As Good as Dead (16 page)

I hardly could think at all, let alone answer, while she rushed on, still looking out to the patio: “You’ve had a writing career, but when we all were at the Workshop, Jeremy was the star! You remember! Everyone thought he’d be big! He already had editors interested in his novel when he arrived! Then we left Iowa and—
poof!
It was strange.” She nodded. “Very strange. He started to suspect that someone at the Workshop had screwed him over.” Her head shook, little shivery shakes. She turned one eye my way. “He suspected it was you, Charlotte. Because of what happened between the two of you. Was it? You?”

“
Esmé
.” I looked out toward the patio then, too. Will and Jeremy Fletcher, sitting in the dusk, still as totems. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry, but, believe me, I never did
anything
against Jeremy.”

She opened her hands in front of herself, waist height, as if they held evidence. “He applied for one of the Michener Fellowships the year that you were a screener, and he didn’t get one.”

“I never saw an application from him, Esmé. I’d definitely remember if I had, and”—I hated the tremor in my voice; it made me sound as if I were guilty—“I’m pretty sure the rules were that he would have to have finished his degree to get a Michener”—

She shook her head. “Let’s cut to the chase.” Her eyes were luminous, large, on the edges of tears, but what I heard in her voice was fury, and when she said, “You care about Will’s happiness, don’t you, Charlotte?” Panic made small black specks—twisting and rising and falling like gnats—rise in front of my eyes, and I had to set my hand on the nearest countertop to steady myself.

Esmé tore a square of paper towel from the roller under the counter and folded it in half and then quarters and held the neat, folded edge to her lower lashes. “A couple of months ago,” she said, “I saw an announcement that you were going to be the judge for a new book prize just for Arizona writers. The Poulos Prize. Jer doesn’t know it yet, but I entered him.” She nodded, kept on nodding. “Ten days ago, a letter came saying he’s a finalist.” She tilted her head back and sniffed and blotted at her lashes with a clean edge of the folded paper towel. “The prize money would be nice, of course—who couldn’t use ten thousand dollars?—but the important thing is for Jer to be published and get the attention he should have gotten in the past.” She slipped the folded paper towel into a pocket in her caftan. “I know you’ll want to make that happen, Charlotte, you and Jer being such old
friends
.”

My fool’s face, mouth open wide, stared back at me from the glossy black door of the kitchen’s microwave oven. Esmé in her turban and emerald-green caftan entered that reflection. She drew close enough that I could hear her swallow before she said into my good ear, “It goes without saying, of course, that no one—not even Will—has to know about this conversation.” She paused. “Or anything else.”

PART TWO

Chapter 12

Over the years, Will and I had learned to keep quiet for a while after a particularly horrible gallery opening or play or whatever so that if one of us—or anyone who might be with us—had enjoyed the event, or found a way to put a positive spin on it, that person had a chance to speak first. After our dinner with Esmé and Jeremy Fletcher, though, as soon as we got into the car, I wanted to say,
Well, that was awful!
I wanted to act as if we still inhabited a normal world.
Well, that was awful!
Impossible for me to say.
Well, that was awful!
I feared that what would come out of my mouth would be the juddering panic I felt, nonsense erupting like machine-gun fire.

In silhouette, Will’s stiff-set jaw looked like something made of bolts as he steered the car out of that supersize neighborhood. My heart was slamming the wall of my chest so hard that it was difficult to imagine that he did not notice—not that I thought he actually would
hear
my heart, but didn’t he notice the way I shuddered in my bucket seat?

There, once more, the big Walgreens. The flowing script on the side of the building now lit up, neon red.

Once more, we waited for the long light at the intersection where the giant Wells Fargo sign—now burning gold from within—turned and turned.

While Esmé and Jeremy Fletcher and Will had sat on the patio, eating spumoni, drinking decaf coffee, I had vomited in the gold-leafed powder room off the Fletchers’ front hall. Now, I felt I might have to ask Will to pull over so I could be sick again. I pressed my hot cheek to the air-conditioned cool glass of the passenger-side window.

You and Jer being such old friends.

Esmé had assumed that she still could count on my being a cheat and a coward. While I stood in her custom kitchen, floundering in terrified apologies and refusals,
I’m so sorry, so sorry, my god, I was an idiot, but you have to understand, I couldn’t do that,
she simply walked toward the French doors.

She did stop walking when I cried out—bleated, really—“Please! Esmé! Even if I were willing, the entries are all anonymous. Even I won’t know who the finalists were until after I pick the winner.”

She looked out toward the patio. “You’ll recognize Jer’s manuscript when you see it. It’s
The Holy of Holies,
the novel he used to get into the Workshop. You thought that was a pretentious title, didn’t you?” Her laugh was shallow. “I suppose you still hold your tastes sacrosanct, but
three
of your peers picked the book from what the letter said were one hundred and thirty-three entries.” She turned to me. She smiled. The Esmé smile that once had made me feel so special. “I’m not going to accept a no from you yet,” she said. “I’m going to give you time to think. You’re a writer! Use your imagination! You have the power to make this a story with a happy ending for all of us—or not.”

The stoplight changed. Will shifted his foot from the clutch to the gas, accelerated. I wanted to cry out an immediate confession, but the lies I’d told—I’d stitched them so heavily into the fabric of our life as a couple. To get at them would require tearing, and, undoubtedly—
this
I never had seen before—the thing that would make Will more furious than anything else would be learning that I had lived alongside of him, all those years, knowing things about our life that he did not know and, worse, that Jeremy and Esmé Fletcher did.

