politics.”
“See where bliss’ll get you.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Me neither. Nothing brilliant about engineering. It’s just engineering.”
“Not that. The corporate politics. I think you were in them up to your neck.”
“So, that’s the deal? You tell me about Robbie Milhouser, and I get to mess up your theory?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not that interested in corporations. There’s something else I want to know,” she said.
If I’d known Rosaline back in those corporate days I’d have tried to hire her. Harness all that obsessive persistence.
“Okay.”
“Why did you wreck those houses?”
I’d heard that question before, a long time ago, and didn’t love hearing it again. For the cops and prosecutors, and the lawyers on both sides, “I don’t know” seemed like a good enough answer. But not for the shrink I’d been forced to see as part of a plea bargain. He wouldn’t let up. Though unlike Rosaline, he had a normal-sized nose and an oversized sense of self-importance. I wouldn’t give him an answer if I had one, which I didn’t.
I told Rosaline as much.
“I don’t believe you,” she said sweetly, leavening the bite of the comment.
“You don’t think it’s possible to not know why you did something?” I asked her. “Doesn’t the fact that people hardly ever know why they do anything keep you folks in business?”
Her smile grew.
“There was a time when I’d let you get away with that, Sam. But I got smarter when I shed my insecurities.”
I was tempted to ask her if she thought fear and anger made you stupider, but I was in deep enough already.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said. “You give me what you can on Robbie, and I’ll give you an hour of couch time. You can ask me anything you want.”
She leaned toward me.
“Couch time it is.”
She used her long middle finger to trace the top of her blouse.
“I’ve already got one of those deals, Rosaline.”
“Highly revocable. But I’ll take a handshake as a down payment.”
The skin of her slender hand was cool and dry, but soft to the touch. Her fingertips slid across my palm when I let go. The door to the lounge opened and a pair of male teachers, delivered by divine forces, barged noisily into the lounge. Rosaline sat back easily into the couch, unruffled.
“Saved by the boors,” she said.
“Postponed, anyway,” I said, despite my better judgment, which as history proves has never been all that good.
She escorted me back to the centurions at the front desk. As we walked, some sort of electromagnetic effect disturbed the energy field between us. I knew this by the slight spike in my pulse rate. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Ditto that,” she said, handing me off and turning lightly again on her toe, then disappearing down the long institutional corridor, lined with lockers filled with secrets past and present, safe from all but the irresistibly curious mind of Rosaline Arnold.
THIRTEEN
WHEN I FINALLY located Amanda she was covered in soot. She was stationed with another blackened soul next to a large dumpster at the end of a relay line starting inside her burned-out house. Charred chunks of sheetrock, two-by-fours and melted fixtures were traveling down the line to where the pitch team tossed them over the seven-foot dumpster wall.
The day had turned bright, the hard light of the season flooding down through the bare tree cover and revealing the ugliness and wreckage of the destroyed property in stark detail. The air was clear, but thick with the bitter, sickly smell of soaked charcoal.
Amanda used the back of her forearm to clear a wave of hair from her face, exposing a smile for me and Eddie as we approached.
“Welcome to the glamorous world of real-estate development,” she said.
“Thanks. I think I’ll observe from here,” I said, standing clear of the ash and dust. Eddie didn’t like the smell and feel of the place, and was happy to stay close to my side.
“I hope we can talk,” she said as she took one end of a shredded piece of half-inch plyscore to help hoist it up and into the dumpster.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said.
Amanda stepped out of the human chain, which reconfigured itself without interrupting the flow of debris.
“I want to plead temporary insanity,” she said as she wiped her hands.
“You had a rough night.”
“I’ve had rougher. I’ve been storing up a little too much lately,” she said, moving out of earshot of the crew. “I wasn’t even aware. Not consciously. The fire triggered something. I took it out on you. I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s adequate.”
Like Rosaline Arnold, an excess of curiosity was one of my greater failings. But there were a lot of things I didn’t want to know about, that I preferred to leave unexamined. How I felt about Amanda was one of them. Maybe because of that I never tried very hard to understand her. As if I was afraid of what that understanding would reveal.
One thing I did know was she’d absorbed a disproportionate amount of sorrow in her life, probably more than you could withstand without some adverse consequences taking root. More than I could take, that was certain.
My wife Abby’s life was one of uninterrupted good fortune, if you discounted her choice of husbands. She honored that providence by filling nearly every waking moment with expressions of disgruntlement and complaint. I realized over time that she really didn’t care if I agreed with her or not, as long as I said something that sounded like I was listening, which I did less and less. Eventually all conversation, acerbic or otherwise, dwindled to nothing and a permafrost of silence and disappointment settled into the structure of our relationship.
Long before I’d ever imagined I’d be sleeping with Amanda, I loved to talk to her. I used to go see her at Roy’s bank, pretend I was a worthwhile customer, which I wasn’t. It was the only pleasure I knew in those days. She didn’t know it, but she was the last and only tether I had to the world, more like a gossamer thread, barely holding on.
Standing there next to her burned-out house, I remembered what it was like to see her at her desk. To bathe in the glory of a welcome look. I didn’t trust it, but I loved it. I didn’t know there could be such a thing.
I’d said to Sullivan that it couldn’t be worth it. But it was.
“I won’t fight with you. I wouldn’t know how,” I said.
“I know. It’ll never happen again,” she said. “I don’t expect you to believe me. Just give it a little while, and you’ll see.”
Her voice was tired, but the words were clear and unstudied.
She reached up and took my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead.
“There. Now we look almost the same,” she said.
“Hardly. You look like the inside of my hibachi.”
“I went to see my friends in the City. I hadn’t heard about Robbie until I read the paper this morning. They don’t really think you had anything to do with it, do they?”
“They have all this damning evidence and no other suspects. I’m new to this, but I think that emboldens the
