Wilde Lake(36)

“Teensy,” I croaked from my bed. “Could I have some graham crackers?”

“No, but you can have some saltines and flat Coca-Cola.” Teensy believed those two things to be medicinal.

I sat up in bed, licking the salt from the Premium saltines. I had seen two people having sex. It was big news, enormous news, but I had no one to tell. Teensy would want to know about the party, and I owed it to AJ not to reveal that. A pound of M&Ms buys a steadfast silence. It didn’t occur to me that the others—AJ, Noel, Ariel, Davey—had not seen what I saw, might not know what I know. I had no real friends at school, not the kind that I could share such secrets with. Strangely, the person I wanted to tell was my father. I wondered if he knew that people did it when they weren’t trying to have a baby because I’m pretty sure he had told me that was the only reason to have sex. But maybe Lynne and Bash wanted to have a baby. Then again, they couldn’t drive yet and I absolutely knew you had to have a driver’s license before you had a baby. My dad had sex twice, I thought, once for AJ and once for me. I bet he was glad he didn’t have to have it anymore. It looked messy and painful.

I was a spy. I was every spy that ever was. I was Velma on Scooby-Doo. I was Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Trixie Belden, the Hardy Boys. I was Harriet the Spy, although I had not met her yet, but I would, soon enough. They were waiting for me, another member of their clan of spies, snoops, and truth tellers. I opened drawers, searched medicine cabinets and pigeonholes, pressed my ear to walls, looked through keyholes. I thought I knew everything. I thought I was entitled to know everything, that the world was conspiring to keep me in the dark.





JANUARY 13


“Do you like this? Do you?”

Lu tries to make clear exactly how she feels about the fingers digging into her scalp, pulling her hair, but the sensation keeps changing, the pain keeps moving. She is on her stomach and the natural instinct should be to crawl away, futile as that might be, but strong hands grab her waist and flip her, so now she is facing him as he enters her and she gasps—she’s lying on a sisal rug, rough on bare flesh under any circumstances.

Then she sees Bash’s face and she starts to laugh. After all these years, she can’t quite get over the fact that he looks like Huckleberry Finn, with his freckles and chipped tooth and never-quite-combed hair.

“When you laugh like that, it’s hard to keep going,” Bash says, and he pushes harder.

“Oh—no—it’s”—she needs a breath or two for each syllable—“it’s—per—fect. Don’t. Stop.”

“I never do.”

He doesn’t. Bash at fifty-three is as priapic as a teenager, always ready, inexhaustible. Well, always ready for Lu, whom he sees once or twice a month in this sterile “corporate” apartment in Bethesda. She’s not sure he’s always ready for his wife of seven years, a hard number who lives in Capitol Hill in what Lu assumes is a drop-dead gorgeous town house. She has never been invited there. AJ, who has, dismissed it as “showy,” which told her nothing. But is it in good taste? she had yearned to ask her brother. Or just a little tacky? She knows the wife is drop-dead gorgeous and not the least bit tacky. Bash brought her to Gabe’s funeral, although his flirtation with Lu had begun a few months earlier. It was probably only the timing of Gabe’s death that kept Lu from becoming an adulteress; she was well on her way to sleeping with Bash when Gabe died. One might think that a husband’s sudden death would shake a woman up, force her to wonder if the universe was sending her a message about the affair she was considering in her head.

One would be wrong. Lu tried to resist Bash, but he had picked up a scent on Lu and pursued her relentlessly. He knew before she did that she was a woman who would revel in a truly secret affair, one that was all about sex, sex that pushed past some boundaries. Lu had been a late bloomer—a virgin until college, married in her twenties to her third-ever real boyfriend. In blue jeans and T-shirt, hair under a baseball cap, she could still pass for a boy from the back. Which explained why she didn’t wear such things. It had been a bizarre kind of relief when the flirtation—e-mails, phone calls, odd little gifts left anonymously at her office—finally ended and they settled into a straight sex thing. The flirtation had been the real betrayal of Gabe. The sex—that’s merely the betrayal of Lucinda, Bash’s wife. But that’s not Lu’s problem. Is it?

Spent, she makes her way to the bathroom on wobbly legs. She has a large bruise on her buttocks, but who will see it there? She doesn’t wash, not yet. He will probably want to go again, given how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, how hard it is to find time since the election. She has let her secretary infer that she’s in therapy in D.C., which would require about three hours with travel time. She has confided something similar to Andi, although indicating she was seeing someone for ob-gyn issues of a vague-but-serious nature. Andi obligingly spread the gossip through the office, then blamed it on Della, who would never betray Lu that way. Thank God she never told Andi the real story, back when they were deputies together. Even then, before Lu had decided to own her real ambition, she understood that this must be a locked room inside her life, a place to which no one can ever be admitted. It scared her at first, the things she wanted to do with Bash, the things she let him do to her. But it thrills her more.