Authors: Sue Miller
‘And you’re the one to tell, I guess,’ the larger one says. ‘He’s not married? He has no family?’
‘No,’ Lottie says. ‘Just me.’
‘Okay, then, just so you know that he was . . . very upset. And he left his wallet too. His wallet and his keys. Just left without them, I guess, when they said he was free to
go.’
Now Danehy pushes himself with effort out of the deeply sprung armchair he’s been in. He stands towering over Lottie, pulling the wallet out of his own back pocket. He hands it to her.
It’s brown leather, worn almost white around the edges, warm from his body. ‘If it’s okay with you, we thought we’d just leave them here.’ He unbuttons his shirt
pocket and pulls the keys out, hands them over too. ‘Assuming, you know, that he’d rather not have to come in and deal with us again.’
‘Yes; that’s fine,’ she says. ‘I’ll see that he gets them.’
‘So,’ says the bigger one, standing up. Together the men seem to fill the room. ‘I guess that’s it.’
Lottie rises too.
‘When you see him, have him call the station, if you would,’ the bigger man says. ‘He can ask for me or’ – he gestures – ‘my partner here.’
Lottie walks behind them to the front door, feeling suddenly small and childish in the wake of their creaking, jingling bulk. They smell of cigarettes, of leather. She feels a peculiar relief
when she closes the door after them.
She returns to the living room and pushes the chairs back where they were. She stands alone in the middle of the room, watching the men out on the street. They laugh at something over the roof
of the car as they open its doors.
When they have driven off, she picks up the wallet from the threadbare arm of her mother’s chair. She hesitates for only a moment before she opens it. There’s about fifty dollars in
cash, and some ATM slips – his checking account has seven hundred dollars, his savings account three thousand. More, actually, than Lottie would have thought. He has a license, a MasterCard
and a Visa, a card for an HMO. He has business cards from another used-book dealer, in Fall River, and from an interior decorator in New York. This seems odd for a moment, but then Lottie remembers
that he sometimes sells whole libraries of beautifully bound books to people who are furnishing elegant studies, who want that cultured, Ralph Lauren look. There are several other scraps of paper
with names and addresses on them, but nothing that suggests anything to Lottie about where he might have gone or what he might be doing.
Distraught
, the policeman said. A clear picture of him in his bathroom, cutting himself, rises quickly in her mind. Lottie winces and immediately dismisses it; but she also decides, at
that moment, to go over to his place. Maybe he’s there, just not answering the telephone; maybe he’s asleep. Lottie feels she needs to know, one way or another.
She goes upstairs to get her purse. When she comes back down, she stands in the hallway for a moment, trying to make up her mind whether to tell Ryan where she’s going. She can hear the
noise of the paint scraper, pulling in hard regular strokes. Finally she decides to write him a note saying she’ll be back at lunch. She props it up on the kitchen table, where they usually
leave messages for each other. Maybe after a morning of work he’ll calm down and they’ll be able to talk more peaceably about all this.
Her car, a dark-blue Saab she bought used four years earlier, is slow to start. It always is after a rain, and Lottie feels a kind of near affection for its predictability. When it finally
catches, she leaves it in neutral for a few minutes, to let it warm up. There are people out on the street now; a man walking his dog, and two little kids on one of the wide lawns farther up the
hill, throwing a big pink plastic ball back and forth. As she drives past Elizabeth’s house, she looks closely at it, but it still has its sleepy, blank look.
Everywhere on the sidewalks and along the river, people are already out, jogging, walking dogs, lying on blankets in the sun. It’s been raining for three days straight in a summer in which
every week brings at least two or three days of rain; on sunny days like this, no one wants to be inside. The South End, where Cam lives, is quieter, though. More people work nine-to-five jobs;
there are few students. Cam’s apartment is at the southern edge of this neighborhood, next to the expressway. All around it are warehouses and abandoned buildings. In the littered entryways
along his street, the alcoholics and homeless people from the shelter on the corner, turned out after breakfast, sit and smoke and tip their faces up to the sun, as grateful as everyone else for
its healing touch.
The stairwell outside Cameron’s apartment is ugly: dirty, covered with graffiti. Here and there, the stairs’ metal railing has been hammered out of shape. With such great effort!
