“For the most part, perfectly safe,” he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets. I nod, turn to leave, and feel his eyes on my back as I make my way to the door. “But Isabelle—?”
“Yeah?” I ask, swinging around. My hand is on his doorknob; I’m almost gone.
“You know what’s more dangerous than sleepwalking?”
“What’s that?”
“Sleep deprivation,” he says. “Really. It leads to all sorts of issues.”
“I know,” I smirk. “I’m aware.”
“I’m being serious,” he says, eying me again, unsmiling, like he isn’t quite sure if he should let me leave. “Forget the lethargy, the memory problems, the sensory disruptions. If it gets severe enough, it can lead to hallucinations, delusions. Really bad stuff.”
“I know,” I say again, biting my lip.
He looks at me for a beat more, like he’s trying to send me some kind of message, until finally, he sits back down, placing his hands on his desk.
“Just try to get some sleep, okay? Promise me.”
“Sure,” I say, opening the door and stepping into the lobby. I’m afraid of how easily they’re coming now, the lies, rising up from the pit of my belly and gurgling out of my mouth like the black algae spewing from that wide, stone mouth. “I promise.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
After Allison’s memorial, Ben came over. He didn’t tell me he was going to; I didn’t ask. But when I heard a knock on my door that night, late, I knew I would find him standing on the other side it. I never questioned how he knew my address, and honestly, I didn’t care. I just opened the door and took a step back, letting him in like I had let him into my life so many times before. Without question.
I remember he was still wearing his suit—the suit he had put on that morning, the suit he had worn as he buried his wife—and within minutes, it was being peeled off by me. His jacket slumped to the ground, left in a heap next to the shoes I had walked three miles home in, their heels worn down to stubs and my heels bloody and raw. There was a clumsy kind of urgency to it, my fingers fumbling their way down his buttons, like tripping off the edge of a cliff. Like if we didn’t just leap into it at that very moment—minds blank, bodies on autopilot—we would come to our senses and back away slowly. We would stop, think about what we were doing, and realize how horribly wrong it all was.
But we didn’t. We didn’t stop.
Afterward, we lay together in silence, fingers intertwined, in bed. I still slept on the same sad little mattress from my childhood bedroom, Margaret’s smell seeped somewhere deep into the threads like a stain. Lying there with Ben made me feel too juvenile, too young, remembering the way my sister and I would pull the covers over our heads and tell each other stories with flashlights, trying to drown out the whispered arguments or full-blown screams coming from somewhere down the hall.
“You know we can’t tell anybody about this,” Ben said after a couple minutes of quiet, his hands in my hair. I was trying to ignore the wedding band I could still feel on his finger. The cool pinch of it on my skin. “Not yet.”
I looked at him, my eyes tracing his profile in the dark.
“With work,” he clarified. “I could lose my job. You could, too.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
“We’ll find a way,” he said, kissing my forehead before rolling over and standing up with a groan. “With time.”
I remember watching him pull on his boxers and walk into the bathroom, my eyes drinking him in as if I were preparing for another drought without him. I didn’t know how to feel in that moment. There had been a question lingering in the back of my mind all day, this unspoken seed of doubt that planted itself the moment Ben had pulled me to him on the side of that house, its spindly roots snaking their way through my brain, digging in deep and growing wild. Ever since his fingers wove themselves into my hair and his lips attached to mine, I couldn’t help but wonder: If Allison hadn’t died, would this have ever happened?
If she hadn’t died, would Ben have ever chosen me?
Maybe this was just his grief talking. Maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, going home to an empty house—the same house where he had found her, sprawled across the tile, a hollow bottle of pills in her palm and the crusts of dried spit caked to her lip. I imagined him standing in my doorway, those dark puddles beneath his eyes like dirty rainwater collecting in the street. Maybe tomorrow morning he’d wake up, clear his throat, and glue those same eyes to the floor, pronouncing this a mistake: something, like that first night together, that we should never speak of again.