by Sue Halpern
“He didn’t say,” Kit told her, which was the truth.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” Sally said. “Gotta go.”
The Doctor arrived within the hour, pushing through the scrum of cameramen assembling on the front lawn, bringing with him the hospital PR flack, a pencil-thin, fidgety man with a slight lisp named Booth who seemed to Kit to be in precisely the wrong profession—but what did she know about men and their character? Nothing, obviously. The two of them set up camp in the kitchen, talking about Cal as if he were a Thoroughbred racehorse who had met an untimely death on the verge of the Triple Crown. Back and forth they went, working on the press release, lobbing laudatory adjectives into the air then swatting them away: none was good enough. Kit listened—Booth and the Doctor sounded far away, they sounded insane, she felt insane—finally interrupting them with the words “he was with a girl,” words so incongruous they didn’t hear them and didn’t stop, just stayed on task, hunched over the PR man’s laptop, crafting the perfect tribute.
“He was with a girl,” Kit said again, hollering from the living room, where she had flung herself down on the futon she’d had since junior year. Her transitional object, she called it. “He, Cal, your son, boy genius. Was with a girl. The Jahrons’ au pair. She’s missing, too.” Her voice kept getting louder and louder, till she was shouting and shaking with rage.
“Katherine!” the Doctor thundered, as if shutting her up would make it untrue.
The PR man stopped typing, his hands stilled on the keyboard. “If that’s correct, we have to reposition,” he said in a strangely singsongy voice, like this was just a little wrinkle that could be straightened out with some clever word massage.
“It is correct,” Kit said, deflated. She’d had her little revenge, watching the mask slip as the Doctor lost his cool, and it was short-lived and unsatisfying.
“How old would the girl have been?” Booth asked.
“Maybe sixteen,” Kit said. She didn’t have the energy to go into the whole orphan passport business.
“Oh, Lord, thank the Lord!” the flack said, breaking into a broad smile that revealed a set of Invisi-braces fencing his upper teeth.
Kit was livid. “We are thanking the Lord that my husband was with a sixteen-year-old girl? Jesus.”
“Age of consent, age of consent, age of consent,” the PR man chanted. “The age of consent here is sixteen. Thank goodness.”
“Really?” Kit sneered. “What a relief!” and pitched herself off the futon, grabbing her keys and purse in a single motion as she headed to the garage and into her car and through the gauntlet of reporters who would have to step aside if they didn’t want to get hurt. If it looked like she was on a mission, she wasn’t. She just needed to get out of the house and away from those men, and away from Cal, as if that were possible, and so she drove fast, her arms perfectly rigid in front of her, until the tears made it hard to see and she pulled over and beat the steering wheel with her fists, over and over, bellowing and crying and crying until her chest was heaving and she couldn’t catch a breath.
She collapsed there, head in her hands, hearing her body fight the air for air as if it were someone else’s body, wishing it was someone else’s body, until, spent, the words “let us advance on Chaos and the Dark” floated into her mind. Kit couldn’t remember where they came from or who had said them, and this infuriated her even more, like it was one more thing Cal had taken away from her: not only her marriage, not only their life together, not only her memory—because as far as she could remember, they had made a promise to be faithful to each other—but her mind, too. She couldn’t think. Her brain was dark. It was chaotic. But eventually, as her breathing slowed to a steady pant, she remembered that it was Emerson who said it, in the essay “Self-Reliance,” a piece of writing she thought was obvious and redundant when she’d read it as a knowing, untested seventeen-year-old. Yet here it was again, decades later, its central message retained and undeniable, and as Kit turned the key in the ignition and brought the car back to life, she realized that her memory was sending her mind a scrap of advice: Get going. She wasn’t sure that driving to the marina would advance anything, but it was a start.
The rumors began as soon as the Jahrons called the church. Questions about the girl and what the two of them were doing on Cal’s boat that evening, and gossip about seeing the married doctor out on the town with Beata for months and how the wife didn’t do anything to stop it. “But she was unattractive!” Kit wanted to yell. “Ugly.”
“I’ve heard of men sleeping with the nanny, but I’ve never heard of men sleeping with someone else’s nanny,” Sally Jahron said before the girl’s body surfaced, a gaseous balloon of decomposition. So yes, Kit told Dr. Bondi, it got worse.
* * *
The heavy bear who goes with me, / A manifold honey to smear his face . . .
—Delmore Schwartz
Rusty stood at the top of the stairs, quietly calling her name. He’d left a light on downstairs, and he was standing in its faint glow, but the path ahead to Kit’s room was completely dark. He needed to wake her, needed to talk to her, so he called her name until he heard her stir, and felt his way down the hall, closer to the closed door, and said, “Kit, it’s Rusty,” and the bed creaked and she said, sleepily, “It’s after midnight,” and then, with more presence of mind, “Why are you still here?”
“Can I come in?” he asked, and she said, “I guess so,” and he said, “Don’t turn on the light,” and she said, “I wasn’t going to.”
