Chapter 15: The Bookmark
The last of them left at twenty past eleven. Joaquin shook Hugh's hand at the door with both of his, then steered Vera down the walk by the elbow, and her Range Rover pulled away without signalling.
Marnie carried the plates into the kitchen. The platter still held one curled slice of roast, and Vera's coffee cup wore a thumbprint of meringue on the rim. Marnie scraped it all into the disposal and let the noise fill the room a while. She washed her hands to the wrist and dried them on the good towel.
Hugh came in behind her with his whiskey, ice long gone. He set the tumbler on the counter and left it there, the way he always did.
"Leave the pans," he said. "Morning's fine."
"Morning's fine," she agreed.
They showered in separate bathrooms, as they had for years now. Marnie took the ensuite and stood under the water until it ran lukewarm. In the steamed mirror she found the bruise again. Four pale ovals down the left side of her throat, blooming the color of a plum's inside. She turned her head to see them better, then washed her hair and stepped out.
She chose the plain cotton nightshirt, the one with the hem gone soft, and she put the locket on the nightstand where it always went. Then she got into bed on her side of it.
The book was waiting where she'd left it that afternoon. Joaquin had lent it to her in the first week, holding it up over the fence between their yards like a flag of something. A paperback, translated, its spine cracked in two places. She'd read twenty pages back then and set it down, because it belonged to the husband in the story and the husband bored her.
She read past that now. The man was driving somewhere and lying to himself about why. The author kept letting him believe he was the smartest person in the car. The sentences were short and clean. Marnie turned the pages and did not hear a word of them.
At half past twelve the bathroom door clicked down the hall.
Hugh came in with his glass, down to whiskey and light, his hair damp and combed flat. He'd put on the grey pajama bottoms and the old college shirt with the collar gone soft at the neck. He stood at the foot of the bed for a second before he sat on the edge of it. The mattress dipped under him.
"That was a good dinner," he said. "We should have them over again sometime."
"We should."
He drank. Ice clicked against his teeth.
"I heard you and Vera in the kitchen talking," he said. "You two becoming best friends?"
"Something like that, maybe."
"That's good." He looked at the wall, then at the dark window, then at his own hands. "I couldn't get a good read on that Quin guy. He isn't much of a guy's guy, you know?"
"His name is Joaquin." Her voice came out soft and even, the one she kept for children and dogs, for the volunteers at the library, for the man at the transfer station who always helped her with the bins. "And I'm sure he's nice enough. It's okay to have friends with different interests than you."
"Maybe." He turned the glass slowly by the rim. "I guess you're right."
"I am always right, honey."
That pulled a laugh out of him, one short breath of it.
He finished the whiskey and set the tumbler on the nightstand, close to her locket. Then he said, "Oh, and Marnie?"
"Yes, honey?"
"You know I love you, right?" He wasn't looking at her. The lamp on his side drew a hard line down his cheek. "I don't know what I was thinking earlier. Too much booze, maybe."
The bruise felt warm on her neck, the whole shape of it, like a bracelet she'd been given and could not take off without asking.
"I'm sure," she said. "Let's just get some rest. You have work in the morning."
He nodded and turned off the lamp.
The dark came down heavy and total for a moment. Then the streetlight through the blinds laid four thin lines across the ceiling, and she held the book open on her chest and did not turn the page.
Hugh shifted. His hand came across the space between them and settled on her shoulder, slid up, and stopped on her throat.
He wasn't squeezing. His palm just rested there, warm and heavy, right where it had been at the stove that afternoon.
Marnie lay still and counted. Ten. Nine. Eight. It was an old trick of hers, one she used with children in a hiding game. At one, his hand slid off her throat and dropped onto the mattress between them, open and empty. A rattle started low in his chest and found its rhythm.
She waited until it steadied, then reached over and found the locket by touch. She opened it under the covers, located the needle with her thumb, and pressed. A bead came up, small and bright in the light from the blinds. She put the thumb in her mouth and set the locket back on the nightstand.
Then she turned onto her side, away from him, and lay there with her hand under her cheek while the house settled around them, board by board.
She lay on her side with her hand under her cheek and listened the house down to its last creak. Hugh's breathing had a catch near the top, the way it always did when whiskey was still working inside him. Every third breath went up and hung there a moment before it came down.
The floorboards were cold through her socks. At half past one she got up, took her phone off the charger out of habit, and went down the stairs with one hand on the rail and no lights on.
