and my work is not good. If I am too happy then I have no perspective, and my work is not good. If I am too far gone then I spend days scratching my arms apart instead of making pictures, and my work is not good. And then the world calls me a killer, a bad mother. They look at me like a specimen in a jar. But my sales rise. My name builds.
I must figure out how to be exactly the right level of insane.
15.
KATE
Kate woke up early, starting awake from a bad dream. The sky outside the window was like the inside of an oyster shell, shiny white, blue at the edges. She was briefly confused by the presence of another body in the bed. Theo had taken most of the covers and huddled them around himself like a burrito, squashing his face into the pillow. Somehow, this made Kate embarrassed, as if he had been the one to catch her sleeping. They both smelled like sex. She needed to shower.
In the bathroom, she saw the same details she had absorbed all those weeks ago, when she had first started nosing around the house: the utilitarian green bar of soap, the carefully stored electric toothbrush, the medicine cabinet that hid his pills.
And now he was out there, thinking she had never seen any of this before. Thinking he had let her into his private world, when she had been there all along. She swallowed and turned the shower on extra hot.
When she walked back into the bedroom, Theo was waking up.
“Shh,” she said, in response to his inarticulate groan. “Go back to sleep.”
He stretched his arms over his head. “You don’t have to go.”
“Yes, I do.”
He encircled her wrist with his fingers—a perfect fit—and pulled her to him. Kate let herself fall, but not all the way, catching herself on the mattress with her free hand. She laughed as he kissed her lips, her throat. In the bathroom mirror, she had discovered a hickey there, the flesh still darkening to a bruise.
“Stop.” Wiggle away. “The kids will be up soon.”
Theo fell back onto his pillow and groaned again. “The kids.”
Outside, the fog grasped Kate like a handshake, like an old friend. She wrung her hair out over the porch and smiled as the flagstones darkened beneath her, the water bringing forth the stone’s hidden veins.
* * *
When Kate walked through Louise and Frank’s front door, she found her aunt in the kitchen, anxiously chewing her thumbnail. Bathrobe and shearling slippers. She jumped up when she saw Kate, her face pure relief.
“Thank God,” she said fervently. She went into the living room and called down the hallway. “Frank! Katie’s back!”
Frank skidded into the kitchen and gathered her in a hug. “There you are. Are you all right?”
Kate hugged him back, bewildered. Fatigue rolled over her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is everyone okay?”
“You didn’t come back last night.” Louise wrung her hands. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. Seeing her without it (the pale eyelashes; the tiny capillaries that threaded through her cheeks) made Kate feel vulnerable by proxy. “Didn’t you see our texts?”
“My phone died. I didn’t think…” She trailed off.
It had never occurred to her to tell Louise and Frank that she was staying over at Theo’s. After all, at what point should she have called them? While Theo was reading his kids their bedtime stories? While he was going down on her? And what should she have said? Sorry won’t be home—busy fucking my boss?
She was used to living in New York, where the weekend subways were filled with people saggy-eyed from getting banged into oblivion the night before. Every time someone left her apartment after dinner or a party, she said, “Text me when you get home,” but half the time they forgot. It was an air kiss: you did it for show, not contact.
“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she said.
“We thought maybe there was an accident coming back from your lake trip.”
“No, there wasn’t any accident.” Kate tried to keep her voice patient. “It just got late and I stayed the night.”
They kept staring. She wondered if she would have to spell it out for them, or if she was supposed to pretend that she had stayed in the spare room. That was ridiculous. She was thirty years old. It seemed a little late in life to be lying about having sex. But admitting it outright would mean opening it up for conversation, which she didn’t