With all my love,
John-Paul
Cecilia thought she’d experienced anger before, plenty of times, but now she knew that she’d had no idea how real anger felt. The white-hot burning purity of it. It was a frantic, crazy, wonderful feeling. She felt like she could fly. She could fly across the room, like a demon, and claw bloody scratch marks down John-Paul’s face.
“Is it true?” she said. She was disappointed by the sound of her voice. It was weak. It didn’t sound like it came from someone who was wild with anger. “Is it true?” she said again, stronger.
She knew it was true, but her desire for it not to be true was so overpowering, she had to ask. She wanted to beg for it to be made untrue.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot and rolling about like a terrified horse.
“But you’d never,” said Cecilia. “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”
“I can’t explain it.”
“You didn’t even know Janie Crowley.” She corrected herself. “I didn’t even know you knew her. You never even mentioned her.”
At the mention of Janie’s name, John-Paul began to visibly shake. He clung to the sides of the doorframe. Seeing him shake like that was even more shocking than the actual words he’d written.
“If you’d died,” she said. “If you’d died and I’d found this letter . . .”
She stopped. She couldn’t breathe for the fury.
“How could you just leave that for me? Leave me to do that for you? Expect me to turn up on Rachel Crowley’s doorstep and tell her . . . this . . . thing?” She stood up, covered her face with her hands and turned around in circles. She was naked, she noted without particular interest. Her T-shirt had ended up at the bottom of the bed after they had sex and she hadn’t bothered to find it. “I drove Rachel home tonight! I drove her home! I talked to her about Janie! I thought I was so great for telling her this memory I had of Janie, and all the time this letter was sitting here.” She removed her hands and looked at him. “What if one of the girls had found it, John-Paul?” That had only just occurred to her. It was so momentous, so dreadful, she had to say it again. “What if one of the girls had found it?”
“I know,” he whispered. He came into the room and stood with his back up against the wall and looked at her as if he were facing a firing squad. “I’m sorry.”
She watched as his legs gave way and he slid to the carpet to a sitting position.
“Why would you write it?” She picked up the corner of the letter and dropped it again. “How could you put something like that in writing?”
“I’d had too much to drink, and then the next day, I tried to find it so I could tear it up.” He looked up at her tearfully. “And I’d lost it. I nearly lost my mind looking for it. I must have been working on my tax return and then it got caught up in some of the papers. I thought I’d looked—”
“Stop it!” she shouted. She couldn’t bear to hear him talking with his usual hopeless wonder about the way things got lost and then turned up again, as if this letter were something perfectly ordinary, like an unpaid car insurance bill.
John-Paul put a finger to his lips. “You’ll wake the girls,” he said tremulously.
His nervousness made her feel sick. Be a man! she wanted to scream. Make this go away. Take this thing off me! It was a disgusting, ugly, horrible creature he needed to destroy. It was an impossibly heavy box he needed to lift from her arms. And he wasn’t doing anything.