She drank her tea, staring into the dark brew.
“That’s about all I’m going to tell you, Duck. It lasted a year, until Sarah disappeared. Each time he pushed it further until finally, well…you’ve seen the drawings. Sometimes you were there, sleeping, sometimes I went alone. He said if I ever told anyone, he’d testify to that Young Playwrights Foundation, or whatever the hell it was, that you’d plagiarized your script. They’d take away your award and your career would be shit before it even started. I didn’t know if it would matter or not, but I couldn’t let him do that to you. Maybe he was bluffing, but how was I supposed to know? I was too scared to confront him. And then … when Sarah drowned…”
It was the first time she’d ever said it: Sarah drowned.
“…I thought the police might put him away—get him out of my life forever. It was wrong—I knew that almost immediately. So was burning down his house. I was so pissed at you that I went straight to Clyde, but you did the right thing, refusing to help. I was out of control. If Ronan hadn’t left…but he did, and then it was over. Except in my head.”
She grabbed her prescription bottle of Xanax from the counter and shook out a half-pill, popping it into her mouth and swallowing it with the last of the tea. I looked up at the fan; if you stared long enough, the individual blades became invisible—all you could see was the blur of circular motion.
“I know it’s weird that we never slept together, Donnie, but …every time I have sex I still think of that bastard, and I never wanted that to be part of you and me. Maybe that’s why I’m usually with guys I kind of hate. I know I messed up—we should have been together all these years. Sometimes I slept with guys just to see if those feelings would stop. It’s sick, right? I thought if you and I were ever together like that it would ruin the one good thing I’ve had in my life, except for Jill, which is you and me. And that’s it…” She tapped her hands on the table in a drum roll. “That’s all, folks.”
There was so much more I needed to know, so many questions, but I didn’t want to push her, not then. She placed the cap back on the pill bottle, her bare feet crossed at the ankles, her pink toes touching the floor. There’d be plenty of time to filter those years through a new, darker lens, to create revisionist histories and myriad interpretations, but now all that mattered was this specific moment.
I reached across the table and touched her hand.
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyes began to tear. “You’d better be.”
“I should have known. I trusted him. I thought … I don’t know …everyone loved us and we were indestructible. We were the mad ones.”
“You were asleep,” she said. Our fingers intertwined. “You were asleep and in love.”
“If you had told me…”
She looked away. “I can forgive you for almost anything, Donatello, except the word ‘if’.”
I nodded, my hand sliding over hers, my thumb pressing circles around her slight, tender wrist, my palm warm to the touch of her skin. Her other hand wrapped with mine, and we sat without words, the refrigerator humming, the clock above the sink ticking steadily.
“And now we don’t talk about it,” Amy said, “which should be easy, since we’ve been practicing for twenty years.”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Upstairs the toilet flushed, and we heard Jill’s footsteps as she padded back to her room.
“Watching those videos of you and Sarah …I miss her,” I said.
“God, so do I.”
We walked back into the living room, where Maddie was asleep on the couch, but you could play a DVD on Amy’s old laptop. I crept over to the TV and ejected the disc. Amy adjusted the blanket over Maddie’s legs before shutting the lamp, and I followed her upstairs to her bedroom, the DVD held carefully between my fingers, all those moments that we’d once considered infinite reduced to the time travel of pixels and scratchy megabytes of sound. But thank God for time travel.
Amy’s bed was an explosion of blankets and sheets, a wall of fat pillows stacked against the headboard. There were empty cookie boxes and yogurt cups on the floor, a brown, withered banana peel next to the lamp. The air conditioner hummed softly in the corner window.
Her laptop was on the nightstand, a peace symbol sticker plastered on its front, and I handed her the disc.
“We miss you Sarah, wherever you are!” Amy said.
We climbed into bed, and Amy hit Play.
. . . . .
Though she invited me to stay, spending the night seemed like a mistake, and once she dosed off, her pretty head slumped against the pillow, I pecked her cheek, then scooted out the door.
It was past midnight, the streets dark and still, and it reminded me of the times I would leave the Carpenter house late at night, Amy asleep on the couch, Sarah nestled in her room, Scarf-Hat standing guard at the foot of the bed. Sometimes
