Lisa Unger - Die For You

“He killed her?”

“She was the only connection to the real Marcus Raine,” I said, so calmly. No emotion. I didn’t even sound like myself. I got up and walked over to Camilla Novak’s bag on the couch.

“What are you doing?”

It was a cheap knockoff, flimsy, fraying at the seams. I started rifling through its contents. A hot-pink cell phone, a purple sequined wallet, two tubes of lip gloss, mascara, tweezers. Then something else that gave me a little jolt of surprise.

“You’re getting prints all over everything,” Erik said. He stuffed his own fingers under arms folded tightly across his chest. Television had turned us all into crime-scene experts.

“Do you know what she said to me about him, the night we told you we were engaged?”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Linda,” I said, annoyed that he wasn’t following my crazed train of thought. “What she said about Marcus?”

He shook his head, looked at me as if he couldn’t imagine what relevance this had, why I would be thinking about this now. His eyes fell on Camilla’s body and stayed there, as though once he’d allowed himself to look, he couldn’t look away.

“She said he was just like our father.”

He brought his gaze back to me quickly, looked surprised. We never, and I mean never, talked about my father, so raw and angry were the wounds his parting left in us.

“What do you think she meant by that?”

He rolled his eyes, started shifting from foot to foot-boyish, anxious. “Izzy Let’s go. We’ll talk about this in the cab.”

“I mean,” I said, all the unexpressed anger I’d had for her in that moment rising like a tide I couldn’t quell, “my father was a kind, loving man. He was warm, affectionate. He had a jovial way about him, a light.”

“I don’t know what she meant. I didn’t know your father.”

“She must have told you.”

“Isabel,” he said, walking over to me quickly, putting firm hands on my shoulders. “Listen. To. Me. We have to get out of here right now or call the police and tell them what’s happened. A woman is dead. Marcus was here. He’s a wanted man. He’s done terrible things. We’re letting him get away.”

“Oh, he’s not getting away. I promise you that. He does have a head start, true.”

“Iz.” He narrowed his eyes, gripped my shoulders a little harder. I could tell by the half-worried, half-angry look on his face that he thought I was in shock, losing it a little. He couldn’t have been more wrong. I’d never seen things more clearly. Or so it seemed at the time-with a head injury and a dead body at my feet, and my husband a murderous criminal on the run from the law.

“Just tell me what you think and then you can call the police.”

“Oh my God.” He bowed his head and released an exasperated breath. “Okay. She meant that the facade was different than the underpinnings. That Marcus presented one face, but that, like your father, there was a dark inner life. She felt his coldness. She said that your father was cold, too, in a way. Even though he seemed very sweet, very loving, that there was something about him that was afraid to truly connect, that was terrified of the intimacy of real love. He had a powerful need to isolate, that he was damaged in ways no one realized until his suicide.”

I found myself nodding slowly, a great sadness swelling inside me. She saw him, both of them, with her photographer’s eye. My writer’s brain saw other men, men I had created and explained.

I moved into Erik and let him hold me for a second.

“I’m sorry, Erik,” I said into his shoulder. Behind his back, I took Camilla’s little surprise from her cheap bag, which I still held in my hand. It felt cool and light, a game of play-pretend, a fantasy.

“This is not your fault,” he said. “Let’s call the lawyer and the police.”

“It is my fault. And really, I’m the only one who can fix this. Otherwise, it’s all gone-the money, my marriage, our family as it was. He steals everything and gets away with it.”

“Honey,” he said sadly, “it’s gone either way. We’ll start again.”

“No.”

I moved away from him and he saw the gun in my hand, sighed and rolled his eyes at the sight of it, as though it were a toy, as though I was throwing a childish tantrum.

“You tell them I pulled a gun on you,” I said, sounding a little shaky, a little nuts. “That you found me here and I wouldn’t go with you.”

He shook his head, gave me a disbelieving smile. “Oh, come on, Izzy”

“I love you. You’re a great husband and a great dad.”

He knew I’d never hurt him, and I knew he knew it. But we played out the scene; he saw something in my face and backed away from the door, put his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.

“I wasn’t enough to keep him with us. None of us were.”

He blinked, somehow knowing I wasn’t talking about Marc. “This is not about your father, Izzy. This is not the same.”

I put Camilla’s bag over my shoulder.

“What am I supposed to tell them, Iz? The police? Linda and the kids?”

“The truth. Just tell them the truth. I pulled a gun on you and now I’m going after my husband.”

“The police are starting to think you’re guilty, that you had something to do with all of this. How am I going to convince them otherwise if you run off like this?”

“They’re right. I’m guilty, like any wife who is guilty for ignoring all the signs, all her instincts.”

“You’re not yourself, girl. Don’t do this.”

But I left him there and he didn’t come after me. And I left the building and ran up the street, then ducked into the subway. I wasn’t flying blind. I knew where to go, maybe where I should have been all along.

She never thought of that night anymore. It lived inside her like a room she never entered in a big, drafty old house. She might walk down the dark hallway might even rest her hand on the knob, but she never opened the door. She heeded Blue Beard’s warning, thought Pandora was a fool. There are some memories better abandoned. Common wisdom demanded examination of the past, probing of childhood pain and trauma. Then-acceptance, release, and ultimately forgiveness. But Linda wondered if this was always the best course. Maybe this was a philosophy that just had people picking at scabs, creating scars on flesh that might have healed better if left alone.

She didn’t want to go back there to that night when she awoke with a start, and the room she shared with Isabel was washed in a moonlight so bright that for a moment she thought it was morning. But then through her window she saw the pale blue face of the moon low and bloated in the sky. She slipped from bed, not worried about waking Izzy who slept soundly like Margie, had to be vigorously roused in the morning. She was a buried ball under the covers, her breathing so deep, so steady, it almost seemed fake. Linda moved over to the window and looked out onto the backyard. The rusting old swing set they hadn’t touched in ages sagged dangerously, its frame crooked in the moonlight. The grand old oak towered, its leaves whispering just a bit in the very slight breeze. Off near the edge of the property, just before a stand of trees, her father’s work shed stood wide and solid, looking righteous, though it was as rickety as the swing set.

A good wind , her mother said, and that thing will be in splinters .

You wish , her father countered.

She saw that one of the doors was ajar. Eagerly, she pulled on jeans under her nightgown, slipped her feet into a pair of Keds, walked quickly down the hall.

The day belonged to Isabel. But at night, when Margie and Izzy were off in their deep, dreamless sleep, Linda was Daddy’s girl. Linda shared a minor case of insomnia with her father, where sometimes the night called them both, didn’t offer any sleep at all.