Little Deaths(96)

And now she smiles back because she knows she doesn’t look good, even for thirty-two. She looks thin and tired and worn down. When she lets herself glance in a mirror, she can see the gray hairs, the lines around her eyes. She looks like someone who hasn’t been able to take a long bath or choose her own bedtime for almost four years.

“You too.”

And she sees that he does look good. He’s lost the paunch he had during the trial. His skin is bright and flushed: she can almost smell the fresh air on him.

“Been a long time, huh?”

More than three years since he stopped visiting. Not such a long time on the outside but in here, where each sleepless night lasts thirteen hours and there isn’t a whole lot to make the afternoons go by faster, three years feels like a lifetime.

She doesn’t answer him because he’ll never understand what time means to her. She just shrugs and lets him make of that what he will.

“Think the hearing’ll go well?”

She wonders if he only answered her letter, if he only came today, because he wants to know where she’s headed if she gets out. He wants to know she’s not going to come asking for anything.

He needn’t worry.

She lifts her head and forces a smile.

“My attorney says there’s a very good chance I’ll get parole. God bless prison overcrowding, huh?”

He nods but she sees from the shadow that crosses his face that he doesn’t understand her last remark.

She lights a cigarette and thinks how odd it is; not just the fact of him in here, but this conversation. The mention of prison and parole between them as though those words have nothing to do with their children. The ordinary tone of this strange exchange.

But even as she thinks this, she can feel the fear building. She knows she needs to say it. She needs to tell him why she asked him to come today. She needs to put a question to him and she needs to hear his answer, and then she can close the door.

In the end, it’s simple. She looks him in the eye and takes a breath and pushes the words out fast before she can stop them.

“It was you. All the time, it was you.”

And he looks right back at her and nods, as though he’s been expecting this. He brings his head close to hers so the guard can’t hear and talks in a sigh, as though he’s been waiting a long time to let it out.


He’s lying on an old couch in the storage room below her apartment, a warm bottle of beer in one hand. His shoes sit neatly on the floor beside him, his head rests on a pile of old magazines.

Sometimes he flicks through one to make the time pass, but it’s too hot tonight to read the same stories again, so his eyes are fixed on the ceiling. He’s found that if he lets them roam along the damp stains, looking for patterns, the hours go by faster.

He shifts a little, peels his shirt away from his wet skin, wipes his forehead, taps out a beat on the bottle. Other than that: silence. It’s been silent for—he looks at his watch—an hour and twenty-seven minutes.

He drains his beer and sets the empty bottle on the floor by his shoes. Looks back up at the ceiling, and links his hands behind his head. Stretches his legs as far down the couch as he can and inhales: laundry detergent and Marlboros and dust, and underneath it all, the smell of damp that never really goes away, even when it’s as humid as all hell outside.

Chrissakes. This fucking damp will mess up his lungs and make him sick—and whose fault is that? He’s not down here night after night for himself. He’s here because of that bitch upstairs.

That whore up there, fucking other men, giving them what’s his. His fucking wife.

He’s not allowed to touch. He’s never allowed to touch anymore. Everyone and the fucking garbage man is allowed to touch her—and not just touch her, but touch her there, make her groan and cry out with her sticky red mouth, loud enough so you can hear her even down in the basement.

She must know he’s down here. She knows what it does to him, imagining her with other men. That’s why she turns it up, moans so loud. All these years she’s been a wife, a mother, and now she’s reminding him that she’s still a whore. She’s waking up that part of him, the part of him that responds to her like this.

She needs to be reminded who she belongs to. She needs to be reminded what she’s done to him. And she needs to be hit where it will hurt her most.

Jesus.

Look what she’s making him do.

Look at the things he has to do for love.


“When I thought you were asleep, I walked to the nearest phone booth and I called you. I knew if you heard it ring, you’d answer, that you’d think it was one of your johns. Gallagher. That cop—Salcito. No answer would mean you were sleeping too deep to hear it. I thought then that maybe I’d be able to go through the front door. Into my house. Into my kids’ room. Like a regular father.”

His breathing quickens, and there is a thickness in his voice.

She’s always thought of him as stupid. Just stupid slow Frank.

“So yeah, I called and when you answered, I picked a fight to get you to hang up. Then I crept back in and I heard you moving around, heard the dog whine and the door slam, and I knew that I could go in.”

He clears his throat. “I just walked into the apartment. Easy as anything.”

She’d thought she was ready to hear this. How could she have thought she’d be able to bear it?