Lottie thinks. What would make you want to take the time? She’s a little breathless by the time she reaches the top, she’s been going so fast. She knocks on the door, and waits. She
knocks once more and calls out: ‘Cam! Are you there? Cameron!’ She can hear a door open below, and someone is silent a moment, listening for her. She is frozen, listening back. Then the
man’s voice yells up, ‘He ain’t home. Okay?’ A door bangs shut.
Lottie takes Cameron’s keys out of her purse. She tries several before she gets the right one. The scarred door swings open. There is an envelope lying on the floor a few feet in front of
her. Even from where she stands, Lottie can tell by the bold, nearly calligraphic writing in the center of the envelope –
Cameron
, it says – that it’s from Elizabeth. She
shuts the door behind her and calls Cam’s name again. Her voice echoes in the open space. The inside of Cameron’s apartment is huge: he actually bought two lofts and knocked out the
walls between. To Lottie it has always seemed beautiful. He did most of the work himself, years before. There must be twenty warehouse-size windows, spaced at regular intervals – tall,
narrow, curved at the top. From the middle of the room, all you see outside is air. The floors are painted a light gray; there are skylights. In the far corner of the space, a green cast-iron
Victorian spiral stair climbs to the opening for the roof deck. Though it’s a completely different kind of place from the apartment Lottie lived in with Ryan in Chicago, it reminds her of it.
Everything has the same quality of having been rescued, claimed from old age and heavy use with effort and care.
She bends over and picks Elizabeth’s letter up. The paper is creamy, heavy. A letter she wrote at home, then, not something composed in haste here. Carrying it with her, Lottie walks
through the open space that comprises the apartment, calling Cameron’s name. The bathroom door is ajar. She pushes it, moves slowly forward. The room is empty, antiseptically clean. Lottie
expels her breath so loudly it echoes in the tiled space.
She goes into the bedroom last, the only area besides the bathroom that’s walled off in any way. The bed is made. There are full, fat red roses in an old pitcher on the nightstand next to
it. Of course: he must have been expecting Elizabeth. Their erotic perfume floats in the room. The phone machine on the bedside table is blinking steadily. Lottie comes back into the living room
and sits down.
After a moment she opens the envelope. She feels justified. She’s worried about Cameron. She doesn’t understand fully what happened at Elizabeth’s house the night before or why
he’s disappeared. She assumes that Elizabeth doesn’t know where he is either – what was it she said? ‘I thought maybe he was with you’ – but Lottie hopes the
letter will help her, will tell her something about what he might be doing and why. The paper is creamy too; it matches the envelope. There are four or five sheets covered on both sides with the
big, bold letters.
‘Darling Cameron,’ it begins.
I can only imagine what you’re feeling, what you’re going through right now. The most important thing you must hear is that it wasn’t your fault, and
it’s worth all the risk I’m taking now – to me, to my marriage – to try to let you know that. Jessica was very drunk, we have learned. I found several bottles under
her bed, and the doctors feel the blood test will show it too. Dear Cam, she obviously wasn’t thinking straight. I had asked her to stop you, to talk to you – and she was so drunk
she somehow thought stepping out in front of the car was a not unreasonable way to do that. [There are several words crossed out here.] Forgive yourself, Cameron. You truly couldn’t
have prevented it.
And forgive me too, darling, for the choice I’ve had to make. Lawrence does want me back – me and the children. And I’m going to go. He is their father, he is my husband,
and it’s our life. We’ll stay in Cambridge until after Jessica’s service, and then we’ll go back to Minnesota.
And I mustn’t see you again, darling. You mustn’t try to call or come over. You can understand, I’m sure, how hard it will be for all of us if you do, how upsetting to
the children – to say nothing of me! And Lawrence mustn’t know about it. Not because it would change anything. I honestly don’t believe it would. But because it would
needlessly cause him so much pain. You and I are in pain, darling – in my case, agony – but there’s no reason to put him through this too. And so, when you speak to the
police, when you talk about it to anyone else, even Jessica’s parents, I must ask you not to mention our relationship this summer. It was beautiful, everything about it, but now it must
be just ours to remember forever. There is simply no point served in making it public knowledge.
