The thought of Ed left her once again exposed and bruised. But she would bury it. For tonight, she wanted to feel triumphant, a great judge carried on the shoulders of a reverent crowd.
On the way home, Jane and the children sang “Over There.” Jane told them about the First World War, which America had entered when she was nine years old. She told them about her brother who had driven an ambulance in France. How splendid it would be for them to be with Jane, Anne thought. How wonderfully everything was working out.
When they turned the corner, Anne could see that all the lights on the second floor were lit.
“Damn it,” she said, in an undertone to Jane, “either she’s not gone yet or she’s left the lights on just to be annoying. That would be typical of that girl. Annoying to the end.”
“Do you want me to go ahead and speak to her if she’s there?” asked Jane.
“Of course not,” said Anne. “I’m not afraid to confront her.”
The children ran into the house first; they were incapable of not racing each other to the kitchen table. Anne walked behind them. They stopped racing when they got into the living room.
The living room floor was covered by a pool of water a quarter-inch deep. Water was splashing down the stairwell. Between the newel posts a steady stream spilled to the wall below, down the spines of the books on the shelves above the piano. Water splashed on the piano. From a spot in the ceiling underneath the bathroom a globe of water hung, dripping a puddle onto the rug.
“Oh, boy,” said Peter. “Someone must have left the bathtub running for a really long time. I’d better check it out.”
Only when he was halfway up the stairs did Anne notice that the water was not clear. A light raspberry stain had spread over the walls, settled at the bottom of the dripping globe of water on the ceiling. She tried to understand what had happened. What was this thing that seeped and dripped and colored all the walls? Not water, or not just water. Water with something passed through it.
Instantly, she knew. The word lodged in her brain, a small dark pebble, then softened and exploded in her mind. Blood. Blood had passed through the water. She knew Peter was looking at blood.
He stood unmoving at the bathroom door. From the set of his back, she knew that he was terrified. Quickly she ran to him. She stood beside him in the doorway. For a second, two seconds, she stood still beside him, unable to grasp or to believe what she saw: a dead girl lying in a tub of red water, one hand, the left, grazing the white tile floor.
Every organ in Anne’s body enlivened, tightened and then hardened and grew cold. At the same time she was riven, a torrent split her, top to bottom, with a violent slice. Blood, death. The words, almost absurd in their simplicity, drove through her body like a blow. This is the end of our life, she heard a voice inside her skull say. Life as we will know it will be different. We are looking at the dead.
But it was not the nameless dead they looked on. It was Laura, whom they knew, whom she had hated, whom she had sent away. And who had killed herself most horribly. The horror took her over. A scream bloomed in her throat, then choked her like the taste of blood. I cannot go on, I cannot go on, she heard inside her skull. Someone must help me now. I cannot do a thing.
But there was no one; it was she who had to act. Laura had spilled her blood there in the house. In the house that she had imagined she would keep her children safe in. She knew she must put aside the horror now, the grief, the terror, whatever she felt that would transfix her so she could not act. For now she must protect her children. She felt Peter looking up at her; she felt alive beside her his desire for her, as his mother, to speak or to move. He needed her to do something, to round things off or tie them off, to stop them shading into the rest of his life. She walked to the tub and turned off the water. Then she walked back to Peter’s side. Beside him once again, she made herself look as he had looked.
There was Laura. She was dead, but death had not made her unrecognizable. The pale flesh against the heavy hair, the white limbs: it was the body of someone Anne had known. Laura’s eyes still looked; their gaze stretched upward at the ceiling. She seemed to smile. It was hypnotic, the similitude between the living body and the dead. Anne felt herself entranced. How young Laura looked, even in death. What had made her do this dreadful thing, to make herself, so young, into one of the dead? All her relations with Laura swam before her eyes. Did she do this, Anne had to ask herself, because I sent her away? What did I do to her, what was I in her mind? Peter took her hand. Sharply, she willed herself to move. She could not think about Laura any longer. She must take her son away. The image must not burn into his mind a second longer. She put her arms around him and led him down the stairs.