Not a word from either one of us, all the way home, but after he unlocked the kitchen door and we stepped inside—not bothering to turn on a light—he took my hand and led me through the dark house to our room. I was surprised. When he was upset about something, he rarely wanted to make love, but after he pulled off his T-shirt and polo shirt—one movement, up and over his head—even in the moonlight, I could see the need on his face.

He always was a considerate sex partner, Will, taking as much time as I required. On those occasions when it did seem to me that I was not going to succeed at having an orgasm, he invariably said, “Well, let’s wait and see,” and it was rare that things didn’t work out. On this particular night, though, he didn’t bother much with me, and I was glad. I couldn’t have stood his making an effort on my behalf.

His orgasm was heartfelt, but not joyful, and he got out of bed soon afterward and pulled on a pair of boxers and one of the gray hoodies that he liked to wear to sleep. “I’m exhausted,” he said and lay down again and pulled up the covers, rolled onto his side, away from me.

I wondered:
If I died, then would he forgive me?

I wanted to stay in bed, close to him, but I knew that I was a long way from sleep. Also, I was afraid that he might, at any moment, suddenly roll over and demand, “So what was tonight all about?” and I was in no shape to answer. Any thinking I’d tried to do had been unproductive, as useless as the snow shoveling my dad would insist my mother and I join in on whenever a blizzard struck.

“I think I’ll read for a bit,” I said, my first words since we had walked out the Fletchers’ front door. I edged off the mattress and grabbed my bathrobe from its hook on the door. “Love you,” I said.

Will muttered something. Maybe it was
love you.
I did not think I should push my luck by asking him to repeat himself.

I took a seat in one of the wingbacks in the living room. I opened a book that sat on the coffee table. What book? Whatever was at hand. It was a prop. The lines of type just as well could have been squiggles designed to fool a distant audience. There was no question of reading or any other distraction.

I thought of calling Jacqueline C. She always had said that I could telephone her at any hour but I would have felt awful, waking her up and, then, I couldn’t see how I could say anything important to her with Will within earshot.

I opened the sliding door to the backyard and stepped out onto the ramada. The moonlight had knitted the scrubby cholla and creosote bushes into a strange, pale blue wave under the night sky. I clasped my hands together to try to still my panic. I looked up at the stars overhead. If God were anywhere, it did seem like the stars would be the place, and I prayed that most elemental prayer,
Please help
.

In the shadows, off to my right, something shifted—

I let out a gasp of fear, but it was only a cat, arching its back as it rose from the old glider we kept under the covered portion of the ramada. Bad Cat, I was sure. It hopped down. Shoulders rolling, low to the ground, it passed along the shady edge of the ramada, then dashed across the moonlit yard and into the oleander hedge.

“Don’t go!” I called, my voice so plaintive that anyone who’d overheard surely would have thought I called to a lover. “Here, kit!”

The cat triggered the security light at the back of the Schaeffers’ house as it passed into their yard. I walked to the hedge and called through the leaves, keeping my voice low now, “Here, kit, here, kitty.” The security light snapped off soon after, but I stayed at the hedge for quite a while, whispering, “Here, kitty, come on, kitty,” before I finally gave up and made my way back to the ramada.

I aged that night, out on the ramada. Panic-stricken, pacing, I felt myself shrink. It got cold—the temperature fell into the fifties—but my shrinking was not a matter of the cold. It felt permanent, like the shrinking of a bone left out in desert sun, any meat on it going dry, hard, shiny.

The night that Martie died, I’d sat beside her bed at the hospital in Fort Dodge. The last day, all day, her breaths were as loud as a locomotive waiting at a station. The nurses said she was unconscious, but her eyes were full of terror. A grieving, monstrous time. I helped the nurses shift the position of her body on the mattress to prevent her from developing bedsores. I wiped her forehead with a damp, wrung-out cloth. I moistened her mouth with tiny, stiff, lime-flavored sponges on sticks until the nurses said, “That’s not necessary anymore.” Nothing I could do would stop the end from coming. Still, at least while I sat beside her, I did not feel I’d caused the situation. There were no decisions for me to make that were of consequence. In that regard, the hours that I spent on the ramada were worse than the hours at Martie’s bedside.

Over and over, I ran through variations of the confession that I would offer Will. What words would be the very best words?

Always, I pictured myself down on my knees, holding on to his strong legs while he tried to wrest himself away from me. I thought,
I have been so much luckier than I ever deserved to be!
Our life together—out on the ramada, alone, any disappointment I’d ever felt over that precious life felt almost indecent. Our life together sparkled before me. It was a paradise, all open and blue-skied and full of possibility.

And to think that making Jeremy Fletcher the winner of the Poulos Prize would allow that life to go on the way it had been!

I had tried to be a person of integrity—in part inspired by what I’d done to Esmé. I did not miss the irony that it was on her behalf that I now was tempted to compromise myself.

At four, I went into the house. Lying under the threads of moonlight coming in through the slats of the bedroom shutters, the gray hoodie pulled up over his head, Will looked like a beautiful monk, carved of stone, but when I brushed up against the bed, he raised the covers to me.

A habitual, husbandly gesture.

Feeling like a thief, I joined him.

Chapter 13

I did not imagine that I would sleep that night, but I did. When I woke up—my heart knew I was in trouble and it already raced—Will was gone.

The clock on his side of the bed showed just past six thirty, but it
was
a Thursday, one of Will’s gym days.

I hurried out into the kitchen. His gym bag was gone from its niche by the back door. Reassuring, I thought at first—life as usual—but there was no yellow sticky note on the kitchen counter. If Will left the house when I was still in bed, he almost always wrote me a note (what time he’d be home, plus an “I love you”).

I opened the sliding doors and stepped outside. The sky was gray, the bricks beneath my bare feet even colder than they had been the night before, but I needed their chill in order to clear my head—

I’d gotten so little sleep.