Olivia was obsessed with Annie Chase O’Neill. It was getting worse instead of better, and now as she sat in her living room watching Paul and the tanned young boy he’d hired carry boxes and furniture out to the rented U-Haul, she felt the obsession crystallize inside her.
She hadn’t wanted to be here when Paul moved his things out. She hadn’t expected him to do it this soon, this abruptly, but he’d called early this morning to say he had the truck, did she mind? She said no, because she wanted to see him. She would take any opportunity to see him, even though every meeting left her bruised. A little more than five months had passed since he walked out, yet she still ached at the sight of him. Even now that he’d met with a lawyer and signed a long-term lease on a cottage in South Nags Head, she still clung to the hope that he would take a good look at her and realize his mistake.
He stopped now in the arched doorway between the living room and dining room, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki shorts to wipe his forehead.
“Are you sure about the dining room set?” he asked.
He’d taken his shirt off sometime in the last hour and his skin glistened. His dark blond hair was damp and pushed back from his forehead, and his glasses caught the light from the windows behind her head. She felt a futile wave of desire, and looked past him into the dining room.
“It’s yours,” she said, holding a finger to mark her place in the journal on her lap. “It’s been in your family for years.”
“But I know you love it.”
He was not without guilt, she thought.
“It should stay in your family.”
He looked at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry, Liv.”
She’d heard those words from him so often these past few months they no longer had any meaning. She watched him lift the two chairs from one side of the table and head toward the door.
She sat glued to the sofa, afraid to see the rest of the house and the gaps he had left her. Once he and the boy were gone she would brace herself and walk through. Slowly. It would be good for her. Maybe reality would sink in. Maybe she would stop hoping.
Paul walked back into the house, into the dining room. Olivia rose and stood in the arched doorway as he and the boy turned the table upside down and unbolted the legs. When the last screw was removed, Paul stood up to look at her. He adjusted his gold wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and gave her a quick grin that meant nothing. A nervous gesture. He still had that slightly gawky, appealingly academic look that had attracted her ten years earlier, when he worked at the Washington Post and she was a resident at Washington General. She thought now of how quickly she could change this scene. With just a few words she could have him back. She let the fantasy unfold in her mind. “I’m pregnant,” she would say, and he’d drop the table leg and stare at her. “My God, Liv, why didn’t you tell me?” Maybe the news would snap him out of the crazy stupor he’d been mired in all these months. But she would say nothing. She didn’t want the baby to be his reason for coming home. If he came back to her it would have to be because he still loved her. She could accept nothing less.
She poured herself a glass of ginger ale and took her seat again in the living room while they carried the table out to the truck. She listened to Paul’s voice rising up from the driveway and through the open front door as he told the boy to get himself some lunch. “I’ll meet you at the new house at two,” Paul said. Then he came back into the house, walking slowly through the kitchen, the study, the bedrooms, to see if there was anything else he could take from her. When he was finished, he sat down in the rattan chair on the opposite side of the living room from Olivia. He was holding Sweet Arrival, the slim volume of poetry he’d published a few years earlier, and one of the copies of the book they’d written together, The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit, and he rested them in his lap.
“So,” he said. “How have you been?”
She sipped her ginger ale. “Busy.”
“What else is new?” His voice bit her with its sarcasm, but then he softened. “That’s good, though, I guess. Good to keep yourself occupied.”
“I’ve started doing some volunteer work at the Battered Women’s Shelter.” She watched his face closely. The change in his features was abrupt. The color left his cheeks and his eyes widened behind his glasses. He leaned forward.
“Why?”
She shrugged. “To fill the time. I work there a couple of evenings a week. They really need the help. Infections pass like wildfire through a place like that.” It had been hard at first, working there. Everyone spoke of Annie in the same reverent tone Paul had used. Her photographs adorned the walls, and her stained glass seemed to fill every window, bathing the broken women and restless children with color.
“It’s a rough place, Liv.”
She laughed. “I used to work in D.C., remember?”
“You can’t predict what’ll happen in a place like that.”
“It’s fine.”
He sat back, letting out a sigh. Olivia knew he had spent the last few weeks covering Zachary Pointer’s trial. She had not read the articles he’d written. She didn’t want to know how he would allude to Annie, didn’t want to read of his delight in seeing Pointer locked up for life.
“Look,” Paul said to her now. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Don’t get mad, okay? I mean, whatever your answer is, I won’t hold it against you. I know you’re human.” That quick, nervous grin again. He fanned absently through the pages of Sweet Arrival, while she waited for him to speak again. “When you realized it was Annie in the emergency room that night—did that affect how you treated her?” he asked. “I mean, did you try as hard to save her as you would have if she were just some…” He must have seen the look on her face, because the words froze on his lips.
Olivia tightened her fingers around the glass of ginger ale. She stood up. “You bastard.”
