He Put My Name on the Divorce Papers Before the Funeral · Ava Sterling

Chapter 2: The Room They Painted

The last car went down the drive at seven forty.

I stood in the hall while the Mancini's van reversed past the fountain and the motion lights came on across the lawn, and for about four seconds the house was quiet enough to hear the water.

Then I went upstairs.

My key card didn't open the master suite. I tried it twice, and then I looked at the lock, and the lock was new. Brass, unscratched, still with the little factory sticker on the escutcheon that a locksmith peels off if he has time and doesn't if he's been told to hurry.

My clothes were in the corridor.

Eleven boxes. Not garbage bags — I want to be fair, they weren't garbage bags. They were the proper kind, from a firm in Newport that does estate moves, white with a green stripe, and each one was labeled in a small even hand.

I.C. — CLOSET, HANGING. I.C. — CLOSET, FOLDED. I.C. — BATH. I.C. — DESK, PERSONAL.

I know Margo Ives's handwriting. I had nine years of it on the corner of my own calendar.

They had done this while we were at the cemetery. Somebody had stood in my bedroom with a roll of tape and a marker at eleven o'clock on the morning of my son's funeral, and had been thorough enough to separate hanging from folded.

I put my hand flat on the door for a second. Then I went down the corridor to Sam's room, because I wanted to sit on his floor for a while, and I had been thinking about it since the church.

I smelled it before I got to the door.

Paint.

The room was empty. Not tidied. Empty. The sailboat paper his grandfather had picked out was gone and the walls were the flat bone colour Constance uses in the guest wing, still tacky at the corners, and the window was open four inches with a fan in it, and the fan was running.

His bed was gone. The rug was gone. The shelf with the christening cup and the shark tooth and the Providence Bruins puck.

I stood in the doorway and I did the thing you do, which is look for one object. Any object. And what my eyes went to was the doorframe, because that was where we had marked him every birthday since he was two. Seven marks in pencil, and the dates, and beside the last one, in his own hand, SAM 7 (NO SHOES).

Sanded. Sanded and primed and painted over, and you could still feel the grain where the pencil had bitten in if you put two fingers on it, and I did put two fingers on it, and that was when I made a sound.

Not a loud one.

"Iris." Constance was at the end of the corridor. "Not now."

There were two people with her. A woman in a linen jacket with a notebook, and a young man with a camera bag on his shoulder, and they had both stopped walking.

"This is Beth Aylward," Constance said, in the voice she uses for introductions. "From the magazine. They're doing the piece on the foundation in the autumn issue and I've asked them to look at the north light while it's good. Beth, my daughter-in-law."

"Mrs. Calloway." Beth Aylward had the decency to look like she wanted the floor to open. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Thank you."

"We can come back another—"

"You can't, though," Constance said pleasantly. "You're on the eight-forty out of Providence. Go on down, we'll be a moment."

They went. The young man looked back once.

Constance waited until the stairs stopped sounding.

"You have paint on your hand," she said.

I looked at my fingers. There was a fine bone-coloured line across the pads of two of them.

"There were marks on that doorframe," I said.

"There were."

"He measured himself on his birthday. In April. He stood there in his socks and made me hold the book flat."

"And in four months," Constance said, "there would have been people in this house for the fall dinner, and one of them would have gone looking for a bathroom and found a shrine. I have buried a husband and a brother, Iris. I know precisely how long a family can be looked at before the looking turns into something else. You'll thank me for it in a year."

"You could have waited a week."

"No," she said. "That is exactly the mistake. A week is when it hardens." She reached out and, with a thumb, wiped the paint off my fingers, briskly, the way you'd clean a child's face. "Adrian is in the study. He'd like to see you before he goes back to town."

* * *

He was standing. He didn't sit down for it, which I suppose was a decision he'd made in advance.

"You've seen Bennett," he said.

"I've seen the date on it."

"Yes."

"The third of June, Adrian. Sam was at Rossiter's. He was lying in a room on Water Street with his hair combed wrong and you were at a notary."

"The filing windows key off the death of a beneficiary." He said it the way he'd say a flight number. "If I let them pass, the Point sits in probate for two years and the state pulls the marina permit, and then it isn't worth anything to anyone, including you. Bennett will explain it if you want to hear it slowly."

"That isn't what I asked."

"You didn't ask anything."

"Why does it say I killed him?"

He didn't flinch. I would have taken a flinch. I would have taken almost anything.

"It says what my lawyers advised it should say," Adrian said. "You were not in the house. That is not an allegation, it is a fact on a calendar, and it is going to be in a file whether or not I put it there. I would rather it be in a file that I control." He picked his keys up off the desk. "You'll take the pool house for the time being. Bennett is firm that we shouldn't be under one roof."

I heard it land before I understood it.

"The pool house."

"It has a bed, a kitchen, and a door. It's more than most people get."

"He died there, Adrian."

"He died in the pool," my husband said. "Not in the house. And you are going to have to be able to say sentences like that one out loud, because on Monday there will be a room full of people who need you to."

* * *

The pool house had been made up with guest linen. Hospital corners. Two bottles of water on the nightstand and a folded towel, the way Constance's housekeeper does it for people who are staying one night.

Through the glass doors the pool was lit from underneath, that heavy blue that turns everything the colour of an aquarium. The safety cover was rolled back on its reel.

I sat on the end of the bed in my funeral dress and did not turn on the lamp. Somewhere around ten I noticed something under the edge of the bed skirt and reached down for it without much interest.

Goggles. Small ones. Green strap, the elastic gone slack, and on the inside of the left lens the smear of a thumbprint that was too small to be anyone else's.

He wasn't allowed to swim without an adult in the water. Not once, not ever, not since he was four years old and had the first one in the bath and I found out what my own voice sounded like when it went past a certain point. There was a rule and the rule was the shape of our whole life. Marisol knew it. Hollis knew it. The pool alarm was wired to the house and to my phone and to Marisol's phone, and if the surface broke without the cover coming off first, three things went off at once.

Nothing went off on Monday.

I had asked about that in the first hour, in the ambulance bay at Bell Harbor General with somebody's jacket around my shoulders, and a sergeant named Poole had written it in her notebook and said they'd look at the system.

Six days later nobody had said one word to me about it.

I was still holding the goggles at eleven o'clock when somebody knocked on the pool house door.

Three knocks, low down, the way you knock when you don't want the main house to hear.

Hollis Pike was standing on the step with his cap in his hands. Sixty-three years old, twenty-two of them on that property, and he had been crying at some point that day and hadn't done anything to hide it.

"Mrs. Calloway." He looked past me into the room, and then back over his shoulder at the lit windows across the lawn. "I've been trying to get you on your own since Monday and they keep moving me off the top of the property."

"Hollis—"

"The police wrote down about half of what I told them," he said. "Maybe less. And I've got the equipment log in my truck, and there's a line in it for that day that isn't mine."