Die For You

Finally, I stepped through onto the hardwood floor.

“Hello?” I said. “Camilla?”

The phone had stopped ringing, and muffled street noise was the only sound I heard. The apartment was tidy, with simple inexpensive furnishing-a matching beige overstuffed couch and chair, a low coffee table, an older television on a stand by the window. A large Oriental rug on the floor, some cheaply framed posters, a gray throw blanket over a footstool. The phone started ringing again. I could see it came from a handbag, which lay on the couch next to a coat.

I moved toward the sound. That’s when I saw her lying on the floor, legs folded demurely to one side, blood spilling an angry red on the floor, on her clothes, sprayed on the white wall. Her impossibly white throat bore a deep gash so dark, so hideous, it almost seemed fake. She was dressed in white jeans, a tight white blouse, now marred with gore.

There was a thick thud within my center, a tingling at the wound in my head that spread across the top of my skull and traveled down my spine. I tried to take in the details of the scene, to process what was before me. But the whole room was shifting and tilting. I was only aware of a terrible nausea, a desire to get away. Then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

“Isabel. Don’t turn around.”

But of course I did. And there he was. My lover, my friend, the stranger with whom I’d shared my life. I found myself reaching for him but he backed away. The lines that connected us, that would have drawn us together the day before, were sundered. He was on the water and I was onshore. He had drifted, not far but too far to reach. He was in view but gone for good.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him. I glanced down and saw the gun in his hand. There was blood on his hands, on his shirt.

Even these things failed to shock me into fear. I could have-should have-been screaming, begging, weeping. But instead I found myself floating above it all, observing… the body on the floor, my husband’s hands wet with blood. He was so familiar, the surface so well known. But his depths were pure mystery, uncharted, now undiscoverable. All I could think to say was, “Why have you done this?”

When the words were in the air, my middle clenched with nausea. I looked down at Camilla Novak, her stillness, and saw the finality of it all. A door had closed. None of us would ever walk though it again. Our life, my life, was gone. Still, there was no rage rushing to the surface, no tears, no urge to yell. The girl on the floor was dead. But I was undead, moving around stiff and unnatural, my soul sucked from me.

“There’s no answer for that,” he said quietly. “Not one you’ll understand.”

His voice sounded different, gravelly and cold, seemed to echo from those unknowable depths. I didn’t know anything about my husband, if asked, couldn’t extrapolate on one certain detail to understand all the evil he had done.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, two strangers who recognized each other from another life. When he started to move toward the door, I made to follow. But he lifted the gun and I froze. I looked at his face, a cool and distant star. He’d use that gun, without hesitation. He’d kill me where I stood and walk away. The knowledge cut too deep for pain.

“Isabel. Don’t come after me.” I was used to this tone. Paternal. Uncompromising. “Start over. Forget. You’ll be fine.”

I think I smiled at him. Then, beneath the thin mantle of numbness, a rage filled me, replacing any love I’d ever had for him. It was a transformation that took place in minutes-no, seconds.

“If you think you’ll walk away from this, you’re wrong. I’ll find you or die trying.”

I saw something on his face-anger, fear, pity, I couldn’t tell. He opened his mouth to speak but then changed his mind. I didn’t try to stop him as he moved toward the door again. I closed my eyes instead, willing him away. When I opened them, he was gone.

Part Two. Dead reckoning

Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions-what we do-that we are happy or the reverse… All human happiness and misery take the form of action.

– ARISTOTLE

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

– E. L. DOCTOROW

14

“You mean there aren’t ever any new days?” Trevor asked. He was young, really young. Anyway, too young for an existential crisis. “Just the same days repeating over and over again forever?”

There was something like horror on his face, as if he couldn’t believe life could be that mundane, with so few surprises. I’d been charged with watching him for the afternoon while Linda took a meeting with her agent and Erik was with Em on some father-daughter trip. Trevor and I had planned for a walk to the chess shop off Washington Square Park, then some kind of high-caloric snack his parents would never allow between lunch and dinner. Maybe he was five or thereabouts.

At the chess shop, we’d lingered for nearly an hour, inspecting chess pieces of all shapes and sizes and incarnations-dragons and wizards, Alice in Wonderland characters, medieval courts, Smurfs. There were elaborate boards of marble and glass, soapstone and metal, plastic. In the end, he chose a simple wooden set with hand- carved pieces. Our Trev, the purist. He had his prize in a bag and we were sitting on a bench in the park, near the speed-chess players, with the leaves changing colors and NYU students moving about with dense backpacks, some kids doing skateboard jumps, and a homeless man aggressively jangling a cup of change.

“But how do you know? You don’t know what will happen in forever,” he said, always practical. “No one does.”

I shrugged, feeling the full weight of my failure to explain this matter. “It’s just the way it is, kiddo.”

It made a kind of hopeful sense that we might wake up one day and it wouldn’t be Tuesday or Saturday, but Purpleday or Marshmallowday. And on this day, things would be different; maybe gravity would be just slightly altered so everything would seem lighter, or the sun would have a slightly pinkish tint to it and everyone would look a little prettier.

“These markers of the passage of time are constructed by the human mind,” I told Trevor. He couldn’t have really understood me. But he seemed to, gazing at me thoughtfully. “The days are always the same because people made it that way. To keep order.”

He seemed to ponder this for a second, picking at a loose thread on his jeans.

“That’s stupid,” he said finally, bereft.

And I was suddenly mad at myself that I hadn’t allowed him the hope that one day in his life wouldn’t be exactly the day he expected it to be. I could have conceded that he was right, that, in fact, I did not know what would happen in forever. I backpedaled.

“Every day is different, Trevor, you know. Surprises and magic can happen anytime.”

He nodded quickly, as though at the advanced age of five he already knew this.

“But it will always happen on a Wednesday,” he said heavily. “Or a Monday.”

I’d always thought of Emily as the poet, but maybe Trevor had a little bit of the tortured artist in him, always