A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [43]
They were coming off the highway now. It felt good just to be able to talk. About nothing, really, and yet something wonderful was happening. He felt so much looser and more open. He could be himself. He didn’t have to watch every word the way he did with most people, especially back there with Delores. He kept trying to think of something clever to say. Jilly drove slower, maybe, like him, wanting the trip to last.
At the security gate she showed her Realtor’s pass. Meadowville was an enormous complex with at least ten five-story buildings. She parked in the visitors’ lot and left the motor running. The headlights shone onto a rock garden of white flowers. In the center a fountain dribbled water from a sculpted fish’s gaping mouth.
“Gordon . . . Oh, I don’t know what to say. You see, I didn’t realize . . . I mean . . . well, I knew you’d been away for a long time, but Dennis never said why.”
“Oh.” He turned, forgetting to hold on to the seat belt. She gave a start as it snapped back. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.” He shifted his feet. His knees jammed into the dashboard.
“No, he just told me. Right before I picked you up, as a matter of fact.” She touched her flushed cheek, then her throat.
“Well, I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to say.” Ahead, the wet stony gills seemed to pulsate in and out.
“I was telling him we could only see one, the empty one, because of how late it was, and I said how that’s something I never do unless I really know the client, but of course with you being his brother and everything.” She sighed.
“We don’t have to go in. I understand.”
Her mouth kept opening and closing, then she blurted, “He said it was a murder. A woman, the same age as me.”
He nodded.
“He said it was an accident. That you were trying to keep her from seeing you, but the pillow smothered her.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“I mean, how can that be an accident?” She shivered and folded her arms.
“I know,” he said dully. The air had turned heavy, the moon paler.
“An accident’s something you don’t mean to do. But you broke into her house, right?”
“We didn’t think anyone was home.” It hurt to speak.
“And that’s when she woke up?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you run?”
He glanced at her beautiful face, then had to look away from such innocence. How many times had he asked himself that very question?
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
He shook his head and had to close his eyes. Even with Jerry screaming at him to cover her face he had wanted to run, knew he should, could have still run and saved his life and hers, instead of grabbing the pillow next to hers, the one on which her husband’s head would have, should have been but for her swollen ankle sprained earlier in the day so that she could not travel with him, so that when the intoxicated, giddy intruders blundered into her bedroom, she was lying there alone. Fresh for the kill, the prosecutor had whispered to the jury. Unable to move, Janine Walters and her unborn son lying there, waiting with only minutes left to live.
“It must be so awful to think someone’s . . . I mean, it’s like . . . like there you were and there she was . . . I don’t know.” She shivered again. “Dennis said it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. The whole family. He said after that everything changed.”
Gordon’s stomach rumbled with the ferment of cream and strawberries rising sourly into his throat. Dennis was right, he never should have come back. People did not know how to deal with such a thing. And why should they be expected to? It was an aberration so beyond the boundaries of normal life that at first even he had not been able to comprehend its enormity and impact. Though his own tearful confession had been derided, when he did run from her bedroom, crashing into tables, lamps, the telephone, and then