I wandered, dazed, into the hallway. Time did not exist inside the hospital. There was no time to get to Chicago. There was no time even to embark. I had lost my suitcase; it would be somewhere among the flotsam of the accident. My shattered phone had been pieced back together but would not quite come back to life. Its power cord, anyway, was in the suitcase. Untethered, I wandered the halls until I found an elevator and took it down to the lobby.
There, the windows were dark. I hurried away from them, my ears buzzing with anxiety, and found an interior waiting area with thickly cushioned chairs. I sat, waiting, but for what I could not say. I was not comfortable.
I got back up and followed the signs for the cafeteria. But the cafeteria was glass, the night sky pressing inward. I backed out of the room and took a hard chair at a table that someone had dragged into the hall. The last occupant had left behind an array of sweetener packets. I chose one and fidgeted, letting the contents run like sand in an hourglass from one end of the paper sachet to the other. I had never felt so closed in, so trapped. I gathered the sugar packets to me. Six of them. I laid them out like a hand of solitaire, lining up the edges just so. This one, Malloy. This one, Dev. Paris and so on.
“Eden?” Warren Hoyt stood above me, his hands in his pockets. For a moment, he didn’t seem real. He didn’t seem possible. I reached out for the soft blue cuff of his shirt and then faltered. He glanced at the arrangement of sugar packets. “Looks like you’re . . . what are you doing? Are you OK?”
It was the worst thing to be alone. To know how small and cast off you were from any shore. Just a tiny island.
“Who bought you the throw pillows?” I said. “Who’s in the pictures in the frames on your desk?”
He knelt in front of me. His worried eyes darted over my face then down at my wrapped hands. “What happened?”
“If it was just you, that’s one thing,” I said. “But if someone else got the pillows for you—”
“Nieces and nephews. In the frames. Me on a hiking trip with some friends.” He reached for one of the gauzy mitts and held it gently. “There’s no one else,” he said. “I just have impeccable taste. In throw pillows and—and in everything.”
“You could do better.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to.”
“I’m afraid of the dark,” I said.
“I heard that.”
I was caught off guard for a moment. I blinked into his earnest face. He’d heard about it? Had he also heard about Dev or would I have to explain? “I’m the villain,” I said. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“Maybe not. Rumor tends to run around me, like water around a rock.”
I stared at him.
“You know how water runs around—look, it was dumb. My jokes are dumb most of the time, which is why I try not to make any.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said impatiently. “But if rumor runs around you, how did you know about my fear of the dark?”
“Well, you made it fairly clear at my house that you wanted the light left on,” he said. “But I had already heard about it before then. I don’t know—Barrows or one of his people, I guess. No, I remember now. Erica Ruth—”
“Erica Ruth heard about it? While she was stuck out in the gate house of a closed park, she heard about it?”
“Don’t feel awkward. Fear of the dark is not as unusual as you might think. Last year we had a . . .”
He nattered on while I tracked the news of my affliction from me to Dev to Sam to Barrows to Cooley to Paris. Somewhere along the line, the tale had splintered off on a course of its own, from Barrows to Hillary, from Erica Ruth to Warren.
And yet, Martha hadn’t heard. How? Because they all protected her like a child? Don’t tell Martha.
Martha, who had been brought to the group by Tash. Without Tash, though, there was no gravity keeping them tied to one another. They were an expanding universe, pulling away from one another. Martha who talked of colleagues instead of friends. The only one of them, I realized, who had not denied planning the reunion.
“What is it? Eden, are you OK?”
I visualized the kitchen of the guest house. After hours, late and dark, a drink between friends. Paris wanted to talk to Malloy, alone. But Martha had followed Paris into the house. Dev had called Paris out for using my phone to text Malloy, but it was Martha who caught her. Dev prevented Paris from sneaking to the kitchen, but no one kept Martha from going.
One friend is supposed to arrive but then another does.
