Things You Won't Say (4 page)

“Coming to bed?” she asked. She knew she probably wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep tonight, but maybe Mike could. And she’d welcome the chance to lie beside him and feel his warmth, to try to get physically close to him to compensate for the emotional distance that had begun to creep between them, like a fog, since the shooting.

But he shook his head. “I’m going to get some cereal.”

“Okay.” Jamie waited until he’d turned and walked toward the kitchen, then she headed upstairs. She stopped in each
of the children’s rooms again, putting her face close to Eloise’s head so she could inhale her daughter’s sweet smell and picking up the doll on Emily’s floor and placing it on top of her bureau. Sadie was curled up in the crook of Sam’s knees, and Jamie gave both of their heads a stroke. She stopped in at Henry’s room and pulled up the covers he’d kicked off.

Finally she went into her own room and climbed into bed. She lay there for a moment, then she got up to do something she never had before in all the years she’d known Mike.

She pulled on the safe’s door to make sure he had locked it after putting away his gun.

•••

Lou’s weary body craved a long, hot soak in the tub. She’d worked at the zoo that morning, then hurried to the apartment for a quick shower and change, then she’d caught the Metro to the coffee shop, where she’d stood for a five-hour shift, steaming endless stainless-steel carafes of milk and dousing iced drinks with whipped cream and caramel sauce. After her bath, she’d make a thick sandwich, then collapse in front of the television. Maybe an old black-and-white movie, or the History Channel, she thought as she fit her key into the apartment’s lock.

She inhaled the scent of roasted garlic as she opened the door.

“Yummy!” she called. Maybe Donny had gotten carryout. He always bought enough for two and insisted she dig in, pretending he’d overordered. He knew she didn’t have much money, and it was one of the many kindnesses he’d shown her during their relationship and in its aftermath.

But the face that appeared around the hall corner belonged to Donny’s new girlfriend. Mary Alice was holding a glass of red wine and wearing a pretty red top, as if she’d coordinated the two. Mary Alice was fifteen years older than Lou—as was Donny—which was all Lou knew about her. That and the fact
that the two of them had met at a Forties and Fabulous! social group that gathered for things like nature hikes and hot-air balloon rides.

“Hi,” Lou said. “What smells so good?”

“Donny’s making chicken cacciatore,” Mary Alice said.

“Wow,” Lou said. “Impressive for a Thursday night.”

Lou pulled off her clogs, sighing as she wriggled her toes, and tucked the shoes into a basket by the front door before walking further into the apartment. The dining room table was set with real china, and there was a bouquet of red roses in a vase. Classical music soared from speakers.

“Hey,” Donny said, wiping his hands on the apron tied around his middle. Lou had bought it for him the previous Christmas, along with a new cookbook. “I thought you were doing the late shift.”

“I was,” Lou said, suddenly remembering how Donny had asked about her schedule earlier in the week. “But someone asked me to switch.”

Donny glanced at Mary Alice, then back at Lou. “Are you going out tonight, or, um . . .”

“Tonight?” Lou asked.

She looked at the two plates on the dining room table, the flowers, the glowing candles.

“Oh! Yes, I’m meeting a friend to—to see a movie,” she lied. “I just came home to change.”

The relief on Donny’s and Mary Alice’s faces was almost comical.

Lou hurried into her bedroom and pulled off her T-shirt, slipping on a clean one. She freed her honey-colored hair from its ponytail and ran a brush through it, then rubbed on a little lip balm. She never wore makeup, so she didn’t need to freshen her face. She sniffed her armpits and decided she’d have to make do with another swipe of deodorant instead of that bath. She gave her small, cozy bed a longing look, then opened the door. She half-expected to see Donny and Mary
Alice waiting there, holding out her clogs, desperate to hurry her along.

Lou covered a yawn with her hand, then injected energy into her voice as she called out, “Good-bye!”

“Bye!” Donny called back.

Lou stepped out of the apartment building and felt a fat raindrop splatter onto her head.

“Perfect,” she said.

She hurried to the bagel place a block away, but it was closed. The rain came down harder, soaking her hair and streaming into her eyes. At least the night was warm, she thought. She walked a bit farther and found an open bar, its pink neon sign flickering in the dusky light. She stepped inside and saw one vacant stool. She collapsed onto it gratefully and reached for the menu.

