Chapter 20

It would never reach him in time. Never.

“Lady, you can mail it or not, whatever you want. I’m only saying I can’t guarantee Tuesday delivery.”

Meredith blinked and stared across the counter at the impatient face of the postal clerk. She heard his words but couldn’t accept their meaning. Arthur Watson would not receive the check in time. She had believed, with the mailing of the check, that the whole business was over and done. But the check had not been mailed.

“Never.” She spoke so softly not even she was certain she heard it.

“Beg pardon? Look, ma’am, make up your mind. I got other people waiting.”

Meredith picked up the envelope, holding it deliberately away from her body, and turned to file past a row of staring faces. The envelope held nothing but a scrap of paper, worth a few dollars. Yet it felt heavy. This envelope was like cold metal in her hand, the link of a chain that bound her inevitably to Arthur Watson. She had driven all the way downtown to the main depot in hope that mailing it here would guarantee next-day delivery. The clerk’s best suggestion had been for her to drop it off at the address. That was one more way of saying never—never would this whole business end correctly and well.

She could not risk seeing him. Meredith stepped from the post office and saw that the overcast sky had lowered to become a dancing mist of fog. Her lighthearted mood of the morning seemed to have descended with it and settled as heavily as the clouds. Thoughts of Richard and the hope for a child lay as far away as Richard’s return. Too much could happen before then, if Gus’s words were true.

“Excuse me, ma’am, coming through.”

The door nudged her back and Meredith stepped aside to watch a postal worker push a cart toward a waiting truck. Her car was parked on the far side of the street and she waited for the light to change, wondering what she should do. She could throw the letter away, deliberately misplace it, put it anywhere, but the debt would always be with her, unfinished business in the back of her mind. She crossed the street, opened the car door, and dropped the envelope facedown on the dash. The debt might never be settled, but for now at least she had to get away from it and think. She slammed the car door and locked it before walking away.

It was midafternoon, but heavy clouds cast a layer of dusk down the busy street. Shops had turned on their lights and racks displaying sidewalk sales were being trundled indoors before the mist dampened their contents. The fog itself cloaked the upper stories of the tallest buildings, leaving the pale squares of office windows as faint hallucinations that dissolved and reappeared at changing distances.

Shoppers moved along the damp sidewalks around Meredith, their heads tucked down into packages, their steps certain in the knowledge of where they were going. She dodged them and let the openings set her path, walking idly past store windows that held no interest and hotel doorways where couples laughed, huddling under umbrellas.

Two blocks from the car, she saw a movie marquee glittering through the mist. Bold red letters advertised the name of a famous female lead, above the film’s title, Luck, Love, and New York. Meredith paused when she reached the theater, studying the posters that lined the building wall. “A love story to warm you all winter” one critic had called it, while another promised, “This is cheer for the grayest day.” Above the blurbs stood a picture of a lovely dark-haired girl, dressed in a shimmering glaze of gown, her arm outstretched as she tossed a diamond bracelet toward the background of a ballroom. A remarkably good-looking man in a tuxedo watched, his hand raised to catch the bracelet, while around the two, well-dressed dancers swirled, smiling radiantly.

Meredith did not pause to think. Before she knew it, her hand withdrew two bills from her wallet and pushed them over the counter. She hurried past the ticket taker and into the warm dark of the theater. She wondered what was coming over her. She never went to movies in the daytime.

The caverned interior of the theater welcomed her into its subterranean gloom. From the screen, flickering light cast vague illumination over the walls and seats, only a few of which were taken. She slid into one in the center section, relief washing over her. Here she would find peace and time to think, to understand why an unmailed letter could strike such terror into her. Surely by the time the movie ended she would be calm enough to go home. She slipped her arms from her coat and tucked it around her shoulders, settling into the comfort and privacy of the darkened theater.

The film had already begun. The images flashing in front of her seemed disconnected, confusing at first, but Meredith fought the dreamlike fog filling her mind and gradually sorted out the plot. It turned out to be about a young Iowa girl, the only member of her graduating class ambitious enough to enter a magazine contest. The prize was a weekend trip to New York, where the girl, who had never fit among the plain people of her hometown, blossomed beneath the attention lavished on the contest’s winner. She was given clothing and a complete make-over at an elegant salon, then escorted to a formal dance on the arm of a celebrity.

