Heartsick

CHAPTER 41

Susan sat on the couch with her laptop and a glass of red wine and started writing about Gretchen Lowell. As far as she was concerned, the After School Strangler story had ended with Dan McCallum’s suicide. She was sure they’d find Addy Jackson’s body somewhere. He’d killed her and dumped her like he had the others, and she was in the mud, waiting to be discovered by some unlucky jogger or Boy Scout troop. The image of Addy’s half-buried corpse flashed in her mind, and she felt her eyes burn with tears. Crap. She was not going to let this get to her, not now. She wiped the image clean, but it was replaced by Kristy Mathers’s damaged naked body twisted on the dark Sauvie Island sand. And then by Addy’s parents, and how they had looked at Archie with such despair and expectation, wanting him to save their daughter, to save them. And then by her own father.

Her cell phone jumped and vibrated on the coffee table. The caller ID screen read UNKNOWN NUMBER. She picked it up and lifted it to her ear. “Yeah?”

“My name’s Molly Palmer.”

“Holy shit,” Susan said.

There was a pause. “Look. I’m just calling to tell you that I don’t want to talk to you. I have nothing to say.”

“It’s not your fault,” Susan said quickly. “He was an adult. There’s no excuse.”

There was a bitter laugh. “Yeah.” There was another pause. “He taught me to play tennis. You can put that in the article you’re writing. It’s the only nice thing I have to say about him.”

Susan tried to control the desperation in her voice. Molly was the story. If she could get her to talk, the paper would have to run it; if not, she’d have nothing, and the senator would get off free and clear. “Get it off your chest, Molly,” Susan pleaded. “If you don’t, it will just eat at you. It will just poison everything.” She twisted a piece of hair around a finger until it hurt. “I know.”

“Listen,” Molly said, her voice catching. “Do me a favor, okay? Don’t call Ethan anymore. This whole thing is starting to freak him out. I don’t keep in touch with a lot of people from back then. And I don’t want to lose him, too.”

“Please,” Susan said.

“It’s ancient history,” Molly said. And she hung up.

Susan held the phone to her ear for a moment, listening to the dead line.

Ancient history. And without Molly, it would stay that way. Susan squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. Ian could have gotten Molly to go on the record. Parker, too. Susan had had Molly in her hands, and she’d lost her. She put her phone down, took a deep breath, wiped her nose and eyes with the back of her hand, and poured some more wine in her glass. There was nothing more reassuring than a full glass of wine.

She considered calling Ethan again. He had clearly given Molly her messages. But then she thought of the pain in Molly’s voice and how she just wanted to be left alone, to leave the past behind.

Was that so wrong?

Fuck it. She picked up the phone and punched in Ethan’s number. Voice mail. Imagine that. “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. Susan Ward. Again. Listen. I just got off the phone with Molly and I want you to tell her that I understand. I had an affair”-she caught herself “-or whatever, with my teacher when I was fifteen. And I’ve spent a lot of time justifying it. But you know what, Ethan? It’s not justifiable. It’s just not. So just tell Molly that. She’ll understand. And I won’t call you again.” Who was she kidding? “At least not for a few days.”

She set the phone back down on the table and lifted her computer to her lap. She was on deadline and this story was about Gretchen Lowell. Gretchen, who was very much alive. Gretchen, who made Susan’s teeth hurt. Susan was convinced that if she could get Gretchen down on paper, she could somehow understand Archie and McCallum and the rest of it. She could feel the story, shadowy and amorphous, in the room with her. It just needed to be gathered and shaped. She took a large sip of wine. It was from the Great Writer’s collection, which she had found hidden in the back of his closet under a stack of remaindered hardbacks of his latest novel. Susan told herself he wouldn’t mind. These were special circumstances. The wine was fragrant and leggy and she held it on her tongue, savoring its heat before she swallowed it.

