Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (34 page)

She laughed—Edward was so predictable—and looked down at her phone. But it wasn’t Edward. It was her office.

The phone buzzed and buzzed—a loud sound that seemed to be buzzing through the whole neighborhood, all the way to the center of her skull. Before she could talk herself out of it, she hit
ignore
. And, just like that, the street was quiet again.

After she dropped by Maisie’s birthday dinner, she would leave Richmond, and tomorrow, she would throw off the covers and go back to the hard grind of daily life. Whatever someone at work was calling her about, it could wait. Whatever
anyone
was calling about could wait. She flipped her phone open and then, for the first time in more years than she could remember, she turned it off.

She pushed open Maisie’s door—thinking about packing, showering, dressing, napping, a thousand things at once—and the sound of paper scraping across the floorboards made her look to keep from tripping.

At her feet, she saw an envelope with her name on it. Slowly, and with a feeling of dread, she bent down.

Eula led Arlen through her house in the late afternoon. She wanted to say,
And here’s the living room, and down there’s the bath, and the bedrooms are down the hall
. But he already knew the layout, though it had been a long, long time.

She took him into the small dining room, and she was surprised when he recognized the oak table as the one that had been in her mother’s house before they sold it. In the kitchen, she watched him run a hand along the Formica countertop as fondly as if he were a musician touching a baby grand. She walked him down the hall to the bedrooms that were meant for children, but which had instead become a craft room, a guest room, and a relatively unused gym.

“Hey.” She stopped him at the bottom of the stairs that led to the second floor. Under her hand, his shoulder was firm and warm. “You doing okay?”

“Great,” he said. “I’m great.” They walked slowly up the carpeted stairs, Arlen following behind her. “You did a lot with the place.”

“But not too much.”

“Nope. Not too much.”

At the top of the stairs she pointed out the space where she’d had a wall adjusted to make a bigger closet in the master bedroom. And Arlen stood with his hands on his hips, looking over the wall and nodding his head, considering the handiwork. He asked polite questions about builders and permits. He wanted to know how long the work took and how much it cost.

His voice was low and thoughtful. “Shame I wasn’t here. I would have done this for you. Piece of cake.”

“Oh, well,” she said, pleased. “There’s plenty of things to repair. Believe me.”

They peeked into the upstairs bathroom with its seashell motif. And then they were standing in Eula’s room, which had once been Arlen’s room too, for a short period of time. The dressers were decorated with lace runners made by a great-aunt; the windows let in light through sheer yellow curtains. The bed sat like a life raft, square in the middle of the room, a soft pink bedspread tucked neatly beneath white pillows.

“Looks like you got some water damage,” Arlen said, looking up.

“Just a little. From a snowstorm last spring. It hasn’t leaked since.”

“I can take a look at the roof. See if I can’t figure out what’s going on.”

She smiled. Arlen was wearing his serious face; though his features seemed longer now and thinner, his expressions hadn’t changed. “You ever think of doing handyman work? I bet you could be real good at it. You always were good at working with your hands.”

“Maybe,” Arlen said.

“Arlen . . . ” He turned to her. She didn’t quite know what it was that she wanted to say. A feeling of deep tenderness had welled
up inside her—but it was more than tenderness too. It was gratitude for the fact that he was here with her. It was the fierce urge to promise him that things would be okay. That she would make them okay if he let her. She hadn’t spent too much time with him last night; he was in many ways still a stranger. But her heart was telling her in no uncertain terms: here was the man she’d married. Generous, forgiving, strong, and, most of all, not gone.

She looked at him, and—
bless him
—he could not hold her eye. But she wanted him to. Oh, how she wanted him to.
Look at me,
she thought. And when he did not, she stepped closer, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed him. His lips were soft under hers—a kiss not quite returned.

She didn’t need to ask him. She knew it had been a long time since he’d been with anyone. And she didn’t need him to lead. She took him by the hand to the edge of her bed, sat him down among the pink ruffles. Then she stepped back, and, button by button, with her head high, offered herself, as if with her skin she might somehow smooth over even the smallest part of his hurt. He watched with his hands on his knees, flexing and curling, until she was in only her panties and bra.