Meredith sat entranced, and a glow of sentimentality carried her deeply into the romance of the movie. Its pastel colors, which would ordinarily appear too sweet, appealed to her today, and even the syrupy music sounded welcome. Dreamlike romance surrounded her. She felt like a princess in a world without dragons or ogres, and the delicate loveliness of the girl made her wish she could be like that: beautiful and wanted.

As it turned out, the good-looking man on the poster had fallen in love with the young Iowa girl, but she did not understand it. The girl mistook his admiration for a sham, one more flattering detail prearranged for the occasion of her winning. She checked out of the hotel early the next morning, ashamed of her own infatuation, and when her escort arrived to take her to the airport he found the room empty.

Meredith tried to discount the fantasy, arguing to herself that it was one more remake of Cinderella, but the fantasy fought back. Deep in her mind it seemed that a different consciousness moved, and that consciousness yearned to believe everything on the screen. It yearned to sink completely into the film’s magical world, letting her live in a land like this eternally. As images flickered, the man made a desperate race through the airport. The startled girl was thrilled as she turned back, hearing him shout her name. Meredith could not fight back the tears. They came hot and fast, filling her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks.

Somehow in the midst of the music and the shimmering of crystal chandeliers, she had become that shy Iowa girl. She felt her own willowy awkwardness transformed into sophistication. She felt her plain features enhanced by a beautician’s magic until she actually belonged in the film’s glittering world. As the lights came up, she burrowed deeper into the seat, embarrassed to be seen with swollen eyes and a tissue still clutched in her hand.

Before long the theater emptied of its few patrons. Meredith gathered her coat and walked slowly up the aisle, passing the trickle of people who had come for the second showing. She had reached the outer doors of the lobby when the theme music struck up at her back, a flurry of orchestral crescendos from the last dance the girl and her escort had shared. Meredith paused. It seemed that her feet actually turned her around, that she had no control over them. A desperate longing to return to that world, to live inside its romance and its swirling passion once more compelled her. She stepped to the refreshment counter, then carried a bag of popcorn and a soft drink inside. Murmurs of happiness seemed to echo in her mind as the pink and blue pastels on the screen showed dawn in an Iowa sky. The least she could do, a voice murmured as she found her old seat in the dark, was to watch the beginning she had missed on the first showing.

Chill wind from a cold sky buffeted her car. Traffic was light. Most people were already home. Fireplaces and furnaces threw heat against the storm of a declining autumn. Leaves blew across the road before the headlights, and it seemed too cold to rain.

It was after ten when Meredith pulled into the driveway, switched off the ignition, and stepped onto the front walk. She had put off leaving the theater, sitting through two more showings of Luck, Love, and New York before joining the crowd that flowed toward the exit. Now, as she walked toward her cold house, she hummed the theme. The magical aura of the film floated in her thoughts.

When she first stepped from the theater doors and realized how many hours had passed, the knowledge hit with a wave of cold shock. It seemed impossible that so many hours had gone by, and even more impossible how deeply she had fallen in love with the movie, with the young girl’s dreams, and with the beautiful man who arrived to fulfill them. Meredith stopped a moment, leaning against the wall outside the theater, pausing to examine her feelings.

The deepest feeling was shock. She knew that she, or at least her own body, had sat like a tender adolescent in that theater seat for the past seven hours. She knew the film’s plot by heart by the middle of the second showing, yet it stirred her emotions again and again. Or else it had stirred someone’s emotions, not her own, but feelings that ran along her nerves, made her throat tighten with poignancy, spilled tears from her eyes, and made her shoulders shudder with sobbing that tore through her whole body. How could she have done this? Pregnancy, perhaps. She’d always heard that pregnancy made a woman more emotional, but could such a hormonal reaction sweep over her so quickly? There had to be more to it.

The movie was a release, she supposed, only a pleasant escape from the many fears that had recently been harrying her. That was all. Thankful to have found an explanation, she walked to her car. It was only a release, after all, she decided firmly, and then let her thoughts return to the poignant undertow of emotion the film left in its wake. Its theme song still rang in her ears, and she gave in and let her own heart sway in time with its pull.

She had worried with the girl in the movie over whether what she felt at the dance could be true. She had given up and felt herself a frightened child on a New York street corner, hailing a cab and watching the city slip away through a haze of tears. It was a silly, sentimental movie. Some part of her realized that, but a part of her did not. A part of her absolutely believed such things were still possible.

Meredith slid her key into the front door’s lock, recalling the moment that the Iowa girl had entered the rooms of her hotel suite. The door swung inward. Darkness seemed to rush out to greet her. The illusion faded beneath the onslaught of frigid silence from inside the house.