When Susan heard the knock at the door, her first thought was that it might be Bliss. She had called her mother when she got home-Bliss, who was the only person in the world without a cell phone or voice mail. Susan had left a forlorn message on her mother’s answering machine, which only occasionally recorded, and more often played back messages in a weird slow cadence that sent Bliss writhing in hysterics. So when Susan heard the knock, she had a brief fantasy that her mother had heard her message and had dropped everything to rush over to see if she was okay. Susan knew this was an absurd scenario. She had spent so much time when she was growing up taking care of Bliss; yet in her commitment to treating her daughter like an adult, Bliss had rarely taken care of Susan. Besides, Bliss refused to own a car and would have had to take two buses to get to the Pearl. No, Susan decided. It was Ian. She smiled at this idea, allowing herself a heartening smugness that he had, in the end, been unable to resist her feminine wiles. They were powerful, her wiles. Yes. It was most definitely Ian.

He knocked again.

She got up and headed to the door in her socks, pausing to check her reflection in an old gilded mirror she passed on the way. The Great Writer had told her he’d bought it at a flea market in Paris, but she’d seen the same one at Pottery Barn. Gretchen Lowell was right: She was developing a furrow between her eyes. Susan didn’t like the look of it one bit. Was it possible she had aged in the past week? She set her wineglass on the table in front of the mirror and held her thumb flat against the offending wrinkle until her forehead relaxed, and then she pulled at some wisps of pink hair and secured them behind her small ears. There. She put on her most dazzling smile and opened the door. But it wasn’t Ian.

It was Paul Reston.

It had been ten years. He was now in his mid-forties. His light brown hair had thinned and inched back from the temples, and his belly had softened. He looked longer somehow. His back bonier, the folds in his face more pronounced. He had given up the rectangular glasses with the red plastic frames that Susan remembered and now wore wire-rims with oval lenses. It surprised Susan to see that he was not the dashing young teacher she remembered. Had he ever been?

“Paul,” Susan said, taken aback. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s good to see you,” he said. “You look great.” He smiled warmly and opened his arms for a hug, and she stepped forward and he wrapped his arms around her. He smelled like the Cleveland auditorium, like paint and sawdust and oranges. “Paul,” she said into his maroon V-necked sweater. “Seriously.”

He let go of Susan and looked at her, his brown eyes heavy with disappointment. “A police detective came to see me.”

Susan flushed with shame. “I’m so sorry about that,” she said. “I took it back. I told him I made it up. It’s all fine now.”

Paul sighed heavily and walked past her into the apartment, shaking his head. “What were you thinking? Bringing that story up again. You know it could cause me all sorts of trouble at school.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Susan said, trying to reassure him. “There’s nothing he can do if we both deny it.”

Frustration sparked in his eyes. “There’s nothing to deny. Nothing happened, Suzy.” He cupped her face in his hands and looked at her. “It’s the truth.”

Susan stepped back, so that his hands fell away. “Yeah. Nothing happened.”

“You had a rough time as a kid. I get that. But you need to move past this.”

“I have,” Susan insisted. “I will.”

He turned back toward her with an imploring look. “So let me hear you say it.”

“Nothing happened,” Susan repeated in her strongest, most confident voice. “I made it all up.”

Paul nodded a few times, relieved. “You’re a good writer. You have so much potential. You were always so creative.”

“I still am,” Susan said, a little annoyed. The door to the hall was still ajar. Susan didn’t want to close it; the gesture seemed too much an invitation to stay.

“Come here,” he said, opening his arms. “We’re okay, right?” He smiled and his face softened and dimpled, and she saw her handsome favorite teacher as he had been, his hair to his shoulders, his velvet blazers and wisecracks and stupid poetry and she almost went to him. Because some small part of her still loved him, still loved Paul Reston. But the best part of her knew that it was bullshit.

Her spine stiffened and she took a tiny step back as he came for her. “I don’t want to play this anymore,” she said. Her voice suddenly sounded hollow and strange, not at all her own.

He stopped and let his arms drop to his sides. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“This is weird, Paul.” She lifted a hand and flailed it around the loft. “We’re alone. We can talk about what happened. So why are we playing the whole ‘It never happened’ thing?”

