She walked to her bookshelf and her eyes roamed the titles, mostly psychology texts, filled notebooks, the white leather-bound Bible Miles had given her as a wedding gift. A few spines away was a battered volume of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, the spine cracked so many times that deep grooves now obscured the title. This was a book she had once found on the shelf in her childhood home. In it was an inscription written for her mother from someone who was not her father. Dear June, there is more than one way to see the world. Enjoy these poems. Love, your friend Eli.
When Grace had asked her about it, June had blushed and said, “Oh, he was a boy I knew in high school. He was—” but her father walked into the room just then. “What about Eli?” he had barked. Her father had been a lieutenant general in the Vietnam War. Garrett was born two years before their father even met him; it was in the local newspaper, a black-and-white photograph of her father’s expressionless face, saluting the flag while his wife stood before him, holding up their child for him to see, or even just notice.
Her father flipped quickly through the pages of the book and, as was his custom when he didn’t understand something, assumed it to be immoral. He called it lewd and threw it in the trash. Later, she had heard him calling her mother’s friend Eli, whoever he was, a faggot.
Grace was only eight at the time. She had read some of the poems earlier that afternoon and not understood what was lewd about them. Later, she took the book out of the trash. She read more of it, read words she had been taught were evil and dirty, words like sex and crotch. There were other words, too, that made her laugh, words like belch. She showed her brother, Garrett, and he laughed, too, but told her to hide it or put it back in the garbage or her father would whip her with the belt. She didn’t throw it out. She kept it hidden for years, pored over it in secret until she was able to understand what her father had found so lewd. It spoke to what she understood to be lewd inside herself. It didn’t make her feel any less tainted, but it made her feel less alone.
She took it with her when she left home, the only thing aside from a few changes of clothes that she had packed into a bag. Her parents had been glad to see her go. Relieved, muttering grateful prayers as they signed papers to release their daughter from their home. Only a moment of doubt, and Grace had seen it. “A minister’s wife,” her mother had begun, and she had been about to say one other thing when Grace’s father had walked into the room.
“What’s that?” Miles had asked her once, about the book of poems. This was later, after he had left ministry and they were studying to become therapists because, Miles had said, they would be able to help more people—and make more money while doing it. “Money we can use to change the world,” he had said, though that part of it had never been clear. Really, they had only ever used the money they made to change their own worlds. Really, they had only used it to turn a patch of jungle and oceanfront into a place that Miles had dominion over. “It reminds me of my brother,” Grace had said, thinking it might be okay to talk about Garrett now. But Miles had frowned and turned away. That was it for the topic of the book. Garrett or no, Miles didn’t concern himself with poetry, not even the Songs of Solomon. He preferred the fire of Exodus, the rule of Deuteronomy. And, lately it seemed, the gospel of Miles.
She had no photographs of her brother, but when she looked at this book, she thought of him, his easy smile and then his urgent whisper: Hide it, Gracie. You don’t want Daddy to whip you. Hey, want to go swamp fishing? This book had become the golden afternoons with her brother that had begun to grow fewer and further between, it had become the moments when he had discovered girls and she had started to fall into trouble, internal trouble, nothing she had acted on, but still, it had landed her in that church basement, her hair held back by a stranger as she vomited her life into a bucket. And she had never mentioned that book of poems. It was one of the greatest regrets of her life. Because what if she had said it was the book that had corrupted her and not allowed them to believe it was Garrett? They would have destroyed the book. Not her brother. If only she’d thought of it.
She ran a finger over the worn cover of the book. Miles turned to the Bible for insight and inspiration, found lines like “To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’” to gild and justify what he believed. She flipped to a page in her book now, lay a finger down at the start of a Whitman verse: “I am not to speak to you,” she read. “I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone. I am to wait. I do not doubt I am to meet you again. I am to see that I do not lose you.”