Meredith hurried through the rooms, turning on heat and lights, restless to drive off the gloom. The house had been empty all day and the chilly dampness seemed more present here than it had been outdoors. In fact, the rooms seemed hazed with thin traces of icy fog. She put on a kettle of water and tried to hum the film’s theme, but her voice sounded small and frightened in the house’s solid silence. She broke off quickly at the kettle’s shrill scream and fixed a cup of tea to carry into the living room.

Two magazines had come in the day’s mail, and she leafed through the glossy pages, scanning advertisements and photographs. She paused at a home-decorating feature detailing the remodeling of an old house.

A leggy blonde lounged in a rattan chair beside a swimming pool. Sunlight sheeted on the pool’s aquamarine surface and struck a diamond of light from the wineglass balanced between the woman’s slim fingers. Those fingers lifted as if toasting the photographer at the instant the shutter clicked. Meredith imagined herself inside the same world as that gesture, a world of cashmere and champagne, of limousines and all the soft, expensive furs that the woman must own—sable, otter, mink.

She realized suddenly that she would give anything, anything in this world, to be the woman in the photograph. She had never wanted such a thing before, but now her mind felt captured by want.

If only she had been born into such a world, Meredith thought, she could toss off a gesture as careless and confident. When she closed her eyes and re-created the picture, she could practically smell the delicate, unique scent of her own perfume, a fragrance blended especially for her. It would imprint itself permanently on the collars of those elegant furs, a whispered message to everyone she passed. That message told the world that she belonged among the beautiful, soft surroundings, among cascading fountains and pearlescent marble, among pastel banners of sunsets and gardens and orchids.

Meredith felt her chin drop. She knew she was dreaming. Or, she said vaguely to herself, someone was dreaming. She thought that she should be angry or startled or afraid, but the dream was only a little bit sad. It was pretty in its way, although it was like no dream she had ever had. Someone was dreaming.

The dream kept unraveling in shining threads. It spun swirls of molten silver and music, dropped in soft folds like cream poured into a bowl, curved back over itself like the moving silk of surf on a white beach. It wove a cocoon over her senses; a sweet, hushing cloud that enclosed her entirely until she no longer cared if she moved or made a sound.

Arthur Watson’s face took shape out of the cloud. He was standing over her, looking down, his eyes wide with concern. His lips moved but his voice sounded thick, as if muffled by the soft fog into which he kept disappearing. His hands reached out of the mist and she shrank from them, calling out after the dazzling dream with its flowery gardens and mossy stones green as gems. Then, all at once, she was lifted up and felt herself fluttering in the air, shaken by her shoulders until her teeth chattered; her head lolled sideways on her shoulder. His hands were gripping her, lifting her up in a fierce and painful grip.

“Don’t sit dreaming,” his voice seemed to say. “You can’t. You can’t dream. It won’t help. It will only hurt. Please.”

The frantic shaking stopped and she stared up at him. His face kept changing. For a moment it was the same, then it disappeared behind the mist to become terrifying; not Arthur’s face at all. It was not Arthur. It was the contorted face of another man. Then the fog would fold over him again, and he was Arthur. He was the man she loved, looking down at her with alarm.

“I can’t,” she heard a small, frightened voice say. “I can’t do that. I can’t do anything. Please let me go.”

His fingers loosened and she tore from them, stumbling toward the doorway of the living room. The furniture seemed in all the wrong places, yet she knew it belonged there. A different lamp stood in the hallway, but she flung herself past it without looking, crashing through the half-open door of the bathroom and slamming it shut at her back.

The mirror was not where it belonged. The wall where it ought to be was covered with dappled gray paper. The paper could not be right, yet she remembered putting it there. Arthur had insisted she do something, anything to keep busy, and she had repainted the house. And it was all wrong; dark and icy, the way she felt inside, shades of gray the only thing that made any sense now. All the other colors were frozen, pale and quiet behind layers of ice that shuddered constantly and locked into new patterns inside her. On the dappled gray paper a layer of ice glistened now, growing thicker with each breath she drew. It would wax deeper the longer she watched. It would finally enclose her.

Meredith turned her head to escape the vision. A flicker of movement caught her eye. She looked into the mirror, into the deep surface of reflection in which she would surely drown.

A pale blond woman stared at her from the mirror, her small brown eyes red-rimmed and terrified. The woman looked back with the panicked stare of a trapped animal, her cheeks ashen and her shoulders trembling with fear.