Rusty could just make out Kit’s form under the covers, saw there was room, and sat down next to her. Kit could hear him breathing, in and out, in and out, and it was so regular she found herself drifting back to sleep. To the extent that she was conscious, she was surprised she didn’t mind him sitting there. It was a fleeting recognition, a whiff of a thought, and then it was gone.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he said at last.
Kit woke with a start.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t realize you had gone back to sleep.”
“It’s okay.” Her eyes were still closed, but even so, she covered them with her hands.
“I’m so sorry,” Rusty said again.
“Welcome to the club,” she said, and let out a long, rancorous breath.
He was quiet then, his shoulders hunched, his hands resting on his thighs.
“I used to be a good person,” Rusty said after a while.
“From what I’ve seen of you, you are a good person now,” Kit said, confused. She wasn’t sure why they were talking about him. “You were great with the Patels the other night. With Mrs. Patel. I saw you. You were great with Carl in the hospital. Gentle. Patient. Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Selling things short—that’s what I did,” Rusty said. “Betting on failure. That was me. You do it enough, you don’t even notice that your success is built on someone else’s misery. You go to work and you want to do better than the guy sitting next to you, you want to be recognized, so you do what’s necessary, whatever it is, and it’s not just appreciated, it’s rewarded. You start worshipping the wrong things, only you believe they are the right things. You’re convinced of it. And you start believing what people say about you. It’s an easy slide. Suddenly you’ve got more money than you can count. Numbers don’t go high enough. And you think you don’t need anyone, because you can have anything. At least that’s the way it was for me.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Kit said, eyes wide open, suddenly alert to the possibility that he was, somehow, trying to defend Cal.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s just something I want you to know.”
They sat in silence, their eyes gradually adjusting to the dark, so that she could see his head was leaning into his palms, and he could see her staring him down—at least that’s what it felt like.
“I’m talking about me, not him,” Rusty said. “To be clear.”
“That’s good,” she said.
&nbs
p; A garbage truck was making its way down Coolidge Street, the sigh of its brakes and the scrape of trash barrels getting closer and closer, and they both listened as if they were listening to something that mattered, and Rusty said, “They’re up early,” and Kit said, “Or late,” and he said, “Or late,” and they continued listening as the sounds faded and disappeared.
“Would it be okay if I lay down?” Rusty said, and instead of answering, Kit moved over and he stretched out, and for the second night in a row they were in her bed together, and this time he reached over and snaked his arm under her head and grabbed on to her shoulder and she let him.
“I didn’t used to be like this,” Kit said.
“Like what?”
“Tense. Scared. Whatever the opposite of ‘tactile’ is.”
“For the record,” Rusty said, “I didn’t used to be like this, either. I was not the sort of guy who lay in bed with a beautiful woman with my clothes on, just talking.”
“I’m not beautiful,” Kit said.
“Who said I was talking about you?” Rusty said, and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Talking is scarier.”
“Talking is scarier than what?” Kit said.
“Sex,” he said. “Way scarier. But why?”
“Intimacy,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Why are you scared?”
“You read all about it,” she said.
“But what happened to you? I’m not being stupid. I’m trying to understand.”
“I guess what happened to me is that I became someone’s wife. That’s what the shrink said. He said that in some fundamental way, I ceased to be real.”
“Was he blaming you?” Rusty asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But it’s a little like that children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, but in reverse: if you’re not loved for who you are, you cease to be real. Definitely for the other person, and maybe for yourself, too.”
“Okay,” Rusty said. “I guess that makes sense.”
They were quiet again, listening to the chatter of shutters, opening and closing in the wind; listening to the wind.
“Can I ask you another question?” Rusty said after a while. “Why Riverton?”
Kit inhaled slowly, registered the smell of creosote on Rusty’s hair, and breathed out audibly. “Mainly because no one would know me or know anything about me. You know, hiding in plain sight. And I couldn’t stay where I was. It was too awful. Humiliating. Trust me, you don’t want to be the wife of the doctor who ran off with the dead nanny. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t work, especially not the kind of work I do. People are always pointing, saying things, and even if they aren’t, you think they are, especially because of the trial.” She rolled over on her side, facing the wall, so her back was to him.
“What trial?” Kit felt his breath on her neck. Each word a warm puff, like smoke signals, but close.
“Cal’s. Cal’s show trial. Which is what happens when your father sits on the board of the same country club as the prosecutor, the DA, the judge, and the defense attorney,” she said, talking into her pillow. “You get charged with negligent homicide, not murder, and you get weekend house arrest for six months and a couple of years’ probation and life goes on. His life. Beata is dead and for all intents and purposes so am I.”
“I don’t think—” he began.
“You don’t know,” she said sharply. And then, more gently, “So much irrelevant crap came out at the trial, like the fact that we couldn’t have kids, as if that gave him license to screw around with a teenager. And how I never went to church with him. Stuff about sex. Stuff about my work schedule. Anything to make him look like the victim . . .” Kit’s voice trailed off. She was wide-awake again, heart racing. Other people knew these things about her because other people were there in the courtroom or read about them in the papers, but aside from her conversations with Dr. Bondi, she had never named her humiliations out loud.
