“Peter fell out by the pool,” she said. “He hit his head.”
“Is he all right?” I asked quickly.
“He’s fine,” Marie answered stiffly. “That’s not the point now.”
I knew what the point was. I could sense it hurling toward me like the head of a spear.
“I had to take him to the hospital,” Marie went on. “The doctor wanted him to stay there a little while, and I thought you’d want to come and be with him.”
“Well, of course I’d want to …”
She lifted her hand to stop me. “I drove to the office to get you, Steve, but you weren’t there. No one was there except the night watchman. He told me that no one had been in the office all night.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Not Wally or any of those other men you said were going to meet you there.”
I struggled to save what I could see sinking in the murky gray water, my wife, my son, sinking away from me forever.
“Marie, I was …”
“I know where you were,” Marie said coolly, though without to amputate the diseased and frightful limb.
“You were with her,” she said, lifting a small square of white paper toward me.
From my place in the doorway, I could see the large block letters Peter had printed so neatly across the page: REBECCA .
I shook my head. “Marie, it’s different, it’s …”
She rose gracefully, like an ancient woman warrior, beleaguered, betrayed, her forces wounded all around, but still in full command. “I guess I always expected that you’d have some little fling somewhere along the way,” she said, then added, “most men do.”
“Marie, I …”
Again her hand rose, palm out, silencing me.
“But I never expected you to forget us, Steve,” she said, “I never expected you to forget Peter and me.”
I said nothing.
“And you did that,” Marie said. “You forgot us. Maybe only for a little while, but an hour would have been enough.”
She stepped out from behind the desk and headed for the door. The force of her character pressed me out into the corridor as she swept by me, marched down the hallway, then ascended the stairs. As she disappeared up them, I would have died to hold her, died to kiss her, died to have been the man she had always expected me to be.
I was still standing, stunned and speechless, when she came down the stairs again, this time with Peter sleeping in her arms. I could see the white bandage with its single spot of blood wrapped around his delicate blond head. I knew that she was going to her parents’ home in the mountains. She would stay with them awhile, but only long enough to get her bearings. Then she would make her life over again, in some other place, perhaps even with some other man. Certainly, she would never come back to Old Salsbury or to me.
“Marie,” I said softly, calling to her.
She turned as she reached the door, glancing back toward me, her face framed by the dark window, the space between us completely silent except for the hollow patter of the rain.
“Marie,” I said again.
She looked at me almost mercifully, no longer as a husband, but only as another man who had lost his way. “Things weren’t perfect,” she said. “They never are.” She watched me for a moment longer, as if in grave regret that what had been so obvious to her could have been so lost to me. “Things were missing, I know that,” she added. “Things always are.” She paused, her two dark eyes upon me like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “But it was never love, Steve,” she said in her final words to me, “it was never love that was missing.”
She turned then, and headed out into the rain. I walked down the corridor, parted the curtains, and watched as she laid Peter down in the back seat, then drew herself in behind the wheel. As she let the car drift down the driveway, I saw her eyes lift toward our bedroom window, close slowly as the car continued backward, then open again as it swung to the left and out into the slick, rainswept street.
Within an instant, she was gone.
For the next few hours, I wandered the house like a man who had awakened in a foreign city. Nothing looked familiar anymore. I heard ghostly, floating voices that seemed to speak to me in a language I had once understood, but which my long neglect had made incomprehensible, a language of connection, of duty, of belonging, a language which spoke of things present, rather than things missing, and as I listened to that language, I yearned for the oldest and most familiar objects in a house that was suddenly brand-new.
I don’t remember into exactly what part of that house I had wandered when, hours later, I heard the knock at the door.
Two men were standing on the small porch when I opened it, one younger, bareheaded, one older, with glasses and a large gray hat.
“Steven Farris?” the older one said.
I nodded.
He reached into the pocket of his rain-soaked jacket and brought out a small, yellow badge. “Could you come with us, please?”
I rode in the back of a dark, unmarked car. I don’t remember anything being said between the time I got in and the moment when the car finally pulled in behind a large brick building that I didn’t recognize. I’m sure they spoke to me, but I can’t remember what they said.
