“Help!” I am screaming, the word catapulting against the slate walls of the mountains, coming right back to me in a diminished, mocking echo. I am turning the ignition pointlessly. I forgot the primer bulb. There is no gas in the motor. The boat rocks forward as Henry hauls himself onboard, the weight of the water pulling his clothes tight to his furious, panting form.
“I’m sorry!” I scream. “I’m sorry! Henry, don’t! I’m sorry!” He stalks toward me in slow-motion horror and grabs me by my ponytail, drags me to the swim step ladder. I have the good sense to suck in one last breath before he buries my head underwater. It is quiet in Lake Wanika, clear and bracing cold. I count. I can hold my breath for a long time. I discovered this special skill with Henry.
Nineteen seconds. I’m usually good for longer than that, but I’venever been in water this cold or this panicked. I suck in a breath and scream for help again. Henry shoves me back under, my entire torso this time. It no longer feels cold anymore, and that’s how I know I am in trouble. A slinky kind of sleep is calling for me. Sleep has a woman’s voice, a voice I recognize but cannot immediately place.
“Faye?” she is calling. “Faye? Are you okay?”
Chapter 12
I do not remember returning to the cabin, but suddenly I am swaddled in a towel on the carpet where earlier I crawled on all fours. Beneath this towel I am not wearing any clothes. Henry lights a roll of newspaper with a match and waves it around the interior of the fireplace like a torch, a search-party signal to the little lost people who took a wrong turn into the chimney. He lights another match and tucks it under the pile of wood. I expect an explosive whoosh, writhing orange peaks, but a single low flame struggles to convince others to join.
Henry sits back beside me. He is still wearing his wet clothes. “Who else is here?” I ask him in a whisper.
“It’s only us,” he answers in a stunned voice, like he can’t believe everything that just happened happened.
“I heard someone saying my name.”
“You lost consciousness. I… I did not mean to hold you under that long. I thought you were dead.” Henry begins to shiver violently. He gets up and leaves me for a while. When he comes back, he’s wearing dry clothes and he offers me some too. He turns away while I put them on, though he must have been the one to undress me, and then he helps me into bed and puts a pillow under my badankle before tucking me in. But even with the fire and the flannel sheets, I cannot get warm. My fingers and toes are ice and my teeth won’t stop chattering. Henry stares at me, shaking so hard the headboard batters the wall, and then tells me this is to prevent shock. He gets under the covers with me. He reaches for me like he used to. We find our fit—my face jigsawed into his collarbone, his hands sprawled in the small of my back, holding our centers together until the birdsong starts in the dark.
Chapter 13
The morning is cold, colder than the lake. Henry taught me that’s why steam rises off the surface of the water; in retrospect, it makes me sound like an idiot that anyone had to tell me this. Of course that’s why steam rises off the water. Joan Didion isn’t the only one who was ever so young.
Henry has been gone since dawn. I have showered. I have paced. I have replayed the disembodied voice I heard calling out to me last night. Near-death hallucination or is someone else here? The idea that I could have been that close to death sickens me, but so does the possibility that we are not alone, Henry and I. After a while I curl up into the fetal position in a state of pure and uncut terror, wondering what the consequences will be for my failed one-woman mutiny.
I hear the turn of the key, and when the door opens, I am on my feet, facing Henry resolutely. Henry stands there, the size of the fucking door, my phone in the palm of his hand. Nausea slams into me like a two-ton truck. I’d rather he was holding a gun.
With a long index finger, Henry scrolls, stops, begins to read a message he has composed in my voice.
“Hi, Caroline,” he begins. Caroline is the name of the agent who is trying to poach me. My spine curls inward, my stomach burbles. I’mgoing to be sick. Breathe.Breathe, Faye. “I wanted to tell you that while I enjoyed our meeting too, I’ve decided to stay put. My team has done right by me all these years, and no doubt you are amazing at what you do, but your taste skews a little too commercial for the aspirations I have for myself.”
Fuck breathing. Fuck just about everything. For a certain kind of literary agent, which Caroline Hasser most certainly is, there is no greater insult than the wordcommercial. And the way Henry has phrased it—tasteskews—is the way I speak. It is the way everyone I speak to speaks. Henry Spalding has combed through my messages and delivered a damn-near-flawless performance of Faye Heron. This is not a message but a missive. It will sound the death knell of any sort of future relationship with Caroline. It all but ensures that if I do file for divorce, if I do find myself a persona non grata at the agency that has done more than right by me over the years, hasmademe, really, my options will be severely limited. Caroline is the head of the literary department at the only other big agency out there. I know writers and other creators who do not believe they need the backing of the big ones to make it in the industry, and maybetheydon’t, but I am someone who needs to have the machine behind her. I crave conventional structure in every aspect of my life but the creative one. I need to feel insulated by fast-talking people in pinstripes, cocooned, so that I can set to work spinning all my strange larvae silk.
What’s worse—what’s actually brilliant—Caroline will read this message and think,Fuck you, Faye. It will not elicit phone calls and messages to check on me and make sure I haven’t been hacked, lost my mind, beenkidnapped, the way Henry’s scheduled Instagram rant would have. Caroline likely won’t even write me back, and there is no one for her to alert. Of course my husband doesn’t know I’ve met with her. Caroline is part of the exit plan I’ve been quietlyassembling while I come to terms with the fact that my marriage is unsalvageable. This is a clean, traceless hit.
“If you send that,” I say to Henry in a quiet, pleading way, because I’ve decided that appealing to the part of him that needs to feel needed by me is the only way out of this, “I’ll be trapped.”
Henry leans against the walls of my confines with a cavalier arch of an eyebrow. His point is not lost on me.
“This is a stay at the Four Seasons in comparison to what I’m dealing with at home.”
Henry puts a hand to his hair, rumples it handsomely, while he considers my plea. “From what I’ve pieced together, your friend—who is also your agent?—seems to think that if you leave him, you’ll have to dissolve your production company, and it could get ugly. I don’t doubt it will—divorce is a nasty business—but I don’t quite understand why your agency would choose him over you.”
“Because his brother is a big shot at the firm.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m Hollywood middle class compared to him.”
“Faye,” Henry all but purrs, “how modest of you.”
I am reminded of that stick of dynamite between my legs. It’s the snooty voice, the loose way Henry is leaning against the wall. It’s the undeniable reality that he could wreck me with his right thumb. “Okay,” I say in the smallest voice I own, hoping it will appease him.
Henry sniffs, his distaste apparent that I would fold so easily. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I repeat, stronger, “I’ll do what you want.” Yes, when it comes to doing the thing I like doing, the thing I’m good at, the thing that earned me entreé into Henry’s tax bracket and invites admiration and respect, I will fold easily to protect that. Why does Henry want me to act as though liking what I do and wanting others to like it too is some sort of deeply immoral character flaw?
“You don’t even know what I want,” Henry says.