The Accident (28 page)

CHAPTER 35

I
sabel pads across the whitewashed floor in bare feet. The wood is smooth and cool against her soles, and the breeze smells of the sea, and the knee-high waves lap at the rocky beach, a circular rhythm that sounds like radio static, someone playing with the tuning knob, trying to get a better signal. She can imagine the low indistinct murmur of a ballgame from a transistor radio in another room, and birds chirping their endless conversations, a car with an ailing transmission accelerating on the distant road, the twang-and-splash of a cannonball into a swimming pool from a sagging yellowed diving board, and the ringing peal of a child’s laughter.

She can imagine that it’s three years ago, and she’s still married, and her baby is still alive.

Her eye is drawn to the built-in bookcases that flank the fireplace, filled with nature books and photography books, with milky white sea-shells and old green soda bottles, the conventional ephemera of a beach house, plus the electronic equipment hidden in the corners, the discreet circular lenses, the reasons she’s here.

The weight of her situation settles onto her shoulders, her soul, her entire being. She can’t remember what it was like to feel safe. It seems like weeks since she finished this manuscript, since this whole thing started,
but it’s … is it possible? … can it be true that she finished reading the manuscript
this
morning?

Isabel puts her hand on the refrigerator’s handle, but she doesn’t pull. Instead she leans against the door. She starts to cry, at first just a few catches of her breath and a couple of tears, but it quickly escalates, and soon her shoulders are heaving, her whole body is convulsing, crumpled there against the cool metallic plane of the refrigerator.

The crying stops of its own accord, its urgency dissipated. She takes a deep quavering breath, then another more controlled one. She wipes her cheeks with her right forefinger; her left hand is still holding the handle.

She opens the door to the freezer compartment, and can’t help but glance down to the bin on the bottom shelf, the big Ziploc that she tucked beneath the box of ice pops, just its zip-closed top fold visible. Then she pulls out the ice-cube tray, and dumps all the cubes into a glass pitcher ringed with multicolor stripes. As she fills the pitcher with tap water, she can see her reflection in the window above the sink. She’s a mess. She wipes her eyes again with her knuckles, then uses a dish towel to do a more thorough job.

Isabel returns to the veranda, where Jeffrey is putting his empty pasta bowl down on the wicker ottoman. He looks over the railing, to where the sun has sunk below the horizon of the water, setting the sky on fire, sending color bolts through the waves.

“Thank you,” he says, taking the glassware from her. He fills a glass with water, hands it to her. Then he fills another, for himself. “That was delicious.”

A single-person meal, pasta with vegetables alongside a salad, a few dollars’ worth of fresh ingredients and ten minutes of cooking time. It’s the type of meal she prepares a lot of, these days.

Isabel sets her empty bowl into Jeffrey’s, but hers is tilted because of his fork; hers is balanced precariously, while his is steady. She stares at this small edifice, the small unstable structure, perhaps analogous to their lives.

Jeffrey turns back to the sunset, and she follows his gaze. For a moment, the two of them stare silently at the colorful remains of yesterday. Then he turns to her and smiles. She has always felt secure in the warm embrace of his smile.

“I know this must be hard for you,” he says. “Being here.”

She feels tears welling up again, and struggles to suppress them, to not fall apart here and now and possibly permanently. She’s been trying to hold it together for a very long time.

T
here was nothing worse than Tommy’s memorial service. Nothing more heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, tear-inducing. Unspeakably sad, but people still had to speak. The hall was standing-room-only, at least three hundred people wearing black, holding handkerchiefs, sniffling, leaning against one another, hugging, wiping their noses, rubbing knuckles into their eye sockets, running fingers through their hair, staring up at the ornately gilt ceiling, at ten-thirty on a Monday morning. What a way to start the week.

Her mother-in-law was the first speaker. The aging hippie had never looked more formal, in her black shift and tights. Grandmothers know better, she said. They know that everything will pass: every tantrum, every toilet-training mishap, every manipulative strategy for avoiding bedtime, every cold and flu, every stomach virus and scraped knee and busted lip, every vicious meltdown with projectile vomit and bitter, stinging accusation. It will pass, grandmothers know, and the memories of the little annoying things will transform into some of the wonderful things, the lovely things, the things we should have appreciated while we could. And so the unfairness of this, it’s unthinkable … Then Karla fell apart.

She was followed by a family friend. Then Isabel’s parents. The final speaker was Isabel’s husband, who spoke for barely a minute, with Isabel slumped against him. But it was too much, not just for him and Isabel but for everyone in the voluminous room, for all the people crushed by
the loss of a boy who was about to start his second year of preschool, who had a best friend named Danny and a favorite teddy named Baba-Beebee and a favorite color orange and a second favorite color green and a favorite television show and movie and song, who had just that Tuesday morning had a tantrum at the toilet—“Pee-pee, come back! Please come back, pee-pee!”—because Isabel had mistakenly flushed the toilet before letting Tommy do it himself.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Then three hundred black-clad mourners streamed out of the building onto the gray, wet street, dabbing their eyes and holding hands. Some lit cigarettes, and others flung their arms in the air to hail taxis, and dozens or scores or hundreds reached into their pockets and handbags and opened cell phones, and switched off silent modes, and examined screens and pressed devices against ears, staring off into the low dark sky, heads hanging at angles, listening to messages, concentrating on the details of their lives from which they’d been absent for seventy-five minutes, to the rescheduled appointments and updates and questions, and their eyes were still inflamed when they eased back into their normal lives, untragic lives from which their perfect little child had not been taken, unshattered lives, lives that still made sense, lives with reasons to move forward, to go to work and then to go home, to wake up the next day and do it again.

