Best Intentions (23 page)

I
t is close to midnight when I slip my keys in the door and slowly turn the lock. My hand is quivering—from the cold, from exhaustion, from a rage that is not yet spent—and it takes three tries before I can open it.

Inside, the apartment is black, silent, coated with sleep.

I kick off my shoes and leave them by the front door to pad barefoot down the hall. I look in on Phoebe first, cocooned inside her quilt. She always folds it in half lengthwise and wriggles within, safe, enclosed, another smaller blanket wrapped around her head. For all of her daytime adventurousness she prefers to be confined in sleep, swaddled. I lean over, kiss her warm, soft cheek, the only part of her still rounded with the last reminder of baby fat.

I leave quietly and go into Claire's room, heavy with the scent of the powdery perfume she bought with her allowance last week, Claire fumbling at femininity, those tentative early steps when you spend hours staring into the mirror trying to figure out your potential attractions, though real sexual longing, the catalyst for all of the efforts and insecurities, is still vague, viewed from a distance, at least for a little while more. I rest my lips on her silky tangled hair, breathe her in.

What will their worlds be like tomorrow?

Sam is sleeping, snoring lightly. I managed to send him a text an hour or two ago telling him I had to work late and not to wait up. Still, it surprises me that he took me at my word, that it is so easy for him. I have no idea what time he got home or when Marissa left. I shut off my phone as soon as I pressed “send.” I look down at him, the contours of his body, the way he has tucked a blanket between his knees, all so familiar. Everything I believed about him, every assumption, was based on a false foundation; the past I thought we had been standing on was illusory.

I lean over, my fists clenched.

I want to pummel him, to bash my knuckles into his impassive, untroubled sleeping face until he starts, wakes, sees me, finally sees me as I now see him. I want him to know that I know.

I stand there, leaning over him, trying to breathe.

He doesn't wake, doesn't sense me.

I do not have the language, cannot summon the words that would give voice to the depths of my wounds and my infinite anger, and I will not risk waking the girls with what will surely rise far above a whisper.

I do the only thing I can do—I walk away from him.

When I do confront him, I need to be in control, to be cooler, harder than this.

Tomorrow, after the girls go to school and we are alone.

Until then I will, quite literally, lie in wait.

I take a pillow and blanket to the couch, where I stare at the car lights flickering across the windows, unable to sleep. My brain is fragmented, I can no longer hold on to any emotion for more than a few seconds before it is supplanted by another. It seems a lifetime ago that I was sitting in that bar with David, though it is only, what, seven hours? Time has slowed down, fractured. My mouth is dry but I do not have the energy to get up for water. I pull the blanket over my head. Like Phoebe, I want a layer between myself and the world. Maybe if I burrow deep enough it will all just fade away.

I must have drifted off somehow. The next thing I know sounds
from the kitchen begin to creep into my consciousness. It takes me a moment to remember where I am before the knowledge of last night smashes into me, a thud that will not stop. I sit up, shake the numbness from my fists I had clenched even in my sleep. I can hear the girls rustling around in their rooms, beginning to get ready for school. I don't want them to find me here, waking up half-dressed on the living room couch, I don't want to have to come up with explanations yet for a fissure it will soon be impossible to hide.

Sam is in the kitchen making breakfast. I cannot fathom how I can look at him with any degree of false equanimity, I can no longer pretend even for the girls' sake. Before Phoebe and Claire emerge I sneak back into my bedroom, close the door and strip off the rest of my clothes. I take a shower, letting the hot water pour over and over me for as long as possible, trying to run out the clock.

I hear Sam knocking on the bathroom door. “Are you okay?” he calls out.

I don't answer. I soap my legs, my arms.

“Lisa?”

I do not want him to open the door, I do not want to see him. “I'm taking a shower.”

“I realize that. But you've been in there forever.”

“Can't you get the girls ready?” I retort. “Just this once?”

I cannot hear his hiss of aggravation but I'm sure that it is there.