You must know how grateful I am to you for your silence so far. What torture it must have been – as it was for me! – to be silent last night through the questions, to sit
across from Lawrence and me and talk to the police and say nothing of what was uppermost in your mind. That took a kind of generous courage I knew I could count on in you – that I did
count on when they took you down for blood tests, etc. When you said, ‘family friend,’ I hope you could read in my face how moved, how touched I was that you weren’t going
to [here several more words were crossed out] say anything more. I want my marriage back, Cameron. I thought it was over, done, but it isn’t; and I find I want it very much, for a whole
variety of reasons. And I need you to be the loyal, true friend you’ve always been, and let me have it once more, by staying silent, by staying away.
It isn’t anything like what you and I have – have had – but it has been steady and good and full of devotion in the past, and I think it can be again. And that’s
what the children – and I too! – need. Cam, you and I love each other in a passionate way, a nearly desperate way, that I’m not sure either of us could live with. And each
of us needs to go back to living, darling, in spite of all the hunger we will always feel – I know I will – for what we have experienced together. I beg you to remain silent. I
beg you not to ruin this for me. I wish I could come and comfort you. I wish our lives hadn’t taken the course they’ve taken. And I also know we must stay apart and we must keep
our secret. I implore you. With all my love, Elizabeth.
Lottie sets the letter down and looks out the window. This is the back view, across to the elevated expressway. Traffic headed into the city is still thick, but Lottie isn’t seeing it.
She’s thinking about Cam, Cam and Elizabeth this summer. She’s remembering the way his face looked when he watched her. She’s recalling her own feeling of hunger for what they
seemed to have – and the anger it made her feel at Jack while she witnessed their falling in love. She looks again at the sheaf of papers. The writing gets bigger, sloppier, as Elizabeth
works her way through, Lottie notes. Suddenly she is imagining the way the scene must have played out at Elizabeth’s last night: the wailing, grieved children bundled up the stairs with
Elizabeth’s mother; Cameron, Elizabeth, and her husband in the living room with the cops. Mostly she can picture her brother’s white-faced silence, his stunned cooperativeness with the
police, with Elizabeth. They would have asked, ‘Now, you were pulling in the drive, Mr Reed, right? Coming to call on . . . ?’
‘I’m a family friend,’ he says, and Elizabeth probably nods. Lottie imagines Elizabeth’s faceless husband looking from one of them to the other as the police move to
their next questions: about the sequence of events, about what Cameron saw, what he noticed.
Lottie gets up, leaving the letter on the wooden trunk that serves as Cameron’s coffee table. She strides across the big open room into the bedroom again. She goes directly to the
answering machine and pushes the message button. How quickly, she thinks, she’s gotten used to feeling she has a right to do this – to read his mail, to listen to his messages. She sits
down on the bed.
The first voice is male, loud. ‘This is a message for Cameron Reed from the Cambridge Police Department. You left your wallet and keys with us, Mr Reed. Repeat: we have your wallet and
keys. And we have just a question or two we’d still like to ask you. Please get back to us. This is Officer Scott, at a little after midnight.’ A fumbling noise. Then a click, and the
buzz of the dial tone.
Another beep, then Elizabeth’s voice, husky and urgent. ‘Cam, it’s me. It’s . . . it’s around five.
A.M.
Pick up, darling. I’ll wait.’ A long
pause. ‘Pick up, Cameron.’ Then, ‘Oh, God, where are you?’ After perhaps ten more seconds, she whispers, ‘Cameron: don’t call me. I’ll call you back,
sweetheart.’
A buzz, and then Elizabeth again. ‘Cam, it’s sixish now. I don’t know what to do. I’ll keep trying, off and on, when I can. If you’re there now, darling, please
pick up the phone.’ She waits. ‘I’m so worried about you. I’ll call again.’
The next message, Elizabeth too. ‘Cam, Char moved your car for me, and I’m coming over, darling. Don’t go anywhere, if you get this message. Stay right there. It’s about
six forty-five or so. In the morning. I’ll be right over.’
Then Lottie’s own voice, sounding little-girl-like and slightly midwestern after Elizabeth. ‘Cam, it’s Lottie. I’m concerned about what happened at Elizabeth’s last
night. Give me a call when you get back.’