I began to climb slowly, almost ponderously, as though weighed down by the knowledge that every step was taking me inexorably closer to something I had been approaching for some days. In fact it was exactly one week since I had returned to this world, my world, and met Larry, that impostor, for a second time in the park.
But Larry was dead now. As dead as if he’d never existed.
Or was he?
Who was climbing those stairs at that moment? Whose footfalls could I hear softly mounting toward what I could only think of as some kind of appointment with destiny?
Why such troubled high-flown thoughts? What “destiny”? Whose? Larry’s? George’s? Sara’s?
Mine?
I was drunk, I knew. My mind was clouded, but through it all I saw or sensed a certain clarity, an outcome, an end to my uncertainty and pain. Yet what it was I could not say.
She did not hear me approach. She stood with her back to me, not far from the low wall, looking out over the darkened garden and into, I felt sure, her own thoughts.
At that moment, with a conviction that startled me, I knew what those thoughts were, and what I must do.
I stayed there for some moments, hardly breathing, watching her. Then she turned, and I stepped forward.
She gasped when she saw me and her hand went to her heart. “You startled me,” she said.
I didn’t say anything for a moment or two, just looked at her. Then I took another step toward her.
“You want to go to him, don’t you?”
She answered too fast. “No.”
“There’s no point in lying about it. I know.”
I could see her eyes flickering in the darkness, trying to find mine. I took another step toward her, and she took another step back. She was standing now dangerously close to the low crenellated wall around the tower.
“George, I’m not lying…”
She tried to take another step back, away from me, and stumbled against the wall.
I moved fast.
I
screamed and tried to fend him off even as I began to fall. His hand closed on my arm and he yanked me toward him with such
force that I thought he must have dislocated my shoulder.
“For God’s sake, Sara, what are you trying to do? Kill yourself?”
I didn’t breathe—couldn’t—for a long time. Then I collapsed against him. He held me as I shook with a sense of release that
I hadn’t known I was so in need of until then.
“It’s all right,” he said, “it’s all right. You were afraid of me, I know. I was half-afraid of myself. I didn’t know what
I was going to do until I got up here.”
I looked at him, forcing my eyes and brain to focus. “What d’you mean you didn’t know… ?”
“It’s a long story. Come on, let’s go in. It’s getting cold.”
He led me gently down the stairs and back to our bedroom. He switched off the television and sat me down, wanting to talk
to me seriously.
“You can go to Steve,” he said. “I’ll arrange it. I can make it possible.”
I started to protest, “How can you… ?”
He placed a finger on my lips. I looked at him, I think, uncomprehendingly, as though I hardly knew him. All the restlessness,
the suppressed anger, the barely controlled aggression that I’d felt around him like an electric charge those last few days
had disappeared. He wasn’t even drunk any longer. His speech, which had been slurred by the end of dinner, was precise and
clear.
“I can’t explain now. Tomorrow. I know what to do. All you have to do is go to sleep. Trust me.”
To my surprise, I did. To my surprise I slept more soundly than I had for days, as though some weight had been lifted from
me, though I had no idea what it was. Perhaps simply the admission to myself, which George had made possible, that I was still
in love with Steve, and nothing that happened or anyone said was going to change that fact.
When I awoke the next morning—Sunday—George was already downstairs. I switched on the television and surfed the news channels
in search of anything more about Steve. There was an item that repeated what I’d learned the night before, but added that
his condition was stable and he was out of danger.
I rang down to Martha and asked if she knew where George was. She said he was in the library making phone calls. I pulled
on a sweater and jeans and went downstairs. He waved to me through the open door to indicate that he would join me as soon
as he’d finished. Five minutes later he sat down opposite me in the conservatory where Martha brought us fresh coffee.
His mood was exactly as it had been the night before when we came down from the tower. It was as though some weight had been
lifted from him too. He told me that he had heard the news that Steve was going to be all right and was clearly relieved by
the fact.
