"Oh, yes, sure," said Janice. "Especially since our copier's low on toner. Nothing really comes out very well."
Wendy smiled numbly and took her snapshot. She said softly, "Where is Oak Grove?"
"Not far," said Janice with an instinctively sad and sympathetic smile. "Go right—is that east? No, west, I always get them mixed up—about half a mile. It'll be on your left."
Wendy thanked her and got back in her car and, in her confused recall of the directions, turned left. After a mile or so she realized her mistake, turned around, and began to retrace her path.
Can it be that I don't want to know? she wondered, and then she smiled grimly. It was much too late for that.
She found the cemetery: a small village burial ground on a low rise that probably once had a view, long obscured, of a nearby pond. There was room for no more than two or three cars in the weedy parking area; she wondered what people did when the mayors of Tillicut died. Parked along the untraveled road, probably.
Wendy walked between the graves slowly, automatically looking for the oldest ones; she was a New Englander, and history was important to her. In the far corner of the burial ground, she found the graves of the founding fathers of Tillicut: a dozen slate stones, their edges slivered by time, leaned this way and that on the highest ground. She murmured the fading names aloud, tolling them like a church bell, in small remembrance of long-gone souls: Crocker ... Leonard ... Dester ... Ilsley ... Tallman.
The Tallmans had married and begat the most, but they'd also suffered the most heartbreaking bereavements. One of them lost not only a wife and daughter in childbirth, but a son, aged five, and another daughter, aged six, in that year of 1823.
How desperately sad Jacob Tallman must have felt ... and yet look. He'd lived until 1882. Eighty-eight years. You lose one wife, you move on to the next. Wendy wandered through the horizontal family tree and discovered that Jacob had had another wife, this one spanning his middle years. He did go through them.
It brought Wendy back to the wrenching business at hand. Nearer the road were several gravestones—surprisingly few—of modern vintage. She wasn't surprised to see a Tallman among those, too.
She wasn't surprised to see James Hodene.
She stood at the foot of his grave in grief and mourning as deep as any his loved ones might have felt. Here was James Hodene. Here was James Hodene. Died at age twenty-six, in the same year that Wendy had met Jim.
For a long while Wendy stood as still as an angel on a tombstone. And then she knelt. And then she prayed. When she was done, she took out her camera to add another snapshot to her album of misery; but she couldn't bring herself to take it. It struck her as sacrilegious, somehow. It didn't seem right that a grave should be violated twice.
She read the inscription on the pink granite headstone one more time, just to make sure that this Hodene was that Hodene. She didn't see how there could be two James Hodenes in Tillicut, both of them the same age, one of them dead and one of them alive.
She turned and walked away. Her mission was accomplished.
Chapter 24
By the time Wendy drove past downtown Providence, the white marble dome of the capitol was afire with the last red rays of the setting sun. It had been a long, wearying drive, made longer by her anxiety over Tyler and the crash-and-burn depression she began to feel as she left Tillicut farther behind her. She approached the turnoff to Route 195 with loathing; she had no desire to return to the beach house that night.
The list of her grievances kept growing longer: Jim. Jim. And Jim. Somehow she had to figure out what her relationship to him was—what her name even was—and how much to let him back into her life. They had Tyler to consider, after all. Though Jim could officially be pronounced a disaster as a husband, Wendy had to admit that he'd been a decent father to their son.
Now she knew that it was only through a tragic turn of fate that, besides a wife, Jim hadn't abandoned a child, as well. So there was that, at least. He hadn't been juggling two families in two cities for a decade or more. As bigamists went, Jim wasn't the worst one out there. Just the most cowardly.
But in the meantime, they were going to have to decide together how to deal with Tyler—Tyler, who was in fact illegitimate, wasn't he? She couldn't begin to imagine how she was going to explain everything to him. Kids understood it when terrible fights were followed eventually by divorce. But a working marriage upended by bigamy—that was a tougher sequence to fathom. Wendy should know.