He cocked his head, an eyebrow raised. “What do you mean, ‘playing’?”

Yeah. Now this was fucked up. “Jesus, Paul,” Susan said.

He laughed, a quick, fierce bark, head back, face rosy. “Okay. I’m sorry. I was just having some fun. When did you get so serious?” He shot her a good-humored look. “You used to love role playing.”

“Three girls are dead,” Susan said. “Another is missing, probably dead.”

He walked to the door, closed it, and leaned against it, his hands behind him, resting on the doorknob. His voice and demeanor were suddenly perfectly calm. “I heard. Dan McCallum, huh? I never would have seen that coming.”

McCallum. She felt the hot sting of tears again. She still didn’t understand how McCallum could have done it. He’d always seemed so demonstratively fair. A pain in the ass, sure, but always reasoned. You never knew what anyone was capable of.

And Paul. She had seduced her teacher, and then blabbed about it to a cop. After she had promised him again and again that she’d never say anything. He probably hated her now. “At least it’s over,” she said.

He brushed the back of his hand against her cheek, and she was grateful for his kindness. “I figured that you might need some company. Let me make you dinner,” he said. He surveyed her kitchen skeptically. “Do you keep food here?”

“Just cans of artichoke hearts and peanut butter,” she said.

“Well, I can whip something up.” He gave a fancy little bow. “I can make a hell of an artichoke heart and peanut butter casserole.”

Susan glanced back at her laptop on the coffee table, longing suddenly for the comfort of her wine and her computer. “I’m on deadline. I’ve really got to get some writing done tonight.” She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the Pottery Barn mirror. There was the furrow again. Her wineglass still sat where she’d left it on the curio table in front of the mirror.

“You have to eat.” He looked at her expectantly.

She turned to him. “How did you know where I lived, anyway?”

“We’ve got access to Nexus at school. You can find anyone. Just by typing in their name.” Reston took a moment, as if considering his exact intent, wanting to get the words just so. “It was hard for me after you graduated.” He glanced away. “You didn’t respond to my letters.”

“I was in college.”

He shrugged casually and shot her a handsome smile. “I loved you.”

“That’s because I was a teenager,” Susan said, trying to explain. “I adored you. What’s not to love about that?” She walked over to the mirror and picked her wineglass off the table and drained it. The photograph that Bliss had given her the week before was stuck in the corner of the mirror. Three-year-old Susan holding hands with her father. Safe. Happy.

Everything changes eventually.

“I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” Paul said.

Susan looked at her reflection. “Come on, Paul,” she said to her own image. “You don’t even know me.”

He walked up behind her, his reflection serious and a little hurt. “How can you say that?”

Susan picked her wooden hairbrush off the table and began to brush her pink hair. It didn’t need it, but it gave her something to do. “Because when you knew me, I wasn’t a fully formed person. I was a teenager.” She kept brushing, feeling the bristles of the brush drag along her skull, the blood rush to her scalp. Her bearded father stared at her from the photograph, his hand clenched protectively around the little girl’s.

Paul touched the back of her head. “You were never a teenager.”

She put the hairbrush down. She did it heavily, and the brush made a snapping sound against the wooden table, startling her. “Look,” she said, glancing at her watch. “You have to go. I’m on deadline.”

“Let me take you out to dinner.”

She turned away from the mirror, from the photograph, from her father, and looked at him. “Paul.”

He gave her that handsome smile again. “One hour. I’ll regale you with stories of Dan McCallum. For your story. Then I’ll drop you off and you can get your work done.”

Susan felt like she was fifteen again. Incapable of disappointing him. Besides, she didn’t have the energy to argue. “One hour.”

“Cross my heart.”

The elevator took a thousand years to get down to the parking garage in the basement of Susan’s building. Paul didn’t speak, and for the first time in Susan’s life, she didn’t try to fill the silence. Paul just stood there with a soft smile on his face, watching her as she fiddled with the sash of her trench coat and shifted her weight on her feet and studied the illuminated numbers above the elevator door. Susan could see both their reflections in the wall’s steel sheeting, a distorted mesh of colors refracting off the metal.

