Two weeks passed before Roger called again. Our talks were purely transactional now, so I assumed he was calling me concerning the court date he’d wanted so badly.
“I can’t meet you tomorrow about the house,” he said. “Johanna died.”
“I’m sorry, Roger.” I paused. “Do we know a Johanna?”
“Sara’s mother, Johanna,” he barked. “Sara’s mother is dead.”
I realized that we, in fact, did not know a Johanna.
When couples separate, you pick up the slightest thing that shows that the distance between you has increased, switching from morning coffee to chai tea, your ex sporting a new T-shirt that you know for certain you’ve never washed, or peppering a new name in conversation. Roger had an entire new Rolodex of names now that I knew nothing about. Johanna was one of them, and now, apparently, she was dead.
I was just learning to adjust to being without Roger. In my observations of divorce, if there is another party involved—and Sara was, indeed, another party—your friends spill every last detail to you out of loyalty. They aren’t sure of the permanence of your marital situation, so, hedging their bets, they dispense information freely—names, places, cars, times they’ve seen her, exactly what she wears and where she gets her nails done. Then, just as suddenly as it starts, information shuts off. These same friends look away and change the subject at the mention of her, deciding it’s time for you to move on and that hiding details will hasten your grieving process along. But what it does, instead, is alienate you from everyone. As Roger rambled on about Johanna, it occurred to me that I felt utterly alone.
The following week, I passed Roger in the hallway of my lawyer’s office where he’d stopped by to transfer the car title. I was startled by his appearance. His face seemed to have been dragged over a cheese grater—an old, rusty one at that. With his hands wrapped in several bloody bandages, Roger explained that the window in Sara’s house had shattered on him while he was cleaning it. The whole time he was telling me this story, his voice a whisper, he never looked at me. I’m not sure if it was because he was in pain or because he had seen enough of me, but I was unsettled by something I couldn’t put my finger on. That afternoon, I called our mutual friend Mickey and asked him what he’d heard. Over lunch at Off the Record at the Hay-Adams Hotel, Mick painted the whole picture for me.
“First”—he leaned in conspiratorially—“Sara’s mother died in some freak accident in like four feet of water at the YMCA before her aqua aerobics class. Four feet? Who dies in that? I mean, stand up, right?” He shrugged. “Then a grieving Sara begins to clean everything in the entire fucking house including the windows. Yuck, right?” Mickey rolled his eyes. “Apparently, she has floor-to-ceiling windows in the new addition to her midcentury.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course she does.”
“Well, one of those fabulous windows shattered on both Roger and her. It could have killed them both.” As if I didn’t get the gravity of the situation, Mickey drew a dramatic line across his neck. “They don’t make windows like they used to, I guess.”
Then he lowered his voice and dropped the bomb. “Sara asked him to leave. She thinks it’s bad karma over their relationship.”
And I had to admit that I agreed with Sara. Something in the universe was swirling, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been me who’d done it—first Johanna, then the window. I was probably being delusional and narcissistic. I couldn’t control things like that in the universe. Could I?
And then I met him and he confirmed everything.
3
Helen Lambert
Washington, DC, May 24, 2012
I was about to speak, but Luke raised his finger to stop me. I turned to see the waiter standing directly behind me.
“We’ll have a bottle of the Château Haut-Brion,” Luke said in perfect French to the waiter, who scribbled the order down before retreating. “As I was saying, you called me, but then you called it off… changed your mind. Shouldn’t surprise me by now, really. You aren’t a vengeful creature. You never were.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I hissed.
Luke raised his eyebrow. “Really, Red?” He reached across the small bistro table between us and moved a lock of my hair out of my eye. “I seem to remember you wanting something pretty bad, curled up on your bed.” Luke took a deep breath. “I was hoping you’d ask me to kill him, but you didn’t. I would have enjoyed that. This time around, Roger Lambert is an even bigger asshole than Billy Rapp, more clueless and duller. Why is it always him, Red? Always. I guess you can’t help it, though, can you?”
“What on God’s earth are you talking about? Who in the hell is Billy Rapp?”
He looked at me as if deciding something. “Never mind.”
“You drowned Sara’s mother.” My voice croaked.
“No.” He pointed to me. “Technically, you did.”
Luke had ordered appetizers, and the pommes frites with Parmesan and truffles arrived. He began chomping on frites like we were having a casual conversation about the band we’d just seen at Rock & Roll Hotel or something and weren’t, in fact, having a conversation about killing a woman. He paused until the waiter walked away.
“Seriously, Helen, you could be a bit more careful around the waiters.” He pulled another french fry from the silver tray and pointed it at me before dipping it in mayonnaise. “You were sloppy. You said you wanted… let’s see… how did you phrase it.” He stared up at the ceiling. “‘Harm to come to Sara.’”
“I said I wanted her dead.” Like a pouting child, I took a couple of frites and stuffed them in my mouth. I chewed them slowly, hoping it showed my disgust.
“No.” He shook his head. “You most certainly did not say that.” He took a drink of water. “Had you said that, she’d be dead. End of story. You never remember this stuff, do you? We’re very specific about these things.” He actually shook a fry at me.
“I never said to kill her mother.” I sat back and crossed my arms, smug.
“I repeat. You said, ‘I want harm to come to Sara.’” He threw up his hands. “Harm can mean anything. You don’t want to play with this shit, Red. You should know that on some cellular level, surely.” He put his hand out like he was presenting something to me. “You call in a general order for poultry, you might get Cornish hen or you might get Thanksgiving turkey, am I right? Precision is key here.” He pointed his fingers in emphasis like a politician—and then just like a lunatic in a bad B movie, Luke Varner changed the subject. “I like this place.” His face lit up. “It reminds me of us in 1938.”
“You’re crazy.” I lowered my voice.
He ignored me. “Your name was Nora then. Nora Wheeler.”
The name off his lips shook me, like a song that I’d heard a long time ago, one that had been out of reach in my memory but that I’d still longed for. I didn’t admit that to him, of course, but the name Nora Wheeler was familiar. I had the strangest urge to correct him and say, No, you mean Norma. This whole thing was mad and it was messing with my head. I figured I’d give it another five minutes before making an excuse to go to the bathroom and slipping out the back door. Tomorrow, I’d deal with Mickey for this date from hell.