Who will pay Pete?
It was another thing they'd have to work out. It occurred to Wendy, really for the first time, that if she weren't legally married, she might not be entitled to any of the lottery winnings.
But, no—wouldn't she at least be a common-law wife?
Or wait: could you be a common-law wife if another wife already existed? She had no knowledge of how bigamy worked. What did the victims do? She didn't know. All she knew was that there would be lawyers. For that matter, there were probably lawyers who specialized in bigamy. Maybe her cousin David would know one. It was a sickening thought.
Wave after wave of humiliation rolled over her. She was nobody's wife. She was the mother of a child who was illegitimate. She was a victim of a crime: she had been conned, and not by Zack.
What could she have done differently? There was no precedent, in her family, anyway, for putting fiancés through background checks. In retrospect, maybe there should have been. Her sister had married an abuser, and she had married a bigamist. They had both been too trusting by far, probably because the quality men in their lives—a loving dad and three good-Joe brothers—had made it hard to understand that any other kind existed.
Nonetheless, Wendy felt guilty. She should have known, somehow, that her marriage was going to end in grief. After all, she knew that Jim liked to gamble and that he loved a quick fix. She knew that he lied, or at least that he hated to tell a painful truth. She knew that he was the absolute center of his world. She had known all of those things about Jim; she just hadn't thought about them all at once. Together, they were the profile of a man who lacked a sense of sacrifice and commitment.
A coward.
The thought of what he'd done infuriated her. She wanted revenge for the pain that he was about to put Tyler and her through, and she wanted it now. In advance. At that moment, she wanted to scratch his eyes out.
Too sick at heart and raging of soul to face Jim just then, she made an impulsive decision to get off the highway and return to Fox Point, to the house where she had been raised and where she had spent over a decade with him. Virtually all of her memories, good and bad, had been formed in that house. The answers to who she was, how she had got there, and where she was going: they were all in that house.
It was nearly dark as she drove down Sheldon Street, wondering how she could ever face her old neighbors again. Would they avert their eyes when they saw her? Worse, extend their sympathies to her for having been so blind? Would she accept them with grace, or try to laugh the whole thing off with some crack about Jim and the Witness Security Program?
A dark thought brought a flash of joy: if she fitted Jim with concrete boots and threw him off the nearest bridge, she wouldn't have to explain anything to anyone. Ever.
Awash in bitterness, she pulled up in front of her house, and that's when she saw Zack's truck alongside. A light was on in an upstairs room, and the air compressor was running: he was working late—on her house. The sight of his truck and the sound of the compressor brought an unexpected rise of tears. Wendy blinked them away, refusing to give in either to self-pity or, for that matter, gratitude. There would be no tears of any kind tonight.
She steeled herself to give Zack the news. Unless she really intended to mix that concrete, she had better get used to admitting the truth: she'd been had.
She opened the screen door into darkness downstairs and flipped on the hall light. The simple switch would be upgraded eventually to a dimmer-style one, but for now, ambience consisted of a l
ow-watt bulb sticking out of the ceiling above her. She remembered how happy she had been just weeks ago as she searched through lighting catalogues and flagged her favorite fixtures for Jim to sign off on. How irrelevant they seemed now.
"Zack?" she called up. "It's me."
She climbed the stairs, passing a two-inch crater that Jim had made in the plaster, hidden until recently by their wedding picture that he'd eventually succeeded in hanging there. Where had she packed away the photograph? She couldn't remember, now.
"I found James Hodene, Zack. You're right. He's dead."
She slid her hand over the varnished banister and felt the rough spot where Jim had grabbed her still-wet varnish and then had said, "Oh, well." She had forgiven him many things, but that unruffled reaction hadn't been one of them.
"I'm not married, Zack. I never have been."
