1.
Sarah’s day passed in a fog. She did her job. Mr. Anderson narrowed his brows at the needle as if preparing to give her grief, saw something in her face, and pinched his lips shut. She drew his blood without saying more than a perfunctory “Good morning” and “Thank you” to him, then moved on to the next room. At lunch she ate too much in the cafeteria, taking helpings of both the Salisbury steak and the lasagna, plus a banana pudding for dessert, then rushed to the bathroom half an hour later to vomit. It was stupid, she kept telling herself—stupid to be this upset, to succumb to this despair. She didn’t know anything for certain yet. But she had by now read the article in its entirety, seen the fact that the man was spotted with the missing woman at Nancy’s the same night Sarah had met Wyatt there. Between this detail and the similarities in the drawing, there was no disputing the fact that the image was of him—that Wyatt was the man the police were looking for. She couldn’t kid herself; she wasn’t the type. And so Wyatt must have also been the man at the gas station with Veronica Eastman, and what did that mean, exactly? If Sarah weren’t the woman who had just spent the night in this man’s bed, lacing her arms and legs with his—if she weren’t the woman who had nursed him back to life, to the desire to live, and seen how sweetly sincere he was, how thoughtful, how tender—would she believe there was a chance he wasn’t connected somehow to the woman’s disappearance?
No. She wouldn’t.
Back at the nurses’ station she reread the article surreptitiously, not wanting Jan to notice her, hoping to find some detail that changed things, that made all of her darkest suspicions groundless. There was nothing. She thought back to that night at Nancy’s, to the group of young men that Wyatt had accompanied there, and realized that any one of them could be making the same connection she was now making—or had perhaps made it already. She wondered if she should call Wyatt at home, to see if he was still there and how he sounded, but her hand kept faltering short of the telephone. What would be worse? Hearing the phone ring and ring and ring, or hearing his voice, trying to decide what she could say in response to it?
The patient call alert sounded loudly, but no more loudly than it always did, and yet Sarah jumped. The newspaper fell out of her hand and onto the floor.
“What’s with you today?” Jan said. “You want me to get that?”
Sarah nodded silently.
“All right, then.” Jan put down the fashion magazine she was reading and rose. “But if someone filled his britches, you’re getting the next five.”
“That’s a deal,” Sarah said softly.
By five o’clock she was a nervous wreck. She had told Wyatt she would come to his house as soon as her shift ended, to make him dinner but also to check his blood pressure, which had been better this morning but still not good. Even now, as torn up as she felt about what she had seen in the paper, she couldn’t just shut off feeling concern about him. If he had not continued to show improvement over the course of today—and she had insisted that he stick to his bed and easy chair, not exerting himself—then her plan had been to insist he go back to the hospital immediately. But now, with Jan’s curiosity piqued, could she? And more important: Did she want to?
She went to her car in a daze and sat behind the wheel for a while; when she finally turned her key in the ignition, the digital clock read 5:20. He would be wondering about her by now but not yet concerned. He would think she had swung by the grocery store on the way to his place, that she was picking up ingredients for dinner. That was, in fact, what she had intended to do. A heart-healthy romantic dinner: she’d originally planned, driving in to work, to buy fish, brown rice, salad greens. Wyatt had mentioned to her that he would miss the catfish at Gary’s Pit Barbecue, and so she was going to whip up her almond-coated, oven-baked tilapia, a recipe she’d happened upon years ago in a Ladies’ Home Journal and trotted out whenever she was making a new go at a diet. She had even thought that she might splurge on some candles. How absurd this all seemed now.
She started driving toward his place. It was cold out, but she rolled down her window halfway and hoped the brisk air would clear her head, would make her see the right course of action. She could confront him, demand an explanation. Perhaps she owed him that. Perhaps she owed herself that. She could go to the police. Her thumbs tapped out a beat on the steering wheel, her breath hitched. She imagined the conversation with him: I saw you in the paper. I know it’s you. What happened? Don’t lie to me. She tried to script for him a response that would explain everything, that would make it all right for her to love him. She just gave me a ride home. I honestly don’t know what happened to her after that. Or maybe the man in the sketch wasn’t him, it was all a ridiculous coincidence, and he had an alibi proving that he wasn’t with Veronica Eastman at the gas station.
