The Darlings (36 page)

SUNDAY, 11:20 A.M.

T
he house felt still, but pleasantly so. Not at all what one would expect of a widow's home. The bedroom was a little too warm (she had told Carmen not to leave the radiator on all day, but it appeared as though she had forgotten again) but the warmth was a welcome contrast to the blistering cold outside. On the side tables, flowers bloomed. They were replaced once a week, except for the orchids, which lasted a little longer than the cut arrangements. Orchids were her favorite, but they were expensive. Morty got upset if there were too many. The lilies were cheerier, anyway. She liked it when the bedroom smelled of them; it made her feel well taken care of. As if she were at a hotel. On closer inspection, the petals were distended, in the final stages of unfurling, and some had begun to drop their stamen on the tabletop, dusting it with golden pollen. They would be dead by Monday.

She wondered if Carmen had been in the house at all that week. She never knew what Morty did with Carmen when she wasn't around, but she suspected that he let her leave early or told her not to come at all. Morty had never really gotten comfortable with the idea of live-in help.

Julianne had slept well for the first time in days. Her first thought upon opening her eyes had been that it was very nice to be back in her own bed. This filled her with a sense of sublime completeness, as though she were on her way to being whole again. Her head felt clear and her body had stopped aching, which it had been since she had gotten off the plane from Aspen. And she was wearing her own silk pajamas, the white ones with the pink piping, instead of the old sleeping shirt she kept in a drawer at the Aspen house, in case she forgot to pack one. She felt,
dare she think it
, relaxed.

Julianne had stayed in Aspen out of a sense of paralysis, as though returning would make it all real, somehow. Also, it was hard to find flights. Sol Penzell had tried to get her on someone or other's private plane and ordinarily she never would have turned that down, but at the last minute she had called his secretary, Yvonne, and declined. What would she do with herself in New York anyway? Eat Thanksgiving dinner alone in front of the television? Begin to pack up her things?

For a moment, she was seized with guilt, or at least the sense that she ought not to be, for feeling so well. But the truth of it was that it hadn't quite dawned on Julianne that Morty was actually gone. The house didn't feel any different than it did when Morty was traveling, which was often. Their bedroom was still imbued with him. His closet smelled of his cedar-scented cologne. Six dress shirts, plastic wrapped from the dry cleaners, hung on the back of the door. Morty must have picked them up himself because Carmen would have unwrapped them and placed them neatly on wooden hangers. On the bathroom counter, Julianne found Morty's razor next to her toothbrush. Its shaft was headless, as if he had shaved with it that morning and tossed away the blade. Around the basin of the sink, Julianne thought she saw traces of beard stubble. She rinsed it out with cold water after splashing some on her face, and placed his razor back on his side of the cabinet shelf.

Why would someone pick up his dry cleaning and shave before killing himself?
She dismissed the thought after she had it, but it lingered in a back corner of her mind like a jungle cat, promising to pounce on her later.

Julianne had grown accustomed to spending Sunday mornings alone. Sunday was Morty's day to catch up on work, and he usually left the house before she was awake. When she did, she would dress in gym clothes, run on the treadmill on the third floor of their town house. Then she would get a manicure (the Koreans on the corner opened at noon on Sundays) and read the wedding announcements in the
New York Times
. She loved the wedding announcements unabashedly; it was the only part of the paper that actually caught her interest. She liked seeing pretty women, not unlike herself, with successful men. Finance guys, mostly, with impressive titles like CEO, principal, managing director. She liked to think about what they did when they were together, alone. Maybe they both loved to sail. Maybe they took shooting lessons or collected Beatles memorabilia. Maybe they both understood what it was like to lose a parent in a car accident or to go through AA or to grow up dirt poor. Maybe they weren't married for the reasons everyone assumed. The process of constructing lives for these couples could consume an hour, maybe two.

Sundays were not that distinct from the rest of the week, but they had a calmness that the work week didn't. Julianne luxuriated in the pace. There were no scheduled appointments or evening functions with Morty and his friends. Morty would be home by 5 p.m. for dinner. He liked to eat early, around the kitchen table. Angela, their cook, would leave carefully labeled Tupperware containers of pot roast or coq au vin in the refrigerator on Friday evenings before she left, so that Julianne wouldn't have to prepare anything in her absence. Though Morty had sent her to cooking school twice, Julianne was a terrible cook. Sometimes she bought bread at the bakery next to the Korean manicure place, if she remembered.

Angela had been given the whole week off because of the holiday, so Julianne was faced with the prospect of an empty refrigerator. Peering into it, her heart sank a little. There was a drawer filled with San Pellegrino, a few soft cheeses wrapped in cellophane, soy milk, a jar of cornichons (
did anyone ever eat the cornichons?
she wondered), cubed cantaloupe, beer and ketchup and assorted other sauces and condiments that Julianne didn't know what to do with. She withdrew the cantaloupe and though it was past its expiration date, fished out a square and popped it into her mouth. It was overripe and nearly fermented, and it burned a little when she swallowed it. She tossed the rest of it in the trash.

As she did, she noticed a pizza box, bent in half, at the bottom of the garbage can. The sight of it stopped her cold in her tracks. It was Morty's; she knew it. She pulled it out and inspected it, as if it were evidence of something. There was a greasy ring on the bottom, and the cardboard itself felt cold and stale. There was pizza still inside. Morty liked to save things: gift wrap, those extra buttons that came in a plastic bag in the pocket of a new coat. The Morty she knew would have saved the leftover pizza. She felt sick with sadness. She wanted to drop it back in the garbage, but was unable to let go for over a minute, too overwhelmed to move.

