The Guilty One (22 page)

No: still reaching too high. Those were the jobs women from places like Linden Creek got when their kids left the nest and they needed a little something to keep themselves busy until their husbands got home from work.

It would have to be a pretty low-level job, something no one else wanted, but that was fine with Maris. How about night clerk in a convenience store? Her boss would be brisk and demanding and dusky-skinned and she would ring up purchases with a brittle smile for those who were out late at night: the drunks and insomniacs and shift workers. Perhaps they would be grateful for the few words of conversation she would offer.

Maris stared at the screen awhile longer. “Prepare invoices quickly, efficiently, and accurately.” She hadn't worked in a business office in years; she had mild carpal tunnel if she spent too much time online. Who was she kidding?

The problem was that she had no idea where she could fit in now. She'd been terribly naïve to think it might be here, with these people, in this house echoing with past tenants' memories. No wonder she had seized upon Norris's photos, no wonder she had worked so hard to expunge all the traces of the prior renter. What she was doing was obvious: trying to change the past by sheer force of will, and since it hadn't worked in her own life, she was doing it to strangers'. “Fixing” the apartment, trying to force Norris to reconnect with memories of something good—these were pathetic substitutes for the prayers that had gone unanswered, back before Maris gave up praying and then gave up on God entirely:
please don't let anything bad have happened to her, please help us find her
, and then later,
please don't ever let me forget a single thing about her, please take care of her in Heaven
. Naïve wishes that felt as childish now as her long-ago belief in the tooth fairy.

Friendship, romance, she had seized upon these unlikely alliances with no regard to how fragile they were. She'd lied; she'd pretended to be someone else. Pet and George, Norris and the rest of them, they all thought they knew a woman named Mary, eccentric maybe but brave. The truth was that Maris was ordinary and a coward. This had to end. She had to stop pretending, playacting, and be an adult again.

Maris knew she was on the verge of beating herself up, and working with Nina had at least taught her to steer clear of this hazard, as it could take her down for days.
Pick one positive thing,
Nina had counseled,
and say it out loud, if you need to
.

“This week I . . .” Maris started. In the months following Calla's death it would be things like:
I wrote three thank-you notes
or
I pruned the oleander,
and the exercise felt meaningless. Later, she worked up to
I sat on Calla's bed for a half hour and focused only on good memories
or
I called Adrian and asked about Tristan's class trip to San Diego
.

“This week I cleaned this place,” she said out loud. “I got rid of all the disappointment and misery and filth that was here. Now someone else can come here and make it home.”

Also, I didn't give up.

Maris closed her laptop and cleared away her dishes. She prepared for bed, slipping on the nightgown and sliding between the sheets that already seemed softer from use.

A series of popping explosions outside made her start, until she remembered it was July 3; people were getting a start on their celebrating with fireworks, the cheap ones, bottle rockets and stink bombs bought out in Livermore.

Another volley, farther away, and then a scream that ended in laughter.

Tomorrow was the barbecue. Should she still go? Could she? George would be there . . . Maris allowed herself to think about him for a moment, his silver-shot beard, his paradoxically formal manners. The way he'd held her elbow as he showed her his “gallery.”

Could she ever be with a man like that? Lord knew, he was nothing like Jeff. That had to be half of what attracted her. George wasn't covering up any deep secrets about who he was. He seemed like the type of man who was comfortable in his own skin, and he—

“Oh,” Maris breathed, surprised at her body's reaction to the thought of holding him. Putting her arms around his solid chest and belly, feeling the warmth of his face against her forehead. She bet he smelled nothing like Jeff, who often showered twice in a single day, once at the gym and once in the evening, and hated to get dirty, even when he was working around the house. Jeff smelled aseptic, clean to a fault; she imagined that George would be the opposite, a complex tangle of scents he trailed from the places he'd been: tobacco, and cooking, and soap and sweat and motor oil and fresh-cut grass.

Tentatively, she ran her hands down her body, the crisp cotton of the new nightgown abrading her skin pleasantly. She stopped short of slipping her hands under her clothes—it had been so long since she'd experienced any pleasure that way that she doubted her body would even remember how to respond—but it was impossible to resist thinking about being held.

