Derailed

TWENTY-NINE

Things happen for a reason. That’s what Deanna believed. That things aren’t as random as you might expect — that there was some kind of unseen and only hinted-at plan out there. That the orchestra might be out of tune and all over the place, but there was a maestro somewhere in that hidden orchestra pit who knew exactly what he was doing.

I’d always treated that kind of thinking with a healthy skepticism, but now I wasn’t so sure.

Take the Saturday after my interrogation. Freakishly warm, pools of soft mud sucking at my shoes as I meticulously picked up after Curry in the backyard. I was concentrating on this task — covering every inch of the yard with eagle-eyed dedication — as a way to keep from concentrating on other things.

I was holding in fear and panic; I was trying not to let them out.

So when Deanna called out to me from the back door — something about auto insurance — I barely acknowledged her.

She needed to renew our insurance, she was saying. Yes, that’s what it was. I nodded at her like one of those bobble dolls they stick on the dashboard of cars — reflexive motion caused by the slightest disturbance in the air. She needed to renew our insurance, and she wanted to know where our policy was.

So I told her. And went back to the business at hand.

It was ten or fifteen minutes later when she appeared at the back door wearing an expression I was all too familiar with. The one I’d hoped to never see again.

At first, of course, I thought, Anna. Something happened to Anna and I must throw down my garbage bag and run into the house. Where I would no doubt find my daughter comatose again. Only at that very moment I saw Anna pass her upstairs bedroom window, where the latest from P. Diddy was streaming through the closed sill. She looked fine.

What, then? So my mind backtracked, scurrying down the recent road to here — searching furiously for clues that might explain the nature of this particular disaster.

I’d been cleaning the yard; she’d come out to tell me something — yes, our insurance needed renewing. She’d asked me where our policy was; I’d told her.

In the file cabinet, of course. Under I for insurance. Right?

Except this was auto insurance. Automobile insurance that needed renewing. So in the haphazard and admittedly chaotic filing system of the Schines, it was possible that this policy wasn’t under I after all, but under A. A for automobile. In the A file.

All this occurring to me at lightning speed and, as lightning would, leaving me dazed and scorched. Possibly even dead.

Which is when I wondered about things happening for a reason. Why, for instance, our auto insurance had needed to be renewed now, right this minute, today. Why? And why at the very moment she’d asked me for help in finding our policy, I’d been so preoccupied with staying preoccupied that I hadn’t had the wherewithall to tell her I’d go get it myself.

“Where’s Anna’s money, Charles?” Deanna asked me. “What have you done with it?”

Maybe I’d always known the moment would come.

Certain things were just too massive to be hidden successfully — their very dimensions make them impossible to conceal. Their edges stick out in the open, and sooner or later someone is bound to notice them.

Or maybe I wanted to be found out — isn’t that what any psychiatrist worth his salt would say? That I might’ve been cleaning up the garden, sure, but at the same time I was yearning to clean up my life.

Hard to believe that I would’ve gone through all I had only to throw it all away on purpose. But then, things weren’t that simple anymore.

“What have you done with it?” she asked me.

And at first, I was rendered speechless. Deanna stock still on the back stoop and me standing there with a garbage bag reeking of excrement.

“I brought the certificates to a safety deposit box,” I lied through my teeth. I will take one stab at extricating myself from this, I thought, one outright denial.

“Charles . . . ,” she admonished me with my own name. As if that kind of blatant lying weren’t worthy of me. And I wanted to say, Yes, Deanna, it is. You don’t know what I’ve been up to — it is.

But I couldn’t say much of anything — not yet, not when it concerned the truth. I was dead in the water, and I knew it.

“Charles, why are you lying to me? What’s going on?”

I suppose I could’ve denied I was lying to her. I could’ve stuck to my ridiculous story about the safety deposit box—ridiculous not because it wasn’t possible, but because even if she had believed me, I would have had to produce the stock certificates on Monday, and that was impossible. I could’ve said this is my story and I’m sticking to it, no matter what. But in the end, I had too much respect for her. In the end, I loved her too much.