He stays there—I can feel him, it makes me grit my teeth—for a minute more and then he leaves me be.

Fifteen minutes later, I come out, wrapped in a robe, just as the girls are shimmying into their coats.

“Mom overslept,” Phoebe proclaims happily, as if she is storing up ammunition for a future argument.

I lean over, kiss her. “It happens to the best of us, sweetie.”

“You never let it happen to me.”

“I've told you, it's my job to annoy you as much as possible. That includes making sure you get to school on time.”

I turn to Claire, who pulls out her MetroCard and waves it in front of me before I can ask for it.

She is just slipping on her thirty-pound backpack, festooned with political buttons and miniature fuzzy animal key chains—even her bag is caught between two worlds—when the doorbell rings.

I look quizzically at Sam, who shakes his head, as confused as I am. It is only 7:30 a.m. No one has ever come by at this hour.

Sam runs his hand through his sleep-matted hair and steps up to the front door. “Who is it?” he asks.

“Detective Larry Callahan. NYPD.”

Sam glances at me for an explanation but I have none. All four of us are here, accounted for, safe. There is no reason to panic.

I watch as Sam tentatively opens the door. “Can I help you?”

The detective, a tall, wiry man with washed-out, almost colorless hair, freckled hands and an impassive face, shows Sam his badge before sliding it effortlessly back into his coat pocket. “Is Lisa Barkley here?”

I tighten the sash on my bathrobe. “I'm Lisa. What is this about?”

“Can I come in?” Detective Callahan asks. His voice is deeper than his thin body might lead you to expect, as if he had purposefully lowered it as a young man to lend a sense of heft and authority his physical lightness had denied him.

“Of course.”

He steps in and, glancing around, notices the girls standing in the doorway watching him.

“These are our daughters, Claire and Phoebe.”

Callahan offers up a professional smile that puts no one at ease. “Nice to meet you,” he says, with the formality of one who is not used to dealing with children and would prefer to keep it that way.

The girls nod shyly. It is obvious that Callahan is not going to say anything further in their presence. The five of us stand there, directionless, stumped.

Sam snaps out of it first. “All right, girls. You'd better get going or you'll be late for school.”

They button their coats and submit to our self-conscious good-bye kisses, glancing back at the stranger in the foyer.

“Don't forget to call when you get off the bus,” I admonish as they head out.

The presence of a police detective forestalls the standard eye-rolling and they dutifully agree.

We watch as they press for the elevator, wait for it in silence, get in. Only then does Sam close the door.

It is just the three of us now.

“I'm sorry to barge in on you this way,” the detective says.

“What is this about?” Sam asks.

The detective turns to me, his narrow eyes, beneath their pale fringe of lashes, blinking as if he had just gotten something in them. “Are you acquainted with Deirdre Cushing?”

“Yes, is she all right?”

“I'm afraid I have some rather bad news.”

A coldness begins to snake down my spine. I can see Sam standing up straighter as well, instinctively bracing himself. There is still room for denial, though: whatever it is won't be, it can't be, that bad. Perhaps it is a different Deirdre Cushing, not ours.

“She was found dead early this morning,” the detective says.

I gasp, a loud gurgling sound I don't recognize escaping from someplace deep within.

“What do you mean?” Sam asks. “What happened?”

“We don't know yet. Her next-door neighbor came home around two a.m. and found Miss Cushing's front door open. She knocked to tell her and when there was no answer, she went in. She found Miss Cushing lying on the floor.” Callahan reports with a lack of modulation, his tone a marriage of sympathy and procedure.

“You're sure it's her?”

“Her neighbor identified the body.”

“Was there an accident?” I ask. My voice sounds far away, childlike and tinny, disconnected from my body.

“We don't know exactly what happened yet,” Callahan says. “There were no signs of forced entry and nothing appears
to be missing. But it does appear there was a struggle. We'll know more after we get the autopsy results but the medical examiner places the time of death between approximately nine and eleven p.m.”

Blackness encroaches, all that is left is a tiny pinhole of refracted light.

