XXVI
DORRIE
The new receptionist is out, and, considering her obvious difficulties with the phones, it occurs to Dorrie that Molly—or is it Maureen?—might never come back. Francine, too, has taken the day off, or at least the morning. “I might pop in for a few hours in the afternoon,” she said, phoning Dorrie on her cell. “Nothing much for me to do at work these days, aside from tweaking my Parisian itinerary, what with Edward’s takeover.”
Dorrie has been left to answer calls. No promises, she’s told Francine; she’ll do her best.
“It isn’t rocket science,” Francine snorted, “despite the new temp’s issues.”
“I guess not,” she said. “It’s just the whole logistics of the thing.” But there haven’t been many calls at all this morning, and those that have come in she’s managed to reroute to her own office. It’s productive, if extremely boring, being in the office on her own. Len, from IT, is somewhere in back, but he’s such a misanthrope, she barely knows him, even after all this time. It’s boring, but she’s managed to make headway with her backlog of paperwork, returned most of her clients’ calls.
When the phone rings at ten thirty, it feels as if she’s been at work alone for days, and Dorrie nearly jogs up the plushy hall to the front desk. She starts to answer in a businessy, generic voice, but then she puts on a thick British accent—another role, just before Christmas at the Colonial on Boylston. “Yes. Hello,” she says. “Might I be of service?” It’s still a part of her, the accent. When a play ends, Dorrie can call up the character for ages afterward.
“Who is this?” Edward sounds confused.
“Dorrie,” she says. “Sorry, Edward. I was just—I was practicing. For a play I’m in. Will be in. At the—”
“I have news,” he says, and he sounds almost gleeful. “Jeananne’s hit-and-run? The driver has come forward. Turned himself in.”
Dorrie sinks into the receptionist’s chair. “Oh my. Really? That is so—that’s—I am so glad to hear that. When?” she says. “Who was it?”
“This morning. And it was a teenager. Some fifteen-year-old kid. Took his mother’s car without her permission. Grabbed the extra key and stole her car from the parking garage where she worked. Right near the office as a matter of fact. Rounded the corner too fast—waayyyy too fast—put on the brake, but it was too late. Smacked right into Jeananne. Said his conscience got to him in the end, but my bets are on the mother finding out and making him turn himself in to the—”
“Still. I am—so relieved, Edward. Thank you for calling.”
“Spread the word,” he says, “and hold the fort!” He hangs up, leaving Dorrie with an earful of bad clichés.
So it wouldn’t have mattered what coat Jeananne was wearing.
Thank you, God!
Back at her desk, Dorrie sits for a minute, letting it sink in, this new information about what happened to Jeananne. If she was wrong about the hit-and-run, could she be wrong about what happened on the night of Joe’s accident? Did she only think she was being followed? Did she just imagine, in her fragile state, that someone tried to run her down? Her lover had just died in front of her. And who knew what shape her brain was in at that point, after the damn airbag whacked her in the head. And the cold. Was she even fully aware of what was going on around her or was she bordering on shock? If so, how accurate was her take on what happened?
But there were the phone calls. There were the texts. There isn’t any question about that.
And there were Joe’s last words to her. It isn’t safe.
No. She is both grateful and relieved that Jeananne’s accident was just that—a random hit-and-run, a stupid, frightened teenager unused to navigating corners—but this knowledge doesn’t change what happened on the night Joe died. It doesn’t make Dorrie any safer.
She brings her e-mail up on her computer and looks again at Joe’s last message, the e-mail he sent on the day he died. Is that why he dragged her out on a night when everyone else was huddled inside, stretched across their couches, watching old movies on Turner? He was trying to tell her something as they rounded that corner, as he struggled to keep the Audi on the road. Did it have something to do with this? With this baffling e-mail?