There wasn’t much here she could eat; she’d become a vegetarian around the same time she’d started working with animals. She scanned through the offerings: buffalo wings, loaded potato skins, hamburgers . . .

“Help you?” the bartender asked. Maybe he was too busy to form a complete sentence; this place was packed.

“Do you have veggie burgers?” she asked, straining to make herself heard over the blaring music.

The bartender shook his head. He had a silver ring piercing the tip of his nose, and Lou idly wondered if it ever got caught on anything. She thought about asking, but he already looked impatient.

“Um, can I get the potato skins without bacon?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Dunno. I’ll check. Drink?”

“A Sprite, please,” she said.

She grabbed a cocktail napkin and wiped the dampness from her face, then glanced around. Almost everyone was dressed in black, tattoos abounded, and a few folks had facial piercings. It was a young, hip crowd. Lou was wearing shorts and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt that was a little big—
tight-fitting clothes chafed her skin—but she wasn’t uncomfortable. She’d long become inured to the sensation that she didn’t fit in.

Donny and Mary Alice seemed like a good match, she thought as the bartender brought over her soda. They were both soft-spoken, with salt-and-pepper hair and silver-rimmed glasses, and Lou could picture them settling into the same easy routines she and Donny used to enjoy: walks after dinner on mild evenings, Sunday mornings on the couch with the newspapers spread out between them, the radio station in Donny’s Acura tuned to NPR while they discussed the day’s stories.

The apartment had two bedrooms, and Lou wouldn’t have a problem with them all sharing the space, but she suspected Mary Alice might not like it. Most new girlfriends didn’t relish having old ones around. Look at the issues Jamie had with Christie, even though Jamie and Mike had been together for more than a decade.

Lou polished off her Sprite, thirsty from her long day in the heat, and tried to puzzle out the lyrics to the song blasting through the speakers. It seemed to involve betrayal, but ennui could also be the lead singer’s main complaint. When her potato skins finally arrived, they were topped with bacon bits. Lou used another napkin to pick them off. The potato skins tasted as stale as if they’d been made the previous week and abandoned under a warming light, but she was too hungry to care.

Was the music getting louder? A pulse in the side of her head throbbed in time to the frantic drumbeat. She ate her meal quickly, then paid her bill (Four dollars for a soda? Really? Maybe hipsters were richer than they looked) and slid off her stool. It was raining harder when she walked back outside and took a look around. A movie theater was a few blocks away, but a quick check on her iPhone revealed she’d missed the beginnings of the two shows playing.

She couldn’t go back to the apartment this soon, and there
weren’t any libraries or bookstores within walking distance. She didn’t have a car, so her options were limited. She found herself heading toward the theater, her heavy clogs splashing through puddles. But when she tried to buy a ticket, she ran into trouble.

“One for whatever’s showing now,” she said.

“The next movie’s at nine o’clock,” the teenage attendant said.

“I know,” Lou said. “But I want one for the movie that’s playing now.”

“It started forty minutes ago,” the attendant protested. He frowned at her from behind the glass window of his booth.

“I don’t care,” Lou said.

“But you missed half of it,” he said. “I can’t give you a discounted price.”

Lou leaned forward. “Look, I’m getting rained on and I can’t go back to my apartment for at least two hours because my roommate has his new girlfriend there and I’m pretty sure they want to have sex. Two hours is enough time, right? I mean if they have dinner first.”

The attendant reared back, and Lou realized she’d probably overshared again. Jamie had suggested, more than once, that Lou didn’t always need to be brutally honest or say the first thing that popped into her head. “Most people don’t mind if you tell them a few white lies,” Jamie had said. “They expect it, even.” This particular conversation had come in their high school lunchroom, after one of Jamie’s best friends had asked if her new jeans made her look fat. “Yes,” Lou had said.

“Jeez, Lou,” Jamie had snapped after her friend had run off to the bathroom in tears. “Think before you speak sometimes, okay?”

“I figured she’d want to know,” Lou had protested. “Maybe she can return them.”

