“Later that day,” I answered. “She looked very weak. Like an old woman, frail.”
But she looked more than weak, more than frail. She looked devastated.
I had arrived home from school just a few minutes earlier and was busily making myself a peanut butter sandwich when I saw her make her way shakily down the stairs. The house was empty save for the two of us. Neither Laura nor Jamie had gotten back home yet, and my father was still at work in the hardware store downtown.
“She must have heard me fiddling around in the kitchen,” I told Rebecca. “That’s probably why she came down.” In my mind, I saw her drag herself down that long flight of stairs, still exhausted and probably in some kind of pain, so that she could say the three barely audible words as she drew herself into the kitchen.
“‘Welcome home, Stevie,’ that’s what she said to me. That’s all she said. Just ‘Welcome home, Stevie.’” I shook my head. “Poor Dottie,” I said. “She died in that same old red housedress she wore when she came down to the kitchen that afternoon.”
Rebecca’s pen stopped dead. “No, she didn’t,” she said. “She was killed in a regular skirt and blouse.”
“She was?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Why did you think she’d been wearing the red housedress?”
I shook my head, astonished and a little unnerved by my own weird conjectures. “I don’t know why I thought that,” I said.
Rebecca watched me with a kind of eerie wariness, as if, perhaps, she already did.
TWELVE
PETER WAS at the small desk in the den, intently tracing a map, when I got home from my evening with Rebecca. It was part of that night’s schoolwork, and he was working at it diligently, as he always did. He barely looked up as I passed, and when he did, a fringe of blond hair fell over his right eye.
“Hi, Dad,” he said, then returned to the map.
I nodded toward him as I headed on down the corridor. I could see the light shining in Marie’s office, and some part of me wanted to avoid it, to slink up the stairs, away from her increasingly uneasy gaze. But the stairs themselves rested at the end of the corridor. Only a ghost could have made it past her door unseen.
She was behind her desk, as usual, a classical piece playing softly in the background, something I didn’t recognize.
“How’s it going?” I asked casually as I stopped at her door.
She glanced up and smiled somewhat tiredly. “Fine,” she said. She was wearing her reading glasses, but she took them off to look at me thoughtfully for a moment, her face very quiet, one part of it in shadow, the other brightly illuminated by the lamp at her right.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” Marie answered in a strange, uncertain reply.
“All your projects moving along?”
It clearly struck her as a spiritless question, with an answer neither wanted nor expected, but she did not make an issue of it. Instead, her mind appeared to shift to a more casual concern. “I thought we might call out for a pizza for dinner,” she said.
I nodded. “Fine with me.”
The thoughtful look returned, studious, concentrated, as if she were trying to read something written on my forehead. “You’ve been getting home at such odd hours for the past few weeks, it’s hard to know exactly when to cook,” she said.
I nodded. “We’re finishing up a few big drafting jobs at the office,” I told her, though she had not asked for any further explanation of my unusual absences.
“Finishing up?” she asked. “So things should be back to normal soon?”
“Yeah, pretty soon.”
She smiled, though a little stiffly. “That’s good,” she said.
“Anything else?” I asked.
The question seemed to strike her as more serious than I had meant it. She looked at me solemnly. “Should there be?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of.”
“Okay,” Marie said, but with an unmistakable tone of resignation, as if a chance had been offered, but not taken. Then she reached for the phone, though her eyes never left me. “With anchovies?” she asked, in a voice that sounded unexpectedly sad.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I told her, drawing away from the door. “I just need to go wash up.”
I walked up the stairs to our bathroom and washed my hands. As I did so, the phrase Marie had used, “back to normal,” lingered uncomfortably in my mind. For Marie, it meant the return to a precious predictability and routine. To me, however, it meant the end of something exciting and full of unexpected discovery. As I dried my hands that evening, I felt like a man who’d lived for many years on a deserted island, only to spot, for a single, shining hour, the approach of a long white ship, the dream of rescue growing wildly with each passing moment, until, after an excruciating interval of anticipation, the great ship had drifted once again toward the far horizon, and, at last, disappeared beneath the flat gray of the sea.