She pulls up the company’s site and tries to remember Joe’s password. He’d changed it on a Tuesday afternoon while they were together somewhere in town. A pub. It was months ago and he’d just begun to train her on an updated design program Home Runs purchased. He changed his company password every few months, he’d told her, and the new one, it was something to do with her, with the perfect afternoon they spent together that last spring. She clears her mind, closes her eyes. Cambridgestreetfestival05. Or, no. Cambridgestreetfair05. That was it. The day he took the photo—a day in May, the fifth month, that gorgeous day—they’d strolled through Cambridge, so different, on that festive afternoon, so opposite the staid reserve of Boston, just across the Charles. Harvard Square was packed with students, the sun dripped down on mimes and clowns, musicians—stores were crowded with newcomers, with shoppers in bright clothes, with lovers holding hands, emerging from a harsh and bitter winter. Spring. A perfect day. She types in Cambridgestreetfair05 and hits ENTER.
What comes up is more than spreadsheets. What comes up is far more detailed—the company’s expenditures, a list of charges. She gets up, makes herself a cup of tea even though she doesn’t want it, really. She walks up and down the hall a few times, stalling, trying to shake her feelings of unease, of disgust at herself for spying. Still, whatever Joe was trying to tell her, whatever was important enough to end their relationship . . . it might be here. It might be somewhere in the files, a hint, a glimpse. She has to try. She brings the tea back to her desk and sits down in front of her computer.
There are columns of withdrawals, deposits. Something is wrong. Off. There are numerous purchases made at various Home Depot stores in the Boston area. And . . . She stares at the screen—almost as many returns, usually the next day or the day after. Was this standard? Did the contractors buy different versions of the same item to give the customers a choice and then return the options that weren’t picked? Possibly. She jots down their account number and closes out, deletes this last visit from her computer’s history.
She calls Home Depot’s 800 number, relays the company’s account number, and requests a copy of bills covering the last four months. “I’m tidying up our finances,” she explains. She puts on Francine’s no-nonsense voice, her controlled and skillful tone. “I’ve lost my copies somehow,” she says, and gives her private e-mail address to the pleasant, eager agent on the other end of the line. It will be sent within the hour, the friendly voice assures her. “Thank you for your patronage.”
On the floor beneath the desk, her cell phone beeps, and Dorrie fumbles through her bag to pull it out. A text message. From Samuel, she hopes, and she thinks about suggesting they meet for dinner, all of them, Lily, too. She’ll get her mind off things. They could go somewhere they’ve never been—the new Mediterranean place near her office or that bistro in Jamaica Plain their neighbors were talking about at the Christmas potluck that they’d been meaning to try. In fact, that would be best in this iffy weather, keep it close to home.
Meet me, the text says, but then she inhales, a sharp intake of air; it isn’t from Samuel. It’s from Joe’s old phone. Again. Her first thought is to delete the text and forget she ever saw it. Tonight, it says. 8:00. Meet me at the Starbucks. That last place. That last place! How would anyone but Dorrie even know that? Dorrie and Joe? He must not have deleted his final text to her from his burner phone and whoever this is, whatever sadistic creepy person has it . . . She shivers. Her heart pounds and skips. She really has to calm herself down, figure all this out. She takes a few deep breaths before she reaches for a bottled water and guzzles it down.
She wants to leave. She wants to slip out of the building and into her car. She wants to be as far away from Summer Street as she can get. She looks up the ha
ll. Francine hasn’t come in yet. Besides the useless Len, there’s no one else here. Hold the fort, Edward said, so she has no choice. She fidgets, makes a few more phone calls, preemptive ones this time. Follow-ups, to keep herself busy, to keep her mind off ghostly phones and Home Depot returns. She hangs up the phone and glances at her watch. Three nos, a maybe, and two yeses. She jots down the names, the numbers, the addresses. Sunporch in the spring, she scribbles next to the first address and then, beneath the second, Reno on upstairs bathroom.
She checks her e-mail, finds a brief message from Home Depot. They’ve sent her four attachments—October, November, December, and January. She opens them, one at a time, and there they are again, the plethora of items purchased and returned almost immediately. She stares at the articles. Electrical supplies and tools. But not in January. In January there were only three returns: two faucets, a sink, and a light fixture, which sounds fairly standard.