“Who were you calling?” I asked.
“Frank Stewart,” he said. Frank was our lawyer.
“What about?”
“Getting you in to see Steve, among other things.”
“George, why are you doing this? You’re being wonderful, but I don’t understand why you’re…”
He held up his hand in a request that I say no more. “I can’t tell you for the moment, but I will—soon, I promise. After breakfast
I have to drive back to Manhattan. It’s probably just as well if you come with me, but if you prefer to stay…”
“No, I’ll come, of course. What d’you have to do that’s so… ?”
I stopped, seeing his look. I was asking questions again. “All right,” I said, “I’ll wait until you can tell me.” Then I added,
but I realized I was smiling, “It had better be good.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It is.”
George called from the car as we approached the city and Frank met us at the apartment. He greeted me as always like an old
friend, but there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Each time he looked at me his gaze lingered fractionally
longer than it normally would have. He knew something—about me and Steve, or so I assumed—and it had changed the way he thought
about me.
The two of them disappeared into George’s study for about twenty minutes and closed the door. I saw the phone in the living
room light up a couple of times, so I knew they were making calls. Then there was a ring at the door. Frank came out before
I could get there.
“I’ll get this, Sara, I’m expecting somebody.”
He opened the door to a tall man in a square-cut gray suit who I had guessed was a cop even before Frank introduced him as
Inspector Todd.
“Ma’am,” he said politely and inclined his head but didn’t offer to shake hands. Then his gaze traveled across the room to
where George stood in the door of his study.
“Before we attend to the formalities, Inspector,” he said, “I think I should tell my wife what’s going on here.”
He came toward me and drew me aside and around a corner where we could be alone. I caught a look between Inspector Todd and
Frank in which Frank seemed to be saying it was all right.
George took both my hands in his. “I love you,” he said, “I love you very much. I want you to know that, because it may help
explain things a little, though I’m not sure anymore if explanations amount to very much. At any rate.” He sighed and dropped
his eyes a moment. When he looked up again I saw tears in them. “The inspector is here to arrest me. I’ve confessed to the
murder of Nadia Shelley. It wasn’t Steve. I killed her and framed him. And I can prove it.”
I hadn’t noticed Frank approach, but suddenly he was there to catch me as the room began to spin and the floor melted beneath
my feet.
I
don’t remember much about the next few hours, except that Frank’s wife, Joan, appeared so quickly on the scene that she must
have been waiting downstairs. She was a sweet-natured woman, motherly and with five kids to prove it. She got me to bed and
insisted I take a couple of pills she had with her. I’d never been much of a pill user, but I was glad of those that day.
They didn’t take away the shock, but they distanced it. I could pretend, at least in the moments when everything welled up
and threatened to overwhelm me, that it all was happening to someone else; I knew that I was that someone else, but I was
able to step back and view what was happening with a detachment that made it bearable.
Joan made it plain that she knew all about me and Steve: Frank had told her everything he’d learned from George. She made
no judgments and offered no advice, for which I was profoundly grateful.
Our doctor came by toward the end of the afternoon, took my blood pressure and made a few routine checks. He said I seemed
fine, but wrote out a prescription for some more sedatives that Joan said she’d have sent over from a twenty-four-hour place
around the corner. Frank looked in again to say that George was being held in custody overnight, but a hearing had been set
for the morning, when he would almost certainly be bailed until sentencing took place. He didn’t want to return to the apartment,
so Frank had arranged a place for him to stay.
I barely took any of it in. In fact it was a couple of days before I was beginning even to think straight. That was the first
time I was allowed to see Steve. The law would have to take its complicated course before his conviction was quashed and he
could be released, but until then he would stay in the hospital recovering from his injuries. It turned out that he had accidentally
gotten caught up in a dispute between two feuding prisoners, neither of whom had anything against him personally.
