Authors: Michael Marshall
I
t’s the afternoons that drag.
In the morning you wake up, and bang—there you are, back in the world: and Hazel has gotten used to doing this in a bed with no one in it but her. She opens her eyes and stares up at the ceiling while she waits for reality to settle upon her. It is not a reality of her choosing, but it seldom is, despite the promises of the self-improvement industry. She’s read her share of the earnest books available on bereavement and guilt. None has helped, regardless of the hectoring assurances of whichever airbrushed robot graces the cover. They’re all the same. Snake-oil sellers in a hope industry.
She eventually gets up and puts on a robe—Phil liked the AC ferociously high, and it’s a habit she hasn’t gotten out of, and never will—and pads into the living room. At one end is the kitchen. It’s small, so as not to dominate the space (and also because The Breakers has two restaurants that would appreciate your custom, so why make cooking any more attractive a proposition than necessary?). She brews a cup of Earl Grey tea. She showers. She dresses. She fixes her makeup and hair.
On her way out of the condo she glances at the calendar on the inside of the door. This tells her how long it is until the next chunk of her life begins, before she goes to stay with one or other child. This morning the calendar tells her that it is three weeks until she goes to Klara’s house over in Jupiter, and gets to be grandma (and free babysitter, and occasionally tolerated advice giver) for a spell.
Three weeks.
Twenty-one days.
She spends her mornings wandering around a mall or taking a look in the (only, and not great) downtown bookstore, occasionally lunching with a friend. These are people she has met in the last few years, since Phil died and her life stopped being wrapped up in what she now thinks of as “the club.” Her friends are kind to her, and they meet up and talk and laugh, and Hazel finds it hard to understand why the world nonetheless feels as though someone had turned the volume down to zero. Maybe, she thinks, precisely because of the club years. Their entertainments go on, she supposes, but without her, like so much else. It is one thing to know the world will continue when you’re gone, another to observe it doing so while you’re still around.
Once in a while she will do something off the beaten track, like taking coffee with that handsome but smug Realtor the day before. She knows full well that he is using her to gain advantage in what passes for his career—knew it the moment he came strolling toward her with his hand outstretched—and she doesn’t care. She wants to redecorate, and has known the Thompsons long enough to understand that it would be easier to levitate than to influence their behavior. Phil could do it, having known them longer and better and being no stranger to bloody-mindedness himself, but Phil ain’t around no more.
So fine, let the boy wonder Realtor see what he can do. Hazel doubts he’ll achieve much. At his age, Tony and Phil were already very wealthy, men of action and result. It might be amusing to watch Tony Thompson wearing the little asshole down to dust, however, dust that Marie will then disperse with a single smoky exhale.
It’s something to do.
And maybe, Hazel realizes, she’s still playing games after all—albeit small and lonely ones of her own.
The evenings aren’t bad. She’ll take a glass of wine in the bar and eat something. A little television, a spot of reading, and early to bed. The evenings, oddly, are okay, possibly because the essence of the evening is the promise of the end of the day.
It’s those endless afternoons . . .
Hazel has fallen into the habit of spending them in the condo. In high season, because it’s hot and humid outside and the resort is too busy and she finds she no longer enjoys being among groups of people. At other times of year . . . perhaps because she fears, below the level of conscious choice, that if she spends too much time in the world, there’ll come a day when she’s used it all up. Better to mete it out. Doing nothing of consequence feels less like defeat than deliberately doing something arbitrary, to fill the time.
She reads. She watches boxed sets of TV shows. She enjoys a few rounds of Sudoku, so long as she can stop herself remembering how pointless it is. She and Marie discovered the craze together, back in the old days, though Marie was always much better at it. She chats with the maid who comes in every other day.
The afternoons do pass, in the end. There has never been one yet that hasn’t eventually come to a conclusion—though there have been a few that felt like they might not, as if time had actually stopped and might never start again—leaving her alone forever, sitting in her chair, in a dry, cool room.
But they drag. They
really
drag, which is why, when Hazel hears the knock on her door at a little before three, she’s happy to get up and go answer it.
A
man is standing outside. The walkway is much brighter than her room, and he’s initially presented to her in silhouette.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” he says.
His voice is polite, deferential. He’s dressed in dark jeans and a new-looking shirt. Trim build, broad shoulders, short hair touched with gray in the temples. Hazel alters her position against the glare and sees that he’s kind of good-looking, with a nice open smile.
