Little Girls(78)

“Don’t take it out on Susan if this is really about us,” he said.

“Ted—”

“And don’t think I haven’t noticed,” he said, gesturing toward her. “You haven’t been wearing your wedding ring. You haven’t bothered to contact a realtor about selling the house. . . .”

“We just got the name and number from Liz the other night.”

“Come on, Laurie. You didn’t need to wait for Liz’s friend’s business card. You could have called someone on your own, someone else. And when I brought up selling the house, you brushed me off, but you wouldn’t tell me why.”

“You think I’m planning to leave you and move in here?” she said. The idea wasn’t just absurd—it was frightening. The thought of staying here permanently, living in this house again.... It would be like being sucked into a vacuum and suffocating.

Ted dragged a chair away from the table but still didn’t sit in it. “I’m at a crossroads here, Laurie. I can’t figure you out. It’s like you’re . . . punishing me. . . .”

She said nothing.

“I don’t know if you want me to say it and put it out on the table, or if you rather I say nothing and you go on quietly torturing me.”

And then suddenly she knew. “Don’t say it,” she told him. Her voice trembled.

“I had an affair, Laurie.”

The No! she wanted to shout at him got caught halfway up her throat. She stood there with her mouth hanging open, no sound coming out.

“It was a stupid, selfish, careless thing. It’s been over for a long time now and I haven’t seen her since.”

It was as though she were listening to him from the other side of a padded sanitarium wall. His voice was distant and her ears were plugged with balls of cotton.

“You’ve always been closed off to me, Laurie. You’ve kept your secrets and I’ve kept mine. But those secrets are breaking us apart. I’m telling you about what I’ve done because I want the admission to save us.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“That’s the problem! A year and a half ago, you and I were living two separate lives. That’s no way to sustain a marriage and it’s certainly no way to raise a little girl.”

She couldn’t look at him. Her face burning, her eyes leaking, she looked at the floor.

“I can only do my half, Laurie. We’re a team. We’re partners.”

“Some team.”

“We both need to come clean, Laurie. Not just me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about secrets. I’ve told you mine. Now you need to tell me yours. If we’re going to survive it, we’ve got to be straight with each other. No more secrets, no more separate lives. We’re one, Laurie. We’ve got to come clean.”

“I’ve got no secrets. I’ve never had an affair. I’ve never cheated on you.”

“Then what is it? It’s something else.”

“It’s nothing!”

“Is it about your father? Or that girl? That . . . Sadie?”

“There’s nothing!”

He released a shaky exhalation. The chair legs scraped across the floor as he slid it back toward the table. “Then we’re both doomed,” he said. His footsteps were nearly silent as he left the room.

You f*cking creep, you f*cking coward, she thought . . . yet she was unsure whether she meant Ted or herself. . . .

At the counter beside the sink, she looked down on the corroded items that still soaked in the acid bath. In the pot, the water had turned a milky greenish-yellow. She strained the water into the sink, then placed the cleaned items on the paper towel beside the others. The decapitated doll head glared blindly at her from the countertop. Laurie’s hands shook. The metal backing of the brooch looked newer from the bath, but the cameo picture was gone forever; the blank white bulb on which it had been etched looked like a single eye, blind with cataract. The keys had come clean as well, though there were still remnants of calcification along the teeth and stuck in the grooves. Yet of all the items, it was the key with the number 58 engraved on it that held her attention.

When she returned to the parlor fifteen minutes later, the lights were off and the room was empty. She went down the hall and looked up the stairwell to the second-floor landing. The door to the master bedroom was shut, which meant Ted had gone to bed. Bully for him. She returned to the parlor to sleep on the sofa, but first she made sure all the doors were locked and all the windows were secure. She went upstairs and made sure the padlock was still on the belvedere door. If Abigail was getting in through the busted window, she at least wanted to make sure she couldn’t get into the rest of the house. She checked the lock on the side door, too. Teresa Larosche’s words ghosted up through the fog of her brain—something about locking up the passageways, that passageways let it in and out like a turnstile. He actually said that—like a turnstile.

Passageways. In her mind’s eye, she saw Sadie scaling the tree and crawling out on the limb to peer down into her father’s greenhouse. She saw her lose her balance and swing down off the limb, falling, falling.... The sound she made crashing through the glass roof of the greenhouse was like two automobiles colliding.