by Sue Halpern
Kit told Rusty how she got out of her car and walked up to the policemen stringing the caution tape and explained that this was her husband’s boat and she needed to see something, and how they said it was now off-limits to everyone, and they argued, and how she finally got them to open the hatch at the stern and tell her what they saw, and how one of them said, “Nothing,” and the other gave a patronizing shrug. What they didn’t know, and what she didn’t tell them yet, was that this was where Cal stored the inflatable dinghy he carried in case of emergencies. And dropping your pregnant girlfriend into the lake, maybe because she balked at swallowing those pills, maybe because those pills were not working, maybe because she had threatened to expose you, or maybe—to give him the benefit of the doubt—because she accidentally slipped and fell, definitely qualified as emergencies. Kit mentioned none of this to the police.
She told Rusty that somehow she had the wherewithal to drive home and make the call to the investigators so the Doctor and the PR man could hear her speak the words: “You will find Dr. Sweeney at the Palmer House in Chicago at the American Neurological Society annual meeting.” She said this with authority, though she didn’t know for sure, but there had to be some benefit from all those years of marriage, like knowing the other person’s habits of mind. And that’s where they found him, nodding off in the second-to-last row of the Wabash conference room while a woman from Duke gave a paper during one of the evening sessions about gamma knife surgery techniques. The dinghy was in the trunk of Cal’s car. Still, he claimed innocence, even when the evidence was right there incriminating him. People who don’t think the rules apply to them, Kit was beginning to learn, are surprised and offended when others don’t recognize and honor their exemption.
And she told Rusty how, when the girl’s body was finally retrieved, it had deteriorated so much that an autopsy would have proven nothing, and how the au pair agency didn’t want to pursue it anyway because it was bad for business.
“So,” Kit said, emerging at long last into the bedroom’s fresh air from the tent she had made from the blanket and her knees, “enough gory details?”
“I guess,” Rusty said. “But he never went to jail?”
“Not after that first night. He made bail and wanted to come home, but I told the Doctor that if he did, if he ever came anywhere near me, I’d tell the police what I knew. This was before they found the body, so there was a real chance there would be solid evidence.”
“So you never saw Cal again?”
“No, I did. I saw him in court during the trial. He tried to pass me notes. I made sure he saw me tear them up and throw them away. What was there to say? That he was sorry? And remember, his lawyers were doing their best to throw me under the bus.
“They trotted out Cal’s pastor, who gave this long, meandering sermon about original sin that seemed to implicate me and the girl and exonerate Cal as a stand-in for all men. They called on the hospital president, who told this story about Cal taking care of a six-year-old with cancer that had everyone in the courtroom in tears, me included.
“Cal testified last. Instead of dressing him in a suit, they had him wear his scrubs, as if he’d just come from saving lives. It was a brilliant tactical move. Yes, a girl was dead, but think of all the people who weren’t.
“‘Did I stray?’ Cal asked rhetorically. You could tell—well, I could tell—that he’d rehearsed his lines. ‘I admit it,’ he said. ‘I did. I love my wife, but we have grown apart. I had my career, she had her job—’”
“Wait,” Rusty interrupted. “He said that?”
“Oh yes,” Kit said. “And no one seemed to think anything of it, except for me. It was like hearing for the first time what he really thought of me and what I’d chosen to do with my life. I realize no one thinks being a librarian is as awesome as being a neurosurgeon, but I always thought I was doing something valuable, putting books in the hands of readers. Books can save lives, too. I really believe that.” And then, more to herself than to Rusty: “Like mine.
