The Woman in the Park

by Teresa Sorkin

  He noticed the book he had bought her peeking out of her bag.

  “Did you finish it?” he asked.

  “Not yet, I almost don’t want to ruin it because I know it won’t end well,” she replied.

  “The beginning is always beautiful,” he reflected. “When the lovers meet, they’re taken with their passion, and it grows and grows until something…well, sometimes they are driven to madness.”

  “Do you think we will be?” she asked, her smile uncertain.

  “It sounds terrible but, somehow, being crazy in love seems to be what everyone wants.”

  She looked at him and realized that what he was saying might actually be true.

  ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1, 2018

  Patient: Sarah Rock

  Age: 39 (Dob: 12/7/1978)

  Sarah did not attend this week’s session or call to reschedule. This is her first no-show in over six months. I’ve called her repeatedly, but she’s not answering. I’ll give her space and allow her to make the next appointment when she’s ready.

  If she doesn’t, I’ll have to contact someone about her; if she is tapering her medications on her own, the side effects could be more than problematic. At this juncture I do not see her as posing a threat to herself or to anyone else, but her behavior has been erratic and will be worth discussing with her under some neutral pretext.

  CHAPTER 10

  The only ambition of this great powerful frame was to do nothing, to grovel in idleness and satiation from hour to hour. He wanted to eat well, sleep well, to abundantly satisfy his passions, without moving from his place, without running the risk of the slightest fatigue.

  THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

  Tap, tap, tap.

  She opened her eyes. Moonlight entered through the garden window, filling the room with a soft glow.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  It was coming from outside, a tree branch tapping against the bedroom window. She got up and walked over to it, looked outside into the darkness at the old damaged tree. She felt as if someone was watching them.

  Surely Eric hadn’t followed them?

  She watched for a while, longer than was at all reasonable, before sleep beckoned her back again.

  She woke late, buried deep in the warm covers. Soft sunlight was seeping in from the window. What time was it?

  She heard Lawrence’s voice: muffled, faraway. It was coming from the bathroom; he was on the phone. It sounded like he was arguing with whoever was on the other end; she could hear him alternately pleading, remonstrating.

  “What? No.” His voice was strained. “Please, it’s too—”

  She couldn’t make out the rest. She realized that the water was running. Did he have the shower on?

  The answer hit her like a splash of cold water and the fog of sleep finally evaporated from her mind. He didn’t want her to hear him.

  He was married. It was his wife.

  She got up from bed, wrapping her robe around her against the morning cold. His gray woolen jacket lay draped over a club chair in the corner. She looked at it, then back at the door. Behind the bathroom door, the heated conversation continued.

  She crossed the room to the chair, grabbed the jacket and felt the pockets. She found the pocketknife she’d bought him; nothing else. His voice stopped abruptly, and she scrambled to put the jacket back, draping it carefully across the back of the chair. As she did, something small and hard fell out and rolled across the hardwood floor. She picked it up.

  It was a ring.

  She felt the coldness of it in her hand, its weight as it clinked softly against her own wedding ring. She looked closely; an inscription ran around the inside, engraved in fine cursive letters.

  B&H—Amor vincit omnia.

  “What are you doing?”

  Startled, Sarah stuffed the ring into the pocket of her robe and swung around. Lawrence emerged from the bathroom, phone in hand.

  “I was going to ask you that,” she said bluntly, her voice louder than she’d intended. Who the hell were B and H? “You were pretty loud on the phone just now; you woke me up.”

  “That was my editor,” he said, clearly annoyed. “He wants me to submit something to him, but I’m not ready to send it yet.”

  “Seemed like it was more than that,” she said.

  “No, that’s all it was.”

  She frowned. “You really sounded—”

  “Drop it, Sarah.” His tone was hostile. “I said that’s all it was, and I mean it.”

  She pulled back from him, alarmed at the turn his voice had taken.

  B&H.

  Had she really wanted this so badly that she’d allowed him to lie to her up to now?

  His face softened again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just—sometimes there’s so much pressure.”

  She wasn’t giving in again. “I understand that. But that wasn’t your editor, Lawrence. We need to talk about this.”

  “About what?”

  “Give me your hand.”

  She took the hand he offered, held up his ring finger. There was the slightest pale band of skin where a ring should be. She felt the rush of vindication—and relief.

  “Plain to see,” she said. “You’re marked.”

  He looked down, his face dark.

  “Now you don’t have to tell me her name, but I want to hear about her. It’s only fair.”

  Lawrence took a deep breath. “I’d rather not,” he said.

  She stood firm. “You’ve been to my home, seen photos of my family—slept in two of my beds,” she said. “You need to tell me something. Is she anything like me, for instance?”

  Lawrence looked at her for a long moment. “She’s nothing like you,” he said finally. “She’s frivolous and uninteresting. She doesn’t have your depth.” When she refused to take that bait, he went on. “We met in college. Her family treated her like a princess, so I got into the habit of doing it, too. She was shiny and pretty and smart but without any scars or chaos to her. No depth. We got married young, in our senior year of college. Her family wanted us to. And it was just—we were so different. She cares about things that have no meaning to me.” He stared out the window.

