Page 28 of Kill Your Darlings

But then Tammy had said something like, “That was awkward,” and they’d both laughed, some of it to cover the embarrassment of the moment, but some of it genuine mutual laughter. They’d stayed in bed together for over an hour, talking about what had brought them there. Tammy told him that as soon as she’d decided that marrying Alex had been one of the dumbest decisions she’d made, that she’d been determined to have an affair, a way to mark the beginning of the end. And then Thom had talked about his marriage to Wendy. He’d said, “I have affairs, but down deep I’m still in love with her. She’s faithful but doesn’t particularly even like me.” He’d surprised himself, because he’d never quite thought of it that way before.

“So why do you have affairs?” Tammy had asked.

“Because I’m lonely, I suppose.”

“You and Wendy... I haven’t spent a ton of time with you, but... you seem to have genuine chemistry.”

“We talk well together, I suppose. But when we’re not talking, I don’t know what she’s thinking. So I fall in love with other women in the hope that it will solve something but I just end up feeling worse about myself. And more in love with Wendy.”

“You’ve given this some thought.”

After that afternoon in bed Thom and Tammy had become confidants, conducting their platonic relationship in secret, as though it were an affair. They met at an Indian restaurant in Beverly to tell each other secrets, and they coordinated their times at the gym, just so they could be close to each other. Sometimes, like lovers, they’d recount their origin story, how their sex together had been so bad that it forced them to become friends.

“You should go back to Wendy,” Tammy said after they’d hugged in the kitchen. Her phone was ringing, although she wasn’t making a move toward answering it.

At the door Thom said, “Do you think they’ll come and question me?”

“Who?”

“The police.”

Tammy thought about it, looking at the ceiling. “People must know we see one another. I’m sure they assume it’s an affair. Who knows? But like you said...”

“I have a solid alibi.”

“You still sleep with your wife?”

“You mean, in the same bed?”

“Yes.”

“I do,” he said. Walking back to his car under the hard blue sky, Thom was possessed by the thought that he’d never see Tammy again, or at the very least that he’d never see her alone again. Whatever they had shared together over the past five years had just come to an end.

He arrived home anxious and sullen, badly in need of a drink. He expected Wendy to question him on his whereabouts but, instead, she was nice to him, even joining him in an afternoon gin and tonic. He waited for a knock on the door, for a policeman to come with questions about where he’d been in the early-morning hours of that day. But no one came.

Two days later, while still waiting, Linda called to tell him that the death of Alex Deighton was being treated as an accident. An autopsy was forthcoming but initial reports seemed to confirm he had drowned. There was a big article in theBoston Globeabout the incident, most of it centered on the varying swimming holes north of Boston and the dangers they presented. As July turned into August, bridged by the worst Massachusetts heat wave in Thom’s memory, he became increasingly depressed. Alex had made him miserable. With Alex gone, things should be better, but they weren’t. He found himself haunted by images of Alex drowning at dawn, and he almost brought it up to Wendy but decided against it; she’d think he was dwelling on the past. He did, however, try to express some of his feelings about Alex to Wendy over dinner one evening on their porch, and all she’dsaid was “Think about how much you couldn’t stand him. That’s all I heard about all year. ‘Alex did this, Alex said that. Alex will never retire, and I’ll never be department chair.’”

“I don’t even know that I want to be department chair anymore,” Thom said.

“Why wouldn’t you?” Wendy said, putting her glass down on the coffee table hard enough that the seltzer water sloshed over the rim. “That’s all you’ve talked about for two years.”

“I don’t know,” Thom said, trying not to look directly at his wife. He knew she’d have that expression on her face, the one he’d privately named her Marlene Dietrich stare. “Marcia deserves it more than me.”

“What does ‘deserve’ have to do with it? I’m sorry, I know that sounds awful, but you’ve been there longer than anyone.”

“Not longer than Don.”

“Don doesn’t count. He’s not interested in being anything but a teacher. He never has been. Listen, I’m going to tell you something.”

The change in her tone made Thom look up at her. She was on the edge of the outdoor sofa, her hair still damp from her afternoon swim in the cove, and for a terrible moment Thom thought she was finally going to leave him. It was as though a huge wind swept off the inner harbor and tore the house off its roots. Instead, she said, “Never mind. Do what you want. You always do anyway.”

2013

June

i

The first time Wendy drove to the quarry, the air outside was so cold that she’d run the heater in the car. It was six a.m., late June, and mist hovered over the lawns and open fields. She’d timed her drive: ten minutes from their house with no traffic. There were two paths that she knew of that led to the swimming hole. One was accessed on the ridiculously named Lane’s Lane, but it required parking alongside a narrow road in full view of several residents. The other access point meant a longer walk through the woods, but it also meant parking out of sight, down a dirt road with a few remnants of asphalt here and there to get to an old granite outbuilding, abandoned when the quarry had gone out of business back in the 1930s. There was space in front of the building to park, and from there she slid past a padlocked fence meant to keep cars from going any farther, then it was a half-mile walk to the southern edge of the quarry, emerging like an artist’s rendition of the ideal summer swimming hole, surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs,the preferred jumping points for successive generations of reckless teenagers, but with one side comprised of long, flat rocks extending into the clear, luminous water like steps made for a giant.

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