“Anyway, it made me feel really sad. And embarrassed. He might as well have called me ‘little lady.’ And then he mentioned our childlessness—didn’t say why, just that we didn’t have children—which sounded like it was both my fault and the great disappointment of his life, which segued into his paternal relationship with Beata, which is when I got up and walked out. So I wasn’t there for the part where he said that he only wanted to do right by the girl—nothing about doing right by me—and give her the love she’d never had, and I wasn’t there when he said the boat trip was when Beata thought he was going to tell her that he was leaving me so they could be together. As if a thirty-eight-year-old physician with standing in the community was publicly going to take up with a sixteen-year-old. Instead, he told her he had prayed on it, and while he wanted her to have the love she deserved, it couldn’t be with him. What was she supposed to do when it was God himself who was saying no? Have a fit, apparently. Cal testified that she started hitting him and wailing, that she was out of control, so he went into the cockpit to get a sedative and when he came back she was gone. Just gone. He called her name, called her name, called her name. He shut off autopilot and reversed course. He pulled out the safety torch and scanned the water. Nothing. Beata had disappeared without a trace. She wasn’t a very strong swimmer, Cal told the court, and she wasn’t wearing a life vest. He got out the rescue dinghy, anchored the boat, and paddled around, looking for her. He figured that by that time she would have been unconscious, but he kept looking. He was frantic, he said, and exhausted, and found himself being carried farther and farther from the sailboat and from Beata, wherever she was. ‘I was in shock,’ he told the court, and showed them a poster of the brain that was meant to illustrate how, when the body is in shock, the mind reverts to well-worn patterns. This was his explanation for why he didn’t call the police or the Jahrons or even me when he got back to shore, but why, instead, he got into his car and drove to the place he was supposed to be. He called it the ‘autonomic stress response’ and said it was well documented in the literature.”
Kit tossed off the covers, jumped out of bed, and catapulted from the room.
“I’m so dry,” she called over her shoulder, and rushed into the bathroom and stuck her head under the tap. She drank sloppily, letting the water run across her cheek and down her chin and neck. It was bracing, a cold slap. “What am I doing?” she wondered, and made it a point not to look in the mirror.
“Nice PJs,” Rusty said when she shuffled back into the bedroom.
Kit glanced down. She’d forgotten what she was wearing—gym shorts and a T-shirt that said creative pests.
Later, as the day was quickening and they were still lying on her bed, awake, listening to each other breathe, he said, “People can be so selfish. I certainly have been.”
“We’ve all been,” Kit said.
“I think you get a pass on this one,” he said.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “I shouldn’t. I could have testified against Cal, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to expose myself that way. So I took spousal immunity since we were still technically married.”
“But that’s not selfish—it’s completely understandable,” Rusty said. He started to reach for her hand, then pulled back.
“That girl had no one,” Kit said. “No one. The Jahrons weren’t about to do anything that would jeopardize Jens’s career—he worked for the hospital that Cal’s father owned. The prosecutor wanted the whole thing to go away; he was a family friend, and there was no evidence of a motive. There was no one to speak on behalf of the girl except me, and I didn’t do it because I just didn’t want to, and why should I? She had ruined my life enough as it was.”
“And you feel guilty for that?” Rusty said, incredulous.
“I guess I do,” she said. “But then I tell myself that it wasn’t as if justice was going to be served no matter what I did. Justice didn’t stand a chance. And I hate that. I hate that I stopped believing in t
hings I didn’t even know were matters of belief, like justice and fairness. Or honesty. Or the promises people make to each other. Of all the things Cal took from me, that’s what I think I miss the most: the apparently naive belief that you keep your promises. You know what the prosecutor told me? The prosecutor, who was supposed to be on my side? He said, ‘Everyone cheats,’ as if that was supposed to make it all right.”
They fell forward into silence, as Kit entered that courtroom yet again, so much bigger in her imagination, and the slimy, insinuating voices of Cal’s lawyers, of his father, of the prosecutor, of people she didn’t know she knew, saying Mrs. Sweeney this and Mrs. Sweeney that, twisting a simple thing like working late on Thursdays into a gyre slipped tight around her neck, then parading the intimacies of her body for all to see as if she were an exhibitionist, as if she’d asked for it.
“Somehow, I was the one who ended up on trial,” she said.
