stilled, splayed. Purses and briefcases were scattered around. Carey had imagined Matt’s death so many times, seen it, thought of it. Now here it was, the street corner, the crowd. Pain crept up and stung at him. People clustered around Matt in the picture. A woman bent over him, caught by the camera looking up, eyes frightened wide.
The woman. He stopped. His skin felt like it was going to lift right off his body.
“What is it?” Maggie asked.
He pointed to the grainy, shaded picture. “That woman there? See?”
“I see,” said Maggie. The woman bending over Matt, yes, she had seen her a thousand times. Studied her face. “Nobody ever got her name. I’d have given anything to talk to her. Maybe he said something, at the end. If he did I’d like to know. But nobody knew who she was.”
“I may.”
His voice was a thin, hesitant thread, but it made her head snap up.
“It’s just possible — ”
“What?” Maggie felt all the air go out of her, leaving nothing.
“This is not a good picture. It’s not clear. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But.” He brought the tip of his finger to the grainy uplift of the woman’s face. “I think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that this could very well be . . .” He swallowed. “It looks like Gao Lan.”
Maggie burst out the front door of the building like somebody swimming up from the deep, holding it in, lungs screaming for air, her heart refusing, denying. On the sidewalk she could not get her breath. Everyone passing her was safe in a group, twos and threes and fours. She jostled and bumped among them, the only one alone. She’d had a pattern in her life once, a pattern of two. Her and Matt. No more.
If Gao Lan was with him the day he died, everything shifted. The wheel turned again. That meant they had a relationship. Then there was a much better chance Shuying was his, or at least that he believed she was his. If he even knew. Did he know? Maggie followed this scenario several moves down her mental game board. Matt may have known nothing of the other guy. He may have known only that his own timing had been right. That would have been enough. His generous nature, his goodness, would have done the rest. That and how much he was starting to want a child of his own. So maybe he knew, after all. Maybe he lied to Maggie more than she wanted to believe.
She felt she was falling down a dark hole. The man she’d always thought she’d known, who had lived in her memory all this past year, was ebbing. In his place there had materialized another, darker one, a shadow of her husband, a man who kept secrets and was divided. Ask me, he seemed to be saying to her. Ask me what really happened.
And yet she had known him, had she not? Was he not real then? He had been good. Remember that too.
She remembered the day she started bleeding mid-month, two years ago, a year before he died; she knew instantly something was not right. She called the doctor and they said to come in. She called Matt, just to let him know. He insisted that he would take her and she should wait there until he arrived.
He came in thirty minutes, calming her, encircling her, bundling her into the car. In the doctor’s office he stood next to her with his large-knuckled hand cupping her shoulder. She had fibroids, the doctor said. Bed rest until the heavy bleeding stopped. No getting up except to go to the bathroom.
“I’ll take care of her,” said Matt.
“It should stop within twelve hours, or call me. By the way, these don’t tend to get better. And they can complicate pregnancy. So if you’re going to have kids you might want to do it soon.” He glanced at the chart. “You’re thirty-eight,” he said to Maggie, and to Matt he said, “You’re . . . ?”
“Forty-two.”
“I see,” said the doctor. “Well.”
Maggie felt she might cry.
Matt saw. “Thank you,” he said, his voice firm. “We appreciate what you said.” He talked the doctor out of the room, steered Maggie out the door and to the car, took her home, and put her to bed. For a long time, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, he lay on the bed beside her. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “He doesn’t know