The kitchen still smelled of cherries and rendered fat. The plates stood in the rack, ticking as they cooled. The pans sat in the sink where he had left them, the roast tin and the skillet, and the juice in the bottom had gone to tallow.
Morning wasn't fine. She ran the tap until the window steamed to the top and put the tin in first.
She washed both pans in water as hot as her hands would take. Grease came off in grey sheets and the drain swallowed it down. She scoured the corners with the green pad, rinsed, racked them, and dried her hands on the towel and hung the towel straight. The clock in the hall ticked out one and then two.
One wedge of pie was left in the dish, the juice gone dark under the lattice. She cut it in half and ate one half standing at the counter with her fingers.
It was still too sweet at the edge. She had left it in a minute past the timer while Vera talked about Cabo. She ate the other half, then wiped the plate with her thumb and put it in the rack with everything else.
Outside, past the fence, the Marshes' kitchen light was on.
Joaquin stood at his sink with a towel over one shoulder and his sleeves pushed up. He was working at something flat, a sheet pan most likely, and he washed it the way he did everything, slow, as if the thing in his hands mattered. She stood at her own sink and watched him, and he looked up and saw her.
Neither of them waved. Waving was for people with nothing in the sink.
Her phone lit on the counter.
Hows the neck
Fine. He's asleep.
The dots came and went. She watched them with her hands still wet.
Thats not what I asked
Warm, she typed.
Does it hurt
Not anymore.
Nothing came back for a minute. Across the fence he set the pan in his rack and stood with both hands on the rim of the sink, his shoulders going up once and staying there.
Then: the stem thing
What about it
She aimed it at him and he looked away. Then he looked at you
Marnie read that twice. She had been watching Vera's ear go pink and thinking about the drawer. She had not seen where Hugh's eyes went after.
Did he
Still is, probably
She breathed out through her nose, which was as close as she came to laughing at that hour. Across the fence the tap went off, and his window was one square of lit yellow in the black of the yard, and she could see the line of his jaw when he tipped his head down to type.
How long
She knew what he meant. It was the same question he had asked her on the shoulder of the highway, in the same flat voice, with the trucks going by.
Not yet, she wrote. Feet first. When I say.
A single word came back. Soon.
She turned off the light above the sink. Across the way he did the same, and both kitchens went black within a breath of each other, and the yard came up grey around her, fence posts and the cherry tree and nothing moving.
On the landing she stopped, because a rectangle of white lay across the ceiling from her bedroom, thrown there by the blinds and by something else. Hugh's phone was face up on the nightstand. It must have lit while she was downstairs.
She went in and stood at the side of the bed and read the preview from where she stood.
Vera Marsh, 1:44 a.m. Do you think she knows?
Marnie stood there with her arms at her sides and dish soap on her wrists.
Hugh slept with his mouth open and one arm flat across the empty half of the mattress. He had never once in ten years slept like that, arm thrown wide and looking for something, unless he had been drinking.
She counted to five. Then she picked up the phone.
She held it up over his sleeping face at an angle, and the little padlock at the top of the screen opened without a sound. His face was a key and his face was right there, slack and harmless, being a key.
The thread came up. She scrolled with her thumb.
Two months of it. His lines short and mostly about hours. Hers longer, some of them after one in the morning, one of them a photograph he had opened and she did not. Nothing in any of it surprised her. She had read the red on his collar after the gala and drawn the rest of the picture herself, and the picture held, and there was a kind of relief in it, like a recipe turning out exactly as written.
She scrolled back to the bottom.
Do you think she knows?
She thought about the kitchen and Vera's hand landing on her shoulder, heavy and friendly and total, and the signet ring on the finger, and the voice saying stay out of his way and do what he says.
She thought about the stem and the ear going pink and the pie dish with nothing left in it.
Then she held the phone over her husband's face again and deleted the one message. Not the thread. Only the last. She set the phone back down with the corner just off the coaster, and the screen went dark.
Let her sit up at her desk at half past one with a glass of something and watch a message go unanswered. Let a woman like that start counting the reasons a man goes quiet.
She put the locket on the nightstand where it belonged and got into bed on her own side. She pulled the sheet up to her collarbone, over the bruise, which was warm as a hand left there. Down the hall the refrigerator compressor kicked on. She lay in the four thin lines of streetlight and did not reach for the book.
At four Hugh rolled onto his side and his arm came across her and stayed. He said something in his sleep with her name in it. It might have been a question. He didn't wake up to hear whether she answered, and she didn't.