Thursday morning, 3:00 A.M.
IT TOOK A LITTLE FIDDLING BEFORE RANNIE’S NEW MEDECO KEY TURNED in the tumbler. Total darkness greeted her, a sure sign that Nate—Con Ed’s dream customer, someone physically incapable of turning off a light switch—was still staying at Joan’s. Rannie dropped the mail on the hall table, plunked down her suitcase. Heading for her bedroom, already pulling off her sweater, unzipping her pants, it struck her that her bed remained unmade from the night Tim stayed over, a task neglected in the rush of packing and getting to the airport. It sent a pleasurable shiver through her, the anticipation of seeing tangled bedclothes, the possibility that traces of Tim—his scent, the indentation of his body—might still be present. In the same instant came another, delayed realization: When Peter had been holding her hand in the hospital, no current had passed—she hadn’t felt one watt of desire.
Then as she walked past the den, something suddenly caught her eye. An indistinct shape moved inside the room.
She screamed.
An arm was visible; a hand groping toward her. Rannie screamed again.
Then one of the table lamps grew bright.
“Oh Jesus! Alice!” Rannie’s hand flew to her heart while she let out a ragged gasp of relief. She sank down on the edge of the pull-out couch.
Alice sat up in bed, blinking. “Ma?” She had on a Davenport College tank tee shirt; a disheveled Pebbles Flintstone ponytail sprouted from the top of her head. She rubbed her eyes. “Nate didn’t think you’d be home so soon.” Her face was puffy and her voice hoarse from sleep.
“Nate’s here?” Rannie asked, kissing her cheek.
Alice shook her head no. She was sitting under the quilt, her arms wrapped around the tent of her legs.
“How come you are?…Is everything okay?”
Alice didn’t reply, and something about her body language, the slight lowering of her head, started warning signals flashing. Suddenly Rannie zeroed in on the bruise marks on Alice’s arms, purple as eggplants.
“Alice, what happened!”
“One sec.” Alice swung her legs around from under the quilt. “I gotta pee.”
Rannie knew a stall tactic when she saw one; nevertheless, she waited until the toilet flushed and Alice returned before inquiring, in what she hoped passed for calm parental concern, if anything was the matter.
As she listened to daughter, Rannie thought: There had to be—what?—a couple thousand undergrad guys at Yale, all of whom were smart and at least some of whom had to be semi-attractive and unaddicted to drugs. But who did Alice get involved with?
“Wait. You’re telling me Grant was at Chaps, outside Tut’s office, right before he died? Do the police know?”
Yes. According to Alice, Grant supposedly heard Tut arguing with someone. Rannie was skeptical.
“And since when has he been missing?” He could be in New York right now.
“Tuesday morning.”
“So, he’s a suspect!” A prime suspect! There’d been bad blood between Grant and Ms. Hollins as well—it was all there in Ms. Hollins’s file.
“You don’t have to sound so happy about it!”
“He hurt you!”
“He didn’t mean to. I knew you’d make a big drama out of this.”
But Rannie saw past Alice’s bravado and held her tongue. Grant must have frightened her more than she was willing to let on, why else seek the security blanket of home?
“Look. Go back to sleep, honey. I’m glad you’re home,” was all Rannie said. She enfolded her daughter in a hug, stroking loose wisps of blond hair off her forehead, then trundled off to bed, just as the sky was turning from black to skillet gray. It wasn’t right—kids were supposed to take turns causing you worry. That’s how it was supposed to work…. If Nate was suffering through a rough patch then Alice was usually coasting along problem-free. And vice versa. Once she’d mentioned this to Joan and rather than looking at Rannie as if she was cracked, Joan said, “Oh, absolutely.” Her theory was that kids could calibrate their mother’s precise breaking point. “So they work in tandem. Otherwise they could really send you right over the edge.”
At last Rannie, forcing herself to turn off her mind, collapsed into bed. She inhaled the pillow next to hers, but sadly all traces of Tim Butler had vanished.