“We’ll have to tell Jane and Sarah now,” she said, holding his hand as they walked down. “But we must make sure that Sarah doesn’t see, so I’ll ask you to stay with her at the Greenspans until I have things taken care of.”
“No, Sarah mustn’t see.”
“It’s important. I’ll depend on you for that.”
Walking down the stairs, she felt the pressure of having to put into words what she had seen. To take from the event its carapace of silence seemed to brutalize it yet again. But she had no choice. For what she must do, above all, she told herself, was remove the physical evidence. As far as she could, she must render it impossible that anyone should see again what she and Peter had seen. She took Sarah into her arms. How did you bring the news of horror to a child? “Laura is dead,” she said, holding Sarah to her.
Sarah began to cry. It was such a relief that someone had a natural reaction that Anne felt them all turn a corner. She held her daughter’s solid body, lively in its grief. She looked over at Peter. He was away from them, sitting on the couch, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes dry and brilliant.
Never had she felt her position as a mother so impossible and so false. She had no idea what the right thing to do for him was. He had taken himself away from them. Should she let him be alone? He had seen a terrible thing. More than that, he had been the first to see it. Of all of them, he was closest to the event; of all of them, he must feel the least innocent. Yet he was still a child. He was the same child who had sat at the diner half an hour ago and blown, for the amusement of the company, bubbles in his milk. He would never be quite her child again, for seeing what he had seen, his childhood was no longer intact, and he would never again need her in the simple way he once had. She began to embrace him and felt him stiffen away from her. She would let him do that; she would let him be by himself. His moving away from her made her see how everybody waited for her action. And suddenly, action seemed the only chance. She saw herself as a machine, bicameral: one part could function and the other, where the cold gears seized, could be closed off. She could act; she did not have to feel or think. She could be like a clock that went on keeping time although it could no longer sound the hours. She must not feel or think. The problem had its physical dimensions; now those would save her.
“Mommy wants us to go to the Greenspans until she takes care of things,” said Peter to his sister.
“When will you come and get us?” asked Sarah, beginning to cry again.
“I don’t know, darling. You may have to spend the night. But I’ll come and tuck you in.”
“I’ll go with them, Anne, and explain what happened. Then I’ll be back and help you. We must get started on all this before it does any more damage,” said Jane.
Damage. How much damage had been done already? They would never lose it from their lives. But physical life had the first place now. Upstairs a body lay. Oddly, this body, dead, had needs. And they were not dissimilar to what the living body had required. It was wet, it was cold, it was naked. It could not stay in a tub of water.
She must prepare the body of the dead. She must touch the flesh that she had shrunk from while it lived. The police were coming. Jane had called them. They would be there soon. And Laura’s body must be clothed before they saw it. What Laura had done was private, and the face she wore was the private face of death. Anne felt the body was painful in its exposure; she must protect it from the gaze of strange men, of men who came from the outside. She felt that Laura’s body, having met death in her house, became her child. So she must protect it from the violations of the outside world as she protected her own children.
She put her hand into the tub. Pulling the plug, she allowed the water to run out, slowly first, then quickly, with a heavy final gush. She waited until all the water was gone and only a thin greasy coating of blood remained before she tried to lift the body out.
The weight was terrible, for it offered no resistance. Torpid, languid, the limbs flopped passively. The body could do nothing to compose itself, to dignify itself, to save itself from the fate of the grotesque. Anne had to drag it from the tub in slow stages, putting it down on the floor from time to time. The flesh was icy cold against her flesh, her clothes were wet from its wetness, and she couldn’t lift it from the floor. Horrified at the spectacle of the only course physically possible to her, she dragged Laura through the quarter-inch of water in the upstairs hall. The trailing feet made a playful swishing noise, a seaside noise, a holiday noise, a noise children might make for the simple pleasure of the act. She got the body to the door of Laura’s room and stopped, exhausted, letting it lie flat on the floor for a moment. Her arms ached; her legs thrummed with fatigue. But she must prepare Laura for the police.