The doors opened and Paul let her exit first.

“I’m this way,” he said, and he pointed off to a car on the far side of the garage, away from the elevator, far from the other parked cars. Well, Susan thought, at least there’d be time to suck down half a cigarette. She fumbled in her purse for one and lit it.

“So, did you know Lee Robinson?” Susan asked, taking a drag.

Paul drew his face back in disgust. “You still smoke?”

“No,” Susan said, flustered. “Just in social situations.”

He looked around the parking garage. “Is this a social situation?”

Susan groaned. “You’re not my teacher anymore, Paul. Don’t lecture me.”

“Four hundred and forty thousand people die a year in the U.S. from smoking. That’s fifty people an hour.”

Susan took another careful drag off the cigarette. “How well did you know Lee Robinson?” she asked again.

He reached up and touched his head, like he had a sudden headache. “Not well at all,” he said.

Susan pulled at her sash, untying it and retying it. “But you were pretty tight with McCallum, right? I thought I remembered you telling a story about going fishing or something with him on his boat.”

“Suzy,” Paul said with an exasperated smile. “That was twenty years ago.”

“So you used to hang out.”

“We went fishing together once twenty years ago.” He reached over and put his arm around her shoulder, and she took an extra step forward and shrugged it off.

Susan laughed nervously. “Could you have parked any farther away?” she asked.

Paul shrugged and put his hands back in his pockets. “It was crowded when I got here.”

“Well, if I collapse because of my poor lung capacity, just leave my body for the rats,” Susan joked.

“Smoking isn’t funny. It’s a very dangerous addiction. It will kill you.”

The car, finally. Susan had never been so happy to see a ten-year-old silver Passat wagon. She smiled at the two stickers affixed neatly side by side on the back bumper. One read SAVE OUR SCHOOLS. The other read IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.

Paul got in on his side first, leaning over and unlocking Susan’s door. She climbed in and pulled her seat belt into place, and took a final drag off the cigarette. Then she looked for the ashtray to put it out in. It was the cleanest car she’d ever seen. The dash was so clean, it shone. There wasn’t a Corgi hair or a pen or an old pack of catsup to be found. She reached out and opened the ashtray in the center consol. The ashtray in her car was filled with old gum and ashes. Paul’s ashtray was empty. You could eat out of it. If you wanted to. Susan examined her cigarette; it seemed a shame to sully his sterile ashtray with it. Paul had turned his head and was leaning between the seats to root for something in the back. She didn’t want to just drop the cigarette on the parking garage floor-she was trying to be better about the whole littering thing. Maybe Paul had something in the glove compartment she could wrap the cigarette in and then she could put it in her purse. She opened the glove compartment. Inside was a flashlight and a single folded map. “Jesus, Paul,” she said. “Clean much?” The car even smelled disinfected, like a freshly scrubbed public bathroom.

“What did you do? Dip your car in bleach?” she asked. “Because it smells like-” She pulled the map out and turned it over in her hands. It was a nautical map of the Willamette. “Clorox.”

He grabbed her from behind just as she reached for the door handle. She clawed at the door, but he hit an all-lock button and the electronic locks bolted into place with a mechanical thud. She scrambled to get to the button on her door handle to unlock her door, but he had a forearm around her neck and something over her mouth and nose and she couldn’t get free of him. She fought, all knees and elbows, but it wasn’t enough. He had leverage on her. She thought of all sorts of things: how she wished she’d done that story on self-defense classes; how she should have worn her shit-kicker boots, the ones with the steel toes; how she should have kept her nails long, so she could rip his fucking eyes out; how, somehow, none of this surprised her at all. She managed to get the lit cigarette up, grinding it hard into his neck until he howled and wrenched her wrist until she dropped it. She had wanted to kill him with it, but she would settle for it burning a hole through his spotless floor mat. That would be her legacy: a burn spot on an otherwise-pristine surface. Fucking perfect. It was her last thought as the darkness engulfed her.