Her husband had been killed.
She blinked rapidly, stood looking down in a daze at Casey as they moved into the elevator, passengers shuffling with their suitcases between their feet, crowding in. Casey hated it when elevators were full, her face forced into people’s asses and groins—usually said something loudly so that they’d give her a wide berth. But at the moment she was saying nothing. Her eyes were on the floor in front of her, her shoulders bent. Susan stood over her in a shroud of self-absorption: she was a pillar of salt, Lot’s wife.
She would be, from now on, that woman with the robbed and stabbed husband—from now until she died herself, till she herself was personally dead.
The woman with the stabbed husband: a kind, faded, betrayed man, if they knew him as she did. The one who bled to death in a gutter, bled out by himself, with no one there who loved him or even knew who he was—only a body to them. A body in a slum, a gutter, another country. Her epitaph, since it was her actions that had driven him there, wasn’t it? Without that particular adultery, that passing and mundane instance, he would never have flown out in the first place: without it he would still be here. He would be driving to work, he would be coming home as he always did, regular as clockwork, in the late afternoon.
She felt sickened—glancing through her was a nauseating unease, a dreadful suspicion. She tried not to feel it, talked to herself instead to cover the noise of her own thoughts, a stream of silent chatter doggedly opposed to both the sickness and the suspicion. It was fully trivial next to death, but her own identity had also been spirited away when the thief took the wallet, which had, it turned out, almost nothing in it. A mistake in judgment, an instantaneous mistake. If only someone had told the thief there were only traveler’s checks in that wallet, if someone had taken him aside . . . her own identity, a side effect, was sunk and submerged in this new description, the stabbed-husband woman. As Hal lost his life she lost her own, as Hal was a murder victim she was an extension of him. That slut, that slut with the husband who got stabbed to death.
It made her feel better to think selfishly. She should think steadily of herself, not of Hal. Then she would not feel sickened, there would be less of an ache because she herself was a safe and mundane subject. There was no pain in thinking of herself. Though—maybe it was her, maybe she had done it, made a victim of him in the same way, in a slasher movie, the woman of low morals was doomed from the start, the buxom blonde in tight clothes good for nothing but ogling and murdering, her future blank save for the pending role as punished dead harlot.
Until this moment, she realized as the doors dinged open, she had been Casey’s mother, but now she was Hal’s killer. That was where her suspicion led.
She wanted to cry but her eyes were dry.
OK. Somehow, maintain composure. Her daughter was here, after all. Not to break down, not to. She would have another cigarette if she could, even a pack of them. Get Robert to buy them for her, call him and basically order them. Make him come to the house and be her servant. Or at least her waiter. A glass of wine. A highball.
She saw that Casey’s eyes were filling as she rolled out of the elevator and she tried to keep close to her daughter, confused, forgetting where to walk, where the car should be parked. Casey’s cheeks were damp and her mouth was clamped tightly closed, likely to keep her chin from trembling. Who could remember where they had left the car? Would they find it again?
But here it was. The car was beside them.
She stayed in Casey’s apartment till after T. had left and all of Casey’s friends were gone, into the small hours. Casey shrank inward, huddled under the blankets on her bed, and Susan sat on a chair beside it. After a while she lay down parallel, her arm around the thin shoulders, propping herself up on an elbow now and then to smooth the hair back from her daughter’s wet face. Under normal conditions Casey had a bravado that passed for strength, but she had crumpled like