“What?” I stop laughing. “Henry, wait. What? You didn’t talk for ayear?”
“Faye,” Henry says, in the same admonishing tone I used whenI insisted I’d told him about what happened to me at daycare. “I told you this.”
“No,” I say firmly, and then I burst into laughter again. This conversation is absurd. “No. Henry. Come on. I would remember if you told me you did not say a word for an entire year. What the fuck? What the fuck happened?”
“Oh,” he says, his eyebrows raised, realizing maybe he hadn’t told me about this either. “I told my mom I had to use the bathroom. We were running errands or something, and the store we were in wouldn’t let us use the bathroom, and she was like, ‘Can you just hold it? We can be home in ten minutes.’ And I probably could have, but I told her I couldn’t. So she took me across the street to the McDonald’s, and she got hit by a car.”
“Henry! No. Stop.Stop.” I’m wiping tears from my eyes with my knuckles.
“Yeah. I mean. She was fine, in the end. But she was in the hospital for like a week.” Henry stares off into space, shell-shocked all over again. “And I was like, I almost killed my mom because I told her I needed the bathroom, so I should probably just never speak again.”
We stare at each other with stricken faces. “Why didn’t we ever tell each other this stuff before?” Henry asks.
“I guess we just didn’t think it was important then, but now we realize it’s so important we thought, of course we told the other about this.”
We stand there in the kitchen a moment, not saying anything else, not looking at each other. Henry notices some crumbs on the counter and sweeps them into his palm, deposits them in the sink. He looks up. Fixates on something over my shoulder. I turn to see my face, frozen on the white-painted wall. I’m twenty-seven, pouty, positively lethal.
“Remember the time we stayed here?” Henry poses the question to my old face, though the memory is so vivid it feels new. PT had a wedding in Europe and asked us to housesit for the week. I told Henry I wanted to fall asleep alone. I wanted him to enter the room in the middle of the night. I wanted to be surprised and scared. I wanted him to be a stranger who felt nothing for me at first, but began to feel bad when I started to cry, who dried my tears with the corners of the sheets and kissed me on the mouth until I gave in and stopped fighting him.This is rape you’re asking for, he said, impressively neutral. It was like a waiter repeating your order back to you to make sure he’d written it down correctly. Henry wanted to make sure I would get what I was asking for. We had been strolling back from breakfast and he had come around in front of me to say this, to stop me and make me stand still and take in what I was asking for. I had given him a light shove in the chest, and he had grabbed my wrist, pulled me close.Should I care if you come?
I thought about my answer as though he were again my waiter, asking me how I’d like my steak cooked.I don’t think I should, I said after a moment,not if I want this to feel real. Henry nodded, his face serious and already frightening.Wear your hair in a ponytail, he said. That was that. My steak was as I asked.
I used to think that the things we did together were possible because of me. I was taught all the tired clichés, that men were pigs, that they only had one thing on their minds. I assumed most would kill for a woman with an appetite like mine, that there were a million Henrys out there and only one of me. But now I know.
There is only one of him too.
Chapter 24
Our last full day is a stunner. Piercing blue sky and the sun shining through to the bedrock bottom of the lake. We have a cannonball contest. We take turns straddling the other on the dock. We go inside and artfully design a snack plate. We make cocktails, screwdrivers. Tomorrow we will leave. Why not get drunk and walk around naked and fuck like the nubile survivors of a shipwreck from that famous eighties movie, discovering what’s between our legs for the first time? We do all that and we doze in the sun and we wake up and do all that again. At some point Henry pries himself away from me to take the toolbox I always made fun of him for having into the cabin to fix the window I broke. I offer to make us another round. From the freezer I remove a frosty bottle of vodka. True WASPs know nothing of quiet luxury or the debatable metabolic merits of tequila. They dress unfashionably, and their Grey Goose is always cold and half empty.
The second cocktail of the day burns a slow, syrupy trail from my throat to the pit in my stomach. I am boozy and besotted with just about everyone and everything, waltzing around the house, humming happily under my breath. Inexplicably, I find myself drawn to the wall of bookshelves. I run my fingers over the spines of procedural crime novels and guides to hiking trails in the Northeast. I see the safe andthink nothing of it at first, and then I remember that yesterday, before we left to meet Emma, Henry had opened it to get my phone, and I caught his fingers plug in the last two digits to the combination:13. I was born on the thirteenth. And now I want to know if Henry used my birthday as the combination to the safe, because if he did I will tease him about it. I’m not really trying to go through his shit again. And I believe this until 12/13, my birthday, works to pop open the door, and inside I find some envelopes containing legal documents that fuzz before my eyes and an orangey prescription bottle for a medication with instructions for Patrick Toner to place a tablet under his tongue at the first sign of an angina attack. The typeface blurs and focuses in my vision. I guess you can murder someone with a heart attack if you pry their life-saving pills from their cold, dying hands, the same hands that once held your bottle and bathed your velvety baby skin.
I walk the stone path between the main house and the cabin with soft feet, my face serene and my heart ramming my ears. I mosey inside with a fresh screwdriver, finding Henry on his knees, blotting the edges of the window frame with a small spongey paintbrush. I rap on the open door to get his attention.
“How’s it going?”
“Just waiting for the caulk to dry so I can repaint.”
“What does the caulk do?”
“Seals the window to the wall.”
“How long does it take to dry?”
Henry sits back on his heels, cranes his neck to check his phone. It’s resting face up on the bed, and I see there are seven minutes left on the timer he’s set. I don’t know how long it will take him to repaint, but once the caulk is set, he won’t be able to get back out the window.Seven minutes. I have to keep this up for seven minutes. I offer Henry the glass. He takes a long swig, stares at the pulpy surface a moment. “I want to see you, after all this is over.” He looks up at me with his ink-blot eyes, terrified. “Do you want to see me too?”
I won’t ever recover from this, I decide. “Henry,” I say, like I can’t believe he had to ask, “Of course.”
Henry expels all the air from his lungs, wide shoulders sagging with relief. It winds me too, to watch someone so big act so small. “I can come to you. Or we can come here.”
“We’d need to be very careful.”
Henry nods. Then, “You don’t think you’d ever leave him?”
“I just don’t know… how we untangle things.”
“People do it all the time.”
“Yeah. And people lose everything.”