“George,” she whispered, and then she closed her eyes and imagined him holding her, wrapping his arms around her while she drifted off to sleep. Protecting her from the pull of sadness, from the eternal grief, and giving her blessed oblivion, if only for a few hours.

SATURDAY PASSED SLOWLY.
Maris didn't venture out until she heard Norris leave in his SUV, and then she drove to the Arco for her morning coffee. She wondered where he'd gone: errands, the gym? Whatever uptight emotionally constipated bachelors did on the weekend. She wondered if this was how it was going to be for the rest of her time in this house—avoiding Norris, burdened by guilt and embarrassment over how she'd upset him, sneaking in and out of his apartment to do her work.

She wouldn't be able to avoid him tonight, though. Pet stopped by midmorning to make plans to go to the barbecue together. They would go in Norris's car at six. Maris couldn't bring herself to tell Pet about what had happened; she considered backing out, but that would mean giving a reason and she didn't have any excuses, at least any that she felt like discussing.

A little after five, as Maris was stepping out of the shower, the phone rang. When she saw that it was Jeff, she let it go to voice mail, staring at the screen until it finally beeped—and then played the message back, dripping water on the kitchen floor as she stood with only a towel wrapped around her.

“Hey, Maris. I wish you would pick up. Three things. I talked to a Realtor, he's coming by tomorrow to have a look. If you want to be there, which, I'm assuming based on our last conversation you don't, but he's coming at eleven. Let me know. Second, I don't know where you are, you have mail at the house, people keep asking me what's going on, I mean, what am I supposed to tell them?” (
How about the truth for once
, Maris thought darkly.) “And third, I'm just wondering if you're going to be at the gala. It's Friday, in case you've forgotten. I would kind of like to know in advance. I mean, I'm going no matter what, and we don't have to make this awkward. You just—I mean, it's—this is going to keep happening, you know, we know all the same people, we won't be able to keep avoiding each other. Okay, well. Haven't heard anything more about the appeal. Anyway, call me.”

Maris put the phone down slowly. The gala. Six days from now, the Callendar Performing Arts Center was hosting its biggest fund-raiser of the year and Maris, as a former chair, would be expected to attend. And Jeff was calling her to say
he
was going, to lay the potential awkwardness at her feet as though it was
her
fault? The injustice of it seized up inside her like a jolt of electricity. Four years ago, he'd put on a suit and stayed by her side throughout the evening as she thanked the donors and ran the raffle and choreographed the presentation, and she'd
thanked
him. She'd actually said in her remarks, “and to my husband, Jeff, thanks for taking care of the dishes and the laundry and the carpools,” so that she could get her committee work done, and later she and Jemma had laughed about it, because when in the history of time has any man stood up to accept a Super Bowl ring or a Nobel Prize or CEO appointment and thanked his wife for making it possible? And privately—she was too embarrassed to say it aloud to Jemma—she toted up how many times he'd really helped, and come up with a kitchen twice left afoul with the clutter of pizza boxes and laundry left forgotten and mildewed in the washing machine.

Maris deleted the message and left the phone in the kitchen while she went to dress. She might not be going to a gala. But she was damn well going to a barbecue.

DUCHESS LIVED HALF
a mile from Morgandale, on the gently sloping hill above MacArthur Boulevard, in a house whose backyard abutted the parking lot of a KFC, so that the smell of the heating coals mingled with the smell of fried chicken to produce what Maris thought was the most tantalizing aroma ever. She realized that she hadn't eaten since her breakfast of a convenience store Danish and an orange, and when one of Duchess's aunts took the plastic wrap off her seven-layer dip, Maris filled a paper plate with tortilla chips and dug in.

She joined Pet at a card table set up in the yard and let herself enjoy simply observing the happy melee. There were two dozen adults and a handful of excited kids running around with plastic pinwheels and sparklers that their mothers wouldn't let them light, not until it got dark. There were beers and sodas in a cooler, and a box of wine set up on a table next to a stack of Dixie cups. There was an elderly man relaxing in a recliner that had been dragged out onto the back deck for the occasion—he nodded and smiled and said nothing at all and Maris decided he would serve as her example. He was excused from conversation, from helping out, due to age, but perhaps Maris could be excused for time served: for all the neighborhood block parties she'd planned and helped at through the years.