Malloy pulls the screwdriver out of the wine bottle, pops out the cork with the opener. Now both opener and screwdriver lay at hand. Perhaps Martha is taking the opportunity of Malloy all to herself to flirt. Show the dimples, see if she’s still got what it takes to turn his head. She wears a ridiculous red lipstick, too—actually wears it, doesn’t just carry it around in her makeup bag, hoping it will look better on her next time she tries. She had already talked them all into coming to the lake. She might talk him into anything.
Or maybe she gets down to business. She’s carrying his kid from their hookup a few months before. Except Malloy is a man with a new lease on life, a fresh and unmarred love affair, a new commitment to the family business, which will make him a richer man than he already is. He sits at the head of the table at a feast of life and opportunity. Maybe when he says “pilgrim” he does not think of humility. Maybe he thinks of empire, of conquering. He is, by his own words, cruel. He will not mourn. He will not be sorry for past sins. He will not be who Martha wants him to be. He never was.
Things go badly. There’s a screwdriver right there. It goes into his neck—not because it is the only tool or maybe even the closest tool or the most deadly lying there on the counter. The screwdriver is from Martha’s car. It is hers. It is familiar.
Malloy reaches for it, his fingertips bloody, and perhaps Martha helps ease him quietly to the floor. Eases him to the floor, an arc of blood smeared on the wall, before panicking. Does she think to wipe the handle of the screwdriver? She does.
She rushes through the back door, letting it slam against the wall, and away from the house. And then back around to the front and inside, because where else can she go?
She runs through the front door. And starts screaming.
Click. When I snapped out of it, Warren was leaning over me, concerned. “Eden?”
“She would have been the first one there,” I said. “She threw herself on top of his body to cover for the blood she would still have on her. And I can’t prove any of it.”
“Any of what? What are you talking about?”
“Martha,” I said. “Martha killed Malloy.”
“How do you know?”
How did I know? Because the worst thing in the world was to be alone. Martha and I had both felt the open maw of solitude coming for us. We reacted to it differently. When real connection was lost, I had chosen isolation, to avoid attaching myself, to avoid making a nuisance of myself, to avoid having to admit what prowled after me in the shadows. Martha had chosen to surround herself, to make her tour, as she had called it. And what a tour it had been, with each of the men worried to hear who the father would turn out to be. You almost had to admire how she had forced them all here. She was not yet done mourning, but it wasn’t Tash she mourned. It was how the people they’d been came together over Tash’s death. As time went on, they’d splintered and grown apart and then—
What had changed? The pregnancy. And Malloy’s will? Something the colleagues had drawn up that Martha wasn’t supposed to see? In any case, the center wasn’t holding. They were spinning away into their own lives, and Martha . . . Martha hadn’t planned for solitude.
How did I know? Because it made awful sense to me. I had stood in that open field made for stargazing in the bright light of day and felt the vastness of the universe swell out around me. Underneath my skin and hers, we might be the same sleepless, helpless howl of a girl, alone in the field, alone in the world. But tha
t’s not how I recognized her.
It was Bix she reminded me of. Empty in the eyes, wearing a daytime mask of dimples and coyness, laughs. Devil may care. But where he was a hero, emptying himself out in a flood of activity that kept everyone away from his tender scars, Martha offered her body, her services as bridesmaid, the tools from the trunk of her car. Anything to be useful. Anything to be needed, to be anything necessary on this earth to anyone. It didn’t matter which one of them.
Although—
I thought it might have. Martha stabbing Malloy was an act of the moment, reaching for the nearest most familiar tool. But the familiar tool was already in the house before it had been used to try to open a bottle of wine. It had already been used to tweak the bannister, just in case anyone sat on it. Just in case anyone sat on it again.
“Sam,” I said. “She meant to kill Sam.” Not Malloy—that was frustration or rage, a hot moment and then regret. And then Paris—that was a mistake, a miscalculation.