But not Isabel. Everyone could see that her life no longer made sense. All those new friends she’d made in the playground and the preschool, all those women who spent their lives managing the trappings of their wealth, tending to their co-op lofts in Tribeca and their beach houses in Water Mill and their slope-side condos in Vail, scheduling their nannies and babysitters and tutors and piano instructors and French teachers, their tailors and cleaners and manicurists and colorists and stylists, their personal trainers and Pilates sessions and yoga classes, their doormen and garage attendants, their summer and Christmas vacations, their midwinter breaks and spring breaks, their cars and boats, their silk upholstery and granite countertops and reclaimed wood floors, their this
and their that, but for Isabel it just didn’t fucking matter what Farrow & Ball shade of blue anyone was painting any goddamned foyer.

Suddenly there was no reason to go to work, or to go home, or to wake up tomorrow.

Because she couldn’t stop thinking this: we don’t lose our babies. That’s not part of the deal of life. That’s not
fair
.

And while she retreated into her grief, her husband veered further toward his nihilist tendencies, the amorality that had always been lurking beneath his surface. He was angrier at the world than ever, and he was taking revenge by not caring about it.

Isabel couldn’t help but think that he was angry at her. That he blamed her. Because she certainly did.

They had never been one of those hand-holding couples, never called each other Babe, never were the ones running out onto the dance floor. But neither had done anything egregious, neither had said anything horrible. It was just that their marriage, which to begin with hadn’t been constructed on the soundest foundation, couldn’t support the weight of their tragedy, their grief. And Isabel’s guilt.

So the divorce wasn’t acrimonious. They split their assets right down the middle, without debate. He bought her out of her share of the downtown loft, and she used that money to buy the uptown apartment, to fill it with soft comfortable furniture in soothing shades of neutrals, with top-end appliances and nickel-plated fixtures. He visited the new place once, for a glass of wine on the terrace, soon after she moved in. He brought a housewarming present, a small lithograph by Helen Frankenthaler, about whom Isabel had written a term paper, two decades earlier.

They still spoke, every few months. Or maybe it had become a couple times per year. There were things Isabel still loved about him, various reminders that could be elicited by that ten-thousand-dollar piece of paper hanging on her living room wall, which is probably why he went out of his way to buy the thing in the first place, a thoughtful present for an ex-wife.

S
he stands at Naomi’s kitchen counter, leafing through pages, rushed. She doesn’t want Jeffrey to discover her in here, doing this.

Isabel knows it’s in the scene about the car accident, so it takes her only a few seconds to find, at the bottom of page 136, the sentence that changed everything:

“Charlie, come on
,
” I said, “stop the car.”

She can’t believe how naive she was, how trusting. She’d always thought of herself as savvy, wary; a native New Yorker’s self-assurance in her immunity to swindles of every sort. But here it was, black-and-white evidence that she’d been deceived on the deepest levels, for an unforgivably long time.

CHAPTER 36

“H
ello, Hayden,” Charlie Wolfe said. The two men shook hands as if they were old friends, free hands on shoulders, wide smiles. But friends are not what they’d ever been. “Nice to see you again.”

For a few years in the 1980s, back when Charlie was still in high school, his father Preston Wolfe had been deputy director of Central Intelligence. The Cold War was in its last throes, and Europe was still a crucial theater for American intelligence. Hayden was becoming an important man there, in an important part of the world, so he and Wolfe
père
had gotten to know each other. They’d maintained a relationship at a low simmer for the next couple of decades, over which Hayden caught the occasional glimpse of young Charlie: a cocky high-school kid at an elitist New York private school, then an irresponsible frat boy, then a striking transformation into a studious law-school student, and finally an ambitious and hardworking and sober young adult, immensely ambitious.

Hayden hadn’t been altogether flabbergasted when Wolfe
fils
first presented himself in London in the late nineties, looking for a useful connection. Just mildly surprised. But then it had been absolutely shocking to Hayden that they started doing business together. The ensuing fifteen years had been good to both of them, in their own spheres, thanks in no small part to the other.

But then it ended.

“Thanks for meeting me here,” Charlie said. Hayden had just flown in from Berlin, a special trip to talk to this one man, in this cold park.

They took seats in the more upright style of the hundreds of metal chairs scattered on the pebbled paths surrounding the fountain. The more prone style was for reading, or sunbathing. But it was December, and no one was sunbathing. Indeed only a handful of other people were scattered around the Jardin des Tuileries. A pair of guys in loose-fitting overcoats stood fifty meters away; Charlie’s bodyguards. Ninety degrees around the fountain, a bundled-up woman in giant sunglasses sat in one of the reclining chairs, facing the weak southerly sun, a book in her lap, looking somewhat asleep. A quartet of retirees—Italian, or maybe Spanish—were eating sandwiches, laughing, having a grand old time. A hundred meters away, a big young guy leaning against a leafless tree was obviously the watcher from the American Embassy. Charlie Wolfe had become a man who would be monitored, as a matter of course. And that meant, unfortunately, that so would Hayden.