You disappeared into Jake and Theo and your art, always your fucking art. And now I ask you how you are, and you come at me acting like I’m a predator. That’s why we don’t talk. Because you’re a shitty friend.
She got up then and went over to Theo and bent down to look at what he was digging. Eventually we went back to the house, ate turkey, laughed, on the surface we returned to normal. I know she’ll never forgive me. For what I said, and for not trusting her with the truth.
I know I was wrong to say it. But I had no choice. If I hadn’t distracted her, she would have kept pushing. She would have gotten me to tell her about what Jake does sometimes. And there are days when I think the only thing holding me together is the fact that no one else knows.
NOVEMBER 23 1990
Lynn and Candace left at last. Dust behind their wheels, the last particles of trust.
No rain here for days. I was waiting for the storm and it came. I triggered it: I poked at Jake about his painting, how it was coming along. Sudden fight about how he couldn’t work with those people in his house, how I made him do all the work, how I’m an ungrateful cunt. He hit me across the face, which he never does because it leaves marks. I fell down on the floor. I tried to pull myself up using the dining table. My hand closed over the letter opener Hal sent last spring in honor of some milestone. For a moment I thought I would use it. I could imagine it so clearly: the opener up to its hilt in his chest. His surprised face. Pulling it out, the metal slick with his blood. The monogram would catch the blood like ink in an engraving plate. Burgundy red: MB.
My hand relaxed. I released the table and fell back onto the rug. Sometimes it’s easier not to try. When I looked over my shoulder, Jake was leaving the room, and Theo was watching from the door.
Yes, Lynn, I am different now. I didn’t know fear before. I didn’t know how it could shape you. Make you do things you didn’t want to do. I didn’t know how it lives in you like dye, like a stain that will never come out. How it works its way through you until your blood is made of it, until it is fear that pushes oxygen through your veins, fear that pumps your heart, open and shut, open and shut. The fear has no subject. It has no ground. It has only me, and some days it eats me alive.
18.
KATE
As July slipped over the cusp into August, Kate’s days changed shape, like a bubble distorting in midair. By unspoken agreement, she and Theo came to a schedule of sorts. They worked separately through the morning, then spent the lunch hour in bed. Despite the routine, the sex still felt spontaneous, urgent, inventive. After, they lay talking about anything and everything unrelated to his family—what they had been like in high school, where they wanted to travel, whether they believed in God. Food was an afterthought: cold sandwiches while hunched over spreadsheets, protein bars devoured on her walk home.
“I haven’t had fruits or vegetables in three days,” she told him one day. “I’m going to be the first person in the world to get scurvy from having sex.”
“Rotted flesh,” he said. “Hot.”
“That’s leprosy.”
“Yum.”
The next day, she found an orange sitting on the dining room table. An imperfect sphere, dimpled like a golf ball, practically glowing. When she bit into the first wedge, it was juicy and almost spicy, like liquid gold.
* * *
It had been so difficult, that morning when Theo came back from the shower, towel around his waist and his wet hair ridged by a comb, not to demand he tell her what he had done with the diary. The shock of its disappearance was quickly followed by fear—did he know she had been reading it? Was that why he had moved it?—and then, in the days that followed, by a sense of resolution. Surely he would have mentioned if he had known she was reading it. He had probably moved it for another reason, maybe to keep Oscar or Jemima away. So her task was the same as it had been: figure out what had happened to Miranda.