I stand and gather myself, putting the pieces back together. I’ll go home and take a long hot shower, wash it all away. Tomorrow, I’ll take Luke’s advice and find a lawyer. But first, I’ll head back to the car and check my phone. Maybe Luke has called by now. Or more likely texted since that’s how millennials make up these days. He’ll say he made a mistake. An unforgivable one. I’ll forgive him, though. And I’ll tell him everything. From the beginning.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand—shit!—and squeeze them shut against the burning. I’d forgotten they were covered in dirt, in grass, in the decomposing cells of Ian. And Kate. And all the others.
The sharp snap of a twig forces them open again.
Eyes stinging, I spin to the sound of it. But through the brine of my tears, all I see is a blur of night and grass and graveyard. Maddie’s weepy face fixed on mine. And Wallace Bergman’s sun-spotted hands reaching for me.
I run.
With the hounds of the past pounding the pavement behind me.
With footsteps thumping in time to the beat of my heart.
I risk a clouded glance over my shoulder, and I see hair like fire. Flames alive and licking the sky.
And then I fall.
****
“Oh my God. Doctor Lawson! Are you okay?”
Cleo looks down at me. Her fire-red hair is calm now, doused at her shoulders. Still, it’s a striking contrast to her pale skin, almost translucent in the moonlight. In her hand, she holds a single red rose. One of the petals has loosed and fallen to the ground at her feet.
“I think so.” I sit up and she offers me a hand. But I wave it away and scramble to my feet, too proud to accept help. Not from Ian’s mistress. Even the one I like.
“You tripped,” she says, as I brush the grass from the mud-caked knees of my jeans.
My toe throbs in agreement, stubbed at the edge of a small slab of granite. I read the inscription: OUR LITTLE ANGEL.
“I thought . . .” What can I say? I thought you were the man I killed. We killed. As crazy as I sound, in my mind, it’s Wallace that’s been calling. Wallace that’s been following me. I’d even pulled up the obituary online to be certain. Still dead.
“That I was chasing you?”
“Something like that. It’s so dark out here, and I got dirt in my eyes. I couldn’t see who was there.”
She laughs a little—high pitched and nervous—the sound as foreign at night as a robin’s song. “You scared me too. I didn’t expect to find anybody else in a graveyard this late. Not anybody living anyway.”
Ian in the silence between us. Right in the middle of two women, where he always liked it best. She glances at my hands, my filthy hands. The dirt smeared on my shirt. My face too, I’m guessing. And I wait for the question—What are you doing here, Doctor Lawson?—but it never comes.
“Cleo, we have to talk. And I suppose now is as good a time as any.”
She lets out a long breath and gestures to the gravesite. The rose dangles awkwardly. As if she can’t wait to be rid of it. “Can we—?”
“Of course.” I let her go ahead. And the long stem of her body tenses at the sight of it. “It feels real when you see it in stone,” I say, thinking of Ian. But also of my father.
She drops the rose at the center of the dirt mound and whispers under her breath. Even on a night as still as this one, I can’t make it out. But her sniffling is undeniable.
“Ian told me about you,” she says, finally. And I feel a sudden jolt to my heart. “That you’d been a student of his. That you were a therapist in Carmel. I was curious.”
I stare at her flummoxed. My thoughts are muddled, and I feel one step behind. As if I’d smacked my head on that stone when I fell and sent all the puzzles pieces flying. “Wait. You knew? The whole time?”
“Didn’t you?” Her lips part in a coy grin, flashing the chalk white of her teeth, and the jolt comes again.
“No. Not the whole time.”
“Not until I let Kate’s name slip, right?”
“I don’t understand. Why would you? Did Ian know?”
She sits on the headstone, shaking her head. More in defeat than disagreement. “He didn’t have a clue. But I thought maybe you could help me. He was way out of my league, you know.”
My laugh sounds like a cackle, a bird of a different kind. A crow, perhaps. “So you came to the woman he cheated on for tips on how to steal him from the woman he cheated with?”
“When you put it that way . . .”
“What about Cleopatra James? Doesn’t she know how to seduce a married man?”
“Seduction is one thing. Commitment is something else.”
I nearly laugh again, thinking of Ian, six feet under and listening. Gloating.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I lied. I dropped out of junior college two years ago, but I spent so much time at MCC with Ian, I started to feel like a student again. We’d even talked about thesis topics, and I really was planning on applying for next fall. Ian was going to write me a letter of recommendation.”
“And Doctor Jarvis?”
She dismisses the name like an unwanted arm around her shoulders. “I thought it would make my story seem legit. I knew Jarvis was a professor at MCC, because Ian talked about him a lot. And not in a good way. He thought there was something going on between him and Kate. He wanted him fired.”
Another jolt, and I’m scrambling to catch up. To sift through the dregs of memory. The night of the vigil with its melting candles and jack-o’-lantern faces. And Jarvis’s smile, kind but wary. His deep, deep sigh. No wonder he’d taken a leave of absence. He’d probably been forced out. Or desperate for an escape from the brutality of Ian’s revenge.
Cleo shifts atop the gravestone, and her heel clunks against it with a hollow thud. She laughs nervously, then winces, as if the noises could offend the sleeping corpses under her feet.
