“So you did it,” Kate said to him. “She’s gone.”
“Yes, I did it.”
“I could feel it in the house the minute I woke up.”
“I felt it was right. She left early to spare you pain.”
Still in her satin robe, she sat down on the stairs, awkwardly, not her usual self, knees spread out peasant-fashion. She leaned her cheek into the wood. When he angled to glimpse her face, he saw it as weary, and for the first time, old. “Recovery by lunchtime,” he recalled his jaunty prediction to Stella, but it did not seem possible now.
“And the boy?” She had to ask twice.
“The husband, you mean. You mean Jeff. Well, he took his choice, I’m told. War or prison. He chose war.”
“Vietnam.”
“It’s the only one I know of.”
Her voice when it came was strained and altered. “You as good as killed him.” She buried her face entirely, sideways into her arm. She kept speaking, leaning her cheek into the banister, lips moving against the wood, so that he could barely make out words: “I never meant this … never meant it. I swear I—” She was not speaking to him: he knew that.
He would call the psychiatrist. He feared a heavy sea ahead. The psychiatrist had mentioned lithium, more than once.
In his upstairs office, surrounded by books his father had ranked on the shelves but seldom touched, he leaned back in his swivel chair and thought over words for so long that at last he whispered them, as though he spoke to someone. To whom? Stella, perhaps. Or even Jefferson Blaise.
Does every personality with a division in it have a missing center which has been given—or given up—to make life possible for someone else? Can wires once cut be rejoined?
He saw on the desk before him a leather-bound diary which, though beautiful, had never been written in. He should start keeping it, to note his progress with his wife. He opened it to the present day, and wrote.
I think she may feel that I took her authority away.
I wonder if she will leave.
He added, after some debate, one final line:
I miss the little girl.
Laying aside the pen, he closed the diary.
His next job was to get rid of Jane.