It was Sam she meant to deal out of the group. The accident she had orchestrated with the stair railing would force the rest of them together, thick as thieves. The circle closed, again.
Sam was the expendable one. And he knew it.
He hadn’t, though, not until he heard what had actually happened to Paris, when he’d understood more than the rest of us. That’s not possible. That means— And then he’d turned himself in to the police early the next morning for any crime he could think of. Not because he thought someone else might get hurt, but because he thought he might. He probably hadn’t even heard about Dev’s “poisoning” by the time he went to confess.
He had loved her, but he wasn’t good enough. No one person was. Martha wanted them all.
And if she couldn’t have them all, as many as she could get. Sam would have been collateral damage.
Martha, rushing to Malloy’s body, blood soaking into her dark nightgown to hide any spatter that might have occurred during the murder.
Martha, tending to Sam after he swooned at the sight of Malloy, the soles of her feet dirty from her run from the back of the house to the beach to wash her bloody hands, and then around to the front of the house.
Martha, not protected but overlooked.
Martha, saying she would never leave—
“Paris,” I said. I stood up.
“What is it?”
I wasn’t sure. Maybe nothing. Paris, twitching at Martha’s touch. Probably nothing. But nothing hadn’t been the case all weekend.
“Paris. I left her alone—”
I rushed away from him and down the hall. The elevator would take too long. I spotted the fire exit stairs and ran up, quick on the first few stories and wheezing by the last. Warren fell behind. When I slammed through the door and out onto the floor of the critical unit, I was alone. The ward had gone dim, the nurses station temporarily abandoned.
I approached Paris’s room cautiously. It was darker than I liked, lit only by a small lamp behind the bed, lighting a small circle on the dark shade pulled down on the window. I fought the itch of my skin and stood in the doorway.
Paris lay as I had left her. Her chest rose and fell evenly.
I let out the breath I had been holding and walked in. At her bedside, I glanced nervously behind me, but no one was there. All that talk about never leaving Paris alone, but Martha had, and for that I was grateful. And maybe she would continue to leave her alone. If she’d only wanted Sam, maybe she was done hurting people. But things had gone wrong, and no one knew her state of mind. Now that Malloy was gone, Dev, Sam hiding from her. Paris was all that remained, which seemed to me a bad place to be. Who could withstand the intensity of Martha’s love, alone?
Below me, Paris’s breath was soft and untroubled, her head turned toward me.
“I won’t let her hurt you,” I whispered.
Her eyes opened.
“Paris?”
She blinked, finding focus and then me. “Dev?” she asked, licking at her dry lips.
Another widow welcomed to the sisterhood. I had done this to her. I didn’t know what to say. She had loved him best, after all.
“I’m sorry.” I looked away from the deep confusion in her eyes and found instead the dark square of the window. For a moment, I was not sure what I was seeing.
I had thought the shade had been pulled down, but instead it was rigged up, yanked open all the way to the ceiling. It was not an opaque covering I was looking at but the dark hole of the night sky. Paris’s window faced the lake, so the sky above went on forever, all dark.
The most beautiful thing. I was alone with the sky.
Below me, Paris whispered, “Dev?”
In the window’s reflection, I could see my own shape, lit by the weak light at Paris’s bedside. But then behind my own form stood a black silhouette, like those that darted into the park road. Only this one moved. Behind me, the door gently closed, click.
“Martha,” Paris said.
The movement in the reflection stopped. I blinked down at Paris. She wasn’t talking to Martha, but me.
“Martha,” she said, a crease forming between her eyes.
It was not a warning. It was an accusation. Someday soon she would say my name the same way.
Whatever she had learned or remembered, it was enough to force urgency into her faint voice, enough to force me to react.
I dodged as the dark figure in the window leapt forward, throwing myself at the nurse’s call button at the side of Paris’s bed. I bounced away just as Martha landed on the bed, the old silver knife from the guest house kitchen in her hand stabbing down and into the mattress. Paris made a terrible sound, not quite as human as a scream.
