I DREW AN X over the scene of the accident on a map. US Route 6, beside the Weweantic River. I drew another X over our house in Providence. And with another X, I marked where he was supposed to have been, at Yale in New Haven. As if it were necessary to corroborate the lie visually.
Hey, honey. I just wrapped up. I wanted to make it home for dinner, but there was no way. My client insisted we have something here in New Haven, at one of the off-campus bars. I’m headed home now. I should be there around twelve. You don’t need to wait up for me. Kisses, my love.
I had listened to the message dozens of times. He didn’t say the name of the client, didn’t say the name of the bar . . . There was no recognizable noise. If anything, there was too much silence. Strange. Off-campus in New Haven. Kisses, my love. He almost never called me my love, because he said it was too important a word to wear out, to turn into a routine crutch. That’s why it had made me happy to hear it in that message. But now when I heard it, I kept thinking of those fake cakes placed in the windows of bakeries to attract your attention. A truth that turned into a lie when you touched it. That’s what I was trying to do, touch Chris’s truth to uncover his lie.
If he hadn’t had the accident, he would have arrived home right at the time he’d said. At twelve. Wherever he called me from, he’d made sure to be the same distance from Providence as Yale: a hundred miles away. I turned back to the map. The scene of the accident was 40 miles away. So he’d been driving for 60 miles or so. Taking that distance for a reference, I traced a line from the Weweantic River away from our home to the east, to figure out what the farthest point he could have driven from would be. Seeing the results of my calculations, my emergency bubble cracked like the windshield of a speeding car struck by a stone, and before I could patch it up, it shattered and soaked my entire body in a cold sweat. One hundred miles to the east. That encompassed practically every corner of eastern Massachusetts, including Boston, as well as virtually all of Cape Cod.
On the refrigerator, among the magnets and Olivia’s drawings, was a sheet of paper that read: Daddy’s Trips. Back in high school Chris had been on his way to being a tennis star. He won the Rhode Island State Championship in his junior and senior years, and that earned him a full scholarship to the University of Virginia, which had one of the best tennis teams in the country. His career there was brilliant: he made it to second place in the US Open Junior Tennis Championships, where he lost to Andy Roddick. Although he graduated with honors from the business administration program, he still wanted to be a professional tennis player. In just one year he made it to the 143rd slot in the ATP world rankings. When he tore his Achilles tendon, his newly minted career was cut short. But he didn’t let it get him down. Nowadays in professional tennis (and in almost anything in life), what you haven’t achieved by age twenty-five, you won’t ever achieve. So, if by the time I’m twenty-seven, to give myself a few years of wiggle room, I haven’t gotten my face on a cereal box, then I’m giving it up, he said, half as a joke and half seriously. When the day came, I made him a special edition of his favorite cereal, Fruity Pebbles, with his photo on the box, smiling with a headband on and holding his racquet. It wasn’t a way to remind him of his failure, but to make him see that there are lots of ways to get onto a cereal box, that even if it wasn’t the way he’d dreamt of, that didn’t necessarily mean it would be worse, just different. And he seemed to take it that way, because he got very excited over it, so much so that he placed it in his trophy case, next to his second place in the US Open Juniors, the high point of his career and his most treasured defeat, as he called it. That same day, in front of the entire family, he announced he was quitting tennis, without the least hint of rancor or frustration. Now I couldn’t help but wonder whether that decision to give up on professional tennis, which he seemed to take so naturally and so calmly, might not have plunged him into some kind of depression or grief that could have provoked a fatal wound to his self-esteem, to his dreams of grandeur—which he’d cultivated from a very young age. An emptiness impossible to share—because he couldn’t stand anyone feeling sorry for him—that might have fed into whatever it was he was doing behind my back.
Not long afterward, he started a business installing tennis courts, which allowed him to pursue a career while remaining close to his passion. He developed and patented an artificial surface, using recycled materials, that not only dried in record time, but also absorbed the impact of players’ footsteps, helping to prevent injuries of the kind he had suffered. He already controlled the better part of the tennis court market in Rhode Island and was starting to expand into Connecticut and Massachusetts. It was just the beginning, according to him. On his last trip, he was finally (supposedly) closing a contract with Yale University to renovate all the tennis courts on campus. If it turned out well, his business would take off. Most universities follow Yale’s lead. If Yale picks me, they’ll all pick me, he affirmed.
He tried to bunch his trips together so he could spend the minimum amount of time away. He was a real homebody, devoted to his routines, devoted to me. That was why all this had to have some kind of explanation.
