The Sixes

the noodles. Perhaps it was the glass and a half of wine she’d already drunk, but the carbonara smelled heavenly to her.

“Does Tony know you can do this?” Duncan asked after she served the pasta and he’d consumed two big forkfuls. “This is amazingly good.”

“Thank you. I don’t have much of a repertoire as a cook, but I’m generally pretty decent at pasta. My Italian grandmother loved to teach me in her kitchen.”

“You’re adopted, then. You can’t be Italian with that fair skin and blue eyes.”

“I’m just a quarter Italian, the rest is English and Irish.” She needed to get the attention off herself. “Do you like to cook?”

“Some nights, though nothing fancy. A lot of nights I end up working late in the lab and I just grab takeout.”

“Is it strange—working with rats?”

“Why, do you find them unnerving?”

Phoebe shuddered a little. “Yes,” she said. “I—I can’t stand it when I see them on the subway tracks in New York.”

Duncan laughed that deep, melodic laugh of his. It was the kind of laugh that made you want to linger in a room with him.

“They have their charms, believe it or not. One of the things we’ve been studying is how cleverly they teach their pups. They make pretty good mothers, too—except, of course, when they eat their young for reasons we don’t quite understand.” He laughed again. “Sorry about that. Not the kind of comment I should be making over dinner.”

Phoebe smiled. “No problem—it’s very interesting stuff.” But she was anxious to get off that topic, too.

Duncan set down his fork and leaned back in his chair.

“So how did you end up writing about actors?”

“I’ve always found them intriguing—though not so much because of the sexcapades and outrageous behavior. I had a second cousin who had a fair amount of success doing TV and off-Broadway theater, and I could always see that she was desperately trying to be something she wasn’t. I kept wondering what demons she was running from. And as I began to do celebrity profiles, I saw that they all were trying to be something different than they were, that they all had these secrets. I love figuring out what makes them tick; there’s an exhilarating rush when I find a clue that helps me piece everything together.”

For the next few minutes they tossed around several different topics: why Duncan had chosen psychology as a field; Lyle’s issues as a college; and how different Gen Y was from their own generation. I like this, Phoebe thought.

They finished their pasta, and Phoebe realized that the night was going faster than she wanted it to.

“Would you like an espresso?” she asked, rising from the table. “I lugged my machine out here from the city.”

“That would be great,” Duncan said. “Let me help you clear, though.”

“No, no, there’s really so little to do.” She returned from the kitchen a few minutes later with the espresso, the fruit, and a plate of chocolate biscotti she’d discovered while searching quickly through the pantry.

Duncan peeled opened a tangerine, not saying anything but seeming content, comfortable with the silence.

“So how long have you been at the school?” Phoebe asked. “And is it a good fit for you?”

He was the one who looked away this time, as if gathering his thoughts, but she knew from experience that people broke eye contact when the other person’s words had thrown them off.

“About two years,” he said, looking back at her. “And it’s been pretty good. It’s just not the kind of place where I saw myself.”

“I hear it’s hard to get a job in academia these days.”

“It wasn’t that, actually.” He sounded grave. “I take it the campus grapevine hasn’t served up my personal story, then?”

She suddenly felt a prick of anxiety, though she wasn’t sure why. “No,” she said.

“My former wife’s parents were from Lyle. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago, and she wanted to come back here to die. I’d been teaching at Northwestern—we were living in Chicago—and fortunately a job opened up at the college here not long after we moved back.”

Phoebe realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it out slowly.

“And?” Phoebe asked haltingly.

“She died fifteen months ago. But ironically not from the cancer. She was in the final stages when she fell asleep reading in the bathtub and drowned.”

7

PHOEBE WOKE JUST after three with a jolt, her heartbeats tripping over each other. A sound, it seemed, had punctured her dream, but she could hear nothing now. She struggled up in bed, listening, straining to see with only the dim glow of the night-light.

Then she heard it again. Something was scampering over the roof. It’s just a squirrel, she told herself, one of the groups she sometimes saw in the tiny backyard. Just don’t let the damn things find their way into the attic, she prayed. She switched on her bedside lamp and let her eyes adjust. For some reason she felt unbearably thirsty. She threw off the covers and padded downstairs.

She flicked on the kitchen switch. Bright light burst into the room from the overhead fixture, like a flash going off. She poured a glass of water from the jug in the fridge and sat down at the small wooden table. Outside, the night pressed against the kitchen windows. She felt exposed suddenly, discomfited by all that darkness out there, so she took the water upstairs with her. As she settled herself in bed again, her back against the headboard, she replayed the evening in her mind.

The revelation Duncan had made toward the end of dinner had thrown her. She’d figured that he must have been married at some point and was now divorced, that he might even have older kids somewhere. The last thing she’d expected was a wife found dead in a bathtub.

“I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “These past couple of years must have been very hard.”

He pulled his mouth to one side. “Yes,” he said. “And yet not exactly in the way you’d expect. Allison and I had agreed to get a divorce just days before she was diagnosed with cancer. The marriage had become a disaster. But I wanted to stay with her during the last year of her life. Plus, I was the one with the health insurance.”

“That was good of you to do,” Phoebe said.

“Part of me actually thought that things might get better between us given the new set of circumstances, but I’m afraid that never happened.” He offered a small smile. “And as you can imagine, my experience as a widower has been pretty strange. People look at me with pity because they think I lost the woman I loved. That’s not to say I didn’t grieve, but my experience hasn’t been what people assume.”

“How much . . . sooner did she die than she would have from the cancer?”

The question was probably going farther than she should have, but Phoebe felt compelled to know. And he’d opened the door.

“A couple of months, maybe a bit longer,” he said. “Ordinarily someone might wake if they were taking in water while sleeping, but because she was so ill, her systems weren’t functioning right. I had warned her about falling asleep in the tub, but sometimes I wonder if she almost let it happen that night. I’d gone out to a school event—and remembered she’d seemed very down. When I came home two hours later, she was dead.”

He set down his espresso cup and leaned back. “So is this what always happens with you? People confess things they generally never tell a soul?”