Once in a blue moon Hazel feels the shallowest of stirrings when confronted with a good-looking man: it has to be an unexpected encounter, as if to bypass her mind and go directly to the biological core. It’s not something she’s ever going to act upon, but it’s pleasant to experience all the same—a reminder that only one of the Wilkinses is actually buried in the ground, so far.
“Afternoon,” she says. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. Looking for a man called Phil Wilkins.”
And just like that, her mood collapses. “You’re too late,” she says, not a woman, merely a widow again.
“Too late? What time will—”
“Six years too late. Phil died.”
She’s looking at the man’s face as he receives this information, and it’s as if his eyes go flat, matte, like a pond icing over. It’s fanciful, but she catches herself thinking that this is a man who also knows what it is to wait, and who has just discovered it isn’t over yet.
Welcome to my world, she thinks.
“Dead, huh?” he says.
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You and me both.”
He nods, looking pained. Rather too late, it occurs to Hazel that he looks familiar, as if he’s someone she saw in passing once or twice, long ago.
“Then I guess it’s you I need to talk to,” he says, stepping inside.
A
n hour later Hunter is sitting in his car. His door is open. He has driven to a location at the northern end of Longboat Key. When he last saw it the place was nothing more than a couple of acres of scrubby woods, swampy in parts, a reminder of the true nature of these half-sea, half-sand islands—an example of the kind of wilderness that still exists down at the southern end of Lido Key. He discovered it by accident when he came to live in the area. For someone raised on the alien plains of Wyoming, there is an endless fascination about this borderland between water and land.
It is no longer how it was. Some developer has bought and cleared it, cutting down the trees and carting off their carcasses, filling in the boggy parts, laying down swatches of crabgrass until it looks like a golf course. Anything that was natural has gone. Even the ocean now lies in an artificial relationship to the land, its edge trammeled, made convenient and beautiful according to the values of leisure development. Somewhere, perhaps in Sarasota, maybe New York or Houston or Moscow, someone owns this land. Hunter wonders if they think of it, beyond seeing it on a balance sheet with the words
Not Yet
scribbled next to it by an underling. He wonders if God keeps these kinds of records, too, and how many people have those same words noted by them.
He feels tired and dispirited and angry. He has spent a portion of every day for the last decade turning down the static of thought and character, letting a simpler John Hunter simply be. It has been far harder since he’s been back out in the world, but he had been holding steady.
But now, today, he has broken the spell.
He has Hazel Wilkins’s keys in his pocket. He will have to return to her apartment after dark. Before that, he needs to focus, regroup, and gather himself. He does not want to make any more mistakes.
He doesn’t want to break anything else.
He sits staring out through the windshield at a place made anonymous and dead. After a time he stops seeing this and sees it instead as it was, hears the laughter of a woman he used to come here with, and feels the ghost of her hand in his.
He is not aware of the tears as they run down his face, and by the time he returns to the present, they have dried away in the heat.
A
s he is driving back down the key, he sees something on the side of the road that interests him. He pulls over, into the front parking lot of the Italian restaurant.
He watches for half an hour. He sees two police cars arrive, along with an unmarked white truck. He sees a third car leave, and then return.
It seems unlikely to him that this level of activity can relate simply to a missing person.
He drives away, knowing that his life is getting more and more complicated. That he must be strong, and fast, and that time is already running out.
I
got home in twenty-five minutes. You can’t do it quicker than that, midafternoon, no matter how fast you’re prepared to drive—and I drove
fast
. I parked in the street outside the house—or stopped the engine and jumped out of the door, at least—and ran up the path.
The front door was locked. The interior of the house was also exactly as I’d left it. I ran around calling Stephanie’s name. I checked the ground floor first, then went through the whole of the upper floor. Nobody there, nothing that looked any different from the way it had when I’d left. I came back down, heart thudding. When I reached the living room I turned in a circle before suddenly finding myself in motion again. We had a portable phone, naturally, but because we both have cell phones the handset generally lives on the kitchen counter. I saw that’s where it was now, next to the base. I couldn’t remember whether it had been there when I’d left. It didn’t matter. Whoever had been in the house had evidently been standing
right there
.
I had a sudden thought and turned to look through the window out at the terrace and swimming pool. Nobody there, either.
Resisting the urge to pick up the phone handset was easy. Would there be fingerprints? Possibly. Would there also be a small black card with the word
MODIFIED
hidden somewhere in the house? Also possible.