I darted for the door while Martha pulled the knife out of the bed. I was almost there—one of my gauzed mitts managed to graze the handle—but then Martha grabbed a fistful of my hair and I fell to the ground.
The knife came down. I rolled out of reach.
The strike to the floor jarred the blade loose from Martha’s hands. It clattered away.
“Stop it!” Paris screeched. “Help!”
I jumped to my feet, yelling, and leapt as Martha clawed for me, landing again at the door. Through the glass, I spotted Warren and a security guard rushing toward us. I put one mitt up to the glass and reached for the handle with the other.
Something punched me in the back, hard.
The wind had been knocked out of me.
My breath. I couldn’t catch it.
The padded mitten at the door handle pawed, pawed, faltered.
Somewhere far away, Paris made another gut-wrenching noise. But that was miles away and years.
I couldn’t think why any of it mattered.
I was up at the railing over the room. The guest house. No, a different room, white, and if I reached down I could move the people around like dolls. Martha, and Paris, fallen out of the bed. Me, sprawled with the tarnished silver blade in my back. I was a troop at war, down there, belly-crawling toward the door.
A tug at my back: Martha pulling the knife.
The door opened. A security guard entered, stomping and kicking Martha’s hands away from me, and behind him, Perez and Barrows, guns drawn.
The room had gone dark, dark, and far away. A slice of narrow room, folded into an accordion and closed, closing. And quiet.
The knife fell soundlessly to the floor, red. Martha scrambled backward, her red lips stretched in rage. She would have her reasons. They would have everything and nothing to do with me. I was forgetting who she was, even as she swept a curl out of her eyes and left a smear of my blood across her cheek.
Far, far. Warren, too. And then he was close, pressing his face to the floor. His mouth opened and closed but I heard no sound. Warren, out of my reach. He was—
Click.
Click, damn it.
It was dark. That’s what it was. I wasn’t afraid. But I didn’t want to be in the dark just now.
I slammed back into awareness. Around me, all the so
und in the world, keening and wailing and yelling. None of it was mine. All the pain and hurt. Mine.
“Eden,” Warren said. His cheek pushed to the floor. Blood, there. “Stay with us.”
“War-ren,” I said with effort. Like Cooley’s song. Someone, ouch, pressed at my back. Two giant handprints on the moon.
“Yes, yes, anything,” he said. “Stay with me.”
“You need . . .”
There were many people now, new sounds and shouts and a blanket from Paris’s bed pulled down and wrapped around me. Warren lay on the cold floor. He had such a nice face. Such a nice, worried face.
“A nickname,” I wheezed.
“You can give me one,” he said, wiping at my cheek. Blood. He looked scared. I didn’t like to think of Warren as scared, as anything other than the guy on the wall. Buttoned-up, in control of the chaos. Naming the stars as though he owned every one. “You think of one,” he said. “You think of a nickname for me.”
“Where do you . . . keep them?” My voice sounded cold, chattering.
“What? Where do I keep what?”
Hadn’t I said? “The plaques,” I said. “For saving everyone.”
“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay with me, and I’ll show you.”
“I want to see,” I said.
“The plaques,” he said.
“And,” I said.
“Yes?”
“The stars,” I said. “Show me the stars.”
His tucked his head into his chest, not really a nod here on the floor, my blood on his face, and then he was back.
“You got it. They’re yours.”
Now
Cooley’s puppy has knocked over my tripod twice. His name is Bronco, which was cute when she first got him, at seven pounds. Now he’s almost a year old, and indeed truck-like. Fast as lightning as she tries to get him to obey her commands. He’s too hyped up by the activity in the viewing area tonight. He wants to sniff around my equipment. He wants to greet each of the amateur photographers as they show up. He’s a fantastic greeter of people who show up. He dodges between their legs and shoves his head into their camera bags. I am expecting twenty photography students to join me tonight, though of course I never mind a drop-in.
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