Lewis wanted to leave, despite a lack of news about Victor or Falk brothers, despite the fact that Leda Remfrey had been declared dead. He wanted a city doctor for her, and he wanted anonymity. But Dulcy wanted fall, and even a dwindling garden was better than no garden. No sweet leaves here like Westfield, flat wet fermenting layers; it was a dry, clear place. She wrapped herself in a blanket most afternoons for a nap, but the dreams and half-dreams of Victor dying returned: one night she cooked his arm, and in another she watched him tacking back and forth on a sailboat on the Yellowstone, looking for her. The harder nightmares were peripheral: hearing the scrape of a chair in the kitchen in the middle of the night, and somehow knowing it was Lewis, but the snakelike arm coming up the stairs was Victor’s. That night, she screamed and pulled herself out of the dream, and then was bereft when she realized Lewis was still away. Another dream had her waking to a man watching her from the chair by the bed, and she was back in Seattle, in sea air and the smell of Victor’s weirdly cloying cologne. This time when she screamed Lewis was home, and he finally talked her into the idea of leaving for California within the next few weeks. Soon.
She thought about the child constantly, moved it though the future—toys, terrifying illnesses to avoid, first books, what apples to make sauce out of this fall for a first meal next summer, what the baby would call them, whether it would still be snowing when it was born, if they didn’t leave for San Francisco. She wasn’t sick to her stomach like Carrie, and she moved through the house and town believing, most of the time, that the world was normal. But she did abnormal things, like failing to cover her garden during the first frost. She lost most of her flowers, and half of her tomatoes, but she couldn’t find the energy to think it mattered.
Brach stayed in Gerry’s jail, and his wife never looked in their direction when she sat in her backyard watching birds. Lewis stopped bothering with the pretense of leaving for the hotel. They hadn’t told anyone yet, about any of it, but it was a matter of cocooning themselves, and thinking it through, and Lewis traveling. Samuel was all about revenge; Margaret had her own life, and her own secrets. No one said a word to either of them about Lewis’s obvious presence, and Dulcy found she didn’t care about what people thought—there were ways to pare down a life other than running away. Storekeepers did not seem to regard her as sinful, and when she dozed through the next meeting of the Sacajaweas, no one offered more than an extra slice of cake. Life skidded by.
But in early October, Lewis woke up sick, and kept being sick, and she called Macalester to the house without bothering to explain. The salvo of fevers shook her out of her daze. He was worse than she’d ever seen him, and it made no sense: surely he would have stored up strength over these last few weeks of good health. Macalester said he was worried about Lewis’s liver and heart.
Dulcy couldn’t imagine his body disappearing. Each time his fever broke she wanted to curl up into a ball next to him. She didn’t understand why some people did well with this illness and others didn’t; she didn’t understand how he could have so much life in other ways and not throw this off. When she woke up with a jolt of worry about Walton instead of Lewis one morning, it threw her into a day of rage and resentment before she settled into all the things that were different: this was Lewis, youthful and her lover. He was a survivor, without self-pity. This was just bad luck.
After a full week of intermittent fever, he sat up one morning, ate most of the food in the kitchen, and wrote ten pages on the piece about bribery in the national parks. He’d have to go to Denver to finish it. She said she wanted him to see a specialist while he was there; he said he’d wait for California, or wherever they ended up. Did she want to go to New York, instead? He’d find a blond wig so that she could take in every restaurant she’d missed.
She’d been cooking obsessively, trying to fatten him up, going on her own tangents: three days of tomato sandwiches; sudden yearnings for shellfish, root beer, plums. But when she thought of New York she didn’t think of food. On the day Lewis left, she handed him a package to mail from Denver. He looked down at Mrs. Alfred Lorrimer and put the tiny sweater back on the table.
“She’ll only be worried. It’s selfish, Dulcy. And he’ll find out. Save it for our own.”
“This can’t go on and on like this,” said Dulcy. “I can’t bear this.” But what, as he pointed out, had she thought would happen when she threw her life out the train window?
It snowed the day after Lewis left. People talked about how this would pass, but she pulled out the gray shearling and walked to the library to look up the town in France where Lewis now owned a house. She peered down with her river-bent glasses: it was right on the ocean, only a few miles from the Spanish border. There were vineyards there, and fishing boats, and a market. Lewis said the house had a rock wall around the garden and high ceilings.
The next day a huge warm wind blew over town, and she ripped out frosted plants in the sunlight, wearing herself out in the right way. She went to bed early, and woke a little after midnight, thinking she heard a chair scrape, and that he was back, before she thought of the wind, and all the other reasons for noise. It would be days.
She opened her eyes again to a flare of light, a cigarette and then the lamp, a man in the chair by the bed. Pretty taffy hair, green eyes, a little worn at the mouth compared to her memory.
“Sorry to wake you, Mrs. Nash.”
She wanted to roll away from him, curl up and shut her eyes again, but her spine and the back of her head would be vulnerable. When she looked into his face she knew he wanted her brains on the floor.
“Say hello,” said Victor.
“Hello, Victor.”
“Aren’t you dead? So many nights I dreamt I’d killed you, and I went to your funeral. Then I saw you in the film,” he said. “Henning said he didn’t believe it at first, but you know that I always look too long at everything. I saw you in Yellowstone Park, sitting on a bench, and I saw you crossing a street toward me, angry, so entirely yourself. Henning had to agree that it was you, and that you might likely still be in the town where that sorry little grubworm Grover Dewberry filmed a silly parade. His idiot widow made us take the film. A deal’s a deal, said Henning. He’s sorry now; he always did try to protect you.”
Dulcy watched him, her head still pressed into her pillow. Victor leaned back, and the chair creaked. He was bigger than she remembered, with a sharper nose. “So we came here, with a photograph—a bad print—and showed it to the girl at the hotel Mr. Dewberry used. ‘Perhaps Mrs. Nash,’ says the girl, ‘but I’m not sure her figure is that good.’” Victor seemed to enjoy this. “Isn’t envy interesting? At any rate, ‘What’s she like?’ Henning asked. ‘Dull,’ says the girl. ‘Maria likes to garden.’”
Victor laughed, the real laugh. “Dull. Imagine. And a greenhouse, built by a German photographer: there it was with the first interview, no need to ask around, which would anyway be problematic. We checked in, and Henning put in some time with the girl while I sat in the window and watched for you on the very street I’d seen in the film. The girl told him that you had lovers—maybe the German, maybe a man from the newspaper, a little Jew surveyor, a doctor, a police chief. On and on. She is no friend of yours. Have you been having your way with all these men, being a merry widow?”