Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

IN BED THAT NIGHT, face greasy with cold cream, she recalled the way, after apologizing and apologizing once more for his harsh words, for his poor behavior, he opened the car door and doffed his hat and followed her to the front door and his head, the top of it, brushed the porch lamp and his hair shot through with light and his face so grave, long shadows meeting beneath his chin. “I wish you could see, Mrs. Seeley, what this is. This thing that has happened, that is happening still, that cannot be stopped from happening. I wish you could see what this is.”

“I know what it is, Mr. Lanigan,” she’d said, clipped and abrupt, shutting the door behind her.

THEN NOTHING FOR DAYS and Marion, head down in work and evenings spent writing a long letter to Mazatlán:

Dr. Seeley, please do not forget me here. My lungs breathe free and clear, couldn’t I come to you at last? I know you said it would not be right to have babies until you had beat this thing, but you have and now I have babies to give and everything else too. All the dark snarls in my head are gone and I can be the wife I…

Each day the idea of another evening spent in her room was near too much to bear. And so she threw herself into the girls’ mad embrace and was so grateful for it.

A midweek supper at Louise and Ginny’s, Louise trying out a new dish she’d created called February Surprise and it was canned cream of celery soup and egg noodles with baking-powder biscuits on top and everyone agreed it was wretched and Ginny tried to throw it out the window and there was screaming laughter. Marion was so glad she’d come.

Even still, seeing Louise, she found herself worrying about the party at the El Royale Hotel. Had it been Louise, and had Louise seen her? Somehow, she had come to persuade herself that she had misseen, as distressed as she was.

But then Ginny, breaking a fever and feeling sour, said, “Marion, do you think it’s nice that Louise leaves me alone so often? I wonder if she’ll go out on the town this weekend, like she did last. I had to entertain myself with Chubby Parker and Pie Plant Pete on the radio instead.”

“Poor little baby,” Louise said, singsong. “Did you need me to wash your hair, Princess Virginia?”

And then Ginny broke the onion face and did laugh and Marion said, almost a whisper, “Where did you go, Louise?”

“Birthday party.” Louise smiled, lifting Ginny’s ankles off the sofa, and settled herself beneath them, squeezing Ginny’s pink-slippered feet.

“And my, did she tie one on.” Ginny rolled her eyes. “Came home near three o’clock and drank bicarbonate all Sunday.”

“I’d’ve just as soon stayed in Saturday night, but someone was rattling like a diamondback.”

“So I drove you out, that it? Drove you to ruin.”

“Something like, kitten.”

Marion almost spoke up but didn’t. To say anything would be to admit she was at the party and that she could not do. She could say nothing, not even to her new, her dearest friends. She would have to live with her shame, but she didn’t need to share it with others. Never that.

LATER, LOUISE MADE MARION a bed of the settee, muslin tucked tight.

“You are a lonely girl,” she said. “We won’t let you be lonely.”

Marion smiled.

“It’s funny,” Louise whispered, head tilted confidingly. “For Ginny, men are only to play with.”

“But not for you?” Marion whispered back.

“Not for me,” Louise said, shaking her head. “Sometimes one gets under my skin and poppoppop like a needle.”

“Yes, that’s what it’s like,” Marion admitted, in spite of herself. “That’s just what it’s like, poppoppop. ”

DR. SEELEY, you must understand my plight. I am in peril. I am nearly lost.

FRIDAY STRETCHED LONG at the clinic. Six new patients were admitted, papers needed to be put in order for the state inspection on Monday, and two nurses had been dismissed the day before (Louise heard tell and shared with Marion they were caught in the east utility room with a male patient and a jar of corn liquor, not a stitch on and he with hands on them both).

The day never broke and Marion’s stockings itched and her back had a mean twist three notches long and Mr. Joe Lanigan had forgotten her forever, hadn’t he, and Marion had never finished the letter to Dr. Seeley and had torn the half-finished draft into pieces and hidden them in the toe of one of her wedding shoes because she was afraid if she threw it in the wastepaper basket Mrs. Gower might find it.

On the streetcar home, she set her handbag, heavy with the medical histories she had not finished, across her lap so that she might slip her hand underneath and between the buttons on her skirt and scratch her legs, tickling unbearably underneath her stockings, worn and no new funds from Mexico for three weeks. Under her bag, her fingertips found her thighs and she chanced only a few deep scores before lifting her hand away. The man opposite her, standing, looming, hat on, close-set eyes and toothpick prancing between lips, he looked like he could see and there was a nasty flicker in his eyes and something curling, raw, in his lips. Marion’s face fell hot with shame.

TWO HOURS LATER, after a starchy supper with Mrs. Gower and the other two boarders, unmarried girls glum with no dates that night, after helping with the dishes and mouth top still burning with macaroni custard, Marion retired to her room and turned on the radio and opened the window as high as it would go and sat listening to The Misadventures of Si and Elmer and knew she should be doing the work she had brought home, or working on the cross-stitch on the handkerchiefs she would send to her mother for her birthday. But she sat by the window and sat until near nine o’clock and that was when she saw the flash of Joe Lanigan’s oyster-white topcoat under the streetlamp below.

Later, she would try to tell herself the story of that hour as if it were a fairy tale: the knight climbed up the tower clasped in three centuries of black ivy and he cut through the ivy with a mighty sword and found the fair maiden and she was his.

Later, she would see that hour as if it were a motion picture: the leading man, so handsome, and the leading lady, bathed in white light, and he moving toward her and she toward him, jittery and lovely. And they embraced like in all the pictures, and it was filled with all the things—magic, longing—that picture kisses are filled with. And the darkness on the edges spiraled toward the center and swallowed the screen black.

Later, she would recall again and again the events of that hour while coverlet to chin in her bed approaching three o’clock and hidden under the hood of late-night melancholic dark where everything means so much and everything is so raw and tender and open and it would be like this, like this:

He stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand, and he said, “Mrs. Seeley, you are an honorable woman. I would not for all the world’s fortune test your honor. But you must see there are things I have to say to you. Will you let me come inside?”

But she would not. How could she, into her room, the room the good doctor had secured for her. The thought of him in that small space, with only one rose chair, one chair and a bed.

He reached across the threshold and his eyes were on her and wouldn’t let go. His hand went out and she jumped back as though he were made of fire, and wasn’t he?

“Mrs. Seeley, might you step outside with me, then? Might you walk with me a little?”

But she would not. To be seen on the street with a man, this man, a man all knew was married, with a stricken wife and—