Die For You

Relief mingled with concern and she raised her eyes to his face. She saw him then, maybe for the first time in days. Their busy life was a perpetual swing dance between kids and home, her work and his, meals and pickups and drop-offs from various activities-kung fu for Emma, violin lessons for Trevor. Sometimes they just fell into a heap on the couch after the kids went to bed and watched an hour of television, or read in bed until one fell asleep and the other turned off the light. She thought some days he noticed the dishes in the sink before he noticed what she was wearing or that she’d changed her perfume. Sometimes she thought they’d see each other more if they worked apart, each of them going to an office and returning home at the end of the day.

She regarded his sandy stubble and ocean-blue eyes, the lean lines of his high cheekbones, his aquiline nose. That face had tamed her heart. He had sunshine at his core, a breezy summer day at the beach.

“What are you so mad about?” he’d asked early in their relationship. A swank gallery in SoHo; he was fifteen minutes late. It wasn’t even her show. But she raged at him on the street in the rain. “Because I know you’re not this angry about my being fifteen minutes late.”

She felt as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on her. Embarrassed, sobered, she caught sight of her reflection in the gallery’s picture window. She didn’t recognize her own expression, her own posture. A few people were watching; one strikingly thin woman smirked, a small plastic cup of wine in her hand. Why he didn’t walk away right then, she never could figure out.

“You’re too young, too beautiful, too good to let yourself be this way,” he whispered, taking her hands. She knew then that he really saw her, that he might have been the first and only person who ever had, other than her sister. The face she wore for everyone else, the demure and polite smile, the unfailingly kind demeanor, the proper girl who did everything right… he didn’t even notice it. When he looked at her he saw straight to the heart of her.

Within a month, she was seeing a shrink, trying to figure out why indeed she was so angry. And then she had to claw her way out of the quicksand of her own inner life before coming to shore. In a cozy office on the Upper West Side, a motherly psychologist with a comforting wave of gray hair and a soft bosom asked her, over time, questions she almost couldn’t stand to hear.

“Do you really blame your mother for moving on, for doing what she thought she had to save herself and her girls? Do you really hate Fred for loving your mother? Isn’t it just that you’re angry with your father for abandoning you, for being absent emotionally before that? Isn’t it just safer to be angry at living people because there’s no way to resolve the anger you have toward your father? Do you really think he loved your sister more than he did you?”

These were the hard things she had to face and answer. But she never would have thought to confront them at all if not for Erik. And where would she be then? She reached for him, touched his face and let her hand drift down to his shoulder.

“How could anything you’ve done be unforgivable?” she asked. He lowered his head at this, put his chin all the way to his chest.

“Linda.”

“I forgive you,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

She slid into him and wrapped him tight in her arms. She held on to him, her buoy against the great tides of regret and shame, guilt for the things she’d done, how she’d betrayed him. I’m so sorry, she said to his heart. I’ll never see him again.

“Linda,” he said again, pulling away from her. She looked at his face and didn’t like what she saw there. Despair. A dark flower of dread started to bloom in her center.

“Erik,” she said, releasing a breath with his name. “What is it?”

IT HAD SEEMED like only seconds after the 911 call, as I begged and pleaded with Fred to open his eyes, that police and paramedics were at the scene. The next thing I knew, Fred was lifted into the back of an ambulance, I climbed in after him, and we raced toward the hospital. More police were waiting when we arrived and Fred was wheeled away.

I stared after him, wondering if my carelessness had ended his life. I didn’t feel anything but a kind of numbness. A voice in my head kept telling me, This is not happening. Wake up.

A cop started asking me questions: What happened? How was it that I was already injured? Could I describe the men who did this to my stepfather? I asked for Detective Crowe. He was called. I was escorted to a waiting area.

I waited, pacing. Fatigue was replaced by nervous energy. I couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t keep my mind from racing back over the story of my marriage, looking for the chinks, the flaws in the plot. And there they were, the clues, the foreshadowing that the hero was really a villain, waiting behind the curtain with his dagger drawn.

But no. Life’s not so simple. People are many things, each of them true. Marcus was my husband. He was right: We were great friends and excellent lovers. That was true once, even if it didn’t matter much now.

I came back to the present when a doctor pushed into the room, told me that a bullet had grazed Fred’s head, leaving a valley over his ear but never penetrating his skull. He’d lost a lot of blood but he’d walk away from the injury. A lucky man. Then, suddenly, Detective Crowe was there with his little black notebook and expensive pen, taking a statement from me that I now barely remember giving. I wondered how he’d gotten there so fast, and he told me they’d been in Inwood, searching the apartment of Charlie Shane, my doorman, another familiar figure in my life who, it seemed, was not what he appeared. They’d found nothing useful. But Charlie had disappeared.

I vaguely recall offering Detective Crowe a recount of the events at Fred and Margie’s house. Was it skepticism that I saw on his face as I recounted the scene?

“Isabel.” There was that friendly use of my name again. “Are you leaving something out?” His pen hovered.

“Of course not,” I answered, indignant.

I felt the weight of his gaze. “Don’t be foolish,” he said quietly, moving a little closer to me.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He let an awkward minute pass, during which I looked at my cuticles in the horrid white fluorescent light. I watched nurses with their swift, quiet steps, listened to the incessant electronic rippling of a telephone that no one answered.

“You know what’s starting to bother me?” he asked finally.

“What’s that?”

“You seem to be having all these run-ins with unsavory types-FBI impersonators and European thugs-and yet you always emerge unscathed. Meanwhile, the bodies of the injured and dead litter the scene.” Poetry again, from the gentleman cop.

I fixated on the word choice a moment, as I’m prone to do, analyzed it for its appropriateness. Unscathed: without suffering any injury or harm.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve ‘emerged unscathed,’ Detective. Quite the opposite.” I pointed to my head but I was thinking of the deeper injuries, my riven life, the derailed narrative of my marriage.

“Relatively speaking,” he said with an assenting lift of his shoulders. “What I meant was, there was really no reason I can see for any of these people to leave you breathing. We’re not talking about people operating with conscience. We’re talking about murderers and thieves. So I find myself asking: Why are you still alive?”

It was a good question and one I’d certainly asked myself, even posed to my sister.

“Any theories?” I asked, only half a smart-ass.

“One theory might be that you have a greater involvement in this than we initially suspected. That rather than a victim, you might be an accomplice, hiding in plain sight, playing the role of the injured wife.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Because to me, you don’t seem like the type for this sort of thing. This woman you see on the talk shows-her husband has another family in Kalamazoo, or her suitor took off with her life savings-that’s not you. You’re sharp, aren’t you? Together.”

“Maybe not sharp enough to be immune to subterfuge, but definitely too sharp to be a part of anything like this. People dead around me, my stepfather very nearly killed, all my money gone, my sister’s money? No. No.” Just the recounting of it all filled me with that dangerous cocktail of rage and fear. I realized suddenly that both of my fists were clenched hard, nails digging ruthlessly into my palms. I released them with difficulty.

“Then just tell me what you’re holding back.”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to look as earnest as possible. “I swear.”