PART X
THE DINING ROOM
CAROLINE
“Drink,” Minna said, refilling Caroline’s coffee.
“I don’t want any.” Caroline took her coffee with sugar, cream, and preferably a nip of something stronger. This coffee was black and very strong; Caroline had already forced down a cup, while Danny and Minna watched her with identical expressions of concern, as if she were a child and they were the overattentive parents. Between them was a vast array of used cups and plates smeared with mustard, platters still piled with sandwiches arranged on wilted lettuce leaves.
“Just drink it,” Minna said. Caroline was too tired to argue. She was still drunk, but not drunk enough. The gun in her hand, the sudden, blinding fury that had gripped her, the sound of screaming—it was achieving reality, floating out from the dream-fog in which it had been comfortably encased.
Minna had gotten rid of all the other guests, thank God, and they’d convinced Danny to delay Caroline’s arrest, at least until after they had buried Richard’s ashes. Caroline couldn’t have faced a crowd. She couldn’t bear to see her former neighbors and so-called friends staring at her, whispering, the hiss of their insinuations about Richard and the woman.
The Woman.
Adrienne was sitting on the far side of the dining room. She hadn’t moved or spoken since she had announced her name, except to ask for some water. Caroline should have ordered her out of the house. She should have commanded it. Instead, she was forced to sit and watch Minna try to appease her, offering her cookies or a glass of wine, speaking in the voice she reserved for when Amy was sad or injured: a voice meant to say Please, please, don’t be angry at my mother. She’s harmless, she’s drunk, she didn’t mean to.
But Caroline had meant to.
“So you’re telling me”—Danny and Minna were conversing in low voices, but not so low Caroline couldn’t hear them; they probably thought she was too drunk to understand—“that this is a different Adrienne Cadiou? That she’s not the one your mom’s been calling?”
“She’s not the one,” Caroline said. It was the first time she’d spoken to Danny since he’d attempted to place her in handcuffs, and he turned to her in surprise. She deliberately avoided looking at him.
This was, in fact, the last and final insult: Adrienne was not the Adrienne Caroline had expected. Caroline wished she’d read more about this Adrienne. She remembered only an article she’d barely skimmed—a hit-and-run, a drunk driver. Now she fought vainly to recall details. She had the sense that it would make her feel more secure, less like she was drowning in open air, as if by knowing a person you could avoid being hurt by them. You might at least anticipate which way the blow would fall.
Suddenly, Adrienne turned to Danny and Minna, who were still standing by the windows, silhouetted in light. “Can we have some privacy, please?”
Neither Danny nor Minna moved. But it was as though Adrienne believed they had. Now she turned and spoke directly to Caroline, pleading with her almost. What had she come for—forgiveness? Understanding? Caroline wouldn’t give her any.
“I didn’t ask for any money,” Adrienne said abruptly. “I haven’t spoken to Richard in ten years. He never answered any of my e-mails. I’d stopped calling a long time ago.” Now that she had started speaking, it was as if she couldn’t stop. She was trembling like someone in the grips of a bad fever. “It’s blood money. I don’t want it.”
“I don’t understand,” Caroline said coldly. She was playing the part of the queen. Adrienne was the penitent. Except that the part felt wrong. Caroline was the one who felt like begging—for Adrienne to go away, for Danny and Trenton to go away, too, for everyone to leave her in peace. She wanted to curl up in her bedroom—the bedroom that had been hers and Richard’s—and drink until the world started to soften and forgive.
“My daughter, Eva.” Adrienne’s voice broke on the name. “She was . . . his.”
For a moment there was silence. Minna turned away, rubbing her forehead. Caroline heard the seconds ticking forward, and then remembered that the big grandfather clock in the hall had been wrapped up and shipped off to the auction house, along with everything else of value.
She was seized by a sense of the absurdity of the scene: the big dining room table and the litter of food and plates and glasses; the narrow wedge of sunlight shining between the curtains; and Danny stuffed into his ridiculous uniform, like a sausage in a too-small casing.
