Page 53 of The Wife Upstairs
And then he releases a long deep breath and says, “It made me crazy. After Bea.”
I look up, startled. I hadn’t expected him to voluntarily mention her after my fuckup earlier.
“The quiet,” he goes on. “Thinking about that night and how quiet it would’ve been, how dark.”
He keeps his eyes trained on the water. “It’s deep out there, you know. The deepest lake in Alabama.”
I hadn’t known that, and I don’t say anything. I’m not even sure if he’s talking to me, to be honest. It’s almost like he’s talking to himself, staring out at the lake.
“They flooded a forest to make it,” he goes on. “So there are trees under the water. Tall ones, sixty feet high in some places. A whole fucking forest under the water. That’s why they thought they never found her. They thought she was somewhere in the trees.”
The image seeps into my mind. Bea, her skin white, her body tangled in the branches of an underwater forest, and it’s so awful I actually shake my head a little. I’d wondered why it had been so hard to find the bodies, and now that I knew, I wish I didn’t.
I wish we’d never come here.
A muscle works in his jaw. “Anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, rubbing his lower back. “If this is too much—”
“No,” he says, then takes a sip of his wine. “No.” It’s firmer this time. “I loved this place, and she loved this place, and one bad memory can’t taint it forever.”
I want to point out that it’s more than a bad memory—it’s the death of his wife, the death of a close friend, but then what he’s actually said crystallizes in my mind, sucking the breath out of my lungs.
One bad memory.
Eddie wasn’t here that night. He can’trememberit.
Okay, no, I’m being stupid. It was a simple turn of phrase, he doesn’t mean it like a literal memory, just thatthinkingabout what happened here is like a bad memory. Right?
But my voice is still brittle when I ask, “Have you been here since it happened?”
He takes a moment before answering me.
“Once.”
It’s all he says, that one word, and then he turns away. “Let’s go out to eat tonight,” he says. “There’s a great restaurant on the other side of the lake.”
And then he’s moving past me into the bedroom, leaving me there in the silence, watching the sun over the water.
21
Dinner is nice. Some fish place with slightly tacky décor and Christmas lights strung up everywhere, but the food is good, and Eddie seems a little looser, back to how he’d been earlier in the day, before we arrived at the house.
There’s no talk of Bea this time, only us, and when we drive back to the house after the sun has set, Eddie reaches over to hold my hand, his fingers stroking my knuckles.
But the closer we get to the house, the more I can feel him tense up, and when we come in, we end up just watching TV and drinking more wine. Maybe too much in my case because when I get into bed close to midnight, my head is spinning and I feel too warm, my skin sweaty, so that when Eddie tries to slide an arm around me, I scoot away from him.
I fall into a fitful sleep only to wake up to find myself alone.
For a moment, I lie there, one hand splayed over the spot where Eddie should be, the sheets still warm.
Then there’s a sound from the living room.
It sounds like something scraping against the floor, and my mouth is suddenly dry from more than the wine.
When I hear it again, I get out of bed.
I come out of the bedroom, my eyes burning, my head still fuzzy, and Eddie is there in the living room, crouched down, looking at the floor.
