Marsha had always been lean and tall, a good head above me, with straight, thick, full-bodied black hair that hung down to her shoulders. Her skin had always glistened with a clear sheen of health, energy, vitality. She’d always seemed aglow with life, enthusiasm, stamina.
The woman who stood before me now, shoulders drooping, head hanging, was an overgrown version of one of those Sally Struthers kids on late-night cable that can be fed and clothed for pennies a day. Her hair was stringy, unwashed, thinner than I’d remembered. Even in the dim backlighting, her skin was splotchy, loose, with a gray pallor. Her nose was red, chapped, swollen. Her eyes were bloodshot and hooded by dark circles. She seemed thinner everywhere, except for the silhouette of her rounded tummy visible beneath a man’s white oxford-cloth shirt that was several sizes too large for her.
“Hi,” I said, after the split second it took me to hide my surprise at her appearance. “How are you?”
I stepped into the door frame and wrapped my arms around her, being careful not to bounce the sack of food off her.
“Hi,” she said softly as I hugged her. Then she made a sound like an ooof. “Not too hard. My back’s killing me.”
I pulled away. “Sorry.”
We stepped in and I closed the door behind us. She moved into better light, which didn’t help much.
“You look great,” I lied.
“Stop lying,” she said, her voice flat, tired.
I was embarrassed. “Okay, pretty feeble attempt on my part. But I am glad to see you.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and we walked into the kitchen.
“Thanks for bringing dinner over,” she said as I put the bag up on the counter. “I realized after you called I was too tired to even cook.”
“No problem, babe. I brought over one high-test, one regular.”
“I’ll let you have the spicy,” she said. “I’ve had heartburn from hell lately.”
I pulled out the boxes. “You sit down,” I said. “Let me pull this together.”
She nodded wearily, gingerly walked over, and sat down real easy. I pulled out plates, opened the boxes, and tested the food. I piled the rice and cashew chicken onto a plate for Marsha, then popped it in the microwave.
“You okay?” I said as the microwave whirred. “You look like you’ve got a cold.”
“It’s not a cold. This is all courtesy of estrogen and progesterone.”
“Which?”
“Hormones. Pregnancy elevates hormone levels in the blood, which causes nasal mucosa to soften and swell. It’s real pleasant.”
“Poor baby,” I said.
“Add three months of dry heat in the wintertime courtesy of Nashville Gas, followed by spring and allergy season, and you’ve got a good case of nasal misery.”
She reached into the front shirt pocket, extracted a wadded hunk of tissue, and sniffled into it. “I think I’ve single-handedly caused a boom in Kimberly-Clark stock.”
I chuckled as I pulled her plate out. “I’ll remember that the next time my broker calls.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” she said, groaning. “My back hurts all the time. I’m short of breath. I don’t sleep for shit. My hair’s falling out, my gums bleed when I brush my teeth.”
“Sounds like fun. Tell me again why you wanted to do this,” I said as I slid the plate in front of her. “Hold on, I’ll get you some silverware.”
“On top of that, for the first time in my life I’m constipated as hell and I’ve got hemorrhoids.”
“Well,” I said, pulling out forks and grabbing a couple of napkins, “as Uma Thurman said in Pulp Fiction, that was more information than I needed.”
I set the utensils on the table and patted her on the shoulder. “What can I get you to drink?”
“Milk, please.”
I wrinkled my nose. Chinese food with a nice big glass of milk. I suddenly flashed on the I Love Lucy episode where Ricky had to go out in the middle of the night to pick up vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and anchovies for Lucy.
“What about you?” she said.
“Go ahead and start,” I said, going for the milk carton. Her refrigerator was about as bare as my checking account. “I’m right behind you.”
I got her squared away, then shoveled my own food onto a plate. As the microwave worked its magic, I leaned against the counter and watched her. She picked at the food, speared a couple of pieces of chicken, stared at them for a moment, then slid them into her mouth. Two seconds later she blanched. With a gagging sound, she slapped the napkin to her face.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped.
“Mrs. Lee would be offended,” I said. “C’mon, I thought you were supposed to be eating for two.”
Her eyes teared up and she set the fork back down on the plate, then pushed the whole mess a couple of inches away from her.
“Jesus, Harry, what have I gotten myself into?”
The microwave beeped, but I suddenly didn’t have much appetite myself. I picked her plate up and took it over to the counter by the sink. No point in torturing the poor woman.
“Is there anything that sounds appealing?” I asked.
“There’s a cup of yogurt in the fridge,” she said. “Maybe I could pick at that.”
“Sure.” The only occupant of the second shelf was a container of lemon nonfat Dannon. I picked it up; the sell-by date was about ten days ago.
“This is past its prime,” I said, opening it. It was half-eaten already, with a thin layer of yellowish liquid on top. “Yuck.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Bring it over.”
“What if it’s spoiled?”
“Harry, it’s yogurt. By definition, it’s spoiled.”
I got her a clean spoon. She stirred the glop a couple of times, then spooned a lump of it into her mouth. This time, it stayed.
I watched her as she ate, genuinely concerned. It’d been weeks since I’d last seen her. She’d been tired and she hadn’t been able to eat much. But nothing like this. Something was wrong; she couldn’t take five more months of this.
“Have you seen your doctor?” I asked.
“My five-month checkup’s in two weeks,” she answered.
“Look, I’m not trying to hover or be overprotective, whatever, but, honey, there’s no beating around the bush here. You don’t look so hot.”
She sighed and set the spoon down on the table next to the empty yogurt cup. “You just caught me on a bad day. I’m not always like this. It’s been a rough week.”
