The Clairvoyants(72)

29




I found I was waiting for William to return, as if he had just gone off on one of his jaunts with his camera, even though the camera, what was left of it and its spool of film, was tucked away on a closet shelf among his sweaters. Part of me longed for him to return to explain himself, to settle things, and part of me dreaded it. I tried to reconstruct the moments of his fall, but they were unclear, blurred and wavering. I wondered if I was having some sort of psychotic break, like Del as a teenager. Then I told myself that if I wondered if I was having a breakdown, I probably was not. I took off Mary Rae’s necklace and set it on the table by the bed, next to the travel alarm clock. I’d abandoned my husband, injured in whatever manner, in that place, and I was certainly a criminal. That he may have intended me harm was beside the point, wasn’t it? I had only Del to rely on for that information. Her insinuation that he’d put something in my wine certainly explained my grogginess that night and the following morning, but I had no proof. And though I’d suspected we’d had sex that night—was I simply half-asleep and unaware? Or had it been something else?

What might have happened if Del hadn’t gotten tired of waiting in the car? The possibilities were ominous. Had he planned to kill me if I hadn’t provided the location of the portfolio? And once she’d insisted on joining us, was his plan simply altered to killing me and leaving Del to take the blame? I felt his grip on my arms, the way he pulled me toward the staircase. And what about Mary Rae? Clearly, it was William she’d loved and couldn’t bear to be separated from. What had happened to her?

Del came to my door with food—a miniature chicken potpie, steaming in its foil pan, glasses of milk and cookies, as if I were a sick child. On the third day of William’s absence she brought me a TV dinner. She plopped down beside me on the bed and set it in my lap.

“You’ve lost your creativity.” I picked up the fork and jabbed at the chicken cutlet in its compartment. “How long are you going to keep bringing me food?”

Del fished a carrot off the tray. “How long are you going to hide?”

“I’m not sure what to do now.” I took a bite of the chicken.

“Anything you want,” she said.

“Well, he’s been missing for over forty-eight hours. Should I report it to the police?”

Del had an aversion to police officers, doctors, and anyone involved in the role of public welfare. In her eyes they’d all either forsaken her or lied to her; their occupations involved the kind of trickery we undertook as children, misrepresenting the dead. They claimed to help, but they did not.

“That’s what you want to do?” she said.

I had to admit when I considered reporting William missing I felt a terrible vertigo, as if I were peering down into the gorge. I waited for Del to talk me out of it, for her to convince me I shouldn’t call anyone. Then she took Mary Rae’s journal out from beneath her sweater.

“Here,” she said. “Put this wherever you have that portfolio he was looking for.”

I took the journal from her and set it on the end table beside the little travel clock. I was waiting for more of her plan. There was always a plan with Del; some scheme would follow.

“And?” I said. “What?”

“If anyone asks where good old Will is, you can say he took off. You two hadn’t been getting along, and he said he was leaving you.”

Del took a piece of the chicken and put it in her mouth, then spit it out into the palm of her hand. I handed her a tissue, and she wrapped the chicken in it.

“So, we never went to the asylum in Buffalo.”

She widened her eyes, innocently. “That’s right,” she said.

“We borrowed Geoff’s car and drove to Connecticut to see our mother,” I said.

There was no body to hide this time. Only an absence.

“He’s gone,” Del said. “You’re free.”

I wanted to ask her exactly what she’d seen at the bottom of the stairs, but I hadn’t wanted to force her to relive it. I knew I should have seen his body, cradled his head as he drew his last breaths, apologized for saying the things I’d said, for making him miserable, for being a hard person to make happy. After all, I had no real evidence he had killed Mary Rae, and now I had even less chance to discover it.

I watched Del carefully. “Are you sure he was gone?”

She put another carrot in her mouth, chewed, ate another. She dipped a finger in the mashed potatoes.

Outside I could hear someone chopping at the snow on the sidewalk with a shovel. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “It doesn’t feel real.”

I covered my head with the afghan. After a few minutes, Del rose from the bed.

“You just have to forget it ever happened,” she said.

Those words I’d told her once. They hadn’t really done any good then, and I wondered if they would help me now. Del left the apartment and stood on the other side of the closed door. “Lock the door,” she said, and I knew she wouldn’t leave until I did.

I would accept that William was gone, that our life together would never resume the way it had been. He wouldn’t walk into my little bedsit, take a shower, sit at the desk in the corner, lie down beside me on the bed. He would never touch me again—what I had come to see as the basis for whatever grief I carried, though I understood that our physical closeness had a terrible edge to it.