Will Lavender - Obedience

They lay there, each of them looking up at the dark ceiling. She had to agree with him, of course. Sense was not a word that could be rationally applied to their situation at the moment. Across the room, Dennis churned his legs and counted under his breath.

“What do you think, Brian?” Mary asked. Over on his side of the bed, he was quiet.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. Mary knew that, like her, he was exhausting himself from turning all the complexities of the game around and around in his mind. “I seriously…I seriously think about hurting him.”

“Hurting who?” Dennis asked.

“Williams. At all this shit he’s caused. I haven’t slept in a week. I can’t-I can’t seem to get my mind off it. If I could get to him and demand answers, you know. Even if he told us Deanna was dead, then that would at least be something.”

“She’s not dead,” Mary said softly.

“It makes me wonder about Dean Orman’s wife,” said Brian.

Dennis stopped kicking. “What does?” he asked.

“This,” Brian replied. “All this. After seeing her that night, I just wonder if she was part of this thing or if Williams was somehow…” He trailed off, couldn’t define the thought.

“That night?” Dennis asked.

“I saw her out on Montgomery Street. By the Thatch River. She’d been beaten. She said that something had happened between her and the guy that looked after their boat for them. A former cop, she said. She wouldn’t let me tell the dean because she was afraid Orman would kill the guy.”

“Pig,” Dennis whispered.

Brian bolted upright in the bed. “What did you say?” he asked Dennis.

“The guy who looks after their boat,” Dennis said. “He’s called Pig. That’s where Williams got his name for the bad guy in his Polly story.”

On her side of the room, Mary tried to figure it out. She worked it around in her head, fused the two narratives, Polly’s and Deanna Ward’s, and now this third narrative that starred Dean Orman’s wife and the former police officer called Pig. But she couldn’t come up with anything. It was all a muddle, jumbled, like the bar owner’s theory of the pancaked universes. What was real, what was fake, what was part of the game and what wasn’t? She lay back down and shut her eyes.

“How could it all be related?” She realized, too late, that she had said it aloud.

“I don’t know,” Brian replied. “But I just have a feeling now, after all we’ve seen today, that it was too coincidental. Too freakish, you know. How could Elizabeth Orman have been there just as I was driving back to campus? It was like she-like she was waiting for me.”

“We have to go to the police,” Mary said.

“No.” Dennis now, speaking in such a hushed voice that it was barely above a whisper.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Mary said angrily.

“I mean no. Out of the question. It’s too soon, Mary.”

“People’s lives could be in danger, Dennis. This is going beyond some-what did you call it?-some tangram. This is real life here.” She realized she had stood up, and she was approaching him across the bedroom. Her underwear was showing, but she didn’t care. She was losing control of herself, of her emotions; she was past the tipping point now. She was so angry-at Williams, at Dennis, at Polly for getting involved in all this somehow. She wanted it all to go back to normal, to when it was just a class. But somewhere along the way they had crossed some imaginary boundary and things had spilled over into the real.

“I know Elizabeth Orman,” Dennis said. Mary stopped. She knew what he meant by his voice, by the seemingly innocuous word know, and the thought of it deflated her, sent her back to her bed where she collapsed face down into the pillow.

“What do you mean?” Brian asked.

“I mean I knew her. I’m familiar with her. Listen…” Dennis began the bicycle thing again. Mary could not listen to him. There was a roar through her entire body, a piercing noise that filled her with an old, familiar ache. “Listen,” he said again, his legs kicking madly and his breath chopped and labored, “there’s something I haven’t told you. I figured it out by…by the San Francisco thing.”

“The San Francisco thing?” Brian asked.

“Well, that wasn’t first but that cemented it in my mind,” Dennis said. “Polly’s mother left and went away to San Francisco. Elizabeth told me a story about her mother running off to San Francisco with this guy. That’s when I figured out the link between Williams and Elizabeth Orman.”

Dennis Flaherty told them about Elizabeth Orman. He didn’t tell them all of it, of course, just bits and pieces. He told them about the boat, and about his reasons for going to the Thatch that day. He told them about their relationship, and some of what she had told him at the Kingsley Hotel. He told them about speaking to Dean Orman that night at the house on the hill. And then he told them his secret: Elizabeth Orman used to see Leonard Williams.

“It was a few years ago,” Dennis explained. “She didn’t think anything of it, you know. Just a fling, to her. But Williams was smitten with her. He fell in love with her, I think. When she tried to break it off, he wasn’t happy. He started getting crazy. Sending her flowers every day. Showing up at their home and just standing outside, watching her. She got scared. She finally told Dr. Orman, and the dean was furious. He confronted Williams at a faculty meeting. It got real bad. Drama. The two men almost came to blows, right there on the third floor of the Carnegie Building. Williams was reprimanded, put on some kind of suspension. They sent him overseas to teach. Sort of to get him out of the way, you know? When he came back, the dean got worried about him again. That’s when he hired this guy, this former cop, to watch after his boat. He was afraid Williams was going to deface it or something. Apparently he’d threatened to set it on fire. This former cop, of course-his name is Pig Stephens.”

“Do you think he’s part of this thing?” Brian asked.

“No,” Dennis said. “I think that Williams put Pig into his narrative just to get a dig in at the Ormans. He was into irony like that. A coal black sense of humor. He told me about Elizabeth when we talked. Was real forthcoming. He claimed the affair was nothing but Dean Orman, who had always been intimidated by him, made it into something much more than it really was. But…”

“What?” Brian urged.

“But I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why Pig would hurt Elizabeth. Unless, you know, unless it’s just random. Unless it’s just a random thing and Pig just flew off the handle one night. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Williams says there is no randomness,” Brian said, sarcasm thick in his voice. “Everything happens for a reason.”

The two boys laughed at that, but Mary had stopped hearing them. She could only think of Dennis and Elizabeth Orman. The image kept flashing through her mind, the sickening image of the two of them together. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She knew that. She and Dennis had had a thing once, a long time ago-freshman year, for goodness sake-and now they were through. At least she thought so. Hoped so. But still the image was there, dogging her, teasing her. She shut her eyes against it but that only made it stronger, more vivid. Suddenly she wanted to be home, away from this mess, this game. She felt hot tears in her eyes, and she had no choice but to let them come.

In the morning Mary found Brian outside on their little balcony, sitting on a plastic chair and looking out at the bustling traffic moving down Highway 72. She took a seat beside him, and they silently watched the gray Wednesday morning shift in the early, diffuse sunlight. “We’re at the end, aren’t we?” she asked him.