I carried my plate over to the table. “Will it bother you if I eat?”
She smiled. “Not if I don’t watch.”
I sat down, the steaming plate in front of me. Even nuked, the kung pao beef was wonderful.
“Why’s it been such a rough week?” I asked with my mouth half-full.
She picked the yogurt cup back up and scraped the spoon around inside it a few more times. She stared into the cup, as if somehow expecting to find something there that hadn’t been there a moment before.
“Just stuff,” she said.
“Stuff?”
She set the spoon and cup back down, planted her elbows on the table, and rested her head in her hands wearily. “With Joyce leaving, the workload’s been off the wall lately. We’re getting the bodies processed, but the paperwork’s killing all of us.”
“I thought that was Kay’s area,” I said. Kay Delacorte had been the administrative guru and head den mother at the morgue since before Marsha started.
She rubbed her eyes. “There’s just been stuff going on.”
“Well,” I said, chuckling, “you don’t have to get specific or anything.”
She stood up and stretched. “It’ll work itself out,” she said, yawning. “It always does.”
Marsha walked behind me, over to the counter, and fished around in her plate of cashew chicken. She picked up a mushy cashew and popped it into her mouth. Her jaw moved slowly as she stared down at the plate. I pushed my plate aside, scooted the chair away from the table, and leaned way back. She was standing there in front of me, but she was a million miles away. Suddenly, my own gut knotted up and food lost its appeal.
“What’s going on, Marsha?”
She looked up. “What?”
“C’mon, talk to me.”
Her voice was suddenly tense, borderline angry. “What do you mean?”
I stared down at the floor for a few seconds, noticing the pattern, the tiles, the swirls of color overlaid on the squares.
“We don’t talk anymore,” I said finally.
“Oh, great,” she said, almost spewing the words. “All of a sudden, you’re the Great Communicator. What happened, Harry? The Prozac kick in?”
“That’s cruel, Marsha,” I said. “Not like you.”
She crossed her arms, resting them on the top of her curved belly and around her swollen breasts. “I’m sorry, but damn it, you disappear out of my life for huge chunks at a time. I don’t hear from you. I don’t know where you are, what you’re doing—”
“Now wait a minute,” I interrupted. “That’s only been the last few months or so and only because of all the—”
“I don’t need any explanations, Harry! That’s not the issue here. You don’t need to apologize and you don’t have to defend yourself.”
I sprang to my feet. “Then what is the issue here?”
Her lips pursed as she stared at me. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Harry. Things have been crazy at work. So stressful, with the baby coming and everything. I don’t even know how long I can stay there anymore. Maybe it’s time for me to move on.”
The thought of Marsha not being at the medical examiner’s office shocked me. Her work had always been her main focus, even ahead of me or any other part of her life. Those were the ground rules from the beginning; I’d always been willing to live with them.
“And my family’s not here,” she continued. “So they can’t help. The few friends I have are all connected with work. I can’t ask them for anything, not really. I just—it’s just that I don’t have any support system.”
“You’ve got me,” I said. “I know it’s been rough lately, but I’ve been thinking a lot about all this. Okay, so you don’t want to get married. That’s fine. But why don’t I move in here with you? At least so I can help with the baby, take care of the house. I can be here for you.”
“Oh, yeah, right, Harry. Until Lonnie calls up with another repo job out of town, or some client needs you to park out in front of a sleazy motel all night with a videocamera hoping to spy on a cheating spouse.”
“I can change all that,” I said. “I can stop taking those cases. Maybe I’ll just get out of that line of work altogether.”
Her head drooped and she turned her dark eyes up to glare at me. “That’ll be great because there’s tons of places out there just waiting to get your résumé.”
I felt my voice tense and my eyes narrow. “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Harry,” she said, exasperated, “when I first met you, you had a great future. You were a fine reporter, one of the best. I imagined you going to bigger places, bigger papers, or if you got tired of journalism, then into some other field entirely. But, Jesus, this! I’ve watched you over the past three or four years. It’s not just the work. Security and investigation can be great professions. There’s nothing wrong with that.
“But you … I don’t understand you anymore. You’re different. Something’s changed. There’s something dark. Something that scares me.” She paused, staring down at the floor.
I felt like my face had gone numb. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
“Who?” She looked up.
“Mousy. Mousy Caramello.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with that man you killed. This started a long time before that. I’ve watched you spiral down for years. More and more, you’re living on the fringes, Harry. You’re running around with people who live in trailers and have untraceable phone numbers and do all this spook stuff. You’re living in an attic yourself. It’s not the money, Harry. I don’t care how much money you make.”
She paused, her eyes glistening.
“It’s not what you do,” she said. “It’s how you do it—and who you do it with. You get yourself in these terrible situations and it affects you so much. You’re not built for this, Harry. You’re not made this way. Something’s wrong and I can’t seem to get your attention sometimes. And I don’t think I can live with it.”
She blinked and a single tear ran down her right cheek. “And I think about the baby, and what kind of a parent I want to be, and what kind of a man I want to raise this baby with.”
I took the three or four steps across the breakfast nook over to the counter without even realizing I’d done it. The more this conversation progressed, the less real it seemed.
I stood face-to-face with her, my voice calm, almost a monotone. “So what are you trying to tell me, Marsha? You got something to say, you ought to say it.”
She looked down, stared at the middle of my chest for a moment. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of man I want to spend the rest of my life with, and the kind of man I want to be a father to my child. And over and over, I keep coming up with the same conclusion.”
She raised her head, met my eyes, looked squarely into them.
“It’s not you, Harry. It’s just not you.”