Deadly Beloved(2)

Patsy put her used glass into the sink. That was the difference between them, of course. Stephen did like the house. He liked everything about it, just the way he liked everything about Fox Run Hill, and the country club, and his job at Delacord & Tweed in Philadelphia. Last month he had bought himself a bright red Ferrari Testarosa. This month he had been talking about taking a vacation in the Caribbean, of renting an entire villa on Montego Bay and keeping it for the three long months of the summer.

“The problem with us is that we’ve never really learned to enjoy our money,” he’d said. “We’ve never understood that there was more that we could do with it than use it to invest in bonds.”

Patsy had fished the lemon slice out of the bottom of the glass of Scotch on the rocks she’d just drunk and made an encouraging noise. The family room had a cathedral ceiling and thick, useless beams that had been machine-cut to look as if they had been hand-hewn, then dyed a dark brown to make them look old. Stephen’s voice bounced against all the wood and stone and empty spaces.

“Now that I won’t be traveling anymore, it’ll be better,” he had told her, “you’ll see. I know that you’ve been terribly lonely, dumped in this house with nobody to talk to for weeks at a time. I know that you haven’t been happy here.”

Now the water-spotted glass sat in the sink, looking all wrong. Everything else in the kitchen was clean to the point of being antiseptic. The sinks were all stainless steel and highly polished, as if porcelain had too much of the roadside diner attached to it, too much of the socially marginal and the economically low rent.

“Damn,” Patsy said out loud. She walked through glass doors that separated the kitchen and the family room from the foyer and started up the front stairs. The stairs made a circular sweep up a curved bulge in the wall that was lined with curved leaded windows looking out on the drive and the front walk. Outside, the Volvo looked dowdy and dumpy and square—just like Patsy imagined she looked dowdy and dumpy and square everywhere in Fox Run Hill, next to all those women who worked so hard on treadmills and Nautilus machines, who came to parties and ate only crudités and drank only Perrier water. The clock at the top of the stairs said that it was 6:26. Patsy stopped next to it, at the linen closet, and rummaged through the stacks of Porthault sheets until she found the gun.

Patsy turned the gun over in her hands. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 657 41 Magnum with an 8-3/4-inch stainless steel barrel, muzzled by a professional silencer that looked like a blackened can of insect repellent. She had bought it quite openly at a gun shop in central Philadelphia, with no questions asked, in spite of the fact that it was a heavy gun that most women would not want to use and illegal to buy in Pennsylvania.

Most women probably couldn’t even lift it, Patsy thought, walking down the carpeted hall. The only real sounds in the house were Stephen’s snoring, and the whir of the central air-conditioning, pumping away even in the cold of the morning, set so low that crystals of ice sometimes formed on the edges of the grates.

In the bedroom, Stephen was lying on his back under a pile of quilts and blankets, his mostly bald head lolling off the side of a thick goose-down pillow, a single naked shoulder exposed to the air. When Patsy had first met him, he’d had thick hair all over his body. In the years of their marriage, he seemed to have shed.

Patsy spread her legs apart and raised the gun in both hands. She had fired it only twice before, but she knew how difficult it was. When the bullet exploded in the chamber, the gun kicked back and made her shoulder hurt. She wished she’d thought to wear a set of ear protectors like the ones they’d given her when she went out to practice at the range. Then she remembered the silencer and felt immensely and irredeemably stupid. Could anyone as naive and ignorant as she really do something like this? Why didn’t she just turn around and go downstairs and get into the car? Why didn’t she just drive through the front gates and keep on going, driving and driving until she came to a place where she could smell the sea?

Stephen’s body moved on the bed. He coughed in his sleep, his throat thick with mucus. He was nothing and nobody, Patsy thought, a cog in the machine, an instrument. He was the one who had wanted to live locked up like this, so that he could pretend they were safe. If I don’t do something soon, he’ll wake up, Patsy thought.

She tried to remember the color of his eyes and couldn’t do it. She tried to remember the shape of his hands and couldn’t do that either. She had been married to this man for twenty-two years and he had made no impression on her at all.