Kit turned onto her back and she and Rusty lay side by side, shoulders barely touching. A mouse skittered overhead, and then another, chasing after it.
“It could be worse,” Kit said, when neither had spoken for quite a while. “They could be flying squirrels.
“The therapist I used to see would be so proud,” she added. “He was all about looking on the bright side. Though the mice are probably up there gnawing on the electrical wires.”
“Well, looking on the bright side,” Rusty said, “that means they will electrocute themselves soon and die. Very convenient.”
“Until they start to smell.”
“Wait a minute,” Rusty said. “I thought we were looking on the bright side.”
“Not my strong suit,” Kit said.
They lay there peaceably then, street sounds intermittently lapping up against the sides of the house like a gentle inland surf, and talked in spurts about nothing in particular, just random associations—his lost sister, their fathers, the Four and what would happen to them now that Carl was gone, lines from poems that carried her through, Sunny, onion rings, his mother, her mother.
“This is like a slumber party,” Rusty said, not bothering to suppress a loud yawn. “Or what I imagine a slumber party is like.”
Kit laughed. “The only way this resembles a slumber party is that we are not slumbering,” she said.
“So tell me, what goes on at slumber parties?” Rusty asked in a conspiratorial whisper.
“Oh, you know, gossiping about crushes and who likes who and dancing to ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ and—”
“Before my time,” he interrupted.
“Thank you for that,” she said. “And doing a crafts project like making fortune tellers.”
“Fortune tellers?”
“Yeah. You fold the paper in quarters and then in quarters again, and you write answers on four of the squares, which no one can see, and numbers on the other squares, and you ask someone to ask a question, like ‘Will Rusty ask Melissa to the sixth grade dance?’ and tell them to pick a number, then whatever is under the flap for that number is their fortune.”
“So who is Melissa?”
“You’ll have to ask the fortune teller,” she said. Though the room was dark, he could hear her grinning.
“Touché. But did he ask her to the dance?”
“Ditto.”
“I’m sensing a pattern here,” Rusty said. “So what else happens?”
“We definitely watch a movie. Anything with Rob Lowe.” She laughed again. “And then, when we are in our sleeping bags and the lights are out, we tell ghost stories. Very scary ghost stories.”
Listening to her, Rusty detected a lightness in Kit’s voice he hadn’t heard before, as if it were shed of all burdens or ignorant of them: it was what he imagined to be Kit’s “before” voice.
“Pull up the covers,” he commanded her playfully. “Up over your head. Now.”
“What?”
“No questions, just do as I say.”
“Rusty—”
“That’s a question. Just do it, or if you’d like, I can do it for you.”
“Rusty—”
“Nope.”
“Rusty, if you want me to pull up the covers, you need to get off the bed. You’re pinning them down.”
“Oh,” he said, embarrassed, and stood up for a second while Kit slid down till she was no longer visible. “Okay,” he said. “Are your eyes open or shut?”
“What does it matter? I can’t see a thing,” she said, her words muffled by the batting.
“Good point. Just checking,” he said. “Now, tell me a ghost story.”
There was silence, then a prolonged sigh, like air escaping a tire.
“I already told you a ghost story,” she said at last. “The one where the wife was invisible to the husband and the truth of the marriage was invisible to her.”
“Not what I had in mind,” he said, trying to make light of it.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s th
e only story I know.”
Her tone had gotten heavy again. It was impendent, like weather. She heard it herself and knew he did, too. What else did she know? That people want sunshine 24/7. Why should Rusty be any different?
“All right,” he said, filling his lungs as if he were about to free dive into deep, inky water, “then tell me that story again. But this time tell me the whole story.”
He asked for it, so she obliged. He was almost gone anyway.
She told him about driving to the marina that morning and boarding the boat before the police had gotten there, and seeing the quilted overnight bag she’d given Beata as a going-away present the summer before stuffed in the hold, and Cal’s dopp kit tethered with a carabineer to a hook in the head just like it always was when he spent the night on the boat, and opening it up and seeing the condoms—“His father would be proud,” she said ruefully, though of course he was married to a woman who was in no danger of getting pregnant—and then searching for and not finding that amber vial she’d handed over to him years before that she knew he’d never bothered to remove—maybe he forgot it was there, maybe it was a talisman, but now it was gone.
So the girl had been pregnant. That’s what this was all about. It wasn’t like Kit could go to the police and explain that the crucial piece of evidence was something that wasn’t among her husband’s razor blades and dental floss. What did Cal used to say about his research? You can’t prove a negative? She had proved it only to herself. She told Rusty about walking back to her car in a stupor. The girl had been pregnant. The girl was carrying Cal’s child, just as she had once. She told him how she sat there in her car long enough to see the police finally show up and wrap yellow caution tape around the boat, and long enough to realize they had it all wrong. The orphan girl was dead and the brilliant, righteous doctor was probably alive. Maybe you can prove a negative, she said to herself, because if Cal had picked up Beata at the Jahrons’ and driven to the marina, his car would have to be there, but it wasn’t.