“Um,” Rusty said, and stopped. “I’m not sure this is even an okay question.” He stopped again. “This is hard. I really don’t want to say the wrong thing.” He looked at her for affirmation, but she had put her hands over her eyes as if they could stop her from seeing that courtroom, those lawyers, her husband, that girl.
“What?” she said. They had come this far, what more was there?
“Did you love him? I mean until all this happened?” Rusty said.
Kit exhaled loudly. “Oh God, if you only knew how many times I asked myself that. I thought I did, if love is caring deeply about someone else. I cared about Cal. I wanted the best for him. I had known him so long. I arranged my life to fit his life, so he could get what he wanted. Is that love? I thought it was. I didn’t see—or I chose not to see—that for the most part, for him, I was just the box on the form where they ask if you’re married. Wife, check. I should have trusted my instincts back in college. But who does? You’re twenty years old.” She shook her head. “Ugh,” she said.
“Is Cal—do you think Cal—”
“Is a murderer?” she finished the sentence for him.
“Yeah.”
“Like I said, I feel like he took my life and shredded it. But do I think he’s some kind of sociopath? No, not really. Something bad happened on that boat and only Cal knows what it was, and he has to live with it. And I have to live with the fact that the man I married was not the person I thought he was. No, that’s not true. Success changed him. His talent changed him. The more important he became, the more self-important he became. They are not the same thing, though they probably both come from believing you are the one person in the world who can bring some deathly ill person back from the brink. And you do bring them back, again and again, the ones with the tumors that no one else will touch, the ones who have run through every course of chemotherapy, so who cares if you are rude to the server at the restaurant? Who cares if you can’t be bothered to buy your wife a birthday present? Who cares if you run a red light? Who cares if you hold hands in church with the girl you have gotten pregnant? What’s the big deal? The big deal is you.
“I’ll stop now,” Kit said, sighing. And then, after a long pause: “‘People change, and smile: but the agony abides.’ It’s a line from a poem. T. S. Eliot. ‘The Dry Salvages,’” she explained when Rusty didn’t react.
“Hmm,” he said.
“Hmm what?” she asked, feeling suddenly exposed and a little embarrassed, spouting lines of poetry in bed with this man, telling him her secrets.
“Isn’t that what we are?” Rusty said.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Why would I do that?” he said, surprised.
“Okay,” Kit said. “Sorry. Isn’t what what we are?”
“Salvages.” He sounded very proud of himself, as if the teacher had asked a question and he was the only one in the class who knew the answer. “We’re salvages. Well, you are. I’m working on it.”
“Eliot pronounced ‘salvage’ as if it rhymed with ‘assuage,’” she said. She couldn’t help herself. It was something she knew.
“Well, Rusty pronounces it to rhyme with ‘savage,’” he told her. “‘Salvage.’ Look it up, Miss Poetry Mouth. It’s a good thing. Now I am making fun of you,” he added.
“Miss Poetry Mouth. You’ve got a way with words,” she said.
“Just so you understand you’re not the only one,” Rusty said, pulling her close.
“My therapist in Michigan told me he couldn’t promise things would get better, only that they would get less bad,” she said, holding on to the last shred of wakefulness as she felt it slipping away.
“And?” Rusty said. But she was asleep.
* * *
In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lighten’d . . .
—William Wordsworth
The call came at seven sharp, waking both Kit and Rusty. Kit fumbled around until she found the phone and greeted the caller with a less than enthusiastic hello.
“Kit, it’s Patrick. I know it’s early, but we’re reading Carl’s will Monday, and I think you’re going to want to be there. Rusty, too, if he’s around,” and before she could say more than “okay,” he had disconnected.
“What is it with old guys and phones?” she said, staring at the one in her hand.
After opening up the library, Kit headed back over to Mill Street.
“I’m probably not dressed for the occasion,” Rusty said when she met up with him, “but I think Carl would forgive me.” He was wearing the clothes Kit had bought for him, the polo shirt and shorts, and looked like he was going out to play a round of golf.