“But there’s a gentler way of telling people that stuff,” Jamie had said. “You can’t just blurt it out.”

“She asked,” Lou had pointed out, but Jamie had just sighed and gone to comfort her friend.

“The computer won’t sell you a ticket to this show,” the attendant was saying. “It will only sell you one for the nine o’clock show.”

“Okay,” Lou said. The solution was easy enough once she had a little more information. “I’ll take one ticket for the nine o’clock show.” By now she was completely drenched.

She walked through the double glass doors and handed her ticket to another attendant, who tore it in half without commenting. She found a seat near the back of the theater and sat down, shivering in the frosty blast of air-conditioning. She glanced around. Everyone seemed to be part of a couple. Even the pretty young star on the big screen was closing her eyes in anticipation of being kissed.

Lou could almost hear Jamie’s voice in her head, cajoling her to get out and meet someone new, to join a cooking class or a gym, to claim an empty spot in a book club. But Lou felt like she had enough filling in her life. Along with Jamie’s family, there was her family of animals at the zoo. Plus she talked to her father every couple of weeks and visited him and his new wife in New York once a year or so.

Sometimes she wondered if their dad still missed their mother. He didn’t talk about her at all anymore, but Jamie had told her they’d been deeply in love. “Don’t you remember them dancing in the living room?” Jamie had asked. “We’d tiptoe down and watch them when we were supposed to be in bed.” Lou strained as hard as she could, but the images refused to bloom for her. She’d been twelve when her mother died, not a toddler. Why couldn’t she remember? “And the parties they had!” Jamie had once said. “Mom would always sneak onto the front porch to smoke with her friends.” Maybe that was why Lou had never minded the smell of cigarette smoke, even though the habit held no attraction for her.

Their father had remarried three years after their mother’s
death, and Lou was glad her dad had found someone. His new wife, Kathy, was nice enough, but Lou had never felt particularly close to her, probably because she’d entered their lives just a few years before Lou had left for college.

She’d missed too much of the movie for it to make any sense, so Lou huddled lower in her chair and closed her eyes. The next thing she knew, someone was tapping her shoulder.

“You’re snoring really loudly,” the girl behind her whispered.

“Sorry,” Lou said. She could hear giggling and she sat up straighter. Her clothes were damp and she could feel goose bumps rising on her skin. She stole a glance at her watch and realized she couldn’t go home for at least an hour. She wrapped her arms around herself and wished more than ever for that hot bath.

She needed to find a new apartment, fast.

•••

She, Christie Simmons, had a job!

A real job, too—not like the hostess and receptionist gigs she usually floated between, or the “modeling” assignments she’d taken in the past that required her to walk around in a bikini at car shows. This was regular, steady,
enviable
work. Elroy had even mentioned an expense account. Bolo-tie-wearing Elroy wasn’t a misplaced cowboy after all. He was a private detective who specialized in infidelity cases, and Christie was going to help him gather evidence. She’d be working undercover. The best part, though, the thing that made her lips curve into a secret smile, was that she’d be playing off the assumptions of people like Baldie with the wedding ring from the bar. Just because a woman was single and sexy, some guys assumed she was easy, a throwaway sort of girl. And during the past few years—the same stretch of time in which she’d begun to feel a slight ebb in her energy and notice a slight sagging of the skin around her eyes and jawline—she’d real
ized it had begun to bother her deeply. Christie wanted a lot of things, including a nice house and car, but something else had edged its way to the top of her wish list, something that couldn’t be bought.

Respect.

Only one man in her life had ever treated her with true dignity: Mike, the father of her beautiful, perfect son, Henry. Christie had met Mike at a bar—because let’s face it, girls like her didn’t hang out at the library or health food store or hiking trail—and he’d offered to buy her a drink. But then the familiar script had strayed from its usual path: he’d kept his eyes on hers instead of focusing them twelve inches lower, and he’d spoken her name when he handed her a glass of Chardonnay. Back then she thought wine tasted sour, but she’d been twenty-three and figured the drink sounded classy.

Mike had been so beautiful—intense brown eyes, a blunt nose, and broad shoulders. A triangle of springy black hair peeked out from the top of his polo shirt. He wasn’t very tall, but he seemed to take up a lot of physical space.