She walked toward him, feeling slightly outside herself. She ran her hands along his hair. Where it hadn’t thinned, it was still thick and rich brown.

“Eula.” Her name seemed to break on his lips. He still did not touch her. “I haven’t . . . See, it’s been a while, and . . . ”

She shushed him, then bent to kiss his lips. They were soft and sweet—until his arms came around her, pulling her hard to the bed, and then his weight was on her and his mouth was so demanding that for a moment she worried about what she’d done. But her confidence returned—this was
Arlen
, after all—and she met him with a need that had been dormant until now. She’d meant to give
to him, to
only
give. And yet, for the first time in years, she actually
wanted.
She felt a loosening like a cramped muscle, part pain, part relief, and then there was only Arlen, his hands, his mouth, his breath on her skin.

Will did not get out of bed for a long time after Lauren left. He lay and watched the late-afternoon light skate across the floor. He got up only to open the window when a little roving thunderstorm came through because he wanted to smell the rain. When the sun began to set, he dragged himself to the kitchen, his rumbling belly leading the way. He made himself a peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing at the counter. Then, because he didn’t quite know what to do with himself and he was feeling lost, he called his sister.

“What’s going on today?” she asked brightly.

“Nothing much,” he said. He washed a bit of peanut butter from his hands. “How’s the baby?”

“Loud. I’m calling him my little fire engine. Because when he’s hungry he wails and turns beet red. I wouldn’t be surprised if his head spun around.” For a moment, Annabelle slipped away from the conversation to coddle the baby. “Am I talking about you?” she sang. “Yes? Are you the little fire engine? Yes, you are!”

Will climbed the stairs to the second floor very slowly. He could picture the baby looking up at his sister with bright but utterly uncomprehending blue eyes. A great heaviness made his feet hard to lift, one over the other, until he reached the top of the stairs. Lauren was gone, but his stuff—all his stuff—was still right where he’d left it. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“So what’s going on with you?” Annabelle asked. “What’s Lauren up to today?”

“Leaving,” he said through clamped teeth. “Back to Albany.”

“Will you see her again?”

“Not likely. She was here for Arlen.”

“That might be why she came in the beginning, but it wasn’t Arlen who she was looking at like he hung the moon.”

Will sighed. Around him, in the hallway that stretched along the second story of the house, his collection had taken on a dull, gray-brown sheen. Normally, when he saw his stockpile, it seemed to him to be vitally alive, full of promise and verve. But now it was just a collection of crap that the life had gone out of. It was garbage—other people’s garbage that he’d made into
his
garbage. He had no love for it at all.

Lauren had not been the first woman in his life to see that he had an illness. One woman, with whom he’d been serious for six months, simply hadn’t been able to understand that his problem was more than mere laziness. She’d told him he was a slob and he’d been glad to let her go. Another woman who’d discovered his problem early on had simply turned tail and run. Men who hoarded like he did were not suitable husband material. It wouldn’t be possible to raise kids in a house that looked like a junkyard.

Already, Will missed Lauren. He would miss going picking with her, would miss listening to her “interpret” the people they met, would miss the way she always tucked her hair behind her ear when she was thinking. Although her leaving corresponded almost immediately with her discovering his illness, he didn’t get the sense that she’d been scared off. More than any woman he’d met before, she seemed strong enough to actually handle what he was. She was tough enough to be with him. If she wanted to.
If
.

“So what are you going to do to get her back?” Annabelle asked. “You’re not just going to let her go like that. Are you?”

“She wants to go.”

“Oh, come on. Will—it’s a teeny tiny little world these days. Just because she lives up north and you’re here doesn’t mean you can’t see each other.”