The weight of everything sank into her flesh like teeth. It wasn't sadness, exactly; it felt more like fear. Her skin pricked up, and her toes curled up off the kitchen tiles. She wanted to dash out into the street and hail a cab and go to the airport and get on the next flight to Texas or Provence or Cairo or Mexico. Get the hell out of there and take nothing with her, just get in the cab and go . . . but instead she stood rooted to the floor, the pizza box held with both hands, the sound of the cars amplifying outside. She could hear the earthy rumble of a motorcycle grow louder and then fade away; she wanted to jump on the back of it, allow it to take her across one of the bridges and deposit her on a deserted side street where she could quietly vanish. What had happened, here in this house? It felt foreign to her now, as if she had broken in through a window and was about to get caught inside.

She went back upstairs and fell into a dreamless sleep.

When she awoke again, the streetlamps were visible against the cobalt sky. She had made up her mind now about what to do, and she set about it with a hell-bent sense of purpose. She went to the kitchen first, and after having emptied all the shelves and cabinets of everything perishable, she took out the trash herself. Morty's cereal, his fiber bars, his Splenda and ground coffee beans. The spice rack, too, because he had given it to her. She worked her way from the bottom floor of the town house to the top, all four floors. The flowers went next, from the living room and dining room and powder room. The photographs of Morty were stripped from the shelves and placed neatly into a large suitcase that she dragged into his closet. His office was neater than expected. She knew that someone would likely come to see it, and would be angry if anything looked tampered with, so she simply shut the door and left it, still as an altar.

The process took several hours, but it was satisfying work. It wasn't altogether clear to Julianne what she was preparing the house for, but she was firm in the conviction that it was necessary. After her father had passed, Julianne's mother had preserved the house, as though he still lived there. His shoes remained lined up beneath the entryway bench, and though no one else ever drank them, bottles of A&W root beer and Bloody Mary mix lined the pantry shelves. Her father had worked on railroads all his life, and the basement was filled with his model trains, their tiny tracks running infinite loops around the wooden tables he had constructed himself out of plywood. It was a hideous way to live, for the living. No one spoke of him, but his presence was felt in every room, as if he had been there just a moment before and had run out to get the paper. Her mother grew gaunt and gray, drifting from room to room like a specter. It was as though Julianne and her sister, Caroline, lived with two ghosts. She rarely left the house except to go to church on Sunday. When she died three years later, Julianne felt more relief than she did sadness, and sensed that Caroline felt the same. They buried her next to their father, in the old cemetery on Mill Street, just past the north edge of the town.

At last, Julianne found herself back in the master bedroom suite, the edges of her hairline damp with perspiration. She had brought with her a roll of garbage bags from beneath the kitchen sink, which she carried straight to the bathroom. The razor went first, and then the shaving cream; Morty's Old Spice deodorant; his Crest toothpaste; his old contact lens case that he still kept but hadn't used since he switched to dailies. She hesitated before throwing out the contacts themselves—they were so expensive—but she did this, too, so that she didn't ever again have to look at them. When it was all gone, she sat on the edge of the bathtub and allowed herself to cry.

Why shave?

There would be many nights in her future when Julianne would lie awake reliving the next twenty minutes. Sitting there on the bathtub's edge, it occurred to her that she hadn't, despite her thoroughness, thrown away Morty's pills. She could name them all: Dilantin for the epilepsy, Lipitor for cholesterol, Ambien for sleep. She knew exactly what small square of real estate they occupied on the shelf. And she knew that she hadn't thrown them away with the rest of the toiletries, though she searched through the garbage, twice, just to be sure.

She didn't need to, because she knew where the pills were. Or not where they were, exactly, but whom they were with. Morty would never have left without his pills. Especially the Dilantin. He was terrified of having a seizure. Lack of control, he once told her, was worse than anything in the world.

She could see him now, standing in front of the cabinet, assessing the pills. His decision to take them with him was a calculated risk. What if someone noticed they were gone? It could be his undoing. No one needed Dilantin at the bottom of a river . . . He would have known this, but his fear of the seizures would have gotten the better of him. What if he had a seizure at the airport? What if he had one once he disappeared? Who would care for him then? He couldn't just check into a hospital; for the rest of his life, he would have to lie low. This was how he would have justified taking his pills.

He would have realized that she would have figured it out. Julianne had always been vigilant about his medication. She would have noticed the pills were gone and she would have wondered. It didn't take a genius, once you knew what to look for.

Julianne was seized with a strange mix of tenderness and anger. There in the bathroom, sitting alone on the tub's edge, was their final shared moment. Morty had let her in on his secret. He knew she would be flattered enough to keep it. She was always flattered when he paid attention to her, flattered and loyal as a dog.

His confidence in her fidelity angered her a little. It angered her enough for her to go to the phone, lugging the garbage behind her like a child with a sled. She picked it up before she thought about whom she was about to dial: Carter Darling? His lawyer, Sol? Her own lawyer, whom she had consulted once, when she had wanted Morty to marry her? She should tell someone, she thought, it seemed only appropriate. But she couldn't think of whom to tell.

Eventually, she set the receiver down and went to throw out the trash. Her anger had subsided, washed away on a wave of fatigue. When she picked up the phone again, later that evening, she made only one call, to her sister Caroline, in Texas.

“I'm coming home,” she said. “If that's okay with you.”

And so she did; back to where she came from. A place she never thought she'd go, and had all but forgotten about when she had arrived in New York. It was the right thing to do, or as right a thing to do as she could think of at the time.