Newport, Charlestown, Worcester, Manchester, Boylston, Hartford, East Greenwich, Block Island, and Yale. Those were the trips he had made so far that year. And once again, not a trace of hotel expenses, local restaurant bills paid for on the credit card, nothing at all. Hadn’t that surprised me before? Not really. His father always said you had to actually pay your bills, with cash, with greenbacks, not with plastic. Because if not, it feels like you’re not earning anything, and you spend more, naturally. You have to be conscious of what you spend because if not, someday, without realizing it, you’ll be left without anything, he used to say. Yeah, the Williamses were a little tight-fisted—though Chris thought of himself more like the thrifty ant in the fable. So even if it had drawn my attention, he would have reminded me of his father’s words and shown me the stack of bills he always kept in his pocket, in a silver clip he’d inherited from his grandfather, and I wouldn’t have had the least doubt he was telling the truth.
In my painting studio in the basement of the house—it had been in the attic until Olivia was born—there was a table in the center crowded with all my junk: paint jars (oil and acrylic), brushes, pencils, plastic picnic plates where I mixed my colors, rags, canvas, frames, sketches, a light table, lots of books, and my laptop, accented with paint drips and splatters from my brushes. A controlled chaos. I liked it that way. Though it wasn’t idyllic, being humid and lacking natural light, it was my corner, my world, where no one but me ever went. I liked how it filled up with life and experience. But now I didn’t hesitate to clear off the entire table. I needed space and privacy.
I opened a road atlas my father had given us years ago and tore out the pages for Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, laying out the sheets to create an enormous, detailed map of the Northeast. Then I traced all of Chris’s business trips in different colors, following the most logical routes. None of these supposed trips would have taken him anywhere near US 6.
His side of the bed still smelled like him, revealing to me the abyss of his absence. A dark, endless precipice, a black hole of sorrow. And yet I refused to change the sheets. Before I went to bed—luckily, I hadn’t lost sleep, for the less I was aware, the better—I thought: I have the surveillance recording of Chris coming back. But naturally, if he passed through that spot on his return trip, he probably did the same on his way out, to wherever it was. Would that date coincide with the day he supposedly went to Yale? What was the owner of the gas station’s name? It doesn’t matter, Alice, his name’s on the gas station. Now get some sleep.
And I did sleep, but first I wrote everything down in a notebook. I had started to always keep one on me to prevent myself from forgetting the few lucid thoughts I had.
I don’t know at what point I got up, went to Olivia’s room, and got into the bed. I was sleeping; I’m sure of it. But I knew what I was doing and that it wasn’t a dream. It was a strange conscious somnambulism. It would have been lovely to stay in that state the whole day long.
“Mommy, why can you come to my bed when you want and I can’t go to yours?” Olivia asked drowsily, not expecting a response, curling up in the fetal position next to my belly, in the exact same position as Ruby, as though pretending she was inside me.
Sam, the owner of the gas station, was overwhelmed as he examined the long list I had just handed him with the dates of the security camera footage I wanted. The dates of Chris’s trips.
January 17–22 and 28–31. February 6–11 and 24–28. March 4–7 and 17–23. April 15–19 and April 28–May 3. And finally, May 9–13.
“Are you going to go into labor again if I ask you why you want this footage?”
“Probably,” I said, rubbing my belly.
“Just one question: Is all this about the person from the accident?”
I decided not to answer and just see what happened. It seemed to work.
“I have good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want first?”
“Are we really going to play this game?” I asked, but Sam just imitated my silence. “OK,” I said. “Give me the bad news first.”
“I’m going to give you the footage.”
“That’s the bad news?” I asked.
Sam grabbed a grimy calculator with plastic over the keys to keep them from getting dirtier than they already were.
“Ma’am, you’re asking me for forty-eight days’ worth of recordings.” He typed. “Forty-eight times twenty-four is 1,152 hours of recordings. That’s a little crazy, ain’t it? What are you looking for? I know, an SUV. You want to know if that Escalade passed by here other times. I read lots of mystery novels.” He went back to his calculator without waiting for me to respond. “So, if you watched the complete tapes, sped up to two times normal speed, still slow enough to see any cars that might pass by, for an average of eight hours a day, like a regular old job . . .” He typed again. “Divide 1,152 by two . . . that’s 576 hours . . . by eight . . . you’d need seventy-two days to see all of it,” he said triumphantly, as though he’d just beat me at poker.
“Then what’s the good news, Sam?” I asked, woozy at the cavalcade of numbers. The truth is I hadn’t thought about all that.
“Well, the majority of closed-circuit systems erase the images they’ve stored little by little. It’s not a legal thing. Here in this state, you can keep them for the rest of your life if you want. But it’s a practical matter, a question of economics. The recordings are stored for twenty-eight days. Why twenty-eight and not a whole month? I don’t know . . .” Sam looked back at the list I had given him. “So I can give you the recordings from April 15 through April 19 and the ones from April 28 through May 3 in addition to the one you’ve already got.” He looked up and smiled at me, now more mocking than triumphant. “That’s the good news. That you’ll just have to watch . . .”
He started computing again. I wanted to slam that greasy calculator right over his head. But I didn’t.