“So Ian knew about your other life?”
“Not from the beginning. Sometimes I’d try to find clients at this upscale casino in Monterey. One night, he was there with that asshole from your office. David Fairfax.”
“David?” Still a step behind.
“Yeah, David. He was wasted that night and getting buried in a poker game. I accidentally bumped his drink, and it spilled all over his watch. He totally lost it. He kept ranting about how expensive it was, how his wife would be pissed at him. And then . . .” Her voice trails off like an old dog hunting the scent of a rabbit in the underbrush. Her fingers whiten as she grips the stone.
“And then?”
“Then, Ian defended me, and things just took off from there. He made me feel like I could be so much more. It sounds stupid, I know. But I guess I had a Julia Roberts moment.”
I think of my first date with Ian—pizza and beer and his unexpected confession. I’d felt saved somehow, seen. I can conjure the memory but not the magic. Not anymore.
“It happens to the best of us. And I understand why you lied.” Hadn’t I done the same? Worse, really. “Did David know you were an escort?”
She shrugs and wipes at her eyes, hiding them from me. And what I know makes me shiver. One of them is lying.
“I guess you can’t be my therapist anymore,” she says.
“I shouldn’t have been in the first place.”
We start to walk back toward the gate, and I spot the silhouette of her bicycle leaning against a tree trunk. The playful red of the frame and the ladybug bell I’d seen affixed to the handlebars seem ominous now, cast against the harshness of this place.
And when Cleo’s cell phone rings, we both startle. With a nervous twitter, she slips it from her pocket, and I gape at the little screen glowing like a watchful eye. The number on it is Ian’s.
“Uh, sorry,” Cleo says, silencing the ring with a click of her finger. “I’ll call back.”
“Who was that?”
She trudges ahead of me, pulling her jacket tighter around her. Concealing or protecting, I’m not sure which. And I have the urge to tackle her, to grapple with her for the phone the way I’d done with Luke.
“Cleo! Answer me.”
When she spins around, fear is cast like a shadow on her face. Even darker than our own silhouettes. “I don’t know, okay? Someone’s been calling me from Ian’s number and saying some pretty messed-up shit.”
“Like what?”
The breeze picks up as we near the entrance, and Cleo’s hair is dancing again. The wind whips through the pines, whistles. Like an old man with wrinkled hands calling that old dog home.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Have you told the police?”
She scoffs as she crouches and slips beneath the gate’s lock. “I’m supposed to meet with the detectives tomorrow, but . . . I don’t know. Ian didn’t trust the cops.”
“Why?”
There’s a rustling behind me, and Cleo gasps. I spin around, certain someone is there. But there’s only the sky and the road—and a sheet of muddy paper blown against my foot.
“You might’ve been right about seeing signs,” I tell her, surrendering my question like a leaf taken by the wind. For now.
I hold the paper out to her through the wrought-iron bars, and she shakes her head as she reads the printed words on the cover of the pamphlet.
In Memory of Ian and Kate Culpepper
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sins.
—1 Peter 4:8
I skirt out behind her as she tosses the sheet to the ground and swings one leg over her bike.
“Not all sins, apparently,” she says.
And I have to bite the side of my cheek to stop myself from answering: Amen.
****
The whole ride home I think of Cleo, replaying every session, every tear and revelation, trying to sort out reality from the rest. Cleo from Cleopatra. Jarvis, the dutiful professor, or the cad. Her David from the one I know. And that inexplicable phone call so much like my own. But of all the questions I want answered, there’s this: Did Ian say anything else about me? Pathetic, I realize.
Luke doesn’t cross my mind until I pull into the empty driveway and check my phone.
Okay, that’s not true. Luke is the backdrop of it all. The cause of the hollow cavity in my chest where Ian takes root again. Like a weed, he can grow anywhere as long as he has enough space. And with not a single message from Luke, there’s plenty of it.
I let myself in and head for the kitchen in search of something to ease the sting. But Luke and I drank the last bottle of red on Valentine’s—one week seems years ago now—and there’s only an old bottle of beer hiding behind the ketchup. Luke’s leftovers. I can’t bring myself to drink it.
Instead, I open the heart-shaped box on the counter and work my way through the rest of the first layer and into the second, methodically discarding the red seashell wrappers in the trash beneath the sink. I’ll regret this in the morning, but I can’t stop. Piece after piece, I shove them in, not bothering to finish chewing before I swallow the sticky sweet lump.
I reach for a glass—cold milk makes the medicine go down—and my throat closes up when I see it. The eighteen-piece knife set and cherrywood block, a wedding gift from my work colleagues. They’d attached a funny note that had made me laugh and Ian groan and roll his eyes: May your love never be severed.
I’d been practical in keeping it. Every kitchen needs a good knife set. But now, I wished I’d taken it to the landfill, dumped it with the other remnants of my marriage. Saved up for my own Wusthof.
The chef’s knife is missing.
Heart beating like a caged bird in my chest, I lean back against the counter and retrace my steps. I’d used the knife last weekend to chop tomatoes for my mom’s spaghetti Bolognese, the one dish I can cook, then washed it by hand and slid it back into its place. I’m sure of it.