“Ma'am? Maybe you'd better sit down.” He's done this before, of course, worse—told mothers they had lost their children, asked husbands to identify mangled bodies. He is practiced at breaking bad news and knows the signs of a fainter, knows, too, that part of his job is to note the response. I can feel him watching me with a detached concern.

Sam leads me to a chair in the kitchen. I stare down, it seems like a totally foreign object to me, I can't quite remember what chairs are for. He gently guides me into it just as my legs give way and then sits beside me, both of us lost.

“How did you know to come here?” Sam asks.

“We looked on Miss Cushing's cell phone for a family member to contact. Your wife is listed as her ICE person.”

My throat constricts as if I am being strangled, I can't get enough air. Sam reaches for me, making a soothing sound, ssshhhh, that seems as if it is coming from another room.

Callahan waits until I have gained a modicum of control. “Does she have family we should contact?” he asks.

I am her family. Or was. Or thought I was. Until last night.

“Her parents are both dead.”

“I see. How well did you know Miss Cushing?”

I stare at him, too woozy to speak, his words, his question swimming about me.

“They've been best friends since college,” Sam replies for me.

“I realize how difficult this is for you,” Callahan says. “But we could use whatever help you can give us.”

“Of course,” I manage to get out.

“When was the last time you saw Miss Cushing?”

I shut my eyes and see us, the two of us. “We had breakfast last week.” The Gramercy Park coffeehouse and the organic oatmeal and her talk of Jack and all the while she was lying to me.

“I'm sorry, I couldn't quite hear you.”

“Wednesday. I had breakfast with her last Wednesday.”

The detective is writing everything down in a little spiral pad. I am conscious of my words going straight to the paper.

“Have you spoken to her since?” he asks.

“Yes, a few times.”

“Yesterday?”

I stare at him.

“Ma'am?”

“No, I didn't speak to her yesterday,” I mumble.

“And you didn't see her?”

“No.”

“All right. The last time you saw her, did she say anything that might have indicated she was in trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“Of any sort. What about boyfriends? Was she seeing someone?”

Fucking bitch, Jack said. I hear the venom, the pure hatred. “She's not going to get away with this. Not this time.”

I shake my head. It's not possible.

Callahan is studying me. “Ma'am?”

I glance over at Sam, his head bent, entranced by his fingertips, the side of his cheek pulled in between his teeth. She was seeing my husband, I think. But just as quickly a sense of shame and embarrassment overtakes me, as if Sam's affair reveals a flaw on my part. The instinct to protect, to keep our dirty laundry private overwhelms logic, honesty, it puts it all on hold. I need to talk to Sam first, alone. The omission is a split-second decision. I regret it even as I execute it.

“Jack Handel,” I tell Callahan. “She was seeing Jack Handel.”

“Is there any reason to believe they were having problems?”

Fucking bitch, Jack said.

“Yes, there might have been.” I pause, trying to find words to convey Jack's state of mind and his anger without admitting the cause. I have dug myself into a hole that I cannot see my way out of. Layers of the mistake are already piling over me. “They had a volatile relationship.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“He's in the middle of relocating here from Boston. He was looking at an apartment in the East Twenties but he hadn't bought it yet. I have his cell phone number.”

Callahan writes all this down and then looks up again. “What about his place of work?”

“He's due to start at Loring, Marcus next week.”

“Is there anyone else you can think of?” Callahan asks.

“What about Ben?” Sam asks me.

“He's in India.”

“Do you have a photo of this Jack Handel? It would help if we had something to show to Miss Cushing's neighbors, find out if they saw anything. Her building has no security cameras or doorman,” he adds disapprovingly.

I nod. The four of us at Jack's birthday dinner, squeezed in, inebriated, a night on the brink, we were just about to tip over, our smiles lopsided and too wide, each of us with our longings so close to the surface, so hidden from view. “I have a picture from last month but it's still on my computer. I'll need to print it out. I don't even think I have paper.”