Either would be a distraction from the main point, which was that someone had come into the house with the aim of screwing with my life. It wasn’t David Warner.
So who?
A
t five o’clock I was still standing at the counter, or rather standing there again. In the meantime I’d searched the house more thoroughly and found nothing. No little black cards, and no missing suitcases or clothes. I hadn’t seriously believed that Steph would just take off, storming down the path like something from act one of a romcom (trials and tribulations lie ahead, constant viewer, though expect reconciliation/redemption before the credits roll). But people do actually do that kind of thing in real life, apparently, and I was very glad not to see any evidence of it in my own home.
I’d thought about calling the cops, of course. I’d thought about it every thirty seconds since hearing the woman’s voice on my phone. I hadn’t done so, because I found it too easy to imagine what the response would be.
Your wife is a grown-up, sir. It’s still within business hours. Plus, you had an argument last night.
So, uh, what’s your point?
I also felt that if I was going to talk to the cops for a third time in one day, then I needed to feel on firmer ground. A nonlocatable wife wasn’t enough. An alleged voice on my house phone line wasn’t enough, either. It could have been a wrong number, a mishearing, or I could have made the whole thing up for motivations of my own—which could only be suspicious, strange, and of possible terrorist intent.
Did I
have
any other evidence? There were the cards I’d received. Had I kept any of them? Of course not. I’d thrown each away as it arrived, dismissing the baby steps of chaos until it was too late.
He didn’t
know
that, of course—whoever he was, the person behind the cards and behind whatever was happening to me. I could have kept the cards. I also had a laptop in the car with folders—and a hard disk—that had been renamed to the same word. I had a copy of the e-mail sent out in my name, and a photocopy of the delivery notice for the book from Amazon. And, it finally struck me, there might have been something else, too: the booking at Jonny Bo’s for our anniversary dinner. Janine said I’d e-mailed her about it. That wasn’t inconceivable—I often gave her jobs when she was looking even more unoccupied than usual—but I couldn’t actually recall doing so. Someone had evidently been digging around in my digital identity even before this week, in order to place the Amazon order. The same person
could
have sent Janine the e-mail asking her to make a booking at Bo’s.
So it was
possible
I should add that to the pile, though doing so would mean accepting the idea that someone had a pretty in-depth knowledge of my habits. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to this at the time? How could I have been so wrapped up in my machinations at The Breakers that I’d let this stuff just flow by?
As I listed these pieces of evidence in my head I was also aware of how trivial they sounded—how easy they were to let roll by when your mind was on higher things. That was probably the whole point. Every one of them was like a tiny little chili that was not only perfectly possible for me to have eaten but seemed too small for someone else to have bothered with.
Except the pictures of Karren, of course.
That was a bigger deal, harder to organize, and came with a heavier payload. They might be deemed worthy of being taken seriously.
But
. . . I could just have taken
those
myself, too. My “proof” that I’d been deliberately kept out of the house that evening—in order to set up the pictures—had disappeared the moment Melania told the cops she’d never spoken to me. Claiming otherwise now just made me look like a liar as well as a fantasist.
“
Shit,
” I shouted suddenly, the whole mess spilling out of my head to bounce off the walls.
The house said nothing. The house felt alien, like a friend you happen to glimpse from a distance one afternoon, sitting outside a café with another member of your crowd, some rendezvous to which you were not invited. No injury has been done to you. Yet something about the sight—as you stand becalmed on the other side of the street, traffic making a river of difference between you—demonstrates that you are not at the center of creation after all. The house was just a house, and a life was just a life. Both might feel like they belonged to me, but there were gaps in its fabric, and gaps mean entrances, ways for strangers to get inside. Life suddenly felt like a random series of events and people connected only by accident and happenstance. So your friends are out for a drink, and you’re there, too, and maybe it’s even your birthday: does that mean it’s actually
about
you? No. It could have happened by coincidence, or to watch a ball game. You could slip away midevening, and after five minutes of bemusement they’d buy another beer, close the circle, and it would be as if you’d never been there. You could die. Within weeks the same thing would happen.
You’re not the cause, the be-all and end-all, of anything. There’s no house. There’s no life. There’s just you. A point in space and time.
I shook my head violently, trying to break the train of thought. Of course it wasn’t the house’s fault that someone had been inside it. Everything was whirling around my head too fast. I knew the only way I was going to be able to regain control was by talking to someone about it. But Steph wasn’t here to talk to.
That was the whole point.