Had Luke used it? Probably. He’d made breakfast on Saturday.
I open the dishwasher. Empty.
The utensil drawer. Not there.
My breath is high and tight in my chest, pushing its way out with a wheeze. I open every drawer in the kitchen, cabinets too. Until my lungs feel ready to burst, and the taste of chocolate burns in my throat like poison.
Luke. I have to call Luke.
I reach for my cell, fingers finding the numbers by heart. Until it rings in my hand. And dread grips me with its cold fingers on the back of my neck.
Ian’s number again.
I slide the green button to answer and wait for the voice that’s become familiar to me now.
“You really should keep better track of your knives, Doctor Lawson. Or they may end up in your back.”
****
I stand alongside the kitchen windows, careful not to be seen, and peer past my reflection out into the darkness, scanning my backyard for signs of life, the slightest movement stilling my breath and moving my eyes like a planchette across a Ouija board.
There. To the picket fence Luke helped me paint last spring.
There. To the broken cobblestone path still slick from the rain.
There. To the shadows that pool at the base of my own towering pine tree. To the little blue birdhouse Jack had carved for me and mounted to the trunk. With its secret hollow meant precisely for the spare key I’d hidden there. The only way the breathing man could have opened my door and come inside and slipped back out with my knife pressed against his flesh.
I shudder as I open the back door and step into the night, flashlight in tow. The wind swirls and whispers still, kicking up the smaller of the fallen pine branches, as if moved too by a spirit, an unseen hand.
It’s less than ten steps to the birdhouse, but each one tests my resolve. Each one requires nothing less of me than indifference to the sharp stick of fear between my ribs. The cruel certainty someone is watching.
I reach it, finally, and open the bottom, shining the thin beam of light on the hook inside. The key hangs there, swaying a bit, as if it’s chiding me for my foolishness. But I chase my relief with a shot of panic when I realize the small piece of black runner’s tape I’d stretched across the key’s teeth to hold it in place is missing.
I comb the ground with my flashlight, frantically at first, and then methodically, dropping to my knees on the wet ground.
And when I spot it, cast off and camouflaged against the soil and debris, I leave it there, making those ten steps to the house in two.
A dissatisfying sex life is like an unsightly rash. You don’t want to talk about it, and every night you pray it will get better on its own. But it won’t. Because it’s not the problem. It’s a symptom of the problem.
—Ian Culpepper, Love CPR
Valentine’s Day
Five Years Earlier
9:30 p.m. Mulholland Drive
What have I done? Ava stood at the edge of the embankment, gaping at the starless sky, the sparse cliffside. The small fire that had begun to burn there. She felt Ian beside her, but she didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. Instead, she started down the steep hill, measuring her steps. Surely, she could fix this. At least she had to try. But he stopped her, his hand around her arm like a noose.
“Leave him,” he said.
****
One week earlier . . .
Ian was angry. Ian was always angry.
And this time Ava knew for certain. It was absolutely all her fault. It started Monday morning when he woke her from a dead sleep, screaming bloody murder. She’d thought the house was on fire. For a split second, she was grateful, hoping the whole thing would burn down. Maybe then, they’d leave here for good. Start over. In a place that wasn’t haunted. But then, she broke through the fog of sleep—
too fast, like a diver jetting to the surface—and realized there was no fire. Only Ian’s hot breath in her face.
“How long have you been taking these fucking things?” he yelled, tossing the packet of birth control pills onto the bed. Like a note from a secret lover. She stared at it, humiliated. “You know what? I’m glad. Maybe you’re not cut out to be a mom. Maybe you’re just too selfish.”
She’d lain there shell-shocked long after he left, his wrath hanging in the air, thick as smoke. In the gray haze, she stared up at the cracks in the ceiling and wondered how far she would go to make Ian happy. If she even could anymore.
Please let Wally like it. She whispered that prayer against her pillow. Because if Wallace Bergman liked the idea Ian pitched for a show about couples in crisis—her idea, she called it Love Doctored—that would certainly make Ian happy. More than anything. Even more than a baby.
But when Ian didn’t come home Monday night, she knew right then. She’d blown it. Another flop. Another failure. A whole year’s worth of them.
She walked to the end of the pier that evening, where she’d always be fourteen and desperate, and stared into the water, wishing for a sign. Ian might have been right. Maybe a baby could fix the mess between them. Put it all right again. She’d throw out the pills tomorrow, give it the old college try, but first she’d see Wallace. She’d try to change his mind.
Tuesday’s session started like all the others lately. Wallace unable to fight back tears. They streamed from beneath his sunglasses down his alabaster cheeks and pooled in his beard, which he hadn’t shaved in months.
“They say it gets easier. Well, screw them. Whoever they are. Because it hurts just as bad today as the day we laid Richard in the ground.”
“It’s only been three months,” Ava told him. “Be patient with yourself.” Meanwhile, she was anything but. She’d needed to get him talking about BXA. To find out why he’d passed on Love Doctored. “Sometimes, it can be healthy to distract yourself. With a hobby. A pet. Work.”
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