Infinite(21)

I had the cab let me off on Sheridan Road, and I walked the last hundred yards under the old-growth trees. I was white and wearing nice clothes, which probably protected me from someone calling the cops. The people in this neighborhood had itchy 911 fingers. When I got to the Chance house, the lights were off, which wasn’t surprising given the late hour. I didn’t want to talk to Susannah or Tom. Instead, I let myself into the fenced backyard and made my way through the gardens to Karly’s dollhouse.

You can call it a dollhouse, but at more than a thousand square feet, it was bigger than our Lincoln Square apartment. That tells you how far down in the world Karly came to live with me. When she turned twenty-two, she moved out of the main estate and into the dollhouse, which was all the independence that her mother would allow her. She was still living there when we met, so I’d spent a lot of time in this strange fairy-tale world. I’d had a key for years, and I knew the security code.

When I went inside, Karly may as well have been a ghost rattling chains at me, because her presence was so strong. Her school pictures were on the walls and her dance trophies and poetry books on the shelves. She hadn’t lived here in three years, but her mother still kept it like a shrine, decorated with furniture she’d picked out for Karly at age sixteen. Susannah probably hoped that her daughter would eventually come to her senses, dump me, and move back home where she belonged.

I sat down in a beat-up leather chair that overlooked the garden. The chair came from Karly’s father, and I think he gave it to Karly for the dollhouse rather than let his wife take it away to Goodwill. It was a man’s chair, ugly and incredibly comfortable, and it looked out of place amid pink wallpaper and sunflower quilts. I’d spent weeks in this chair after Roscoe was killed. With my arm and leg in casts, I was essentially immobile, and Karly did everything for me. We barely knew each other, but she was my caregiver. And soon after that, my lover.

The last time I’d been here was six months ago, in January. She’d called me from the office on a Tuesday morning and said she needed to get away, and could I meet her in the dollhouse? I said yes, but I got there late. I was always late. Work always came first. As I came in from outside, I brought cold wind and snow flurries with me. Karly had made a winter picnic for us, spreading out a blanket on the floor and opening wine and laying out a Mediterranean lunch of hummus, grape leaves, and pita.

She stood on the other side of the dollhouse, where a fire in the fireplace warmed her bare legs. The chill had pinked up her face. Her breasts swelled with each calm breath. She stared at me with a kind of forever seriousness, just the barest smile on her lips. I swear, she was like a painting that way, frozen in her beauty. A Manet. A Vermeer.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“Nothing. I love you, that’s all.”

“I love you, too.”

It was hard to imagine a more perfect moment, but looking back, I knew that very day was when things had begun to fall apart for us. I could draw a line from our lunch in the dollhouse to her foolish affair with Scotty Ryan to the last speech she’d given me that weekend in the country.

If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that Karly was unusually quiet. She was off somewhere in her own world, and she never took time off in the middle of the day unless something was wrong. I should have looked behind her peaceful smile, but instead, I was blind. I poured wine, and we sat across from each other on the blanket, with the fire crackling beside us.

“Susannah talked to me,” Karly said, when we’d enjoyed our lunch quietly for a few minutes. She said it casually. No big deal.

“Oh?”

“She’s giving me the Vernon Hotel account.”

I put down my wine and realized this was a celebration. Except it didn’t feel like a celebration. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s like the biggest account in the firm.”

“Yeah. It is. She says I’m ready.”

“Well, of course you are.”

“Thank you.”

“This is huge,” I said, trying to fill this moment with excitement, because the excitement in her face was strangely missing.

“Yeah. Pretty huge. It’s way more money. That’s good, huh? But a lot more time. Long hours.”

“So neither one of us will ever be home,” I joked, but Karly didn’t laugh.

“Susannah thinks we should move. We should be up here in Highland Park or something. She says we need a place where we can entertain.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

The same flat monotone all the way through. So unlike her. So not Karly. Why didn’t I see it?

“Well, congratulations,” I said, leaning over to kiss her. “You’re a star. I mean it.”

Karly smiled at me, but her smile was hollow, like one of her dolls on the shelves. Then, just like that, she changed the subject.

“I bumped into a friend at Starbucks this morning,” she went on. “A girl I knew in college. Sarah. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned her.”

“I don’t think so.”

“She’s got four kids now. They were all with her. Her youngest is almost two. A Down syndrome girl. So, so sweet. While Sarah was chasing the others, her little girl sat in my lap. I fell in love.”