Die For You

striving to make the world match his vision, always wishing for stardust where there was only ash.

“Come on, Trev, let’s go get a shake and fries,” I said.

He brightened then, as though the conversation that left me grieving had never occurred. That’s the gift of childhood, the ability to be distracted from the big things by the little things.

* * *

FUNNY, HOW YOU find yourself thinking of the most inane things in the worst moments in your life. I could have run after Marcus but I didn’t. Instead I stood rooted, for I don’t know how long, stunned by the woman on the floor, by my encounter with my husband. It was impossible to reconcile my life as it was in this minute with the life I’d had just a few days ago.

I knelt down beside the woman I recognized as Camilla Novak from the photo Detective Crowe had shown me and put my hand on her shoulder. I’d just talked to her; it seemed impossible that she’d be dead. In spite of all the blood, I wondered stupidly if she might be breathing, like Fred had been. At first glance, I’d thought he was gone, since he’d been so pale, had lost so much blood. But no, her body was already unnaturally rigid, still.

I touched her for another reason, something less noble than hoping to save her life. I just wanted to see what that white, white skin felt like. I didn’t feel any revulsion in that moment.

Her flesh was like clay earth. Under my hand, I could feel the warmth draining. What leaves us? When the heart stops pumping blood through our veins, when the lungs stop filling and releasing, a door opens and something exits, leaving behind the bare stage. The curtain is open but the lights come down. What is it? It’s more than the failure of the machine to operate, isn’t it?

“Most people would flee from a dead body, get as far away as possible,” Crowe would later say. “Only in the movies do civilians lean in close to see if someone lying in a pool of blood-with her throat cut, no less-might still be alive. People literally swoon, faint, vomit at the sight of so much gore.”

“I’m not most people.”

“I’m getting that.”

But that was much later.

“Oh my God.”

I turned, startled from my thoughts, to see Erik standing in the doorway. He looked stricken, as if he might pass out. He turned away, took a step back toward the hallway.

“Shut the door,” I said sharply. “Lock it.”

“We have to get out of here, Isabel,” he said, glancing behind him. “Right now we’re going to that lawyer. What are you doing?”

“Christ, Erik,” I hissed. “Get in here and shut the door.”

He hesitated, seemed reluctant to leave the safety of the doorway, and then obeyed.

“Who did this, Izzy? Did you-”

“Did I?” I stared at him, incredulous. He looked so horrified, so much like Trevor, his eyes wide, this earnest line to his mouth.

He lifted his palms. “Then who?”

I looked back at Camilla Novak-her long, thin limbs, the exposed lace of her bra. On the coffee table there was a half-full cup of tea, the press of her lipstick on the rim. Her jacket and purse lay on the sofa. She was on her way somewhere when Marcus came to her door. She’d let him in. He might have been able to trick her from the street door. But she would have kept her apartment door shut until she saw him. She knew him; she opened her door and let him in. Then he killed her.

“Marcus was here,” I said.

“You saw him? Here?”

I nodded, thinking of that look on Marc’s face. It wasn’t malice really, or anger. It was a look I recognized, a superior kind of patience. Who was he?

“He killed her?”

“She was the only connection to the real Marcus Raine,” I said, so calmly. No emotion. I didn’t even sound like myself. I got up and walked over to Camilla Novak’s bag on the couch.

“What are you doing?”

It was a cheap knockoff, flimsy, fraying at the seams. I started rifling through its contents. A hot-pink cell phone, a purple sequined wallet, two tubes of lip gloss, mascara, tweezers. Then something else that gave me a little jolt of surprise.

“You’re getting prints all over everything,” Erik said. He stuffed his own fingers under arms folded tightly across his chest. Television had turned us all into crime-scene experts.

“Do you know what she said to me about him, the night we told you we were engaged?”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Linda,” I said, annoyed that he wasn’t following my crazed train of thought. “What she said about Marcus?”

He shook his head, looked at me as if he couldn’t imagine what relevance this had, why I would be thinking about this now. His eyes fell on Camilla’s body and stayed there, as though once he’d allowed himself to look, he couldn’t look away.

“She said he was just like our father.”

He brought his gaze back to me quickly, looked surprised. We never, and I mean never, talked about my father, so raw and angry were the wounds his parting left in us.

“What do you think she meant by that?”

He rolled his eyes, started shifting from foot to foot-boyish, anxious. “Izzy Let’s go. We’ll talk about this in the cab.”

“I mean,” I said, all the unexpressed anger I’d had for her in that moment rising like a tide I couldn’t quell, “my father was a kind, loving man. He was warm, affectionate. He had a jovial way about him, a light.”

“I don’t know what she meant. I didn’t know your father.”

“She must have told you.”

“Isabel,” he said, walking over to me quickly, putting firm hands on my shoulders. “Listen. To. Me. We have to get out of here right now or call the police and tell them what’s happened. A woman is dead. Marcus was here. He’s a wanted man. He’s done terrible things. We’re letting him get away.”

“Oh, he’s not getting away. I promise you that. He does have a head start, true.”

“Iz.” He narrowed his eyes, gripped my shoulders a little harder. I could tell by the half-worried, half-angry look on his face that he thought I was in shock, losing it a little. He couldn’t have been more wrong. I’d never seen things more clearly. Or so it seemed at the time-with a head injury and a dead body at my feet, and my husband a murderous criminal on the run from the law.

“Just tell me what you think and then you can call the police.”

“Oh my God.” He bowed his head and released an exasperated breath. “Okay. She meant that the facade was different than the underpinnings. That Marcus presented one face, but that, like your father, there was a dark inner life. She felt his coldness. She said that your father was cold, too, in a way. Even though he seemed very sweet, very loving, that there was something about him that was afraid to truly connect, that was terrified of the intimacy of real love. He had a powerful need to isolate, that he was damaged in ways no one realized until his suicide.”

I found myself nodding slowly, a great sadness swelling inside me. She saw him, both of them, with her photographer’s eye. My writer’s brain saw other men, men I had created and explained.

I moved into Erik and let him hold me for a second.

“I’m sorry, Erik,” I said into his shoulder. Behind his back, I took Camilla’s little surprise from her cheap bag, which I still held in my hand. It felt cool and light, a game of play-pretend, a fantasy.

“This is not your fault,” he said. “Let’s call the lawyer and the police.”

“It is my fault. And really, I’m the only one who can fix this. Otherwise, it’s all gone-the money, my marriage, our family as it was. He steals everything and gets away with it.”

“Honey,” he said sadly, “it’s gone either way. We’ll start again.”

“No.”