Through the Heart (31 page)

He came in the door, and Celia saw him first. Then I saw him.

We were both there, naked on the bed, staring at him. And he simply stood there.

I rolled off her and reached over to the floor for my boxers.

No one said anything for a moment. I was waiting for something—some recriminations. You know the things you imagine people saying, like “How could you?” or “I trusted you,” or “I never thought you’d do something like this.” Maybe cursing or even for Marcus to hit me. Lord knows, I deserved it.

The first thing he said was directed at Celia. “Get your clothes and go back to the room.”

His voice was eerily calm.

She didn’t argue. As quickly as she could, she wrapped the sheet around her, gathered her clothes in a bundle in her arms, and then paused by the door.

“You go on; I’ll be there in a second,” he said.

Without a word, she opened the door and went out.

He looked at me. Then he said, “Nora’s out in the hallway. She was the one who asked me to come in here and get Celia.”

When he said that, I wished he had hit me instead.

“We’ll be leaving tonight and driving back to the city,” he added.

There were so many things he could have said. But he didn’t. I have never respected a man more than I did Marcus at that moment. The word “character” came to my mind. And I knew Marcus had it—and I didn’t. I realized that, before, I’d always put Marcus down in my mind as a sucker. As a patsy. Now I saw that that was my way of not being the bad guy. Of making it somehow his fault. Suddenly I saw how ridiculous that was. If he’d said anything to me, anything at all, I think I might have been able to twist it somehow so he’d be implicated as well. It was his weakness that allowed me to do that to him. I would have jerry-rigged some excuse like that. But by not saying anything at all, he’d left the whole where it belonged—in my lap.

He looked at me for a moment; then he turned and left the room. And when he left, I felt something I hadn’t felt since I was a child. It was shame.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and waited.

When Nora came in, I forced myself to look at her, and I said her name: “Nora.” But that’s all I could manage.

She crossed to the chair and sat down. She didn’t say anything. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I said, “You’re not going to marry me now, are you?”

It seemed like an eternity went by before she answered.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know . . . So there’s still a chance?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

There was another long silence.

Finally, I asked the question I could never seem to get an answer to, no matter how many times I asked it. I said, “Do you love me?”

There was no pause. There was no hesitation. She just looked at me and said, “Yes. I love you.”

And, I can’t explain this, but I finally believed her. I had never believed her when she said it before, but I believed her now. Why now? Maybe because there was no reason for her to say it. Maybe because I knew I didn’t deserve it. Maybe it was true for the first time. How can I know?

“Nora,” I said. “Please . . .” Please what? I didn’t know. “Please . . .”

I think I meant to say, “Please marry me. Please don’t leave me. Please forgive me.” But I realized that I had everything I wanted. She loved me. What else was there to ask for?

She got up, kissed me on the forehead, and left.

I sat there for a moment. And I felt the most wonderful sense of peace. This was it. This is what I had been looking for. And it came in the way that I would have least expected it.

I lay down. I would have thought that I’d lie there wide-eyed for hours, but surprisingly I felt myself drifting into sleep almost immediately. Then a thought pulled me back from the very edge of unconsciousness. I thought of Celia. What if she hadn’t left? What if she tried to come back to see me again? When she got something in her head, there was no stopping her. She had talked her way past my doorman. She had called me ten times a day for a week until I picked up. I couldn’t be sure what she would do.

I got up and locked the door and went back to bed. And I was asleep in seconds—the kind of deep, dreamless sleep where everything is lost but nothing is missed.

 

 

 

 

 

I
went down to breakfast the next morning. There was a spread set out in the dining room: coffee, tea, fresh orange juice, muffins, cereal, all laid out along the table.

The dining room opened onto the morning room at the back of the house, where there were armchairs and couches—and where everyone from the wedding party was scattered. I scanned the group. It looked like almost everyone was there (except for Marcus and Celia, of course). But the one person my eye scanned the room for was missing. Nora wasn’t down yet. I wondered what that meant.

The morning room was aptly named: the morning sun poured in and everyone seemed to glow just a little. Except Tammy and Edward—they looked like hell. They looked like I should have looked. But I had woken up feeling great. The disaster of the night before seemed like a dream. Had it even happened? I had woken up with the sense that anything was possible. (It turned out that sense was exactly right—but not at all in the way I had imagined it.)