The front door opens and Francine hurries in. Her coat rustles across the lobby. “Dorrie?” she calls. “Good gawd it’s cold out. Dorrie? Are you here?”
“Yes,” Dorrie calls back. “Be right there. Just let me—” She saves the e-mail to her Upcoming Auditions file and closes out, just as Francine appears in her doorway; her face is pink, her nose a fiery red.
Why all these returns?
XXVII
KAREN
Karen wakes up to Antoine nibbling at her hand. She forgot to stick him in his little room the night before, or maybe she just wanted the company. At any rate, he’s wakened her before she was ready to wake up. He’s waked her in the middle of a dream. About Edward, of all people. “Thanks, Antoine,” she says. “You got here just in the nick of time!”
There was a short period, back in college in Miami, when Karen and Edward were closer. It was before she’d actually met Joe—long before the languid days in his old crumbly apartment.
Edward was in one of her classes. She closes her eyes and drifts, tries to remember which one. English Lit, she thinks. Or, no. Humanities. He sat behind her in the dome-shaped auditorium, watching slides—a whirlwind trip through the history of art—Leonardo to Georgia O’Keeffe in six weeks’ time. A taste, the professor said, to whet their appetites. They’d shared a table in the cafeteria once or twice, had a few Cokes together, a couple of talks about Degas or Bosch, wending their way through throngs of students to sit down. Her hair was long and bright. Edward was tall and kind. Who knows what might have happened? Karen had wondered once or twice over the years, during one or another of Joe’s endless trips, or sitting in traffic on the way to the ER to treat Jon’s sprained ankle or Robbie’s broken arm. It might have crossed her mind as she sat alone on the back porch, her husband dozing in front of the TV, that things might have turned out differently if Joe hadn’t come along when he did. It turned out they were friends—the poli sci major and the budding engineer—a perfect match, the two of them, so opposite they rounded one another out. “You complete him,” Karen used to tell her husband, laughing. And it was a better match by far than she and Edward would have been. The man went through wives as quickly as a bottle of scotch, and then paid lavishly to be rid of them. Edward’s Expensive Exes, Joe called them. All four of them.
Still, there was that one time. Edward’s second wife had left him in a huff. Her spiky heels had barely clicked out of his life, her plane was barely off the tarmac before Edward turned up at their door. “She’s gone,” he had announced. “She isn’t coming back.” And Karen let him in, fixed him a drink, fixed him another, and, before she realized it, the three of them were wasted. Joe staggered up to bed, and Edward stayed the night, too drunk to drive. They talked for a while longer, just the two of them and Karen made some coffee, made it very strong, a cup for each of them, because she’d felt attracted to him then. That one time. That one night, tucking in the sheets on the couch in the den.
And now she’s had a dream about him. Always loved you. Always will.
God!
“Okay, okay.” She lets Antoine lead her to the kitchen, watches as he runs in circles between her and his empty bowl. The dream was so vivid. So sexual! She pours Antoine’s kibbles in his bowl and makes herself a cup of coffee, but she doesn’t sit down. She paces. She tells herself the dream of Edward was only misplaced longing for her husband—it would be too painful to dream of him, his death too fresh a wound, too recent, still. It was Edward in the dream because he’d held on to her a tiny bit too long outside the restaurant; it stuck in her subconscious. That was all. That and his offhand remark about always loving her. She tells herself these things, and then she reaches for her phone and texts Tomas. Can you get away?
Yes, Tomas texts back. Of course. Where?
Lunch, she says, but in her heart she knows it won’t be only lunch. She lets Tomas pick where they’ll meet—a little ethnic place on Boylston. She reads his text directions, slathers raspberry jam over her toast, and washes it down with her coffee. Outside, Antoine runs across the snowy yard and she opens the back door. He bounds inside, shakes off the cold. Trees sway in the wind. It’s a sunny day. A yellow day. The sky is clear. Snow sparkles on the tree limbs. As she watches, a blue jay lands on a large oak branch and makes a raucous sound before it flies to a rickety bird feeder that she keeps stocked with seeds. Karen looks back at her phone. Yes, she texts Tomas. Twelve thirty is perfect.