She placed the body in the center of the bed in a posture that might be like sleeping. Then she looked among Laura’s clothes. There were so few: a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, underwear, socks, a sweater. Alone in the closet was the dress that Anne had given her. None of Laura’s clothes seemed right. She went into her own room and got her bathrobe. Coming back into Laura’s, she thought, as if it were a problem in physics, how she would begin to dress the body. She sat down on the bed and spread the bathrobe out. She lifted Laura’s head and upper back and held them against the front of her own body. As a posture, this was not unfamiliar to her; it was not unlike dressing a sleeping child. She pulled the arms through the sleeves and let the body down to rest once more against the pillows. Straightening the robe underneath Laura, about to put the sides together and tie them, she looked at the girl’s body. There were the breasts, the sex. There was the waist, the white thighs, the surprisingly delicate ankles. She remembered that Adrian had been Laura’s lover. The thought shocked her: the juxtaposition of death and sex seemed wrong, as if the sexual activity one knew the dead to have been involved in had failed in its promise to bestow eternal life.
She closed Laura’s eyes, arranged her hands at her sides. The police were downstairs; she heard Jane talking to them. Now she must go and tell them what she knew. Which was nothing. That a girl who had been alive was dead by her own hand. That she didn’t know why she had done it. Except that she might have been disturbed by an incident earlier in the day in which she had been told that her services were no longer needed. She would not say to them, although she knew it was the truth, “She was driven to death by the hatred I bore her. She died because I could have killed her.”
She heard herself saying these things in her own mind, calmly, at a remove, as if she were being sentenced in a dream court. Calmly, she walked down the stairs, through water that splashed with every step she took, toward the police who were sitting on her couch.
They asked questions; she answered them as simply as she could, determined to talk about what had happened as little as possible. When she brought them upstairs and took them into the room where Laura was, they told her she shouldn’t have moved the body.
“We would have liked the coroner to see her as she was, ma’am,” the policeman said. “The cause of death has yet to be established.”
“But she cut her wrists in the bathtub,” said Jane impatiently. She’d followed Anne and the policemen up the stairs; she was trying to protect Anne from them.
“We’re not in any position to determine the cause of death. We’re just here to investigate the circumstances of the crime.”
“The crime?” said Jane.
“Legally speaking, it’s a crime, ma’am.”
“I don’t understand what you need to investigate. It seems quite straightforward to me,” said Jane.
“Well, there could have been foul play. Someone could have drugged the victim, for example, and then cut her wrists and put her in the tub like that to make it look like suicide.”
“How absurd,” said Jane.
“We’re not inferring anything, ma’am. It’s our job to investigate all areas of the incident.”
Jane spoke to the policemen as if they’d wandered impertinently onto her estate. She expected them to listen to her; she expected them to leave. But Anne thought they were right: there had been a crime. They would never know the name of it, and they would never name her as the criminal. But she had done it. She had closed her heart to Laura. She had driven her to death.
The policemen looked cursorily at Laura’s body, then seemed no longer interested. They turned their attention to the rest of the room.
“Here’s the note,” said the blond policeman, reading it quickly and passing it to his partner, who passed it to Anne.
“I thought you said you weren’t close to the deceased, that you hardly knew her,” said Officer Planck.
“That’s true,” said Anne, staring in horror at the words Laura had written.
“There’s no telling what some people keep bottled up inside, is there?” said Officer Duffy.
“No,” said Anne. “No telling.”
“Thanks, ma’am, we’ll just look around up here by ourselves. We’ll call you if we need you.”
Anne went downstairs and handed the note to Jane.
“My God,” said Jane when she had read it. “But, Anne, you mustn’t take it as meaning anything, not for a moment. It’s a work of absolute derangement.”
“We can’t talk about it now,” Anne said. “We can’t even think about it. What we must do now is clean things up.”