He set the books on the end table and walked toward her, rested his hand on her elbow. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was out of line. It’s just that…I’ve always wondered. I mean, if it had been me in your position, I don’t know if I could have…”
She jerked her arm away from him. “You’d better go, Paul.”
He walked back to the end table, not looking at her, not speaking to her, and she watched as he gathered his things together and left the house. When he was gone, she sat down again, her legs too weak to carry her through the house. How far they were from a reconciliation if he could think that of her. Hadn’t she wondered about it herself, though? In her bleakest moments, hadn’t she asked herself the same question? She knew the answer. She had tried—with every ounce of strength in her—to save Annie O’Neill’s life. That night had been the hardest she’d ever endured in an emergency room and she was certain she had done her best, although the irony of the situation had not been lost on her for a moment. She had, quite literally, held the life of the woman her husband loved in her hands.
Paul had not hidden his infatuation with Annie from her, and at first that had made Olivia feel safe. If Annie had been a threat, she thought, he would never have been so open about his feelings. It started with the spread he did on her in Seascape. He spoke admiringly of her, but the admiration quickly turned to adulation. It was like a sickness in him. It was one-sided, he assured her—Annie barely knew he was alive. Yet he could speak of nothing else. Olivia heard lengthy descriptions of Annie’s physical beauty, limitless generosity, charming quirkiness, boundless energy and extraordinary artistic talent. She listened, feigned interest. It was a phase, she told herself. It would pass. When it didn’t, she carefully, tactfully suggested he was going a little overboard. No, he said. She didn’t understand.
It wasn’t until Paul mentioned Annie’s two children that Olivia began to feel truly threatened. Paul was one of six children in a closely knit family. He was hungry for a family of his own, and all the medical tests had pointed the finger at Olivia as the reason they had none. She’d finally had surgery this past fall to improve her chance of conceiving, but by then it was too late. Even at the hospital, while holding Olivia’s hand after the operation, Paul spoke of Annie. She had once donated her bone marrow, Paul said. “Can you imagine that? Undergoing surgery to save the life of a total stranger?”
“Yes, Paul, you’ve convinced me.” Olivia spoke in anger for the first time. “She’s a saint.”
After that, he stopped talking to her about Annie, which worried Olivia even more because she knew by his brooding silence that Annie was still much on his mind. He was restless in his sleep. Losing weight. At the breakfast table he pushed his food from one side of the plate to the other. He lost track of their conversations, misplaced his car keys, his wallet. When they made love—their futile attempts at conception—his fingertips felt as dry as ash on her skin, and no matter how close their bodies were she felt the gulf between them that she couldn’t narrow with her words or her touch.
She had asked him outright if he and Annie were lovers, and he hadn’t bothered to mask his disappointment when he told her they were not. “She’s completely in love with her husband and committed to her marriage,” he’d said gloomily, in a way that let Olivia know he no longer felt any such commitment himself. Obviously, the platonic nature of his relationship with Annie had been dictated by Annie herself and not by Paul.
After walking out on her the night Annie died, Paul had taken an apartment close to his office. He’d written her a long letter, filled with his apology and confusion. He knew he couldn’t possibly have Annie now, he wrote, but knowing her made him realize what he was missing with Olivia. Olivia’s self-esteem, which had taken a lifetime to construct from the scrappiest raw materials, disintegrated in the few minutes it took her to read his words.
She saw him from time to time over the next few months when he needed things from the house. Clothes. Tools. The computer. She watched his hands as he folded, lifted, packed. She missed his touch—she’d started getting massages once a week just to feel another human being’s hands on her skin. Paul was no longer cool when he spoke to her, and there was occasionally a smile in his eyes when he saw her. She clung to the hope that the smile meant there was something left between them, something she could build on, but he never gave her the chance. He never stayed in the house longer than he had to, except for that one night in April when she’d shamelessly begged him to stay and he relented, only to kill her with the regret she saw later in his eyes.
What had become of the man she’d married, the man who had written an entire volume of poetry about her, who had helped her put her past aside and made her feel safe for the first time in her life? Who made love to her as though she were the only woman he could ever imagine loving? The man who had not yet met Annie O’Neill.
She wanted him back. She needed him back.
Olivia stood now at her living room window, the room behind her taunting her with new empty spaces to fill, as she watched the U-Haul disappear behind a dune. Out of the hundreds of times they’d made love, why had the forces of nature picked that particular night to leave her pregnant?
She felt a sudden determination replace her dejection. Like the room behind her, she had empty places to fill, and she would fill them with the qualities that had drawn her husband to Annie. But first she would need to learn what they were, and as her impulsive decision to work at the shelter had shown her, she would do whatever it took to find out. She had to admit the truth to herself: Paul’s obsession with Annie had become her own.