“We can’t,” Will said. He kicked an old claw-foot end table with his toe, and the whole pile of junk that sat on top of it threatened to collapse. He put out his hand to steady it, but still, a few pieces of paper fell. He felt himself to be on a dangerous precipice, and he was shuffling inch by inch closer to the edge. “I’ve got no future with her. There are things besides geography standing in the way.”

“What things?” Annabelle asked slowly.

He took a deep breath. His legs felt weak. His mouth suddenly felt overly full of teeth. “I . . . ” The years flashed in frames, the rooms filling box by box, bag by bag, thing by useless thing. “I have a problem,” he said.

Already he felt a little better.

“Oh, Will,” Annabelle said. And it wasn’t pity he heard in her voice, but relief. She’d known. She’d always known. Probably, the whole family did. “As soon as you say the word, we’re all here to help. You know that.”

Will rubbed his eyes. “I’m saying the word,” he said.

The envelope in Lauren’s hand had her name on it—handwritten letters in the thick black script of a felt pen. She stepped into Maisie’s house, into the rush of air-conditioning, and locked the door behind her.
Arlen,
she thought.
He’d written to her
. She set down her bag, then dropped herself onto Maisie’s butter-cream couch. Her heart was pounding now. She had a sense of time stopped—as if whatever she was about to read was going to change things, and until she read the letter, time would not go on.

She wedged her thumb into the envelope and tugged until it was
open with a ragged edge. The note inside was written on an unlined index card. The words gave her pause.

She stared blindly at the letters of the sentence. The words were blunt, so without mystery or the slightest bit of room for interpretation. Arlen was done with her. Will must have told him that she was leaving—and this was Arlen’s response. In some ways her errand to Richmond had been over before it had started. She let the note fall to her lap. A great wave of exhaustion came over her, mental and physical.

She’d once heard of a man, a detective in Arizona, who was known for his brutal, endless interrogations of suspects. If a colleague needed a confession, this man was sent in. He could get any suspect to break down. At his hand, three men were sentenced for murder based on their confessions. They spent years in jail.

Later—when it became clear that the men’s alibis checked out, that their DNA didn’t match what was found at the crime, that there was no possible way in the natural world that the four men could have committed the murder—the detective was questioned about his brutal tactics. Lauren had caught an interview with him replayed on a news program. The man was defensive and antagonistic, sitting in his gray suit behind his desk. Despite the clear indication that his life’s work had hinged on his talent for browbeating and coercion, that his ability to wring false confessions out of scared men would have made the Spanish Inquisition proud, he insisted he was without blame.
I still believe they’re guilty,
he said, again and again, with all the conviction of a man looking up at the sky and swearing it was night instead of day.

Now there was this note:
What you did is unforgivable.

She wished she could assure Arlen. She wouldn’t forget. She wasn’t going to just go on with a life of denial, pretending his conviction had never happened, pretending that she was blameless. She wished she could tell him that—how her life, too, had forever been changed.

She did not get up from the chair in Maisie’s living room. She called her father.

“Dad?”

“What’s wrong, darling?”

She meant to say that she would be driving home late tonight. That she’d see him tomorrow after work. She meant to tell him to pass the word along to Jonah that she would see him soon. But when she spoke, other words were on her lips. “He won’t forgive me.”

She heard her father sigh. “I’m so sorry.”

She rarely allowed herself the luxury of sniveling, but now, she didn’t deny herself a few silent tears. They felt good and overdue.

“Come home now,” her father said. “Your mother and I miss you. Jonah misses you.”

“I miss you too. I just . . . ” She felt the words on the brink of slipping from her lips. And though she hated to appear pathetic before her father, she didn’t stop herself. “I wanted to make things right.”

“I know.”

“I hate that I disappointed everyone. That I disappointed myself.”

“Lauren, no one expects you to be perfect.”

She was quiet.

“You gave it your best shot, but Arlen
wants
to hold a grudge. And that’s his right. Maybe it’s time you just . . . let him.”

“Think so?”

“I do.” His voice was tender. “Come home now, sweetheart. There are amazing things waiting for you here.”

“Yes,” she said.