The lawyer’s office was up a back flight of stairs, one floor above the mortuary.
“Very convenient,” Rusty said as they went by. “One-stop dying.”
“You’re looking very dandy,” Kit said to Patrick, who was wearing a three-piece suit, even though the day would soon grow hot.
“And you look exhausted,” Patrick said. “Are you getting enough sleep? Oh, I forgot,” he said, nodding in Rusty’s direction. “The fire.”
There were five chairs arrayed in front of the lawyer’s desk, and now that they were all assembled—Kit, Rusty, Rich, Rich, and Patrick—Patrick took one of them and turned it around so it was facing the rest.
“You’re probably all wondering why I called you here this morning,” Patrick began.
“No,” Rich the driver said. “We’re wondering why you called us so goddamned early on the day of rest.”
“I was up,” Patrick said simply. “Anyway, as I was saying, I called you here because, as some of you know, I am the executor of Carl’s will, and today is the day it is going to be executed.” He cleared his throat and pulled on a string hanging off his jacket cuff until it broke, and then took an official-looking document from the lawyer’s outstretched hand.
“‘I, Carl Layton, being of sound mind and body—’” he began in a formal, stentorian voice.
“That’s a joke!” one of the Riches said.
“No comments from the peanut gallery,” Paddy growled. He began again: “‘I, Carl Layton, being of sound mind and body, do hereby swear, on this tenth day of July, 2009—’”
“A year ago,” Kit mumbled. Patrick glared at her but continued on without comment.
“‘As you may know, I am a parsimonious man,’” he read. “‘And if any of you don’t know what that means, it means I was a cheapskate.’”
“You can say that again,” Rich (driver) said. “He was always ‘forgetting’ his wallet when we went to lunch.”
As Patrick read on, Kit had to keep pinching herself to stay awake. Rusty, she noticed, was pushing a pen cap into his cheek—same thing. Carl’s will directed the estate to donate some money to the Humane Society, some to the United Way, and a large gift—$10,000—to the hospital, “so there might be many more delicious meals there.” At the mention of the hospital and food, both Riches and even Patrick started to tell funny Carl-at-lunch stories, and after a while, K
it nudged Rusty, and they got up to leave.
“Thanks, Patrick, for including me,” Kit said. She was weary. It was time to get back to work.
“Yeah, thanks,” Rusty said. “I’m really glad to know the lunches will continue.”
“Where do you two think you’re going?” Patrick growled. “We’re not done. You don’t leave in the middle of a will being read.”
Schooled, Kit and Rusty sat down, and Patrick gave a few theatrical coughs and then continued. There were more donations: to the food pantry, and to the high school marching band, and to the Boy Scouts, the Cub Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the Brownies. Kit was impressed by Carl’s generosity and bored with the whole thing. Work—her office, her office door—was so close—so close—but there was no getting to it.
“Okay, listen up,” Patrick said after getting through the part about the Scouts. “You are going to want to pay attention. Can everyone hear me?” They all nodded like obedient children. “Okay, here goes:
“‘All other assets of mine, including physical property, are to be put into a trust for the purposes of supporting the Riverton Public Library, where I spent many wonderful hours, to be overseen and administered by my four dear friends Richard Everett, Dr. Patrick Randall, Elliot “Rich” Hazelton, and Katherine Jarvis, also known hereafter as the New Four, or by a trustee appointed by them.’”
“Wow,” Kit said as she wiped an unexpected tear from her eye. She was the one who started calling them the Four. Now she was one of them—“my dear friend,” he had called her—and it moved her more than she could say.
“I’m very happy to be able to bring down the average age of the Four,” she teased, trying to deflect her emotion, “but which one of you is Elliot?” she said, looking from Rich to Rich. “And why?”
“It started out as joke, when we were kids,” Rich the executive said. “We were cousins, just a few months apart, and everyone used to say it was like we were twins.”