Zack was standing at the landing at the top of the stairs, somehow filling the space with his height and breadth, and he was unbuckling his tool belt. He dumped it on one of the roughed-out plywood stairs that led to the someday-loft; at the same moment, Wendy reached the landing. He turned to her, and then she was in his arms, completely enfolded, somehow secure. He was as big as her brother Frank, who had hugged her so often in her life; but the feeling was nothing the same.
He held her close, threading his hand through her hair and pressing her cheek to his broad chest. He was hot, sweaty, silent—the opposite of what she imagined a grief counselor to be. And yet she was consoled.
"Everything you told me was true," she said into his damp T-shirt. "I can't believe it. It's all true."
He held her even more closely to him, rubbing soft circles on her back with his free hand.
"How could he do it, Zack? Live a lie like that for so long?"
"This will pass," he said, kissing the top of her hair.
She realized that he'd been through the same heartbreak with his sister, and so much worse besides. No wonder he was such a rock. He'd had practice.
"I don't know what to tell Ty," she said, admitting her greatest fear.
"Tell him the truth," said Zack. "You'll find the words."
It sounded so easy, once he'd said it. He must know all about truth.
"I keep thinking of Zina on the day I first saw her," she said with a sigh that seemed to tear her chest in two. "I keep wishing I had believed her. Will you tell her how sorry I am?"
"Shh. You can tell her yourself, someday."
"I hate him," she blurted. "For all of it."
"I know, Wendy. I know."
She took comfort in the thought that Zack had reason to despise Jim, too; they were allied in that emotion, at least. She needed desperately to have someone on her side just then. "This will be so humiliating," she confessed. "How will I face the world?"
Zack's laugh was low and gentle. "What're you, Madonna? I thought we'd been through all this."
She looked up at him and smiled and said, "Don't make me feel better."
His expression was serious as he said, "Sad to say, the world won't be shocked, Wendy. As for your family, it's you they care about, not the state of your marriage."
"You did meet my mother?"
"She'll be fierce for you; you know she will. She loves you." He added softly, "You're an easy person to love, Wendy."
"Zack—"
He brushed away her hair from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear and then softly, tentatively, lowered his head and touched her lips. It confused her, that kiss. It was so barely there, and yet the thrill went down to her knees. She half sighed in acknowledgment of its power, and she closed her eyes, waiting for him to kiss her again. He did kiss her again, lightly again, and again she gave herself up to the thrill of it, responding to the unique sensation of having another man's mouth on hers.
He was different from Jim. He tasted different, he smelled different. Was this how women felt who cheated on their husbands? Assuming that the men were their husbands? A sharp surge of bitterness emboldened her, and she slid her arms around Zack, then touched his tongue with her own, tip to tip, a naive question from her to him: did he want to make love to her?
His answer was a deep, probing kiss, a silent thunderbolt through her body that drained her of thought, of motive, of breath itself. Everything was gone from her but desire. She responded with a fervor that frightened her, as if she were starving, and now she had food.
Pounding her with the force of his kisses, Zack slid his hand down behind her and pulled her close. He was aroused and powerful, and she realized that he had the strength to snap her in two. She made that her rationale for letting him lift up her top and pull away her bra, then drop to his knees before her.
"Wendy, ah, Wendy ..." he said. His mouth moved with devastating effect over the tips of her breasts, making them unbearably responsive to his will.
Her eyes were closed. She steadied herself with her hands on his shoulders and swayed weakly as he unzipped her skirt and pulled it down from her hips, letting it pool around her feet on the dusty floor. Her panties came down next. He left them at her ankles, too irrelevant to bother with, as he cupped his hand over the soft flesh of her lower torso, drawing down a rush of wet.
The last vanishing impulse of decency warned her that they were on the upstairs landing, in the light, with the front door open and in full view from the porch. It shocked her, what she was letting him do, and it whipped her on. She wanted to shock—herself, her world—in the hope of somehow making things right again. It was a form of therapy, and she was aroused enough and fierce enough to embrace it. If he were to pin her to the wall right then and there, so be it. She was ready. She was willing.
