The Pact (38 page)

At a little after three-thirty, one of the officers came into Chris's cell and started packing up Steve's things. Chris set down the book he was reading. “Is the trial over?” he asked.

“Yup. Guilty. Sentenced to life in prison.”

Chris watched the officer pick up the broken shards of the plastic razor, the one Steve had pried apart for its blade. He pulled his pillow over his head, sobbing as he had not since the day he'd arrived at the jail. And he did not allow himself to ask whether he was crying for Steve or for himself; for what he had done, or for what was certain to happen.

At first, Barrie Delaney had called Melanie often, giving her updates on evidence that had dribbled in from the ME's office, or the forensics lab. Then the telephone calls had been made from Melanie's end, periodically, just to keep Emily on Ms. Delaney's mind. Now, Melanie called maybe once a month, not wanting to take from the prosecutor any amount of precious time that would be better served preparing for the trial.

So Melanie was rather surprised when Barrie Delaney tracked her all the way to the library to talk to her.

She picked up the phone, certain that the other librarian had gotten the caller's name wrong, only to hear the prosecutor's clear, clipped voice.

“Hi,” Melanie said. “How is everything?”

“I should be asking you that,” Barrie said. “Actually, everything is fine.”

“Have they changed the date of the trial?”

“Oh, no. Still set for May.” She sighed into the phone. “You see, Mrs. Gold, I was wondering if you might be able to help me with a bit of research.”

“Anything,” Melanie assured her. “What do you need?” “It's your husband. He's agreed to testify for the defense.” Melanie was silent so long that the prosecutor began calling her name. “I'm still here,” she said faintly, remembering Gus at the cemetery, certain she'd put Michael up to this. She felt her head start to pound. “What can I do?”

“Ideally, you can get him to back down,” Barrie said. “And if he refuses, maybe you can find out what he's going to say that's so useful to the defense.”

By now, Melanie's head was bowed, her forehead grazing the reference desk. “I see,” she said, although she did not. “And how do I do this?” “Well, Mrs. Gold,” the prosecutor said. “I guess that's up to you.”

The first thing Michael noticed when he entered the house, sweaty and tired and reeking of sheep dip, was that the stereo was on. After months of prolonged silence, music seemed sacreligious, and he had the absurd urge to turn it off. But then he came around the comer of the kitchen and found Melanie chopping vegetables, the jewel tones of the peppers dotting the countertop like confetti.

“Hi,” she said brightly, so much like the woman she'd been a year ago that Michael started. “You hungry?”

“Famished,” he said, his mouth dry. He heard the swell of a horn on the CD, and resisted the desire to reach out his hand and touch Melanie to make sure she was really there.

“Go clean up,” she said. “I've got a nice lamb ragout cooking.” He walked up to the bathroom like an automaton, his head spinning. This was what he had heard about grief, after all-it could change a person drastically, then, one day, they'd be all right. It had certainly been that way for him. Maybe it was Melanie's turn to come back to life. As he soaped himself in the shower and lathered his hair with shampoo, he kept envisioning Melanie as he'd seen her in the kitchen, her back to him, the curve of her spine graceful beneath her turtleneck, the highlights in her hair winking gold and roan and russet in the afternoon sun. He came out in a towel, only to find Melanie sitting on the bed with two steaming plates and two glasses of red wine.

She was wearing a green silk robe that he remembered from a second honeymoon a million years ago, its sash slipping open. “I thought you might not want to wait,” she said. He swallowed. “For what?” he asked.

Melanie smiled. “The ragout.” She stood up, the colorful delicacy on the plates jiggling with the movement of the mattress, and lifted a glass of wine. “Want some?” When Michael nodded, she took a sip, and then leaned up to kiss him, letting the wine run over his lips and into his throat. He thought he was going to come, right then and there.

It had been months since he'd made love with Melanie, as long as his daughter had been dead. He would have jumped at the invitation to share a bed with her ... but this was not Melanie. In all the years they had been married, Melanie had never been one to initiate sex. He thought of her dribbling wine into his mouth, felt himself grow even harder, and then wondered what book she'd stolen that from.

Before he could stop himself, he laughed.