It was so strange, almost unreal, seeing Steve again after all that time. There was an IV drip in his arm and he was wired
up to monitoring machines as well as being wrapped in bandages, so he couldn’t move much. I leaned over and planted a kiss
on his lips. “I love you,” I said, “everything’s going to be all right.”
There was something in his eyes I didn’t recognize at first. Then I realized it was fear.
“What is it?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“You know what I did,” he said. “Now you know what I really did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t kill her, but I ran. When I found her there, all I thought about was myself, my career, my future…”
He paused and corrected himself, his gaze still fixed anxiously on mine. “Our future. It was our future I wanted to protect,
but I behaved like a coward and a fool.”
“Most people would have done the same.”
“Would they? I wonder. I used to think I wasn’t ‘most people.’ That’s me—a coward, a fool, and arrogant.”
“It’s over now.”
“I’ve been lying here wondering what you’d think of me. Afraid you’d despise me.”
I felt such a tenderness and pity for him in that moment that I wept. All I could do was take his hand and shake my head mutely
while the tears rolled. We sat exchanging looks, caresses, little smiles, like a couple of teenagers discovering love for
the first time.
Later we talked about George: about the extraordinary lengths he’d gone to to commit and then conceal his crimes. It made
no sense to either of us that he should suddenly turn around and confess like this. Steve asked if I would be talking to him;
I said I assumed I would.
George was granted bail as expected, and I asked Frank to arrange a meeting between us. Frank said George was against it,
and he himself was unsure it was a good idea. But when I insisted they both gave way.
I wasn’t allowed to know the address where George was staying—something to do with the terms of bail—so we met in an empty
office at Frank’s law firm. There was an unreality about the encounter that was almost tangible, as though everything in the
room, including ourselves, had been coated with some special high-gloss varnish that brought us into sharper and more dramatic
focus, yet somehow made us artificial—copies of our real selves.
I didn’t have much to ask him—except why? Not why he had committed the crimes (he claimed to have also killed a man in England;
police there were looking into it), but why confess now?
He gave a curious smile—not sad, not even resigned. Tranquil, I suppose, if I had to find a word for it. It was the kind of
smile I’d seen on the faces of (it seems so strange to say this in the circumstances, but it was true) mystics, contemplatives,
philosophers: people for whom the material mundane world held little attraction. Not that they despised it, but they’d somehow
seen beyond it, risen above it, and were no longer hostage to its shallow charms and trivial fortunes.
“It’s something I can’t explain,” he said, “because if I did it would sound too crazy to believe. I’m not even sure I believe
it myself. All I can say is that I know I’m doing what’s right, and for some reason that’s more important than anything, including
being able to explain why. Explanations aren’t enough. In the end it’s just turtles all the way down.”
I must have looked puzzled, because he smiled and told me a story about some scientist and an old woman. I laughed. It seemed
impossible, but I actually laughed in that dreary and rather dark little room, and he looked pleased that I had.
“I’m not sure what all this means,” I said. “I don’t understand all of it. But I want you to know that I’m sorry, genuinely
sorry for my part in driving you to do what you did.”
“Don’t be. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t Steve. Maybe it wasn’t even really me. Maybe we’re all driven from another place by forces
we know nothing of—like puppets of the gods, you know? Or figures in some computer game. Maybe we’re just part of a research
program being run by a socially dysfunctional nerd in some underfunded cosmic lab.”
“God is a socially dysfunctional nerd?”
“Who the hell knows,” he said, and laughed. “Explanations are just an art form.”
“
Just
an art form?” I said.
He continued to smile. “Okay, delete ‘just.’ Maybe you should organize an exhibition.”
“On the theme of ‘Explanations?”
“Why not? You should do it.”
I thought for a moment.
“Maybe I will,” I said.
And that’s where we left it.
“It started with my father’s death. At least, that was how it seemed at the time. Now, looking back, I realize how impossible
it is to be sure where anything really begins; or, for that matter, where, or even whether, it has ended.”