  “So why not split up with her?” she challenged him.

  “Why haven’t you?” he smiled faintly.

  She couldn’t answer that.

  “I’ve never cheated on her before this,” Lawrence went on.

  “What did you tell her about where you are now?” she pressed.

  “I told her I’m doing research for my novel. Which is true, in a way. I needed space to work—it was just mental space.”

  An image of Eric flashed through her mind, placing folded shirts in his suitcase. “You told her you were going on a work trip,” she said quietly.

  He nodded. “It’s all that really makes sense to her anyway.”

  She thrust her hands into the pockets of her robe, feeling his ring there. He’d been right: it was easier when they knew less about each other. Was he B or H? Thérèse Raquin popped into her mind, and she laughed, surprised by the thought.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I just realized something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your name is Lawrence.”

  His smile was confused. “You just realized that?”

  “Laurent. Thérèse’s lover in the novel is Laurent.”

  He laughed, relieved to change the subject. “I guess it is. I never really thought of it.”

  His phone beeped, and he ignored it. Sarah couldn’t help but wonder if it was his wife.

  While he was getting dressed, she replaced the ring in his jacket pocket, its weight a burden lifted from her.

  Amor vincit omnia: the strange words rang in her head. She made a mental note to look them up later.

  Over coffee she handed Lawrence an extra set of house keys.

  “I’m going to visit Jason at school today,” she said. “It’s not too far from here. They’re doing a Parents’ Day for the older ki
ds; Darcy’s on an overnight trip, but I thought I’d surprise him.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “I think you’ll love the town—it’s quaint and close enough to walk to. There are some cool antique shops. A good bookstore, too. Maybe we can meet back here for lunch?”

  Lawrence smiled. “I’ll go to the market, then. I’ll make you something fancy. Fondue, maybe. You like fondue?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling. She remembered the first time she’d tried it, on a trip to Switzerland with Eric and the kids. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  “Fondue it is,” Lawrence said.

  “He’s a good lay, a good cook—is there anything this guy can’t do?” she joked.

  “The cooking is from summers with my sister in France,” he explained. “She taught me everything I know.”

  She looked into his blue eyes. Couldn’t they go back to knowing only minor details about one another?

  “‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’” he said abruptly. “ ‘And sorry I could not travel both.’”

  Sarah knew she’d heard the lines before. “What’s that from?” she asked.

  “Robert Frost,” he said. “‘The Road Not Taken.’ It’s one of my favorite poems. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by—’”

  “Like the road you’re on with me?”

  “‘—And that has made all the difference,’” he finished. He took her by the hands. “This is our road, Sarah. We may be meant to be here, right now. We owe it to ourselves, and to them, to find out for sure.”

  “And if we’re wrong?” She searched his eyes. Was he B or H? She questioned to herself.

  Did it really matter who he was?

  “‘And both that morning equally lay. In leaves no step had trodden black,’” he quoted again. “Maybe neither path is really wrong—we just think that one of them must be.”

  “And because we’re us, we assume it’s the one we’re on?” she asked.

  He drew her close.

  “That’s right,” he said. “And that’s a choice, too.”

  CHAPTER 11

  After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy…

  THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

  The Cole Manor School occupied a stately green campus a little way upstate, nestled between an impoverished old Hudson River village and an up-and-coming town that attracted hipsters from New York and Boston on the weekends. Wild woods stretched out behind the old red brick buildings; in the distance, the high steeple of a church rose above the foliage.

  Sarah parked the car and walked the brick-lined path down to the center of campus. It really was more beautiful than she remembered. On earlier visits to the school with Eric, the place had struck her as impossibly pretentious, an elite prep school where the almost-one-hundred-percent-white student body rowed crew, fenced, and learned to ride horses after classes in (as the school’s website boasted) “high-tech science and vector calculus.” Ordinarily, privilege never embarrassed Sarah, but here it was hard to escape the awkwardness of it; there was something sad about all these kids being sequestered in the woods from the reality in which their well-off parents toiled back in the city. But today the long green lawns of the campus, its benches and little tables, seemed inviting and harmonious. Farther away down the hill, she could see the river, a placid mirror silently traversed by rowboats. Along its banks, the trees were on fire with vibrant red, orange, and yellow. It was a peaceful place, the very picture of safe, healthy, nurturing.

  She stood in front of the tall glass façade of the school library and waited for Jason to appear. The buildings of the campus were inspiring, venerable; for the first time, she found herself wishing she’d been a student here herself. The school housed over 500 children—many of them there because it had proven too burdensome to their parents to keep them at home. Parenting was difficult even for the wealthy; children were a mystery even to the powerful. She looked at the students and parents going in and out of buildings.