Melanie's eyes flickered; someone who did not know her as well as Michael might have missed the indecision that widened her pupils for that fraction of a second. To her credit-and his shock-she put the glass of wine down, reached for the back of his head, and tugged him down for a kiss. He felt the robe open, her nipples peaked against his chest. He felt her tongue curl into his mouth and her fingers stroke the nape of his neck. And then he felt her other hand slide between them, to cup his testicles.

She had him by the balls.

Suddenly he understood why Melanie was cooking ragout, wearing silk, making love to him. She had not changed overnight. She only wanted something.

He lifted his head and drew back. Melanie made a sharp, tiny sound, and opened her eyes. “What's the matter?” she asked.

“How about,” Michael murmured, “you tell me.”

He saw her looking at him, felt her surprise as his penis grew flaccid in her grip. She tightened her grasp almost cruelly and then let him go, jerking the lapels of her robe closed. “You're going to be a defense witness,” she hissed. “Your own daughter's dead, and you're going to stick up for her killer.”

“That's what this is about?” Michael said, incredulous. “Did you think if you fucked me you could change my mind?”

“I don't know!” Melanie cried, her hands buried in her hair. “I thought that maybe you wouldn't do it. That you'd owe it to me.”

Michael blinked at her, stunned that in a marriage which had lasted twenty years, she could even think of using sex as a down payment, instead of a gift. Wanting to hurt Melanie as badly as she had hurt him, Michael schooled his face into a careful blank. “You flatter yourself,” he said, and walked out of the room.

He was naked, but that didn't matter. He stalked across the house and up the connecting staircase to the offices of his veterinary practice. There he dressed in the scrubs he wore sometimes for surgeries, and sat down at his desk. He could hear the quiet clatter of Melanie in the kitchen. His hands were shaking as he picked up the phone and dialed.

Gus WALKED INTO THE Happy Family restaurant and immediately strode toward the booth in the back that they all used to frequent on Friday nights. Michael was sitting there in a pair of green scrubs, drinking what looked to be straight vodka. “Michael,” she said, and he lifted his head. She had seen that look before, but she couldn't quite place it. The vague set of the eyes, the small parenthetic downturns at the edges of the mouth. It took her a moment to recognize it as despair, an expression she'd seen on Chris's face before he remembered to pull his mask of indifference into place.

“You came,” Michael said.

“I said I would.”

He had called her at home, risky to begin with, and begged her to meet him right away. Trying to pick a familiar public venue that wouldn't be too busy this time of day, she suggested the Chinese restaurant. It was only as she was driving there, having lied to James and Kate, that she realized how crowded it would be with memories.

“It's Melanie,” Michael said, and Gus's eyes widened.

“She's all right?”

“I don't know. I guess that depends on your frame of reference,” he said. He told Gus what had happened.

By the time he finished, Gus's face was pink. She remembered, not so long ago, laughing with Melanie over coffee, discussing width versus length and other abstractions about sex that seemed too close for comfort right now. “Well,” she said, clearing her throat, “you knew she was going to find out if you testified.”

“Yeah. I don't think that's what upset me, really.” He looked up at Gus, his eyes clouded. “It's just that this very horrible thing has happened to the two of us, you see? And I guess I always figured that if it came to this, we'd band together. Ride out the storm.” He stared down at the place mat, festively decorated with a Chinese calendar wheel: the year of the rat, of the ox, of the horse. “Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give-and then realize that it still isn't what they need?”

“Yes,” Gus said simply. “I do know.” She reached across the table and clasped both Michael's hands, giving him strength. And they thought separately of Melanie, and of James, and of how a stream of difference between two people might, overnight, turn into a canyon. They were still holding hands when the waiter came over to take their order. “Missus! Mister!” he crowed, a wide smile splitting his face as Gus and Michael jumped apart. “It be many time since you be here to eat,” he said, his voice a pidgin singsong. “When are coming the other couple?” Gus stared at the waiter, openmouthed. It was Michael who realized the mistake that had been made. “Oh... no,” he said, smiling. “We're not married. We are, that is, but not to each other.” Gus nodded. “The other two, the ones who aren't here-” she said, and then broke off as the waiter smiled beatifically at them, unwilling or unable to understand.

