Siegel, James - Derailed

“I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know.”

She nodded. She looked away, down at her bare feet, which seemed strangely vulnerable on the green step of our back stoop, like naked newborn mammals. Then she looked up again, squinting, as if looking directly at me were hurting her eyes.

“I was going to say, How could you, can you believe it? I was. But I know how you could, Charles. Maybe I even know why you could.”

Why? I thought. Tell me. . . .

“Maybe I even understand it,” she continued. “Because of what’s happened with us lately. I think I can understand it, I do. I just don’t think I can forgive it. I’m sorry about that. I can’t.”

“Deanna,” I began, but she waved me off.

“It’s over now? This affair?”

At last a question I could more or less handle.

“Yes. Absolutely. It was once, just one time, really. . . .”

She sighed, cracked her knuckle, wiped her eyes. “Why is Anna's money missing, Charles?”

Okay. I’d told half of it, but there was still a whole other half, wasn’t there?

“You don’t have to tell me anything else about the affair — I don’t want to know anything else about it,” Deanna said. “But I want to know that.”

So I told her.

As sparingly as possible, as linearly as I could remember it—one thing leading to another leading to another—and I could tell that while it had all made sense to me, in a horrible, albeit panicked, way, it wasn’t making any sense to her. Even when I reached the part where we’d been attacked and beaten and I could see actual sympathy in her eyes. Even when I reached the part where Vasquez entered our home and put his hand on Anna’s head. Still it made no sense to her. Perhaps she could see what I hadn’t been able to—could spot the moments in this tortured tale when I could’ve done something different, when this different course of action was crying out to be tried. Or maybe it was because I’d left something out, something significant and necessary to any true understanding of events.

“So I paid him the money,” I finished. “To save her.”

“You never thought about going to the police? About going to me? ”

Yes, I wanted to say. I had thought about going to the police, or going to her, which was pretty much the same thing, really. But when I’d thought about it, I’d pictured the way she’d look—which was the way she looked now. So I hadn’t. And now I really couldn’t go to the police, even though it might not make much of a difference, since it was entirely probable the police were coming for me.

“That money,” she whispered. “Anna’s Fund . . .” saying it the way I’d heard investors mention one fund or another these past couple of years while perusing the stock pages on their way to work. That Dreyfus Fund . . . Morgan Fund . . . Alliance Fund . . . As if reciting the names of the dearly departed. Gone and never to return.

“You have to go to the police now, Charles. You have to tell them what happened and get our money back. It's Anna's. ”

I’d told her a story with a hole in it, a hole I’d hoped would be big enough to sneak through. But no. She was making a perfectly reasonable request, only I didn’t have a perfectly reasonable answer. Protecting Lucinda from her husband’s anger wouldn’t do now — not for Deanna, not when protecting her was costing our daughter over a hundred thousand dollars.

What she didn’t know was that I was protecting me.

“There’s more,” I said, and I could see Deanna deflate. Haven't you told me enough already? her expression seemed to say. What more can there possibly be?

“I asked someone to help me,” I said, thinking that I was still lying, since I hadn’t asked Winston as much as coerced him. On the other hand, Winston hadn’t actually helped me as much as set me up. “I asked someone to help me scare off Vasquez.”

“Scare off?" Deanna might be in semishock, but she was still smart enough to see the inherent flaws in my plan, and she was calling me on it. That when you ask a man to scare off someone else, there was a volatility factor of plus ten. That what starts out as a fist in the face can end up as a knife in the heart. Or a bullet in the head.

“He was threatening this family, Deanna. He came to our house. ”

When something loves me I love it back, Deanna had said to me once. That was her rule to live by, her credo, her own semper fidelis. But she was in the battle of her life now, with bomb after bomb falling all around her, and it was anyone’s guess if that love could actually survive. Judging by the expression on her face, I would’ve had to say no. She was having problems recognizing me, I imagined — recognizing this man as the generally loving and gentle husband she’d known for eighteen years. Not this guy, who’d had a seedy affair and paid blackmail money because of it and even enlisted someone to get rid of this blackmailer for him. Was it possible?

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said lamely.

“What happened?”

“I think Vasquez killed him.”

A sharp intake of breath. Even now, when I’d no doubt ripped apart every illusion she once cherished, I was still capable of surprising her. An affair—bad enough; but then murder.

“Oh, Charles . . .”

“I think . . . I believe, this man, the man who died, may have been taping me. Setting me up, sort of.”

“What do you mean, setting you up? ”

“He was an ex-con, Deanna. He was an ex-con and an informant, I think. He was obligated, maybe.”

“You’re telling me . . . ?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. But I’m worried.”

And so was she. But maybe the biggest thing she was worried about was where love goes when it goes. This steadfast devotion of hers, which had been pummeled and knocked around and stomped on. Where?

“I knew something was wrong, Charles. I thought some money was missing before—when you took the first ten thousand, I guess. Maybe it’s my imagination, I thought. So I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was imagining everything — the way you were acting. The hours you were keeping. Everything. I thought it might be a woman. But I didn’t want to believe it. I was waiting for you to come tell me, Charles. . . .”

And now I had told her. But more than she could have actually imagined.

She asked me a few more questions—some of the ones I’d expected she would. Who was this woman, exactly? Was she married, too? Was it really just that one time? But I could tell her heart wasn’t really in it. And then other questions that maybe her heart was in, or what was left of her heart — how much trouble was I really in with the police, for instance, things of that nature.

But in the end, she told me to leave the house. She didn’t know for how long, but she wanted me out of there.

A few weeks later, weeks I spent avoiding Deanna and retiring to the guest bedroom after Anna went to bed, I found a furnished apartment in Forest Hills.

THIRTY

Forest Hills seemed to be made up of Orthodox Jews and unorthodox sectarians. People who seemed alone, or who were without a visible means of support, or who didn’t seem to really belong there. In that particular apartment or particular building or that actual neighborhood. I fit in perfectly.

For instance, I looked like a married man, but where was my wife? I was undoubtedly a father, but where exactly were my kids? And then I even became a little shaky on the means-of-support thing.

On the first Tuesday after I moved out, I took the train into work at Continental Boulevard.