Chapter 28
I sit, slumped and hurting, at PT’s elaborate hickory table with thick logs for legs, watching Corrine bang around the kitchen, seeking anything with carbs. Henry is across from me, monitoring me without expression. I can’t look at him looking at me like that, and so I stare at the lines in the wood of the table until they swirl like I’ve microdosed too many times to have any business using the made-up word. I am, at the moment, tripping all over my mutinous unconsciousness. My feet catching on the corners of everything I refused to see before. Henry has always been my captor, even when I thought I was free.
“Cereal.” Corrine retrieves a box from the cabinet next to the refrigerator, turns it over in her hands, looking for the best-by date. “I bet that’s a real treat for you, Faye.”
My vision throbs like a second pulse. “Will someone tell me what the fuck is going on?”
Corrine sighs. “See,” she says, “the problem is you’re an actress. So I don’t know what to make of this whole wide-eyed thing you’ve got going on.”
“Campbell’s dead and you seem pretty okay with it. I am unclear what to make of that as well.”
“Pretty okay?” Corrine repeats in a rage. “You think I’mpretty okay?”
“You don’t seem all that torn up.”
“I’m furious.”
“He attacked me first. I had no choice.”
“Jesus, Faye.” Corrine groans, exasperated. “We were planning on offing him anyway, is that what you need to hear me say?”
Outside, the frogs are shrieking incessantly.What is that?I asked, the first time I came here, and then they dulled to background noise that I stopped noticing until now.
“It’sHenryI’m furious with,” Corrine clarifies, “for thinking with his dick when he’s the one who needs this to work out more than anyone.”
I allow my eyes to drift to Henry at that. There are freckles over the bridge of his nose that were not there when we arrived. Did that happen when we were lying on the dock and he gave me his battered heart to hold? My chest feels hot and cold, a strange menthol sensation, remembering the wounds we bared and then what we did to each other to anesthetize the pain. Henry stares back at me with the indifferent gaze of a sunning house cat.
“I’d argue,” Henry says idly, “that you need me more than I need you. You’re the spouse. Everyone will be looking at you.”
“Which is whyI’mcovering all my tracks. You should try it, Hen!” Corrine slams the cabinet door shut. “See, Faye, when I called the caretaker to ask if he’d seen Campbell—I’m playing a part here, you know. I have to look like I was worried I hadn’t heard from him—he said no, but that he did see Henry at the super Walmart, groping hothouse tomatoes with a woman who wasnothis wife.”
“Fuck,” I say.
“Fuck,” Corrine agrees, opening and closing the cabinet drawers until she finds the one with the utensils.
“He didn’t recognize her,” Henry says to Corrine about me, as though I am not sitting right there. “And he’s promised not to say anything.”
“For a price,” Corrine reminds Henry furiously. She gets out a bowl, and into it she shakes a generous serving of stale cereal. I know it’s stale by the sound it makes when it hits the porcelain; like broken glass. “That’s coming off the top of yours, by the way.”
I gape at Henry. This is about something as cheap as money? “Is it a life-insurance thing?”
Corrine snorts. She has found a carton of shelf-stable milk in the pantry, and she’s sniffing from the spout, making a putrid face. “Henry? Would you like to be the one to elaborate?”
“I think,” Henry says in a clipped tone, “the less she knows, the better.”
“Guess not,” Corrine says, pouring what must be expired milk down the drain. “I’d fill you in, Faye—I’m leaning toward believing you don’t know what’s going on; you’re not a very good actress, to be honest, smart of you to focus on the directing thing—but I really think it will be better coming from Henry.”
“Doyouknow what’s going on?” I say, hoping to provoke her. “Do you know what they did to Sarah?”
Corrine fills a glass with water. She comes over and places my flavorless prison meal in front of me. “Faye,” she says with something approaching gentleness, “who do you think wrote the suicide note?”
The cereal is that brand that offers a diet plan on the back of the box. Replace two meals with this cereal, it says, and you could lose up to ten pounds in two weeks. I tried it once, and I am as lightheaded now as I was when I stepped on the scale after two weeks to discover that the back of the box wasn’t lying.
Corrine groans at the dazed look on my face, like she expected more from me. “Faye, comeon. You really thought that my dumbass husband, God rest his soul, turned to your dumbass boyfriend—take the hit, Hen—and said, ‘Hey you know what? Sarah can’t seem to get pregnant and seems a little devastated about that. She can hardly get out of bed. She can hardly face the world. She can hardly stand to look at anyone who could be so glib about having children, and we might be able to use that to throw everyone off the scent. We have a key to their place. PT is out of town. We could sneak in there. We could write something short but real-sounding. I mean, no, we’ve never experienced anything like this, but we have hearts and minds, so we can use those to at least imagine what someone going through what Sarah was going through might feel. What do we come up with? How about—It’s too much. Because that’s what it is even though it doesn’t make sense. It’s nothing when you should have something, and it’s nothing over and over again, and it’s simply too much nothing. Then, after we’ve gone outside and pushed her scull into the lake, we have to go in the bathroom to throw up, because again, hearts and minds, we have those, and this is all just so awful and sad, but it’s also the way it has to be because this was an accident and at least one of us has been accepted into the investment trading program at J.P. Morgan, and Godforbidwe jeopardize that. And while we have our heads in the toilet, we happen to notice a negative pregnancy test in the trash can, and we’re just like, holy shit. Holyshit. And so we fish that out and we leave it next to the laptop before we go.’ Truly, Faye, think for one fucking second.” Corrine jams her index finger into the side of her head forcefully.Think, you fucking idiot.Think.
“I don’t think like you do,” I say to her.
Corrine screws up her face to make a mockery of my face, my voice. “You’re so cool, Faye, because you don’t want kids.”