I was about to head over to say good morning to Nora’s mother and sister when Edward ambushed me in the doorway.

“Holy shit, Timothy, that little girl . . .” And he glanced over at where Tammy was sitting across the room.

“She’s not so little,” I reminded him. “She’s Nora’s age. She’s thirty-three.”

“Whatever. But I have to tell you, last night—”

“Listen, spare me the details, okay Eddie?”

He didn’t even seem to notice that I had called him Eddie.

“Okay, fine. I just want to know, what’s her deal?”

“Forget about it, okay? That’s Nora’s best friend. You did whatever you did last night, but past that, she’s off-limits.”

“I have the best sex of my life, and you tell me it’s off-limits? That’s not right,” he protested.

“Oh, come on. I know how much sex you’ve had, Edward. You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not. I swear to God, I’m not. You don’t want to hear the details, but—”

“I really don’t. Listen, I’m going to take a breather from this discussion, and I’m going to go get my breakfast, okay?”

I escaped from Edward by retreating back into the dining room. As I was getting my coffee, Neil came up to refill his cup.

“So I guess you guys are keeping it formal?” Neil asked. “Not going to see Nora before the wedding?”

“No, we’re going to see each other,” I said. “I guess she’s just sleeping in.” At least I hoped that was it, and it wasn’t that she was avoiding me.

Tammy joined us over at the buffet: “You mean I drag my ass out of bed, and she’s sleeping in?” she demanded, overhearing my explanation to Neil.

“By the way,” Neil interrupted. “Did you hear who my new manager is?”

I looked over at Tammy. “I don’t believe it.”

Tammy shrugged. “He begged me. I told him I’ll probably quit after two weeks.”

“So you’re going from working at the Box to working at Starbox?” I said. “One box to another?”

“Actually,” Neil said, “I’m changing the name.”

“What’s the new name?”

“Neil’s,” he said, with an embarrassed smile.

“Of course it is,” and I nodded, remembering Joe’s and Mike’s.

“I think it’s time to get the lazy bride out of bed,” Tammy said. “Shall I fetch her, or do you want to?”

“Why don’t we both go,” I suggested. I wanted to see Nora, to try to gauge how things stood between us, but I didn’t want to go up alone and put her on the spot. I was well aware I didn’t deserve to demand anything of her after what had happened the night before.

We climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to Nora’s room. Tammy knocked on the door.

“Nora? Time to get your lazy ass up and get married,” she called out.

There was no answer.

Tammy knocked again, harder. “Come on, Nora. We’re waitin’ on you.”

She waited for another moment, then she tried the knob. I saw it turn in her hand, but she didn’t open the door. Instead, she called once more, “Nora? If you’re not gonna come answer this door, I’m just gonna come in.”

Still no answer.

She glanced over at me, rolled her eyes, and said, “Just give me a second.” Then she disappeared inside.

I waited outside in the hall. I had woken up feeling so peaceful, but right at that moment that felt light-years away. I was anything but peaceful. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

It felt like I waited outside the door for an eternity, but it was probably less than a minute before Tammy came out again. The moment I saw Tammy’s face, I knew what people mean when they call someone’s face a mask. Everything seemed frozen except her eyes, which I can’t describe. They were the eyes of someone who has just seen something awful, something horrific, and just by looking at their eyes, it is as if you can see what they have seen—not the actual image, but the feeling. The feeling was beamed out like a laser.

All she said was, “Oh, God” and her voice was shaking so much I barely recognized it.

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I pushed past her to go in the room. I heard her say, “Timothy, don’t.” That’s what people always say in these situations, and it never stops anyone.

I don’t know what I expected. My first thought was, “What kind of bed-and-breakfast puts brown sheets on the bed?” What a stupid, trivial thing to think. But there it is.

Of course they weren’t brown. It was Nora’s blood, which had soaked the sheets and then dried. And later I found out the grizzly detail that the darkness of the blood was a result of where she’d been stabbed—in the right side of her chest, the chamber where the blood had just returned to the heart.

Details like that haunted me later. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. But the worst was seeing her face. I wish more than anything I had left without looking at her face. For the longest time afterward, I couldn’t remember her face as it had been when she was alive. Whenever I tried to remember what she looked like, I saw her as she looked that morning. It didn’t look like she was sleeping. It didn’t look like her. We don’t know it these days, because death is so hidden from us, but death has a face. It has a look all its own.