She left the office and crept next door, into her bedroom, carrying the book with her. She changed out of her dress into a peignoir and bed jacket, then walked to her en suite, book still in hand. She slid it into her cosmetics drawer, closed it, and began to unpin her hair. She listened, but still heard nothing. It had never bothered her, when she had heard Miles and Ruth together, when she had passed the door to his suite of rooms and heard laughter, even moans. She realized now there was comfort in it for her. She was free on those nights, safe. On those nights, she didn’t have to think about how repulsed she was by her own husband’s touch. But it was sick, wasn’t it, to find comfort in the sounds of your husband taking pleasure from and giving pleasure to another woman? To allow it to happen under your own roof? It was abominable, wasn’t it, to pretend to be the ideal couple when really, you lived separately, under the same roof, when really, the moment you saw how besotted your intern was, you had encouraged your husband to solve the fact that the feeling was clearly mutual by taking a second “wife” because you were too afraid to stand up and be who you really were?
Miles. Behind her. Standing reflected in the mirror, and she hadn’t even noticed him come in. A sharp intake of breath, but she tried not to show her fear. “The behavior I witnessed tonight,” he said, and she glanced at his hand and saw the intricate pressed-glass tumbler, a wedding gift. It was almost empty of its clear liquid. Not water. Vodka. He would have taken one of Shell Williams’s bottles. He did that sometimes, if Ruth didn’t hide it first after the contraband-gathering missions. He saw her looking and his eyes narrowed. “You made me do this,” he said. He had been saying that to her for years, whenever he faltered. Sometimes it was drink. Sometimes it was pills. Sometimes it was women. Or a combination of all three. All things that could be found if you combed through the resort in secret. A kingdom of riches, a mine of temptation. “You upset me so much you made me do this. And her. That woman. She did, too. I can’t stand women like her.”
He was slurring. The vodka smelled like surgery. Grace didn’t reply, just kept unpinning her hair and trying to stay calm. He had always called her hair her crowning glory. She wondered, suddenly, what it would be like to take the kitchen shears to it while he watched her in the mirror, wondered what he would do. Wondered what it would be like to stand up to him, instead of trying to fly under his radar, instead of suffering through nights like this every few months. There was a change in him tonight, an intensity she had seen building, along with a restlessness she should probably have been fearing instead of trying to ignore. You should have left yesterday. She said this to herself every time he got like this—every time it was far too late.
She finished with her hair and ran cool water over a cloth, lined up her creams. But then she put the cloth down instead of raising it to her face. She looked at herself in the mirror, at her husband behind her, at the pure, distilled hatred in his half-closed eyes. Everything she had—her marriage, her work, her self—was a lie, and she could see it all at once in the crystal clarity of the fear that hung in the room. You could ignore the truth, but it would come for you eventually.
“Please explain to me what happened between you and Ruth,” Grace said, and as she spoke she remembered Ruth’s arrival as an intern, three years before. She had been so starry-eyed. I can’t believe I’m
actually meeting you two, she had said, over and over. And meanwhile, Grace had felt she and Miles were at the edge of ruin. A maid had come to Grace with a story about Miles’s advances getting out of hand. Grace could still practically feel the sting of her stony glare directed at the young woman. Who had she become, in that moment? It was a familiar person. It was a person she had met many times at the church she and Miles had attended. A woman willing to fall on her sword in the name of her beliefs—or, a woman willing to use her sword to hurt anyone standing in her way. “No one will believe you,” Grace had said to the maid. Such simple words, such awful truth. “What, the world will ask, would a man like Miles Markell, who has money, success and one of the most renowned marriages in the world, want with a maid? If Miles says he didn’t do it, people will believe him.” Oh, Grace. Her eyes were filling with sorry, regretful tears. She had given the young woman money to be quiet, but it was really money to make Grace feel better and it hadn’t worked. It had been money from her own personal stash, a portion of her inheritance from her mother she had managed to hide away from Miles and had never imagined using in this way. It haunted her, still, what she had said to that maid. And she feared her, saw her in her nightmares. She could still come forward, and when she did, it would be with her finger pointed directly at Grace, she knew it. I am not innocent. I am the person who stands by and allows him to do this to people. And, I am broken. I am so, so broken.