Her car wheezed as it climbed Hill Street. There was, she was realizing, another part of her operating, a more coldly logical part, and it was taking inventory. Who could connect her to Wyatt? How drawn into this situation was she? She had danced with him at the bar, but she left early, without him—even that blond-headed shit with the trashy girlfriend would have to acknowledge this was the case. She had tended to him at the hospital, but that was her job. Perhaps she had given something away on Sunday in front of Wyatt’s work friend, the one who drove him home from the hospital—but it couldn’t have been too much. They didn’t kiss. She had been keenly aware, before she had an obvious reason to protect the secret of this new relationship, that it would not be wise for her to let her work life be too evidently influenced by her personal life. That was why she had not yet even spilled the beans to Jan and Shurice: she had wanted to make sure this thing was real first. A part of her had wondered if what was developing between them wasn’t just some kind of Florence Nightingale thing; it was a cliché, but she had been hurt before, and so she had decided to tread quietly and cautiously.
She imagined how her parents would react if it got around that she was dating the man from the police sketch, the “person of interest.” The police might say that Wyatt was just wanted for questioning, but the subtext was clear, and the newspaper had spelled it out in fifty-point font: SUSPECT. They would tell her she was being foolish, kidding herself; they would tell her that she was hurting the family, her brother and nieces, who didn’t have a say in whether or not Sarah attached them to a killer. And they would be right, goddamn it—but did she really believe that Wyatt was capable of this? Wyatt, this good, gentle, loving man who answered her brash posturing with sweetness and patience, who kissed her as if he were the lucky one, as if she weren’t the kind of woman that other men stood up or walked out on?
A kid ran across the street as she started her ascent of Harper Hill, and Sarah braked hard—too hard, really; he was a good twenty feet ahead—her face slick with sweat. “Get it together,” she whispered to herself, easing the car forward and cutting the boy a hard look as he passed. He waved absently, backpack bouncing against his shoulder. Sarah wiped her forehead with the hem of her blouse.
The fact was that she couldn’t conceive of Wyatt doing harm to another person. The idea was ridiculous. She might not have known him well yet—they hadn’t even gone on a date—but every day she was forced by her work to see people at their most frightened and humbled, which meant that she saw people at their worst. She had treated abuse victims and spoken curtly to the men by their sides, the men whose heavy brows and set jaws implied a threat that they wouldn’t come right out to her and say aloud. She had treated half a dozen people who were arrested in their beds for DUIs, one of whom awoke to the knowledge that she had hit and killed a ten-year-old boy riding his bicycle home from a friend’s house. She had treated two participants in a fight, big men with lacerated lips and broken noses and shattered bones in their hands, one with a ruptured spleen, the other a punctured lung, and listened mildly as they cursed each other and the woman who’d driven them to it. She knew something about the darkness of human nature. She thought she could recognize it when she saw it, and she did not see it in Wyatt.
She pulled onto his street and slowed her car almost to a crawl. Wyatt’s truck was in the driveway, and lights were on in the front room and kitchen. Nothing seemed unusual. Her yearning for him was a physical ache, as if the only thing she needed to do to fix her anxiety was to go inside that home and embrace him, to allow herself to love him and feel his love in return. She was forty-three years old. She had assumed for a long time that love would happen to her, then grown to assume it wouldn’t, and now here she was, a little over a week into this brand-new gladness, in which the impossible had suddenly seemed not just within her reach but within her rights. She hadn’t been unhappy before. She’d had her job, her family, her home, her good friends, and all of those people and things would still be waiting for her if she drove away right now, if she pretended these last two weeks of her life away. But it would never be the same, she knew. She exhaled, noting how her breath clouded, fogging the windshield. But her head was at last clear. The choice wasn’t between staying or telling; it was between a sorrow she couldn’t conceive of and a sorrow she could.
She rolled up her window and hit the gas.