answer to everything. “I don’t know of any statistics on times of suicides, but it does seem unusual to wake up and take your own life.”
“Jean did love her sleep,” he offers as a possible reason. Some days she didn’t even dress, just moved from the bed to the couch, to the patio lounge chair, back to the couch, and then the bed again. So much of her life horizontal. Sometimes when she was sleeping he’d climb in next to her, feel the warmth radiating into his cold body.
“You said your wife took an overdose of …”
“Seconals.” He pictures her picking up the pill bottle, noting the dosage. What was Jean’s singular emotion as she unscrewed the cap? Was she anxious or at ease, depressed or euphoric? So much of life is one thing or another, a dialectical world. Would the moment have passed if the cap stuck at first, childproof—would that have given her pause?
“Did your wife leave a note?”
“That wouldn’t be like Jean. She wasn’t one to sum up things. Her whole life was the note. She knew I’d understand that.”
“Do you?”
“Understand? Of course. She was raped.”
“How do you know that was the reason she committed suicide twenty-five years later?”
“I lived with her for twenty of those years.”
“Most rape victims carry the pain of the experience throughout their lives, but they don’t kill themselves.”
“Good for them.”
“I wasn’t debating the legitimacy of your wife’s feelings, Mr. Chambers.”
“Would her suicide be any more legitimate if I told you she became pregnant from the rape?”
She looks up with interest. “Are you telling me that?”
He tips his head just slightly. Sometimes a nod can say so much more than words.
“Did she have the child?”
“No.”
“An abortion?”
“No.”
“What then?” As if the possibilities have been exhausted.
“She had trouble giving birth. They had to cut the baby out of her. A boy. He was born dead.”
Her face twists up in a mother’s expression of ache, a sympathetic response.
“Interesting way to put it,” Paul says, “born dead. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it.”
“That’s a terrible thing for a young girl to cope with.”
“Jean didn’t cope. She blamed herself for getting raped and then for losing the baby.”
“Did you blame her for that, too?”
“I told her once, ‘He ruined your life, and you ruined ours.’ I’d say that’s blaming her.”
“Resentment is natural,” she says automatically, and he wonders how often she has repeated this worthless observation. She even feels compelled to continue her point, as if sharing rare insight. “Spouses of people fighting cancer for years often get so fatigued being the caregiver that they lash out at their loved one sometimes, as if it’s their fault they’re sick.”
What does cancer have to do with it? People die from cancer. Women live with rape. He says, “It’s comforting to know that I reacted like so many other resentful spouses.”
She ignores this obvious sarcasm. “Did your wife know her attacker?”
“Does that make a difference?”
“Often it does. A rape by a stranger is random, and so the victim tends to become fearful of all strangers. A rape by someone she knows can lead to fear of friends, even family and intimates.”
Intimates—so that is the category in which he falls. An intimate without intimacy. “She knew him.”
“Was her attacker arrested?”
“The rapist was never arrested. Jean never went to the police.”
Her face takes on a look of recognition, eyes widening, and a slight nod. “That’s quite common, unfortunately. Did your wife reveal who he was?”
“She told me who he is. He has a wonderful life going, it seems. Loving wife, beautiful child. Of course, you can’t really tell about lives from the outside, can you? Maybe it’s a cold, loveless marriage. Maybe they have a troubled little brat of a kid. I’m sure he hasn’t told her about his rape. Secret lives are interesting, don’t you think, how much energy it takes to keep up the illusion that you’re a nice person when you know inside that you aren’t?”
“Do you know where this man lives?” she asks. She has so many of her own questions to get through, and only an hour to do it.
“That’s why I’m here.”
She looks up at him. “The man who raped your wife lives in Red Paint?”
“Is that so surprising, a rapist in the friendliest town in Maine?”
“There are rapists everywhere, of course. Did you come here to find him?”
“No, I was just passing through and thought, Wait a second, isn’t this the place where Jean said her rapist lives? Maybe I should look the