But Zack wasn't. "Not here," he said. He lifted her up as if she weighed no more than a bundle of shingles and carried her into her old bedroom.
She clung to him, her panties still dangling from an ankle, her top and bra awry, as he grabbed hold of a corner of the canvas tarp that she had spread over her mattress to protect it, and pulled it away with a sweep of his free arm.
He laid her down on the bare mattress and began himself to undress—quickly, efficiently, untying his work boots, then shedding his socks, shorts, and boxers. He crisscrossed his arms in a grab for the bottom of his T-shirt and yanked it over his head, revealing a flat stomach and a tanned and muscular chest that in every respect was unlike Jim's.
If anything needed to bring home to her that the train of her life had just gone careening off its tracks, it was the view of Zack Tompkins, current builder and attempted blackmailer, standing naked before her.
And she wanted him, absolutely. She said, "This might be because of Jim, Zack. I don't know."
"Don't think of Jim," he said, bracing himself on the bed as he hovered over her. "Think of me."
Her breath was ragged with tension and, somehow, sadness. "I just want to be fair to you."
"Don't think about being fair," he said. "Just think about you."
In the dim light spilling from the hall, she could see a faint smile playing on his lips as he swung his thigh over hers. More than a smile, it was a promise, and she had no doubt that he would be able to fulfill it.
He positioned himself at the entrance to her and came in with a single thrust that took her breath away. She let it out on a moan. It was a delicious, satisfying, fiery sensation to have this man, this lover, filling her.
And the door downstairs was still open, an apt symbol for the wild disregard she was feeling just then.
Zack didn't move; his body was coiled for release that he was denying himself. His own breath, bottled up, came out in a sigh. "Coming attractions," he explained, his voice husky. "Now, where were we?"
He began a slow move inside her, but it didn't take long; she was so primed to come. Her release was huge, a torrent of every possible emotion, all of them overflowing her capacity to contain them. Desire, anger, hurt, sorrow, fear, shame, revenge, humiliation and, yes, a new inclination to care—all of them were lifted and carried away on the wave of her orgas
m.
She felt utterly, completely, improbably spent.
In the past, when she had had an orgasm ahead of the man who she believed was her husband, she would say, "Wait ... just ... let me be ... for a bit," and never with any success. She wasn't that experienced in the ways of men, and she had assumed that they were all alike: eager and clueless.
But Zack was not Jim. He positioned himself alongside her and, blithely ignoring his own unspent state, he stroked her hair, and kissed her fingertips, and murmured small flatteries that she immediately wrapped in silk and tucked away in the deepest chamber of her heart.
His willingness to wait made her eager to have him. Before very long, she slipped her hand behind his head and pulled him down into a deep kiss, urging him back on top of her again.
He came in, then, filling her, and this time they came together.
Chapter 25
Before Wendy left Zack, they embraced and kissed on the sidewalk under the street lamp in front of her house. The embrace was emotional and bittersweet, as well as a fairly public announcement to the neighborhood that her not-marriage was over.
In case they didn't catch me naked on the upstairs landing, she thought, slipping inevitably into her grim mood as she got back on the road.
The beach house was minutes away. Wendy was going to have to confront Jim over her discovery in Tillicut, and the sooner she did it, the better. Making love with Zack had delayed and dampened—but hadn't extinguished—that impulse. She might not feel like scratching Jim's eyes out anymore, but she wouldn't think twice about spitting on him.
Emotionally, she was officially declaring herself a disaster area. If someone had predicted to her three hours earlier that she was going to let herself be carried to her bed by her carpenter, she would have asked that someone what he'd been smoking. And yet here she was, her flesh still burning from their mad, pumping scramble to multiple climaxes.
They hadn't even used condoms, for pity's sake. It hadn't even occurred to her, for pity's sake. She was on the pill and so used to having one partner that she never gave a thought to any other cautions. Her only concern was to put out the fire, and she hadn't even done that, because here she was: her flesh, still burning.
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