Now You See Her Page 0,16

in various neutral shades: cream-colored walls, crisp white bedspreads, light beechwood furniture. The only real color came from several exuberant paintings by Irish artists, one on the far wall, another over the bed. The effect was at once understated and luxurious, a heady mix of old-school restraint and modern decadence.

Rather like the man lying on his back in the middle of the queen-size bed, a white sheet wrapped lazily around his still-slender torso, Marcy thought, watching the steady rise and fall of Vic’s chest as he slept. She’d always liked a man with hair on his chest, had never really understood what today’s women found attractive about someone who’d been shaved and waxed to within an inch of his life. Hairy chests were like English gardens, unruly and vaguely chaotic, yet strong and stubbornly resilient. There was just something so reassuringly grown-up about a hairy chest, she thought, returning to the bed and perching on its edge.

But then there were all sorts of areas where she and other women parted company on what constituted sex appeal. For one thing, she wasn’t overly fond of muscles. A well-defined pair of biceps tended to make her more anxious than aroused. As did men in uniforms of any kind, including the mailman. You’re worse than my poodle, Judith had once said, chastising her. And how many women could say they actually enjoyed the sound of a man snoring? How many found such a sound not only comforting but life affirming? When she was a child, there were nights when she would tiptoe into her parents’ bedroom during one of her mother’s unexplained and extended absences, and she would lie down on the floor at the foot of their bed, soaking up her father’s prodigious snores, which filled the room like a lullaby, assuring her of his continuing presence as she reluctantly gave herself over to sleep.

Peter never snored, although he claimed she did. “Why do you have to sleep on your back?” he’d say accusingly, as if her snoring was something she was doing deliberately to provoke him. And then increasingly, as the years passed and more grievances surfaced: “Do you have to move around so much?” “Do you know you talk in your sleep?” “Can’t you ever just lie still?” Until one morning about a year after Devon’s accident she woke up to find Peter’s side of the bed empty, and when she’d gone to look for him, she’d found him asleep in the guest bedroom.

He never came back.

Five months later, he moved out altogether.

All he’d taken were his clothes and his golf clubs.

Marcy sighed, reaching her hand out to touch Vic’s cheek, then withdrawing it before she made contact, returning it to her lap. What on earth had possessed her to sleep with a man she barely knew, a man she’d met on a bus, for God’s sake, a man who was still grieving the death of his first wife even after divorcing his second? Grief makes us do funny things, he’d said.

Was it grief that had brought her to his bed?

Or was it gratitude?

I think a mother knows her own child, he’d said, and she’d actually had to hold herself back from leaping across the table, crawling into his lap, and smothering his face with kisses. Yes, thank you, you believe me!

At last, somebody believes me.

Was that all it took?

Or maybe it was hope that had brought her here. Hope that had let a virtual stranger undress and caress her, hope that had allowed her to respond so eagerly to his touch, hope that because Devon was alive, so too was she, that two people hadn’t drowned on that horrible, cold October day, and that she could finally spit out the water that had been trapped in her lungs for far too long, inhale and exhale without feeling a knife plunging into her chest.

Devon was alive, which meant Marcy had been given a second chance, a chance to make things right, a chance for both of them to be happy again.

Had they ever truly been happy?

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” she remembered asking one July night almost exactly five years ago. The night when everything changed. The night she had to stop pretending they were a normal family, that everything would be okay.

It was after midnight. Devon had been out partying with friends. Marcy was lying in bed, Peter asleep beside her. She’d been drifting in and out of consciousness, having never been fully able to give in to sleep until