It had started as a private game, a way of breaking domestic boredom, creating a Linda Peterson-Cornell that seemed daring, provocative, a person her husband appreciated more.
While Linda was growing up in northern Illinois, her father had managed a successful feed corn farm. Her mother, a homemaker, had been a scattered woman, but kind; their last name was Nicely, and Linda and her two sisters were known as the Pretty Nicely Girls. It was a pleasant childhood, and then her mother suddenly, so suddenly it seemed to Linda to happen while she was at school one day, moved out and into a squalid little apartment, and it was the most terrible thing Linda could imagine, worse than if her mother had died. After a few months her mother wanted to return home, but Linda’s father refused to allow it, and the image of her mother living alone in a tiny house—after the squalid apartment—and having given up her friends, all of whom reacted with fear as though her mother’s attempts at freedom might be contagious, terminal, along with the estrangement of her daughters, because their father pulled their loyalty to him; all this was—by far—the strongest event in Linda’s life. The week after Linda graduated from high school she married a local boy named Bill Peterson, then she divorced him one year later, keeping his name. In college in Wisconsin she met Jay, who with his intelligence and vast money seemed to offer a life that might catapult her away from the terrifying and abiding image of her mother alone and ostracized.
—
Now, as Linda sat at the end of the dining room table, the doorbell rang, though at first she wasn’t sure she had heard right. It rang again. She peeked through the curtains and did not see anyone, so she opened the door cautiously and it was skinny Joy Gunterson, saying, “Linda, I just had to come over.”
Linda said, “No you didn’t, no you did not. You have nothing in common with me, do you hear? You have nothing in common with me. Go away.”
“Oh, Linda. But I do—”
“I’m not going to end up living in some trailer, Joy.” It amazed her that she said this, no part of her had any inkling she would say that. It seemed to amaze Joy too. The woman, shorter than Linda, had a look of confusion shift onto her face.
Probably this mutual surprise prevented Linda from closing the door. So Joy had time to shake her head and say, “Oh, but, Linda—see, it doesn’t matter where you live. That’s what you find out. When the person you love more than anyone spends his days in a cell, then you’re in a cell too. It doesn’t matter where you are. You’ll find out who’re your real friends. They won’t be who you think. Trust me on that.”
Linda closed the door and locked it.
She went to the door of Jay’s bedroom, but he was still fast asleep and snoring, lying flat on his back. Without glasses his face seemed naked; she had not seen him sleeping for some time. She closed the door and went back downstairs. She did not know what she would say to this lawyer. Norm had said it also depended on whether or not Yvonne continued to want to press charges. A lot depended on Yvonne.
Linda walked around the house quietly. She understood that her mind was trying to take in something it could not take in. She thought of Karen-Lucie Toth, who must be with Yvonne right now; the police had come to collect Yvonne’s things and return them to her. Linda had not asked where Yvonne was. In the kitchen sink were two white mugs with coffee stains; Linda couldn’t say who had been drinking coffee, how they’d got into the sink. As she washed them, her legs almost gave way. She pictured jurors sitting in a jury box. She pictured Yvonne, with her too much makeup, on the stand. And then she thought of the cameras; why in the world had she not thought of the cameras? Did you, or did you not, watch women with your husband while they undressed, showered, used the toilet? How long had you been aware that your husband was watching them this way?
Driving toward Layton, Linda stopped at a gas station a few miles outside of town. She felt horribly exposed and so did not pull in to the self-serve dock, but instead had a man fill up her tank. But then she suddenly had to use the bathroom. With her sunglasses on she went into the store, past the rows of cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and cakes and peanuts and candy. The filth of the bathroom appalled her. She could not remember the last time she had used a public restroom this filthy, and she thought: Why should it matter when now nothing matters? Her mind was scrambled like that, so when she walked back through the store and bumped straight into Karen-Lucie Toth they stared at each other with amazement. Karen-Lucie was also wearing sunglasses; she removed them, and her eyes, to Linda, seemed older than Linda would have thought, and sad, and still pretty.