  She had waited for Jason when he was born, too. He had come late on a hot summer day. At the time her little boy had existed in her mind for so long, she almost couldn’t believe he was going to emerge into reality; his little kicks against her stomach, his sleeping and waking twists and turns inside her, had brought out a love that she couldn’t imagine attaching to a person. She had loved his being, his life, far more than her own. And when he finally came, she thought she had discovered peace in that ultimate selflessness.

  But he was his own person and, with his independence, new fears had awoken in her. Before becoming a mother she’d only had herself to worry about, to care for, to consider in that intimate, unconditional way. Now, having first found unconditional love in another person, she had found unconditional fear too: the constant awareness of her powerlessness to protect and control the life she loved so much. The darkness had returned to her then, more deep-seated than ever, a darkness she felt would take more than a lifetime to let go.

  Then she saw him, her Jason, walking across the lawn. He was looking straight ahead, though not at her: an unselfconscious smile on his face. He looked almost as she remembered him: innocent, engaged, open to the world and to life.

  She wanted to call out to him and wave, and almost did—and then she saw him laugh to someone else close by. As Sarah watched, a girl stepped forward from one of the library steps to hug Jason. The girl had long dark hair and an olive green jacket; her smile was as open as Jason’s. A thought of Juliette flashed through Sarah’s mind and she recoiled from it, shocked.

  She sat down on the bench nearest her, watching the two children as they laughed and chatted. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen her son looking so happy, and the unbidden image of Juliette returned to her mind. Was he this way all the time when away from home?

  Was Sarah being replaced for him, too?

  Then, the girl was up and gone. Jason stood to go too, and when he did, he turned in Sarah’s direction. Their eyes met, and for a terrible instant he looked stunned, horrified. Then he came toward her uncertainly, his expression dissolving into vague annoyance.

  “What are you doing here, Mom?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I’m here to check on the tree and sort some other stuff out, up at the country house,” she said. “I thought I’d stop by for Parents’ Day.” She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Jason looked at her as if she were speaking a different language.

  “The tree?” he asked incredulously. “Mom, you—” He looked around in exasperation. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  She was taken aback. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m trying to move on. Don’t you get that? You’re making it really hard for me.”

  “Move on?” she repeated, puzzled. “I don’t understand. Why is it an issue if I want to see my son?”

  “Because I don’t want to see you, Mom. I want to be normal up here. I see you on most weekends. Isn’t that enough?”

  She was shocked. Teenage rebelliousness was nothing in comparison to this; did he really hate her so much?

  “I just want some space, Mom. Some independence.” He sighed heavily. “This Parents’ Day thing is lame anyway, and this weekend…I’d rather we not do it. Okay?”

  She frowned, hurt. “I don’t mean to embarrass you, Jason.”

  “You’re not,” he said quickly. “It’s just that—I get to be different here? I need that. You’ve said that yourself.”

  She nodded, looking past him in the direction his friend had gone.

  “Of course.”

  “And I’m going to see you next week anyway,” he added.

  “It’s all right,” she lied. “I love you, Jason. I understand.”

  She hugged him and he let her, his irritation giving way just a little. “I love you too, Mom. I’ll see you next week.”

  She nodded as she watched him go, her pain just another thing she had failed to protect him from.

  Th
ere was a diner near the school, The Peter Pan. She pulled into the lot outside and cried for a moment, just letting her emotions run. Why did everything seem to end up in loss? What had she done to deserve this?

  She wiped her face dry and looked in the mirror. She’d have to be sure to go home early; she didn’t want Lawrence to see her like this. In the meantime, The Peter Pan looked cozy and welcoming.

  She went into the diner, sat down in a booth, ordered coffee and took a sip of the bitter black drink.

  Her attention was drawn to a flash of ebony hair outside the window. Sarah looked out at the woman crossing the street, her face obscured by her long, beautiful dark hair. Slender, long-legged, purposeful in her stride—even with her face hidden, the woman was almost shockingly glamorous-looking, entirely out of place in the little town. Sarah’s blood ran cold as she realized who it was.

  Juliette.

  What was she doing here? Eric wasn’t even here—had she followed Sarah? Had she seen her with Lawrence?

  The waitress was nowhere to be seen. Sarah rummaged in her purse, found a five-dollar bill, and threw it on the table. A few of the other customers looked up as she ran from the diner, the glass door banging behind her. She looked around just in time to see Juliette slip into a little deli across the road.

  Sarah crossed the road after her, ignoring the sparse traffic. A car swerved around her, its horn blaring; Sarah heard the driver shouting obscenities at her as he went past. So much for small-town courtesy, she thought. She ran into the deli, preparing herself for battle.

  An older woman walked laboriously through the aisle, pushing a half-full basket on the floor ahead of her with her foot. A man stood at the counter, buying cigarettes from a boy behind it who looked like he was in his teens. Juliette was nowhere to be seen.

  Sarah went up to the counter. “Is there a back door to this place?” she asked. The man buying cigarettes turned to look at her.

  “Y—yeah,” the kid said, staring. “But that’s only for employees.”

  Sarah turned and saw it. Employees Only. She made for the door.