So even though I knew what I was about to do, knew that now that I was about to take a stab at the truth I was going to be stabbing her — I went ahead anyway.

I started with the train. That hurried morning, the lack of cash, the woman who’d helped me out.

When I mentioned Lucinda, I could see Deanna’s expression change — her features flattening, the way animals’ faces do at the first sign of danger.

“Then I had a bad day at the office,” I continued. “I was kicked off the credit card account.”

Deanna was obviously wondering what getting kicked off an account had to do with $110,000 missing from Anna’s Fund. And with the woman on the train.

I was wondering about that, too. I knew there was a connection, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Something about needing to talk to someone, maybe — or had it simply been a precursor to what followed? One step taken off the ledge before the other foot followed?

“I ran into the woman again,” I said. What I should’ve said was that I ran after, sought, meticulously looked for, this woman. But wasn’t I allowed to soft-pedal just a little?

“What are you talking about, Charles?” She wanted the Monarch Notes version now — she wasn’t interested in a prologue or an introduction, not when she could tell that her future with me was hanging in the balance.

“I’m talking about a mistake I made, Deanna. I’m so sorry.” A mistake. Was that all it was? People made mistakes all the time, and then they learned from them. I was hoping she might look at it that way, even though common sense and everything I knew about Deanna after eighteen years of marriage told me there was no chance of that. Still.

Now Deanna sat on the stoop. She pushed her hair back from her face and straightened her back like someone about to be shot who still wants desperately to keep her dignity. And me? I raised the gun in my hand and pulled the trigger.

“I had an affair, Deanna.”

P. Diddy was still seeping through the window. Curry was barking at a passing car. Still, the surrounding world was about as silent as I’d ever heard it. A silence even worse than the kind that had permeated the house ever since Anna got sick, silence so black and hopeless that I thought I might start crying.

But she did instead. Not loudly or hysterically, but the tears suddenly there, as if I’d slapped her hard in the face.

“Why?” she said.

I’d expected she would ask questions. I thought she might ask me if I loved her, this woman—or how long it had been going on, or how long it was over. But no—she’d asked me why instead. A question she was entitled to, absolutely, but a question I was unprepared to answer.

“I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know.”

She nodded. She looked away, down at her bare feet, which seemed strangely vulnerable on the green step of our back stoop, like naked newborn mammals. Then she looked up again, squinting, as if looking directly at me were hurting her eyes.

“I was going to say, How could you, can you believe it? I was. But I know how you could, Charles. Maybe I even know why you could.”

Why? I thought. Tell me. . . .

“Maybe I even understand it,” she continued. “Because of what’s happened with us lately. I think I can understand it, I do. I just don’t think I can forgive it. I’m sorry about that. I can’t.”

“Deanna,” I began, but she waved me off.

“It’s over now? This affair?”

At last a question I could more or less handle.

“Yes. Absolutely. It was once, just one time, really. . . .”

She sighed, cracked her knuckle, wiped her eyes. “Why is Anna's money missing, Charles?”

Okay. I’d told half of it, but there was still a whole other half, wasn’t there?

“You don’t have to tell me anything else about the affair — I don’t want to know anything else about it,” Deanna said. “But I want to know that.”

So I told her.

As sparingly as possible, as linearly as I could remember it—one thing leading to another leading to another—and I could tell that while it had all made sense to me, in a horrible, albeit panicked, way, it wasn’t making any sense to her. Even when I reached the part where we’d been attacked and beaten and I could see actual sympathy in her eyes. Even when I reached the part where Vasquez entered our home and put his hand on Anna’s head. Still it made no sense to her. Perhaps she could see what I hadn’t been able to—could spot the moments in this tortured tale when I could’ve done something different, when this different course of action was crying out to be tried. Or maybe it was because I’d left something out, something significant and necessary to any true understanding of events.

“So I paid him the money,” I finished. “To save her.”