On the sly, however, she watched Pet, and thought about Calla. Her daughter, at family events—there had been an annual summer trip to see Jeff's cousins' families at the lake, the Thanksgivings in Orange County—seemed to glow with the delight of being included. It had always given Maris a pang, since she and Alana were the most paltry of families; if it hadn't been for Jeff they wouldn't have had more than a few people around any holiday table. Calla seized upon every tradition with zeal: charades, flag football, soaring shrieking over the lake in the tire swing and dropping into the water at the last minute with a giant splash. Walking into town with her cousin to buy Slurpees; staying up late in the rec room in a sleeping bag with the other kids.

But now, Calla was gone, Jeff was gone. Maris remembered an Easter Sunday nearly a decade ago, when Alana had still been married. Jeff had taken Calla skiing with his brother and his kids, and Maris had showed up at Alana's with a bunch of tulips, and the three of them—Maris, Alana, and her starchy hedge-fund-manager husband—had eaten paillards of lamb and tiny peas to the lugubrious strains of Barber's
Adagio for Strings
. Was that what she had to look forward to? She wondered what Alana was doing tonight and felt guilty for not calling.

When a little plastic boomerang landed at her feet, Maris looked up to find a girl of seven or eight staring at her, her mouth dusted with orange Cheeto crumbs. As Maris smiled and handed the toy back, she was overtaken by one of the bad moments, the ones where Calla's absence felt bigger than her whole body, and her throat closed and her eyes filled instantly with tears. Pet was in animated conversation with a girl who was painting the kids' faces and hands with little flags, and there was a cluster of people standing on the deck blocking the door, and nowhere to go, nowhere to escape—not even a paper napkin to dab her eyes with.

Maris grabbed her purse and started rummaging in it, just for something to do because she already knew she hadn't packed any tissues, but a moment later George was kneeling at her side. She'd seen him come in awhile ago, watched him greet half a dozen people, tried not to be caught looking. But now he placed a hand on her arm and looked at her with concern.

“You okay?”

Maris took a deep breath and let it out. “Um, I don't suppose I could convince you it's just allergies?”

He smiled. “Hey, don't be embarrassed. I was crying just last night, watching
Princess Bride
.”

“You were not.”

“Well, okay, I wasn't, but I did the first time I saw it.”

Maris wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand and managed a small smile. “You're still lying.”

“Yeah, well. I would say, do you want to talk about it, but chicks never want to talk about it when you ask; you all like to spring it on us when we're least expecting it.”

Maris blinked, taking in George's soft brown eyes in his deeply tanned and lined face. He'd had a haircut since the other night, and his beard had been carefully trimmed. He was wearing a sea-green shirt and a gold chain with a small gold medallion on it. “That's the most sexist thing I've heard all day,” she said.

George squeezed her hand and released it. “Yes, ma'am. It's true. I'm old school, I still think ladies should be ladies and . . . well, I'll shut up before I piss you off any further. Mostly I just wanted to say, I don't know, I'm here if you need me.”

It took him more effort to get up than it had to crouch down, his knees popping and his hand holding the edge of the card table for support.
Jeff's in better shape
, Maris thought,
but George
—

The thought was abruptly cut off when the boomerang sailed into her lap for a second time and Duchess's uncle hollered that the hot dogs were ready.

AS THE SKY
went purple and the first home fireworks popped elsewhere in the neighborhood, the kids shrieking with laughter and the older women covering the uneaten food and replenishing the drinks, George found Maris again. She'd moved to a perch on a retaining wall at the edge of the yard. Pet and the face-painting girl had gone to get cigarettes and not returned; Norris was helping Duchess in the kitchen. Maris had finished a Sprite and a beer, had touched up her makeup and lamented her out-of-control hair in the bathroom, and was trying to focus on the moment, the way she'd learned in therapy, the soundtrack of her senses overriding her heart's temptation to slide back, back, back to what used to be and what was lost.
The sky is navy blue, she'd been thinking, the girl's shorts are red, I can smell the frosting on that cake, and the cinder block is rough on my thighs
.