The next year a client came forward and this time Grace and Miles worked together to secure her silence. It was expensive. And, Grace believed now, it had cost her a portion of her soul. The recession hit and she wondered if there would be enough money to pay the next woman who came forward. She imagined what the world would think of her, when the truth about her, about their marriage, came to light. She knew the things Miles would say about her to save himself, the secrets he would reveal. She saw her secret shame hung out to dry, heard the taunts and the curses. And people would see, wouldn’t they, that she was the liar? People would see that she had never been a wife to Miles, and because of that she had ruined him. Not everything Miles said was true but this was: she was broken and he had tried his best to fix her, once. She had been working her entire life to do this one thing he had told her: to avoid turning her brokenness into sin.
Most of the time, it felt like that was the sin.
It was when Grace had been standing at the precipice of her deepest fears and shame, afraid of who she was becoming, that she offered Ruth to Miles.
Grace looked at Miles now, met his hateful eyes in the mirror and remembered the calm that had existed there, for a while at least. “She’s perfect,” Miles had said to Grace, back then. “She’s the one. The one who will bear my children.” And Grace hadn’t felt jealousy, only a flood of relief. It had not lasted. All of the women who had come into Miles’s path were distracted by his fame. She knew now that Ruth was just the next in a long list of women who had been, as she had, seduced into serving him. All of them blurred together. What was clear was that Grace had been willfully ignorant. She had been throwing women into Miles’s path for years. She was just as bad as he was.
It had to stop.
“Miles. Ruth loves you. She’s heartbroken. You need to do something.”
“Ruth isn’t worthy of my love.” He said it slowly, as if explaining something to a child. “She lost one of my sons, and so did you. Neither of you are worthy. I need to find someone who is.”
His words crackled between them. “Not Shell Williams,” she said. She met his eyes in the mirror and lifted her chin. But it was there: the tremble. He saw it, heard it. He put the glass down on the counter. She lifted the cloth, tried to pretend nothing was happening, that they were just a couple having a conversation about their shared work. “She seems fragile. I don’t think you have a clear handle on what she really needs yet, and you should—”
“Don’t tell me what to do! Don’t try to mother me, damn it!”
There it was. There it always would be. How simple it was to trace back into childhood and find the moments, the environment, that had created the adult. His mother was a woman abandoned by her husband, turning to a church with rotten foundations for comfort and strength, and then—people speaking in tongues in their parlor and writhing on their living room floor, Miles soaking all of it up like a sponge. Acts done to Miles in the name of the Holy Spirit that should never have been done and which he spoke of like a robot, devoid of all emotion. He ran away from home, he told her after they met, and he didn’t talk about what had happened to him during the years he was lost—but she came to understand the addictions he had cultivated and the hatred he had nursed. Hatred of the mother who had hurt him that had blossomed, dropped seeds. All he said about his past was that he had eventually been found, saved, put on a path that landed him at the doorstep of her family’s church, a reformed young man ready to save other lost souls.
“Miles was once broken, too,” they said to Grace. “He sinned in other ways, but still, he sinned. And then he was found. And then he was saved. Let him save you, Grace. Let him in.”
Miles moved in on her. He picked up a strand of her hair, lifted it to his nose, dropped it. She tried not to tremble anymore. “I know better than you. You fumble through your days and it’s sheer luck when you actually get it right, isn’t it? How often are you coming to me for advice? You would be nothing without me!” His words were angry but his touch was gentle, first on her waist and then, drifting up to her breasts. She eyed the wastebasket in the corner but prayed she wouldn’t be sick because it always made it worse for her when she was. “That woman,” Miles said, his voice now soft. “The red-haired one. Johanna. The way she took her husband by the hand like that. She might as well have screamed, ‘Hey, everyone, we’re going to go fuck.’”
