Siegel, James - Derailed

State them.

No, not everyone, Palumbo said.

Just you.

TWENTY-NINE

Things happen for a reason. That’s what Deanna believed. That things aren’t as random as you might expect — that there was some kind of unseen and only hinted-at plan out there. That the orchestra might be out of tune and all over the place, but there was a maestro somewhere in that hidden orchestra pit who knew exactly what he was doing.

I’d always treated that kind of thinking with a healthy skepticism, but now I wasn’t so sure.

Take the Saturday after my interrogation. Freakishly warm, pools of soft mud sucking at my shoes as I meticulously picked up after Curry in the backyard. I was concentrating on this task — covering every inch of the yard with eagle-eyed dedication — as a way to keep from concentrating on other things.

I was holding in fear and panic; I was trying not to let them out.

So when Deanna called out to me from the back door — something about auto insurance — I barely acknowledged her.

She needed to renew our insurance, she was saying. Yes, that’s what it was. I nodded at her like one of those bobble dolls they stick on the dashboard of cars — reflexive motion caused by the slightest disturbance in the air. She needed to renew our insurance, and she wanted to know where our policy was.

So I told her. And went back to the business at hand.

It was ten or fifteen minutes later when she appeared at the back door wearing an expression I was all too familiar with. The one I’d hoped to never see again.

At first, of course, I thought, Anna. Something happened to Anna and I must throw down my garbage bag and run into the house. Where I would no doubt find my daughter comatose again. Only at that very moment I saw Anna pass her upstairs bedroom window, where the latest from P. Diddy was streaming through the closed sill. She looked fine.

What, then? So my mind backtracked, scurrying down the recent road to here — searching furiously for clues that might explain the nature of this particular disaster.

I’d been cleaning the yard; she’d come out to tell me something — yes, our insurance needed renewing. She’d asked me where our policy was; I’d told her.

In the file cabinet, of course. Under I for insurance. Right?

Except this was auto insurance. Automobile insurance that needed renewing. So in the haphazard and admittedly chaotic filing system of the Schines, it was possible that this policy wasn’t under I after all, but under A. A for automobile. In the A file.

All this occurring to me at lightning speed and, as lightning would, leaving me dazed and scorched. Possibly even dead.

Which is when I wondered about things happening for a reason. Why, for instance, our auto insurance had needed to be renewed now, right this minute, today. Why? And why at the very moment she’d asked me for help in finding our policy, I’d been so preoccupied with staying preoccupied that I hadn’t had the wherewithall to tell her I’d go get it myself.

“Where’s Anna’s money, Charles?” Deanna asked me. “What have you done with it?”

Maybe I’d always known the moment would come.

Certain things were just too massive to be hidden successfully — their very dimensions make them impossible to conceal. Their edges stick out in the open, and sooner or later someone is bound to notice them.

Or maybe I wanted to be found out — isn’t that what any psychiatrist worth his salt would say? That I might’ve been cleaning up the garden, sure, but at the same time I was yearning to clean up my life.

Hard to believe that I would’ve gone through all I had only to throw it all away on purpose. But then, things weren’t that simple anymore.

“What have you done with it?” she asked me.

And at first, I was rendered speechless. Deanna stock still on the back stoop and me standing there with a garbage bag reeking of excrement.

“I brought the certificates to a safety deposit box,” I lied through my teeth. I will take one stab at extricating myself from this, I thought, one outright denial.

“Charles . . . ,” she admonished me with my own name. As if that kind of blatant lying weren’t worthy of me. And I wanted to say, Yes, Deanna, it is. You don’t know what I’ve been up to — it is.

But I couldn’t say much of anything — not yet, not when it concerned the truth. I was dead in the water, and I knew it.

“Charles, why are you lying to me? What’s going on?”

I suppose I could’ve denied I was lying to her. I could’ve stuck to my ridiculous story about the safety deposit box—ridiculous not because it wasn’t possible, but because even if she had believed me, I would have had to produce the stock certificates on Monday, and that was impossible. I could’ve said this is my story and I’m sticking to it, no matter what. But in the end, I had too much respect for her. In the end, I loved her too much.

So even though I knew what I was about to do, knew that now that I was about to take a stab at the truth I was going to be stabbing her — I went ahead anyway.

I started with the train. That hurried morning, the lack of cash, the woman who’d helped me out.

When I mentioned Lucinda, I could see Deanna’s expression change — her features flattening, the way animals’ faces do at the first sign of danger.

“Then I had a bad day at the office,” I continued. “I was kicked off the credit card account.”

Deanna was obviously wondering what getting kicked off an account had to do with $110,000 missing from Anna’s Fund. And with the woman on the train.

I was wondering about that, too. I knew there was a connection, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Something about needing to talk to someone, maybe — or had it simply been a precursor to what followed? One step taken off the ledge before the other foot followed?

“I ran into the woman again,” I said. What I should’ve said was that I ran after, sought, meticulously looked for, this woman. But wasn’t I allowed to soft-pedal just a little?

“What are you talking about, Charles?” She wanted the Monarch Notes version now — she wasn’t interested in a prologue or an introduction, not when she could tell that her future with me was hanging in the balance.

“I’m talking about a mistake I made, Deanna. I’m so sorry.” A mistake. Was that all it was? People made mistakes all the time, and then they learned from them. I was hoping she might look at it that way, even though common sense and everything I knew about Deanna after eighteen years of marriage told me there was no chance of that. Still.

Now Deanna sat on the stoop. She pushed her hair back from her face and straightened her back like someone about to be shot who still wants desperately to keep her dignity. And me? I raised the gun in my hand and pulled the trigger.

“I had an affair, Deanna.”

P. Diddy was still seeping through the window. Curry was barking at a passing car. Still, the surrounding world was about as silent as I’d ever heard it. A silence even worse than the kind that had permeated the house ever since Anna got sick, silence so black and hopeless that I thought I might start crying.

But she did instead. Not loudly or hysterically, but the tears suddenly there, as if I’d slapped her hard in the face.

“Why?” she said.

I’d expected she would ask questions. I thought she might ask me if I loved her, this woman—or how long it had been going on, or how long it was over. But no—she’d asked me why instead. A question she was entitled to, absolutely, but a question I was unprepared to answer.