This Secret Thing, стр. 55
“Maybe we could hang out sometime?” She blurted it out before she lost her nerve. “I mean when you’re not working?”
She saw him visibly relax. He smiled again, and she could tell he knew that that smile opened doors. He’d used it before and he would use it again. And she didn’t care. She didn’t need love. She needed something else. She wasn’t sure what yet, but she wanted to find out. “Say when,” he said.
She smiled back at him. For a moment they were just two good-looking people smiling at each other at the edge of the woods. She could see that he recognized the same thing about her smile, that she knew how to use it. Or she did once. She’d forgotten about it, or given up on it. She’d become someone else for a while. But perhaps now she was coming back to herself. It felt good to flirt without fear, to feel in control of a situation for the first time in a long time. Because, at least for now, for this moment, she was in control. She could see it in his eyes. She could steer him any way she wanted, and he would allow it. He would follow wherever she led. She felt the power just as sure as if she were holding it in her hands. It felt like taking in oxygen, pure and sweet, for the first time in a long time.
“When,” she said.
Bess
She was closing down the house for the night, turning out the lights in the kitchen, when a flash of movement in the backyard caught her eye. She reached to turn out the last remaining light, the one over the sink, so she could see out better. She leaned closer to the glass, squinting to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. She watched as Jason slipped into the shed and closed the door behind him. She stood stock-still for a moment as relief filled her. His wasn’t the body from the lake. He was alive and in her shed.
“Bess?” Steve, back from his short trip, called from the den. “You going up?” This, she knew, was his indication that he was retiring for the evening and that she should join him.
When she tried to speak, her voice came out in a croak. “Y-yes.”
But she made no move to go. She stood in front of the sliding glass door that led into the backyard and took in her reflection. She wore her white nightgown, the one Steve called her “Ma Ingalls gown,” but she loved it. It made her feel feminine and unconventionally sexual. Long white nightgowns weren’t exactly featured in the display windows of Victoria’s Secret, but it made her think of gothic romances, long sweeping lawns behind dark gabled mansions, the white nightgown standing out against the black night. She wondered if Jason would think so, or if he would tease her, too. Then she shook her head at her fanciful imagination and went to join her husband in their bed, where she belonged.
She woke up from a nightmare, sitting bolt upright with her heart in her throat and the blackness swirling all around her, as if it were alive. She sat there for a moment, waiting for her heart rate to slow down, her breathing to return to normal, the blackness to start to recede. She looked at the clock on her bedside table. It was 3:27 a.m. . . . her birthday was March 27, but she tried not to attach too much to the numbers.
The dream had been, of course, about the body in the lake. And why not? She’d thought of little else all that day. It made sense that her subconscious would keep processing it even in sleep. That’s all the dream was: a manifestation of her obsessive thoughts. She told herself this to reorient, bringing her mind back to reality. It was just a dream, albeit a disturbing one. She recalled bits and pieces. In it, she’d been at the lake. An officer had told her she could open the body bag and so she had, finding Casey’s face just underneath the wide black teeth of the zipper. She’d screamed and zipped the body bag closed again. Then she’d opened it again, this time finding Nicole’s face. She’d done this again and again, seeing the faces of those she loved each time. Not one of the faces had been Jason’s.
She looked over at Steve, but he slept on. She slipped from the bed, needing to go and look at her girls sleeping safely in their beds to reassure herself. She padded across the room, barefooted, and opened the door without a sound. She looked over her shoulder before she left the room to see if perhaps Steve had felt her leave their bed. He snored in response. She rolled her eyes and closed the door behind her.
Nicole’s room was closest, but Bess went past it to check on Casey first. She had seen Casey’s face first in the dream, so she felt more compelled to check on her. She wondered if she would’ve had this same dream if Casey had stayed at school like she was supposed to, if she hadn’t found her and Eli in bed, if she knew what was really going on with her older child. She opened the door quietly, the door moving across the carpet the only sound. For a split second she wondered if she’d find Eli again, the two of them spooned together in the bed Casey had gotten for her fourteenth birthday, covered with the quilt Bess’s grandmother had made that Casey had decided was “retro”