Dream Girl(69)

He glances at his almost empty datebook. It has long been Gerry’s practice to jot down a few details about the day’s work—words written, ideas he should pursue in revision—but there has been nothing to jot down for weeks, months. Only Leenie’s work is moving forward. Maybe he could keep a record of her progress, note what he has accomplished as her teacher and editor.

April 30 has been circled in bright red, but there is no text to indicate why. A day so momentous that it required no entry, yet he has zero memory of what was supposed to happen then. It’s not a birthday or anniversary of note. And then he remembers—it’s the day he’s supposed to start preparing to walk again, transitioning first to a wheelchair and then to a walker. Within weeks, the walker next to his bed will finally be used as it was meant to be used, not as a combination of lance and shield. Did he really push Margot? Did he really kill her? He is in his seventh decade and he has never put his hands on a woman in anything but love and passion. Well, what happened with Margot was a kind of a passion, he supposes.

Leenie comes in with his lunch, a tuna salad sandwich on toast and some carrots. The food she prepares has improved and he now realizes that those terrible dinners she forced on him were part of his punishment, his gaslighting.

“It’s going to be strange,” he says, feeling that he’s being expansive, “when you’re not here any longer.”

“Where am I going?” she asks.

Not my concern, he thinks. “I just glanced at my calendar—I’m going to be learning how to use a wheelchair in a week. That’s why I do the exercises with the pulleys, so I’ll have the upper-body strength to get myself in and out of the chair.”

“There’s still a lot you won’t be able to do.”

“Of course, but eventually—I will be ready to be on my own. I think I’m going to sell this place and move back to New York.”

Leenie sits in the dining room chair that now is always at his bedside, ready for their “classes” together. “No,” she says.

“No?”

“I don’t have anywhere to go. Even with continuing payments from you—”

Wait, there are going to be continuing payments? He misses a few words in his panic over the idea of what he now realizes is this inevitable and infinite blackmail.

“—and I don’t want to live in New York anyway. We’ll never have this much space.”

We? WE?

“Leenie, how do you envision this ending?”

“Happily ever after.” She laughs at the expression on his face. “Just kidding. But, we are in this together. Remember how you had us read The Getaway at Goucher, then screened the film for us? We’re Doc and Carol, in a sense. But we can choose whether we’re the ones in the book, who are miserable together, or the ones in the film, who are sincerely on each other’s sides.”

There is too much to absorb in what Leenie has just said. All Gerry can do is focus on the least important aspect, that this thickbodied, plain woman has just cast herself as early 1970s Ali MacGraw. True, that makes him Steve McQueen, but—no, he is not Doc. He does not rob banks. He has killed no one.

Finally, in that moment, he realizes this to be true. He did not kill Margot. This woman did and left the body for him to discover, hoping he would blame himself.

“If we’re Doc and Carol,” he says, “the ones in the film, not the ones in the book, then we have to trust each other. That’s the key difference, right? In the book, they can never trust each other, but in the film, they have each other’s backs. I don’t want to live out my days thinking you’re going to betray me, and I assume you feel the same. Cards on the table, Leenie. What really happened to Margot?”

She thinks about this, her eyes darting around the room.

“No thinking. No stories. Talk to me.”

Her words come out fast, with the whoosh of a child who has been dying to confess. “Margot returned that night, just after midnight. You’re right, she took the security pass. She had been drinking, I’m pretty sure of that. I’m not sure why she came back. Maybe she planned to stay here. Or maybe she was going to confront you about what she knew. Whatever it was she knew. She let herself in and—” Her voice falters.

“And?”

“She found us in bed together.”

The sentence makes no sense. Gerry has not had sex since last fall; he is keenly aware of that fact. A stupid regression with Margot when he went back to New York, but she took him unawares on a bench in a shadowy corner of Riverside Park. Obviously, Gerry couldn’t have been in bed with anyone and if he could, it wouldn’t have been Leenie. What is she babbling about?

“The pill I sometimes give you, the one I said was a calcium supplement? It’s my own scrip for Lunesta. Combined with Ambien and your pain meds, it made you sleep really soundly. I once banged a pot right in front of your face to test it. Anyway, on those nights, sometimes, I would get in bed with you. I couldn’t really spoon or hold you, and I was respectful of your body, but I would lie next to you, my head on your shoulder. Just for a little while. I didn’t see the harm.”

“And you killed Margot because she saw that?”

“She was yelling and trying to take photos of us. I grabbed her phone to delete it. She was scary, she wasn’t going to stop. She was saying you were a pervert, that she already had evidence of how awful you were, but this was just more proof and she was going to tell the world what she knew about you and she slapped me, hard. I really did see little black shapes circling my head. Not stars, I wouldn’t call them stars—”