At lunch she barely tastes the food. Chilean, she thinks, or Peruvian—something South American, and she’s not even sure of this. Afterward she can’t remember what she ate. The conversation is stilted, halfhearted. Tomas drones on about Honduras, his job at the hospital.
“How are you?” he says. “Are you doing all right? Is there anything you need?”
Karen nods. She looks up at him. “Yes.”
They play with their food. They speak of the weather, what a pretty day it is, how glad Tomas is that he doesn’t go to work until the evening. Usually. “Not always, though,” he says. “If they need me at another time, they call me in. I am the last one hired. I am the new one.”
Karen pokes at her food, asks him how his family’s holding up after the mother’s death. Polite, a little distant, as if they are friends who know each other slightly, co-workers grabbing a quick bite before a meeting.
“Fine,” he says. “It was expected. No one was surprised. Sad, of course, but we were prepared. My brothers and I were with her at the end.”
Karen stares at her hands. “And after? When you got back? Do you have your old apartment?”
“No,” he says, “but the one I live in now is near to the old building. Would you like to see it sometime?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’d like that very much. Is it far? Can we walk there?”
He looks away, somewhere over her head. “Yes,” he says. “Not in this weather, but it isn’t far. A short train ride from here. Would you like to see it?”
She nods. “Yes.”
It’s a tiny fourth-floor walk-up. No elevator; the stairs are poorly lit. Even in the daylight, even on a day as bright as this, it’s difficult to see the stairs.
“Be careful,” Tomas says. “The owner is a crook. He doesn’t care about these things.” He cups her elbow lightly in his hand, steers her in the dark stairway, and Karen finds she’s breathing very hard by the time they get to the fourth floor.
“Out of shape,” she says and laughs. “I didn’t realize quite how much.” Tomas fumbles in his pocket for his keys. The door is old—dark brown paint is chipped away in spots, exposing other colors. A rainbow door. The lock is also old and Tomas jiggles the key until it catches, finally, in the tumblers. Odors from apartments downstairs drift in the air between them, beef and garlic and rich sauces. Karen inhales. “Guatemalan,” Tomas says. “Sometimes the women bring me food to try.”
“It smells heavenly.” Karen inhales again. “I’ve gained five pounds just breathing in your doorway.” For a second, she has the craziest thought that she could leave her life in Waltham in a heartbeat and
live here in this quiet, unassuming place, at least for a little while. A transition period—that she could slide inside Tomas’s life without a backward glance. She’s lived in places like this—that room off Boylston, before she moved in with Joe, and the place in South Miami with the landlord’s grumpy dog, its leash clipped to a clothesline in the yard.
The place is tiny. Dark, again, despite the yellow day. The window is small, dirty with smoke from the stove. A huge cat sits on the fire escape, turning when he hears Tomas’s voice. He thumps against the window with his massive head.
“Spike,” Tomas explains. He wrenches the window open a few inches and the cat slinks in. “One day I was sleeping between shifts, and I woke up to a commotion on the fire escape. I looked out and saw this scruffy old guy fighting with a tom on the third floor. I believe a female house cat was involved. Attractive. Fluffy. I sometimes see her sitting in a window on the second floor. Spike will come inside to eat now, to visit, but he’s an alley cat at heart. ‘I could never live indoors,’ he tells me. ‘It is much too boring.’ ” Tomas tugs at the stuck window and it slams shut with a noisy thud.
Karen looks around. Tomas flicks on a light, rummages in a cabinet for a bag of cat food, and pours the pellets in a chipped yellow bowl in the kitchen, an alcove off the only real room.
There is a large brass bed that he explains came from a junk shop two or three stops up from his. He tells her about lugging it onto the train in pieces. “Three trips,” he says. “One for the headboard, one for the footboard, and one for the—what—the raves?”
“Rails,” she says. “The rails.”
The Other Widow Page 17