“If we’re Doc and Carol,” he says, “the ones in the film, not the ones in the book, then we have to trust each other. That’s the key difference, right? In the book, they can never trust each other, but in the film, they have each other’s backs. I don’t want to live out my days thinking you’re going to betray me, and I assume you feel the same. Cards on the table, Leenie. What really happened to Margot?”
She thinks about this, her eyes darting around the room.
“No thinking. No stories. Talk to me.”
Her words come out fast, with the whoosh of a child who has been dying to confess. “Margot returned that night, just after midnight. You’re right, she took the security pass. She had been drinking, I’m pretty sure of that. I’m not sure why she came back. Maybe she planned to stay here. Or maybe she was going to confront you about what she knew. Whatever it was she knew. She let herself in and—” Her voice falters.
“And?”
“She found us in bed together.”
The sentence makes no sense. Gerry has not had sex since last fall; he is keenly aware of that fact. A stupid regression with Margot when he went back to New York, but she took him unawares on a bench in a shadowy corner of Riverside Park. Obviously, Gerry couldn’t have been in bed with anyone and if he could, it wouldn’t have been Leenie. What is she babbling about?
“The pill I sometimes give you, the one I said was a calcium supplement? It’s my own scrip for Lunesta. Combined with Ambien and your pain meds, it made you sleep really soundly. I once banged a pot right in front of your face to test it. Anyway, on those nights, sometimes, I would get in bed with you. I couldn’t really spoon or hold you, and I was respectful of your body, but I would lie next to you, my head on your shoulder. Just for a little while. I didn’t see the harm.”
“And you killed Margot because she saw that?”
“She was yelling and trying to take photos of us. I grabbed her phone to delete it. She was scary, she wasn’t going to stop. She was saying you were a pervert, that she already had evidence of how awful you were, but this was just more proof and she was going to tell the world what she knew about you and she slapped me, hard. I really did see little black shapes circling my head. Not stars, I wouldn’t call them stars—”
“Please, Leenie, this isn’t a time to dwell on metaphors.”
“I grabbed the letter opener. I was only trying to defend myself. Whatever happened, happened.”
Gerry finds himself thinking of a famous parody of passive voice. Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind. In the same way that Leenie became hyperfocused on describing what she saw when slapped, he finds himself thinking about that one word, reels. A reel can be a dance, but most people associate it with fishing. A reel is an orderly thing. It unspools, it winds up. His mind is spinning like a top, a wobbly metal top, the kind that one pumped up and down, then set loose on the world. How could Margot describe him as a pervert? They had been two consenting adults and she had been the one inclined to push the envelope, including that last time in Riverside Park. Besides, public sex didn’t make one a pervert. His conscience is clear. Clearish. Even what happened with Lucy, the shameful episode with Shannon Little, the one time he cheated on Sarah—none of those things make him a pervert who should fear shame and exposure.
“Did she explain what she meant?”
“No,” Leenie said. “Things happened pretty fast. I’m glad I took advantage of her phone being unlocked. I deleted the photos, then I reset it to the factory settings.”
Imagine that being one’s impulse when a woman is lying dead at one’s feet. To wipe a phone and reset it.
Thinking quickly, speaking gently, he says: “But don’t you see—it’s safer, I think, if we don’t continue, um, living together. Together, we will draw too much attention. I mean, at some point, I simply wouldn’t have a nurse.”
“But you could have a girlfriend. You wouldn’t be the first man to fall in love with his caretaker.”
He is truly nonplussed now. Also, the only such relationship he can summon up is Henry VIII and Catherine Parr and she was the one that the Tudor king did not outlive.
“Anyway, I’m glad there are no more secrets between us. Because I have something to show you.”
She goes downstairs. Gerry wonders briefly if she’s going to go full Annie Wilkes and hobble him, so he will remain in her care longer. But he’s more terrified by the idea that Leenie wants him to get well. Wants him to be her boyfriend.