“You never thought about going to the police? About going tome? ”

Yes, I wanted to say. I had thought about going to the police, or going to her, which was pretty much the same thing, really. But when I’d thought about it, I’d pictured the way she’d look—which was the way she looked now. So I hadn’t. And now I really couldn’t go to the police, even though it might not make much of a difference, since it was entirely probable the police were coming for me.

“That money,” she whispered. “Anna’s Fund . . .” saying it the way I’d heard investors mention one fund or another these past couple of years while perusing the stock pages on their way to work. That Dreyfus Fund . . . Morgan Fund . . . Alliance Fund . . . As if reciting the names of the dearly departed. Gone and never to return.

“You have to go to the police now, Charles. You have to tell them what happened and get our money back. It's Anna's. ”

I’d told her a story with a hole in it, a hole I’d hoped would be big enough to sneak through. But no. She was making a perfectly reasonable request, only I didn’t have a perfectly reasonable answer. Protecting Lucinda from her husband’s anger wouldn’t do now — not for Deanna, not when protecting her was costing our daughter over a hundred thousand dollars.

What she didn’t know was that I was protecting me.

“There’s more,” I said, and I could see Deanna deflate. Haven't you told me enough already? her expression seemed to say. What more can there possibly be?

“I asked someone to help me,” I said, thinking that I was still lying, since I hadn’t asked Winston as much as coerced him. On the other hand, Winston hadn’t actually helped me as much as set me up. “I asked someone to help me scare off Vasquez.”

“Scare off?" Deanna might be in semishock, but she was still smart enough to see the inherent flaws in my plan, and she was calling me on it. That when you ask a man to scare off someone else, there was a volatility factor of plus ten. That what starts out as a fist in the face can end up as a knife in the heart. Or a bullet in the head.

“He was threatening this family, Deanna. He came to our house. ”

When something loves me I love it back, Deanna had said to me once. That was her rule to live by, her credo, her own semper fidelis. But she was in the battle of her life now, with bomb after bomb falling all around her, and it was anyone’s guess if that love could actually survive. Judging by the expression on her face, I would’ve had to say no. She was having problems recognizing me, I imagined — recognizing this man as the generally loving and gentle husband she’d known for eighteen years. Not this guy, who’d had a seedy affair and paid blackmail money because of it and even enlisted someone to get rid of this blackmailer for him. Was it possible?

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said lamely.

“What happened?”

“I think Vasquez killed him.”

A sharp intake of breath. Even now, when I’d no doubt ripped apart every illusion she once cherished, I was still capable of surprising her. An affair—bad enough; but then murder.

“Oh, Charles . . .”

“I think . . . I believe, this man, the man who died, may have been taping me. Setting me up, sort of.”

“What do you mean, setting you up? ”

“He was an ex-con, Deanna. He was an ex-con and an informant, I think. He was obligated, maybe.”

“You’re telling me . . . ?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. But I’m worried.”

And so was she. But maybe the biggest thing she was worried about was where love goes when it goes. This steadfast devotion of hers, which had been pummeled and knocked around and stomped on. Where?

“I knew something was wrong, Charles. I thought some money was missing before—when you took the first ten thousand, I guess. Maybe it’s my imagination, I thought. So I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was imagining everything — the way you were acting. The hours you were keeping. Everything. I thought it might be a woman. But I didn’t want to believe it. I was waiting for you to come tell me, Charles. . . .”

And now I had told her. But more than she could have actually imagined.

She asked me a few more questions—some of the ones I’d expected she would. Who was this woman, exactly? Was she married, too? Was it really just that one time? But I could tell her heart wasn’t really in it. And then other questions that maybe her heart was in, or what was left of her heart — how much trouble was I really in with the police, for instance, things of that nature.

But in the end, she told me to leave the house. She didn’t know for how long, but she wanted me out of there.

A few weeks later, weeks I spent avoiding Deanna and retiring to the guest bedroom after Anna went to bed, I found a furnished apartment in Forest Hills.