. Okay, then: get it over with. She took a breath and headed toward La-La.
They all look alike. She remembered hearing her father say this to her mother one day when he got home from work. Joy had banged into the kitchen on the force of her indignation and said, “Who all looks alike?”
“What do you mean, ‘who’?” her father said. “Those condos. They’re cookie-cutter. You can’t tell them apart.”
It had been true once, but the fire the night of the Halloween party had changed all that. The right-side units, including the one she headed toward now, were only black, burnt-out shells of buildings.
How will I know you? The familiar line popped into her head from the story of how her parents met, what they jokingly called their “origin story.” When she was younger, she loved playing along when her parents said they’d pick her up from school or Harper’s house or art class. “But how will I know you?” they’d ask and, already giggling, she’d give the answer she knew they were waiting for. I’ll be the one who looks like me.
But the last time her mother had invited her to repeat the routine, during the days her father was living away from the house, Joy let the line lie in the air between them, then (knowing how obnoxious it was, but unable to help herself) announced that the question was obsolete. “Now you’d just send each other selfies. End of story,” she said, having to turn away from the hurt look on her mother’s face. To steel herself against feeling the same hurt, she dyed her hair a few days later so that finally, there could be no doubt: her parents would not recognize her anymore, as she no longer recognized herself.
“Over here
,” a man’s voice hissed from a corner, and she saw a crack in the door at no. 19. “For crying out loud.”
For crying out loud—it was an expression her father might have used. Joy loved this about him, his refusal to swear, his old-fashionedness. If he weren’t so gentle all the time, she might not hate her mother so much for what she’d done to him. But as it was, every time she thought of her father’s face and imagined him finding out about Martin Willett, she felt like shaking her mother and screaming, What’s wrong with you?
Well, that’s pretty much what she had said, before hijacking her mother’s car and screeching away from the house. It was another moment of not recognizing herself. Everything would have to come out in their conversation tonight—finally, they would all know the truth. The prospect of such relief made her feel almost dizzy as she stepped through the door of the condo and into the dark room.
How had anyone ever thought these would pass for luxury units, with so few windows? It was supposed to be a big selling point that they fronted on the pond, but what did it matter if you couldn’t see the water from where you sat?
She smelled him before she could see anything—pot and BO. Familiar somehow, though she couldn’t immediately place it. It took a few seconds for the glare from outside to go away, and when it did she saw the silhouette of a man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, diving to shove awy a tangle of bedding and other junk.
“Shit,” he said, peering as he moved closer to where she stood. Her own eyes hadn’t adjusted yet. She blinked, barely registering his curse and what it might mean, still unable to make out his face.
“You broke in here?” she asked. “You’re a squatter?” She felt affront on her father’s behalf, even though he was not the owner. Besides, it was easier to accuse someone other than herself.
How Will I Know You? Page 34