Blood in the Water(94)

“The other money wasn’t so much,” she said. “It wasn’t any huge amount. It was just a couple of thousand dollars. And there was a key. Gregor Demarkian asked me about the key, but I didn’t tell him. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell him. It was Martha Heydreich’s key. Stephen didn’t find it.”

The psychiatrist still said nothing, and Eileen found herself drifting off. It was very peaceful, sitting in the chair the way she was. She felt as if she were floating in a vast ocean, and nothing and nobody would ever be able to find her. She would float away, and when she had floated away far enough, there would be mermaids singing. There were mermaids in the Odyssey. There were mermaids in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She had never paid enough attention in school.

When she got back to her room, the sun was shining. There were birds making fretful noises outside her window. They had given her a pill. It had made her sleep. She lay down in her bed and drifted off again.

Here was something she liked more than any of the rest of it. She liked the way this made her feel that she could sleep and sleep, sleep and sleep, forever, without anybody being able to wake her up. She would be like a princess in a tower, and some day a prince would come to kiss her awake. What she really wanted was for no prince to come at all. She would just sleep. And if a fairy godmother ever asked to know where she was, people could say that she’d left on vacation, and never come back.

Stephen’s voice at the end of the hall had been strident, insistent, a little panicked.

“She tells all these stories,” it said. “She tells them and she has no idea whether they’re true or not. She tells them and then she can’t remember if she made them up or not, and then everything goes to hell.”

A little while after that, Stephen came down to the room and sat in its one, hard-backed visitor’s chair. He had his jacket unzipped. His hair was very mussed. He sat with his legs apart and his forearms on his knees and watched her for a while, as if it would be useless to talk to her. The light in the window came and went and came again. There were clouds out there. Eileen could tell.

“I don’t know what you said to them,” he said, “but they had a warrant when they came to my office. A warrant when they came to my office. Can you imagine? It will be all over town before you know it. I could have been arrested.”

Eileen reminded herself that she was on a deep sea. The law of the sea said she did not have to answer questions. She would never answer questions again.

“They found the money,” Stephen said. “It was sitting right there in my desk drawer. I hadn’t had time to do anything with it yet. Do you think when you do these things? Do you ever think at all?”

Eileen almost said that she was thinking right then, right that minute, but if she’d done that, it would have started a conversation. She didn’t want a conversation.

“There’s all kinds of shit hitting the fan at the moment,” Stephen said. “I hope you’re satisfied. I hope this is what you wanted.”

What Eileen wanted was Michael back. Michael just the way he always was. Michael as she had loved him from the very first moment she had seen him in the flesh. Sometimes she thought she could still feel him moving around in her body, the ebb and flow of him that last two months or so before he was born. Sometimes she thought she could see him in his playpen the very first year, slamming soft toys one against the other as if his life depended on tearing them apart.

Stephen had gotten up and gone after a while, and then there had been nothing but the bare empty room and the silence that choked it. The day had gone on without incident, except that a nurse had come in to bring her lunch, and a nurse had come in to bring her dinner, and yet another nurse had come in to bring her pills to swallow. Of course, there was a nurse always on watch just outside the door, because they were all afraid she would make another attempt to kill herself.

She had known, stringing the rope up this morning over the beam, that the beam was only decorative. It would not hold. She would not die. She would step off the stool and into the air and then she would fall, creating a mess in the kitchen, making a noise. When Stephen came home, he would find her lying there, and she would give him no explanation.

She had no explanation for anybody now, either, except the obvious one. She had seen Michael with Martha Heydreich on the night he was murdered. That was it. Everybody at Waldorf Pines had seen the two of them together. She had stood on her own deck and watched them walking across the green, far away, almost at the pool house, and for a moment she hadn’t recognized them.