Grace tried to pretend he wasn’t touching her the way he was. “We’re encouraging intimacy. That’s the point of the game, isn’t it?”
A grin, a smile on a wolf. Once, she and Garrett had seen a wolf in the swamp. Garrett had thrown rocks at it until it slunk away. Grace wished her brother were still alive. “The way you were looking at her, too. Did you know you appeared so hungry? Did you feel it, Grace?” He squeezed her breast hard and she tried not to wince or even move or even think about what he was saying. “Did you want to fuck her, too, my darling, my love?” Then he had her by the wrist, so fast it took her breath away and she stood, gasping, as he twisted her arm behind her neck and the cloth fell to the floor. “Answer me!”
“Let go.”
“Wives obey your husbands,” he hissed in her ear. She closed her eyes. It hurt so much. “You will always be broken. Maybe I should break you for real.”
She heard a scream. She realized it was her own. He let go. He wasn’t the type to break bones, only the type to threaten it. He stepped back from her and reached into his pocket. A white tablet. He pressed it into her other hand. “Take your fucking pill,” he snarled, and he waited. She put it in her mouth and tried to parcel it into her cheek. “Swallow,” he commanded. She did what he said. He left the room, left her staring at herself in the mirror, a metallic taste in her mouth and a deadness already setting in as she rubbed her wrist.
She needed ice but she couldn’t risk leaving the room. She saw his glass on the counter and knocked back the last sip. The vodka burned down her throat and set her chest on fire, but did nothing for the cacophony of pain in her wrist. With her other hand, she locked the bathroom door, then opened her drawer. The book of poems was still there, a silent witness to all this. Her finger found the right page. I am to see that I do not lose you, she read.
She slid to the floor, a woman with nothing left to lose.
She slept in the tub.
Day Five
Her: He was my everything. As much as I came to hate him, he still had such power. Such charisma. I regret what I did. My heart was broken, but it’s no excuse. It’s just—those final weeks
were hard. Those people, all of them—it’s like they were slowly killing him. And he was trying so hard to play God. We’d done it before but it didn’t feel right, not that time. I should have known. I wanted to try to save him. He refused to believe he needed to be saved. If only he had really listened to me. If only he had really wanted what I wanted.
Him: You’re dwelling on the past.
Her: It’s all I have.
Someone had left one of her sleeping pills on her bedside table. Shell recognized the smooth beige circle immediately. And instead of questioning where it had come from, Shell almost cried with relief when she saw it. She took it and she slept for almost twelve hours and still barely had the energy to get out of bed, to order a breakfast she couldn’t eat because of nausea and trembling hands and a mouth so dry nothing could slake her thirst. She drank glass after glass of water that wasn’t cold enough, and scalding black coffee that cooled in her cup too quickly. She showered and dressed, then took the stairs to Ruth’s office because she didn’t know what else to do with herself except sit in the villa and wish for things she didn’t have anymore. The ones she didn’t have anymore. Her next session with Miles couldn’t come soon enough.
At the door at the top of the stairs, she forgot to knock, just walked in. Ruth jumped and minimized what she’d been reading on her computer screen. “You scared me,” Ruth said.
“I’m sorry. I’m here to—”
“Yes, I know why you’re here!”
“Sorry,” Shell found herself mumbling.
“I’ll leave you alone today,” Ruth said. “I just need to gather my things.”
Shell looked out the window while she waited. It was a gray morning, still hot, but there was a strong breeze off the ocean. A man far down below on the cobblestone path walked in a familiar way, hands in pockets, head bent. Colin. She found herself stepping toward the window, lifting her hand to touch the glass. Where was he going? He was walking fast. She realized his speed and sloped posture were because it had started to rain. He disappeared down a path. She willed him to appear again and give her a clue about where he was heading, but he didn’t. Colin is not your concern, Miles had said to her the day before. It seemed strange, the idea of there ever being a time when Colin wasn’t her concern, the idea of that time being now. She missed him. It was sudden and acute. She missed the way they had been before.
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