Michael rested his palm on the menu. “Chicken and broccoli,” he said. “And more vodka.” In the awkward silence that followed the waiter's disappearance to the kitchen, Gus slid her hands under the table, still tingling with Michael's touch. Michael tapped his chopsticks against the edge of the vodka glass. “He thought that you and I were-”

“Yes,” Gus said. “Funny.” But she was staring down at her place mat, at the odd Chinese calendar, and wondering if the waiter was not the only one who had thought that spouses were interchangeable. It was a logical mistake, after all; anyone who'd seen the Hartes and the Golds here for years, and the rapport between the four of them, could have come to the same conclusion. Gus peeked at Michael over the edge of her teacup, considering his thick silver hair, his capable, square hands, his heart. She had come to Michael tonight because he'd needed her. It felt perfectly natural-after all, he was almost a member of the family.

Which was, in itself, a little horrifying.

And incestuous.

The heavy china cup clanked onto the table as it slipped out of Gus's hand. Both she and Michael had felt the odd, simultaneous ease and discomfort of this attraction. But they were old enough to move away from each other, when reality-in the form of a Chinese waiter-intruded. It might not be as simple, for someone younger.

Who was to say that Emily hadn't felt it, too, blithely pushed into a romance with a boy who might as well have been her brother?

Pregnant with his child?

Gus closed her eyes and offered up a quick prayer, suddenly realizing what no one else had been able to for many months-why the bright, lively, intelligent Emily Gold might have been confused enough to take her own life.

THEN October 1997

. he first time Emily told Chris she wanted to kill herself, Chris laughed. The second time, he pretended he didn't hear.

The third time, he listened.

They had been driving home from a late movie, and Emily had fallen asleep. She was doing that a lot these days, Chris realized-nodding off in the middle of the evening, sleeping so late in the morning Chris had to wake her up before driving her to school, once even dozing off in class. Her head was balanced lightly on his shoulder as he drove, her body canted sideways over the stick shift between the bucket seats. Chris kept his left hand on the wheel, his right bent at a strange angle to cradle Emily's head and keep it from bobbing all over the place.

He needed both hands to get off the highway, and he let go of Emily only to have her her slip off his shoulder and settle in his lap, her ear pressed against the ring of his belt, her breasts nestled against the gear shift, her nose an inch from the steering wheel. Her head was heavy and warm, and as he drove through the silent streets of Bainbridge he rested his hand on it, brushing her hair back from her face. He turned into her driveway and cut the motor and the lights, watching her sleep. He traced the pink of her ear, so fragile that Chris could see the slight blue veins webbing it, could imagine the traveling blood. “Hey,” he said softly. “Wake up.” She did, with a start, and would have smashed her head on the steering wheel if Chris's hand wasn't there to stop her. She struggled upright, Chris's hand still on the back of her neck. Emily stretched. There was a deep red furrow on her left cheek, a scar carved by the edge of his belt. “Why didn't you wake me up before?” she said, her voice husky. Chris smiled at her. “You looked too cute,” he said, and he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. It was nothing, a compliment like a thousand others he'd given her, and yet she burst into tears. Stunned, Chris reached across the stick shift, trying as best as he could to gather her into his arms.

“Emily,” he said, “tell me.”

She shook her head; he felt the slight movement against his shoulder. Then she drew back, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. “It's you,” she said. “You're what I'm going to miss.” It seemed a strange way to say it-“I miss you” would have made more sense-but Chris smiled. “We can visit,” he said. “That's why colleges have long breaks, you know.” She laughed, although it might have been a sob. “I'm not talking about college. I keep trying to tell you,” Emily said haltingly. “But you don't listen.”

“Tell me what?”

“I don't want to be here,” Emily said.

Chris reached for the ignition key. “It's early. We can go somewhere else,” he said, a thrum of alarm working its way up his spine.

“No,” Emily said, turning to him. “I don't want to be.” He sat in silence, his throat working, his mind replaying the other, dismissed things Emily had said that had been leading up to this. And he saw what he had been trying so hard not to see: For someone who knew Emily as well as he did, he saw that she'd been acting different. “Why?” he managed.