The kitchen door slammed, and Trenton came into the dining room, stamping dirt from his sneakers. “We’re burying Dad under the weeping willow,” he said. Then, seeing Adrienne, he froze in the doorway. “Sorry. I thought she was . . . ” He trailed off before he could say gone.
When Adrienne turned to Trenton, her expression was full of such open hunger that Caroline’s stomach rolled. “How old are you?” she asked.
His eyes ticked temporarily to Caroline, as though requesting her permission to answer. “Sixteen,” he said.
“Eva would have been thirteen in July,” Adrienne said. A smile flickered over her face, but her eyes remained empty, huge, like open wounds. “She wanted—she wanted to go to Six Flags for her birthday.”
Trenton stiffened, as if a current had gone through him.
Caroline said. “Is she . . . ?” She couldn’t bring herself to say dead.
“I called Richard from the hospital. I don’t know why. We only met once. It was a mistake. We both knew it.” Adrienne’s voice cracked again. Caroline felt like spitting at her. She, Caroline, was the one who should have been crying. All this time, this other person, this phantom-child, had been running parallel to Caroline’s life, waiting to destroy it. “Still, I sent him pictures. Letters. A cutting of hair.” She didn’t stop herself from crying this time; she picked up a napkin Caroline was sure was dirty and wiped away the tears when they came. “My poor Eva. The doctors told me she would never make it. I—I thought Richard could make it untrue.” Adrienne’s face was white, like the center of a very hot flame. “But Richard was dead. Someone answered. ‘Don’t call back,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. He’s dead and he left you nothing.’ ”
Minna inhaled sharply. Trenton pulled a chair out from the table, letting it scrape on the floor, and sat down heavily.
“They were going to bury her,” Adrienne said, her expression wild, begging. “They were speaking her favorite psalm. The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t bear it. I was in Buffalo before I knew where I was going—before I knew I was coming here.” She was shaking so hard that the ice cubes rattled in her glass. “It was my fault. All my fault. I was driving—I should have seen the other car. I should have known . . . I should have saved her.”
“Holy shit,” Trenton whispered. “My sister.”
“Minna,” Caroline said sharply. “Get Adrienne something to drink.”
They sat rigidly, in silence, until Minna returned with whiskey. She had to physically remove Adrienne’s empty water glass from her hand, as though Adrienne had forgotten how to move her fingers. Caroline watched her drink. She remembered, now, that she had seen pictures of Adrienne’s daughter: a girl with a wide, frank face, freckled and grinning, like a child you would see on a commercial for pancake mix. She’d had bright blue eyes, like Richard’s. Like Trenton’s.
She remembered, too, the phone call from the police the night of Trenton’s accident; the blind drive through the dark, when the sky had seemed like a lid that might suffocate her.
People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something—the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing—remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.
Caroline stood up. Adrienne froze, as if she expected Caroline to lean across the table and strike her. But Caroline wasn’t angry anymore—not at Richard, not at Adrienne. All at once, in one second, the past and its ruin of promises and disappointments had released its hold on her. She was filled with a golden warmth that made her limbs feel loose and light; it made her forget her swollen ankles and the fact that she was not drunk enough to ward off the beginnings of a hangover.
She didn’t have to forgive him—the idea came suddenly, like a deep breath of air after a long submerging. It was all over now. She didn’t have to forgive him, and she could love him and hate him at the same time, and it was all right.
She closed her eyes and felt, for a split second, a hand pass across her neck; and in that moment she had a vision of rooms like atoms, holding a universe of secrets; and she, Caroline, gripped in the small bounded nucleus of the past.
Now she was free.
She reached across the table to take Adrienne’s hand. “It’s not your fault,” she said.
“My sister,” Trenton whispered again. This time he spoke quietly and addressed the word to the walls.